by Jorge Ishizawa with
the late Eduardo Grillo Fern㌻dez
PRATEC

In the Andean world of peasant agriculture, wisdom ﾑwhich is not knowledgeﾑ is love, nurturance, symbiosis, conversation, reciprocity, and dance. Ukhamakiwa (ﾔthat is the way things areﾕ) is, in the Aymara language, the expression of acceptance of the world as it is. That it is more than acceptance can be ascertained in the eloquent testimony of Romualdo Aguilar Quispe, who lives in the community of Angar Bajo in Pucar, in the Quechua part of Puno:

The celebration of the festival of the chacra [in carnival time] is not for the entertainment of the human community alone, but a vitally important activity which regenerates the nurturance of life, of the chacra, of seeds, etc. It is a festival of harmonization and of gratitude to the Apus [mountain deities], to Pachamama [Mother Earth], for the wellbeing of the natural collectivity. In these months they are also flowering, the mountains are happy, the Apus, the chacras, the pastures, the animals are well-fed. There are abundant flowers, water and with all this the runas [humans] are very happy, in harmony; so we invite and offer the flowering festival or taripay according to our possibilities (ASAP 2001: 41).

This is in stark contrast with the situation in the modern West where knowledge and judgment reign.
Knowledge and judgment in the modern culture of the West
1. Knowledge: technique and taking distance
Jean Beaufret ﾑa French philosopher and Heidegger’s friend and interlocutor for more than thirty yearsﾑ confides in an interview with Frederic de Towarnicki that Heidegger held that ﾒ…the ‘technique’ of something is to confront a thing as it manifests itself in the open.ﾓ (Beaufret, 1987: 99)
Clearly, to know requires that confrontation as a previous action. Now, to confront a thing is to negate it, to take distance from it. It is to transform it into an object (the Latin word objectus is the past participle of obiceno which means ﾒto throw, to put in front ofﾓ [Pe紡, 1986: 75]). Hence, knowledge of the thing implies its transformation into an object and can only be achieved by someone who, through an exercise of will, is capable of differentiating himself from it in confrontation with it. Because of this, knowledge of a thing is possible only for someone who confronts it constituting himself as a cognizant subject. Thus, the opposition subject/object is inherent to knowledge. Also inherent is abstraction ﾑ”to mentally separate what in the world is united” (Abugattas, 1986: 103).
This is the way to place a thing in the open ﾑit is the aletheia of the Greeks, Descartes’ seeing “clear and distinct”, the opening of the transcendental world of Kant. It is also the way to initiate the material operation of the extraction of resources from nature.
The attitude of knowing, of thinking, is a very special and willful, attitude that can only be motivated by a profound disagreement with the world as it is. This attitude belongs to suspicious people who believe that there is something in the world that is being hidden from them, that there is something they deserve and that is being denied to them. This distrust can only find a home in people whose arrogance makes them overestimate themselves. It is out of this condition that they propose to transform the world in order to fashion it according to their whim. They try to reveal, that is, to discover that which they suppose is hidden from them. It does not matter to them that in their inquiring zeal they may disturb the harmony of the world. This harmony strikes them as hostile. Their attitude is the indolence of the arrogant.
In the Bible, this attitude is present in Adam and Eve ﾑthe first humans who having at their free disposition the tree of life and having been expressly forbidden the tree of knowledgeﾑ are carried away by morbid curiosity, typical of those arrogant people who come to believe that any prohibition denies them access to something they deserve ﾑand they make use of the fruits of the tree of knowledge, and with it spoiled their chance to Paradise and life therein. The seriousness of the perversion involved is shown in the severity of the punishment that Adam and Eve and their descendants received.
This is, however, a continuing attitude in the Western project of domination of nature. The attitude of knowing and thinking extends from the Bible to Heidegger, from Judaeo-Christianity to the modern West. Heidegger has stated: “Modern metaphysics, from Descartes to Kant, and above all the metaphysics of German idealism, are unthinkable without the fundamental representations of Christian dogma.” (Beaufret, 1987: 110)
From the above it should become clear that the technical attitude, which involves knowledge understood in the modern sense, is a particular process that has been forged since Biblical times and has achieved a precise formulation with Descartes ﾑto be materialized (not only formulated) ever more completely in the acts of imperialist domination which endeavor to shape the world in accordance with knowledge, essence of the “will to power.” It must be added that in this context, knowledge is an intellectual act, opposed to affection and feelings. One does not ‘know’ one’s mother or child. We are united to them by familiarity, tenderness, and the immediacy of the caress inherent in nurturance. We do not take distance from them transforming them into objects, nor do we assume the role of subject in order to know them.
2. Judgment: aesthetics and ethics
The distance required by knowledge induces a second characteristic in the technical attitude: permanent judgment. This has a direct implication in how technique intrudes in the appreciation of art. It can be seen in how (as Beaufret also indicates) the word ‘technique’ appears in the 18th century. Art was being increasingly displaced from its former place to the field that after the end of the 18th century came to be called ‘aesthetics’ and it is the way in which The用hile Gauthier, for instance, uses the word ‘art’. It appears that it was the word ‘technique’ which came to replace ‘art’. What we want to point out is that aesthetics is nothing more than the invasion of the technical, that is, of knowledge ﾑwith its implicit relation of subject and object and abstractionﾑ into the appreciation of beauty and art. It now becomes a question of evaluating art from the viewpoint of technique. Ernesto S㍍ato, the Argentinian writer and thinker, remarks about the modern West:

