Aymara Erotic

The Aymara are the people of the high plateau — the altiplano that stretches across the basin of Lake Titicaca and southward into the salt flats and cold grasslands of western Bolivia, southern Peru, and the northern reaches of Chile. They live higher than almost anyone else on earth, mostly between 3,500 and 4,000 metres, and that altitude has shaped almost everything about them: the crops they grow (potato in dozens of frost-resistant varieties, quinoa, the bitter tuber oca), the llamas and alpacas they herd, the chewing of coca leaf as a workaday stimulant, the lung capacity that lowland visitors notice within an hour of arrival.

Their language, Aymara, belongs to a small family of its own — Aymaran — and sits in long, complicated contact with Quechua, the larger Andean tongue of the former Inca state. The two share vocabulary and grammar in ways linguists still argue about, but Aymara is unmistakably its own thing, and it is one of the few Indigenous American languages with millions of living speakers. It is co-official in Bolivia and Peru, taught in schools, and used in courts and broadcasting. A famous quirk: Aymara speakers gesture as if the past lies in front of them, where it can be seen, and the future behind, where it cannot — a spatial metaphor that runs the opposite direction from most of the world's languages.

Catholicism arrived with the Spanish in the sixteenth century and was imposed firmly enough that nearly all Aymara today identify as Christian, mostly Catholic, increasingly Evangelical in the cities. But the older religious world never really left. Offerings of coca, alcohol, and miniature objects are still made to Pachamama, the earth, and to the achachilas, the spirits of particular mountains, often on the same days as Catholic feasts. The yatiri, a kind of ritual specialist who reads coca leaves, still works alongside the parish priest in many villages without anyone treating it as a contradiction.

Politically, the Aymara have been the demographic engine of Bolivia's modern Indigenous movement; the 2006 election of Evo Morales, the country's first Aymara president, marked a real shift in who got to speak for the highlands. The mestizo Bolivian identity — Spanish-speaking, urban, partly descended from Aymara grandparents — exists in constant negotiation with the rural, Aymara-speaking communities that still anchor the altiplano's social life.