The characteristic of the new society is quantity. The feudal world was a qualitative world ﾑtime was not measured and one lived in terms of eternity… It was a qualitative time, which corresponded to a community that did not know money.
Space was not measured either, and the dimensions of figures in an illustration did not correspond to distances or to perspective ﾑthey were expression of a hierarchy.
But when the utilitarian mentality burst forth, all was quantified…The artist of that period emerges from the artisan ﾑindeed he is the same person and it is reasonable that he brings to art his technical preoccupations…
According to Alberti, the artist is above all a mathematician, a technician, and an investigator of nature…
…whatever its psychological origin, from the point of view of its essence, abstract art is today the expression of the scientific mentality of our time. And, as such, rather than representing a revolutionary art, it characterizes a culture in decline. (S㍍ato, 1980b: 73-4)
In another of his works S㍍ato refers to the geometrization of the novel and the mathematization of music (S㍍ato, 1980ｻ: 104-144). What Beaufret and S㍍ato show makes clear that aesthetics, that art which in the modern West is a technique, is a form of knowledge, an objectification and reification of the world. At the same time, however, aesthetics itself and art are objects of technique, an object of knowledge. When art was technified and became aesthetics, it could be evaluated by an art critic, who permits himself to compare the work of art as it is with a model of what it “should be.”
Having briefly referred to aesthetics, we can also consider ethics as an object of knowledge. To see that this is the case we are aided greatly by Alasdair MacIntyre who in his A Short History of Ethics recounts that:

His [Socratesﾕ] great point of agreement with sophists is his acceptance of the thesis that ㎎et (virtue) is teachable. But paradoxically he denies that there are teachers. The resolution of the paradox is found only later in Plato, in the thesis that the knowledge is already present in us and has only to be brought to birth by a philosophical midwife. Its statement depends on the Socratic thesis that virtue is knowledge (episteme)… The knowledge that constitutes virtue involves not only beliefs that such and such is the case but also a capacity for recognizing relevant distinctions and an ability to act… Aristotle says of Socrates that ﾔhe believed that all the moral virtues were forms of knowledge; in such a way that when we knew what justice was, it followed that we would be justﾕ… (MacIntyre, 1998: 21)

It is a virtue to be attained through abstraction:

Good therefore is not just that which we happen to desire at any given moment; it is that which would satisfy us, and which would continue to satisfy us once we had made the ascent of abstraction from particulars to the Form of the Beautiful. This ascent has to be learned; even Socrates had to receive this account from Diotima… The good can be achieved only through an education of a particular kind, and if this education is to be available to more than a random selection of mankind, it will have to be institutionalized. What is more, the institutions of the educational system will have to be directed and controlled by those who have already made the prerequisite ascent from the vision of particulars to the vision of the Forms (MacIntyre, 1998: 53)

Ethics, therefore, corresponds to the project of knowledge, the attitude of thinking and the attitude of transformation of the world through the exercise of the “will to power”. Ethics is nothing more than the invasion of knowledge, that is, of ‘technique’ into the behaviour of the individuals in society in such a way that this individual behavior can be apprehended in order to be regulated and evaluated. Hence comes the obvious relationship between ethics and the State that orders the world, arbitrarily defining what is good and what evil, and assuming responsibility for what “should be” in a utopia postulated as universal. The State establishes the order that agrees with the capitalist production process and the ‘good citizen’ adapts himself to that established order and that adaptation it calls ‘being reasonable.’
It should be clear by now that the stance of the knower ﾑentailing the dualism of subject and object and the instrumental rationality consisting of the dichotomy between ends and meansﾑ is unique to the modern Western culture, that is, to the world of the technical.
The attitude of knowing, the technical attitude, corresponds with the will to power and consists of abstraction, which opposes itself to the world in such a way as to be able to transform it into “what it should be”.
What is known in the West as aesthetics is the result of the intrusion of knowledge into art and ethics is the result of the intrusion of knowledge into the behavior of the individual in Western society. Thus, the project of capitalism is to be able to apprehend art (and the artist) and the individual to judge them in correspondence with its ends.
In contrast, in the Andes, we ourselves are the Andean world; we are a living world which reposes on the love of the world as it is. We are a world in which we exist by nurturing and letting ourselves be nurtured. We are the world of the inmediacy of the caress, wherein the distinction between subject and object has no place, neither does the distinction between ‘ends’ and ‘means’ nor any similar abstraction.
We are a living world which recreates itself by encouraging that harmony be always nurtured with the communal participation of all, and in reciprocity, this harmony nurtures all. As the Andean world, we are a world of symbiosis in which the life of everyone depends on the life of all the rest. Here in the Andes no one is redundant and no one is segregated.
Nurturance and symbiosis in the perennial Andean culture
1. Nurturance: Love of the world as it is
The Andean world is all of us ﾑwe who live here in the Andes nurturing and letting ourselves be nurtured, making family. We are a living and vivifying world in which no one is alien to life, be it a man, a tree, or a stone. We are a world in which there is no room for inertia or sterility. Neither is there room for abstraction, separation, or opposition of subject and object, and ends and means. We are not a world of knowledge because we do not want to transform the world; rather, we love it just as it is. Santos Vilca Cayo, an elder from the Aymara community of Aynacha Wat’asani in the district of Tilali, Puno, by the northern shore of Lake Titicaca expresses it thus:

For us, all those of us who live in this pacha [locality, local world] are persons: the stone, the soil, the plant, the water, the hail, the wind, the diseases, the sun, the moon, the stars, we all are a family. To live together we help each other. We are always in continuous conversation and harmony. The chacra [the cultivated field], being a person, is in need of everything. With my wife we are always attentive to her. For her [the chacra] we have to prepare soil and obtain guano for the sowing. When the time comes (in September, October and November) we have to deal with the seeds with great care, because at that time they are going to enter the stage of motherhood. Then we have to clothe them, hilling soil to the plants, caring for their health. Thus we nurture with great affection and respect. In the same way they will nurture us… The Ispalla [new tuber seed] is the woman herself. She is the same mother who nurtures us and whom we nurture as well. The new seeds are the young and pretty women who can bear more fruits, while the seeds who have stayed for many years are the tired women or mothers… The seeds, the women and Pachamama (Mother Earth) are the same. This we know from our dreams: the three appear as women. They have the same qamasa [alternate form]. For this reason women are the ones who better get along with seeds. They, with their good hands, deliver the seeds to Pachamama so that they regenerate…” (Chuyma Aru, 1998b: 17-19)

We are a world of the immediacy of the caress, of conversation, of play, of sincerity, and of trust. We are a world of love and begetting. Nurturance is the unconditional affirmation of life and of love of life. Nurturance, both for the one who nurtures and for the person who is nurtured, is the way of facilitating life, it is the way of fully participating in the fiesta that life is. Romualdo Aguilar Quispe continues his testimony on the festival in carnival time:

…when the first fruits are harvested, people are also potatoes then and the women take them out with great care, avoiding hurt to the chacra or Pachamama, who is at the same time mother of the potatoes. Then they collect the potatoes, cover them up like a baby in a istalla [small ritual shawl], and converse with them and kiss them. They [the potatoes] are given coca leaves to chew, are sprinkled with sweet wine, and adorned with misturas and serpentina [shredded and coiled multicolor paper] and wild flowers. Thus with the warmth that a mother offers to her child and with affection the potatoes are carried by the women on their backs. They show them to the relatives who come to the feast, and they kiss them, caress them and say that there is already food and that we will not suffer from hunger (ASAP 2001: 42)

We emphasize that Andean culture is a culture of nurturance because nurturance cannot occur under all circumstances, and not everyone is capable of nurturing or of letting oneself be nurtured. In a world of competition and distrust, the individuals who live in society do not nurture or allow themselves to be nurtured because they try to be as autonomous as possible in the struggle to impose their interests. There, rather, everyone nurtures himself trying to acquire the theoretical and practical knowledge from each one of the options they choose throughout their lives ﾑdefending their interest and exercising their free will and their rights as citizens. Under these conditions each option leaves them an experience and a scar.
Nurturance in the Andes takes place within an ayllu, the extended family which includes not only humans but deities and nature. Jos Isabel Ayay Valdez of Chilipampa, Cajamarca, tells of it in the following testimony:

There in my village we speak like this ﾑfor the family we say ayllu. It is composed of a family, for example, the animals, the chacra [the cultivated field], water, birds, animals, little and big. That is called a group of family, that is called ayllu.
The father, the mother, and the children make up the family, that is, of humans, It is just there, just within that, it is ayllu. And within the ayllus come the grandchildren, the sons-in-law, the daughters-in-law, marriage. The seeds, the pirkas [stone walls surrounding the chacras], are also part of the family. We call it an ayllu.
When one is just starting to prepare to live in a new house there we need what one seeks in the countryside ﾑfor instance, a mortar stone, a stone called palag溶 [serving dish] for feeding the dog, and something for collecting water for the hens to drink. That is called ayllu. “He’s preparing an ayllu” they would say. Sometimes it lacks something, sometimes it is already complete.
One cannot live alone because one is thought well of in a pair… Everything needs to have a partner. Alone one cannot live.
We say suq in Quechua to say number one, but it is not just one, it also says there is another. That is, it is one but with its little pair. One is not alone, one cannot be alone, it is with its other. Everything is with its partner. The man and the woman are also a pair. There is not one all by itself, there are several… (The Peasant Encyclopedia Project, 1991:15-16).
What Jos Isabel Ayay says is that here, in the Andes, the family, the ayllu, does not correspond simply to the human lineage but instead includes all those (be it men, trees or stones) who live with us in the locality we inhabit, that is, in the pacha. In the locality or pacha [local world] we are all relatives. He also shows clearly that we do not have individuals nor is there solitude. Suq, the number ‘one’ in the local Quechua language of Cajamarca, does not designate an isolated individual but rather “one with its other.” Everyone goes in pair. As Jos Isabel says well, suq is the pair of man and woman, but it is also the couple with their children in another instance ﾑthe couple, their children and the grandparents, the sons-in-law, the daughters-in-law, and so on. He also tells us: “there is not one by itself, there are several.” In other words, here in the Andes the world is alive, we are all relatives and we all accompany each other. The sun and the moon accompany us, the winds or the clouds, the pastures or the crops, the llamas and alpacas, the hill or the river, the vicu紡 [a wild Andean camelid] or the birds ﾑeverything nurtures us and everything lets itself be nurtured by us.
Thus, in the Andean chacra, not only are plants and animals nurtured but so is the water, the land, and the micro-climate. The chacra is not only nurtured by man but also by the sun, rain, wind, hills, insects, and ultimately by the whole ayllu of the pacha. In each moment it proceeds through consensus. There is no relation of private property to the chacra or of its fruits with the campesino [peasant] for it belongs to the whole community of the ayllu that lives in the pacha.
In the Andes, learning takes place while nurturing and being nurtured in the daily activities of minding the chacra, not in the abstract environment of the school. Don Zacar誕s Condori, from the community of Llach’ajoni of the Sullkaata ayllu in the district of Conima, Puno, says:

I teach my children everything since they are small; I ask them to hand me over the rope to tie the sheep. I take them to pasture far away in order for them to learn and to get used to walking. They also help me to collect guano in the pen and put it in sacks, and so on. They learn everything I do, because I have also learned that way. (Chuyma Aru 1998: 70)

Wisdom in the Andes is not exclusive of human beings. It is embodied in the whole ayllu and the pacha. Don Patricio Yanama, from the community of Chuquihuarcaya in Ayacucho asserts:

If you would want to extinguish Andean wisdom you would have to kill all people, the Apus, Pachamama, Mama Qocha [Mother Sea], Tayta Inti [Father Sun]… because as long as Tayta Inti shines upon us, there will be life. It would have to be the end of the world… (PAM 1998: 65)

Values in the Andes are not abstract, either. Respect, a central value, shows in concrete ways. As Magdalena Machaca from the Asociaci溶 Bartolom Aripaylla of the community of Quispillaccta in Ayacucho writes: “… in Andean life uyarikuy [to know how to listen], riqsikuyniyuq [to be grateful, a person who knows his/her own], manchakuyniyuq [modest], rimakuykuq [a person who greets], kuyakuq [a person who draws affection], kupayakuq [kind], allin sunqu [good hearted], allin runa [good person], llakipayakuq [a person who accompanies you in your distress], are phrases which refer to the qualities of people who know how to nurture and let themselves be nurtured by the runas [humans], the sallqa [nature] and the deities. There does not exist a Quechua word to designate respect. Don Santos N恂ez Cabana, a fifty year old member of the community of Chaquiccocha, says:

“For me a ‘respectful’ person, be he/she younger or older, is someone who greets you, and for his / her mode of being moves you to also greet him / her, is serious, listens to advice, is compassionate, modest, and is capable of being ashamed.” (Machaca 2001: 58-59)

As for aesthetic appreciation, it is also concrete. Stone, for instance, is also nurtured in the Andes. Pablo S㌻chez Zevallos, an engineer from Cajamarca in northern Peru recounts the day when he and an architect visited a stone carver in his place. The architect, impressed by the “aesthetic value” of the work, asked the master stone carver how he was able to achieve such perfection and he responded: “Se撲r, in the inside of the stone is its form”, and he said that the better he conversed with the stone, the better the work he achieved. (S㌻chez Zevallos, 1987)
The master stone carver sees the form “in the inside” of the stone, and lovingly, in an intimate conversation with it, he proceeds to uncover it. It is not a process of imposing a form on the stone. There is no wilfulness in the labor of carving stone in the Andes. Many stones do not have form “in their inside” and there are others whose forms it is not pertinent to uncover. All this the master stone carver knows well. It is very different from the deliberate work of a sculptor who plans his work and makes sketches and carries out in stone the work he has created. While the sculptor is a technician, the master stone carver of Cajamarca is a nurturer of the stone.
Something similar happens when terraces are nurtured on the slopes of Andean mountains. That is, starting on the slope of the hill, a series of surfaces of good agricultural soil are nurtured. Not all slopes “ask for terraces,” which is equivalent to saying that not all hills have a terraced form “in their inside.” Nurturing terraces is not, then, to build an engineering work planned in accordance to technical parameters. To nurture terraces it is necessary to know how to see the forms that the very hill contains and it is necessary to know how to uncover them. In order for that to occur there has to be consensus in the ayllu of the local pacha, that is, deities, nature and the human community must concur.
1. Symbiosis: the community of the heterogeneous
The Andean world, as a living and vivifying world, is an extremely diverse world of biological species, ecosystems, climates, geology, geography, etc. It is a world happening at every moment and continuously in which harmony is not given but is nurtured at each moment with the diligent participation of all of us who are this world. This is a communal world, a world of protection which does not exclude anyone. Each person (whether man, tree, or stone) is as important as any other in the daily nurturance of harmony. Nurturance of harmony happens through conversation, reciprocity, and dance between all existing forms of life so that none is excluded from the fiesta that life is in a world entirely alive. It is precisely during this jubilant and daily fiesta of the living world that harmony is continually nurtured by achieving complementarity among all and by confirming that the life of each one is only possible because of the presence and collaboration of all the rest. We live in a world of symbiosis.
Let us look at an instance: the harmonization of the regeneration of different forms of life in the Andes with the climate of each year and over a period of years. It is based on the harmonization of the magnitude of the animal population (including man) with the plant population of that year or period, which in turn depends on rain. Climate in the Andes is a major event in conversation, in sharing, and in dance within human communities (runas), as between human communities, the communities of nature (sallqa), and the communities of deities (huacas). The form and the moment of flowering, the place and the way birds nest, the behavior of vicu紡s and foxes, the mode of appearance of the stellar constellations, etc., continually tell us if the rains will be abundant or scarce, and if they will come early or late in the year ahead.
An example from the altiplano of Puno will help further clarify this. Llama and alpaca herders attentively observe the nests of a small bird called chijta who lays one to three eggs, according to upcoming conditions relevant to its brood. Along with many other occurrences, or signs, the herders orient the care of their animals by this bird. If it lays three eggs then there will be abundant forage in the upcoming years and the females should be impregnated to have as many offspring as possible while the males should be kept in order to fatten them on the good grass. If the bird only lays one egg then the herders proceed to slaughter most of the males because there will not be enough forage to feed them. In these years it is necessary to reduce the flock and there will be few offspring ﾑonly the strongest females should be impregnated by the most vigorous males to ensure few offspring, but of great vitality (Chambi, Quiso, and Tito 1992: 10).
In Andean culture however, humans do not distinguish themselves from nature, and proceed in their nurturance according to what suits the harmony of the pacha. Our culture is very rich in herbal treatments used for avoiding pregnancy as well as for aiding it (Ant從ez de Mayolo 1986). In this way the human community contributes directly, like the chijta, to the harmonization with the climate. This might seem to contradict the fact that the population in Peru, for the period between 1945 and 1980 rose from seven million to twenty three million inhabitants. But a closer and longer look reveals that in the years following 1532 the diseases brought by the European invaders caused a demographic collapse in which nine out of every ten inhabitants died (Cook 1984). From then until 1945 the population grew very slowly. Later, the so-called “population explosion” allowed us to rapidly restore the magnitude of the population sheltered in our territory at the moment of the Spanish invasion. What is new in our demographic history is not the size of the population but its present agglomeration in the cities, since before the invasion the population was widely dispersed throughout the entire Andean region. According to the perspective of Andean cultural affirmation, the “population explosion” has a positive aspect, and is not at all opposed to the capacity of harmonization with the climate that is characteristic to Andean culture and integral to the symbiosis upheld by the community of the heterogeneous. The next task in Andean cultural affirmation is to restore the demographic dispersion.
In contrast, in the modern West ﾑthe world of the technicalﾑ the event of ﾔpopulation explosionﾕ has been posed as a “demographic problem” from an economic perspective. In this view, the goal is to show that one of the causes of “underdevelopment” is the high rate of population growth in our countries. Western arguments addressing this supposed problem, whose pertinence is usually unquestioned, focus on the so-called opposition between population control enforced directly through the State or indirectly through appeal to the “conscience” of the couple to limit the number of their children based on an interested and misleading diagnosis. The difference between both positions is only the manner in which they impose their “will to power.” In hospitals and medical posts in our countries, meanwhile, women have been sterilized for the sake of progress and development.
Incompatibility of Andean culture and the modern West
Knowledge and judgment ﾑattitudes peculiar to the culture of the modern West which nonetheless claim universal applicabilityﾑ constitute the contents of what is lived here as cultural colonization and of official education on a worlwide scale. Schools and universities are institutions which are physically located in the Andes, but fulfill, nevertheless, the function of fashioning our youth with colonizing interests.
From this follows the paradox that the formal political independence of our countries from the metropolis has not been a process of autochtonous cultural affirmation on the part of the “independent” country, but to the contrary, the idea of development that has been imposed takes as the paradigm precisely the mode of living corresponding to the colonizing metropolis. This reflects the fact that the leaders of “national liberation” movements have almost always been educated in the principal cities of the Western world, and in consequence, hold in high esteem the colonizing culture while rejecting their own country’s culture. Education is one of the means that the colonizing powers employ to create, within our own people, allies interested in westernization and modernization through imitating the imperialist countries, which are held up as the only way out of the misery into which colonization has plunged us in the first place.
Knowledge and judgment are inextricable from the zeal for control of imperialist powers; they are the instruments of its “will to power”, and education is the process by which these powers achieve the schooling and obtain control of our “trained intelligence”: intellectuals, artists, and technicians. Colonization confers on them a special status as part of the “global middle class” which makes them everywhere anxious to get ahead in their professional careers and attain the perks success brings to them for being one with colonization.
But very few are still deceived by this seduction, now that this Western mode of knowledge, judgment, and control are effectively destroying both human beings as denounced by many social critics, and life on earth, as denounced by ecologists.
On the other hand, it is also true that increasing numbers of students of peasant extraction enter the university with the purpose of serving their communities but do not find there what they need to do so. The training and knowledge that the university offers them does not enable them to work in the community’s chacras. If they are able to get a job in public administration, or in business, or perhaps with an NGO, they will not find there a way to serve their communities either. Political militancy even in the revolutionary parties turns out to be completely frustrating because there too knowledge and judgment also reign, and the goals are, implicity or explicitly, Westernization and promoting the development of capitalist production. In Peru this has led some university professionals of peasant background who have no interest in entering “the global middle class” to serve instead Andean cultural affirmation. To this end they have decided to return to their native communities to reintegrate themselves into rural life and to collaborate with traditional authorities in the process of decolonization, regenerating it from its true basis.
Andean wisdom ﾑwhich is not knowledgeﾑ consists in knowing how to nurture and how to let oneself be nurtured in this living and vivifying world which we love unreservedly just as it is, but which we have also been trying to recover for the past 500 years, serenely, in the fullness of health, healing it daily of the colonial illness, a serious disease which we will soon overcome.
The wisdom of the original cultures of the world lies in that their daily lives of loving the world is the best guarantee for restablishing the health of the Earth. For this reason the affirmation of primal cultures, such as the Andean, also affirms life in the Earth.
References
Ant從ez de Mayolo, Santiago 1986
Pr㌘ticas tradicionales de planificaci溶 familiar (Traditional practices of family planning). In: Parto, lactancia y planificaci溶 familiar (Birth, Nursing, and Family Planning), pp. 99-116. Lima: AMIDEP.
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Al encuentro de Heidegger: Conversaciones con Frederic de Towarnicki (Encountering Heidegger: Conversations with Frederic de Towarnicki). Caracas: Monte Avila Editores.
Cook, N. D. 1984
Demographic collapse: Indian Peru. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Chambi, N市tor, V団tor Quiso and Francisco Tito 1994
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Chuyma Aru 1998a
”Reflexiones sobre el aprendizaje campesino” (Reflections on peasant learning) in PRATEC, La Regeneraci溶 de Saberes en los Andes (The Regeneration of Knowledge in the Andes). Lima: PRATEC.
____ 1998b
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Jorge Ishizawa was born in Lima, Peru in 1941. He graduated in civil engineering from the Universidad Nacional de Ingenierﾕa (National University of Engineering) in Lima in 1962. In 1968 he was awarded a Ph.D. in structural engineering from the University of Illinois. He has devoted his professional career to diverse aspects of socio-economic planning, systems and informatics both in the Peruvian public administration and international organizations. Since 1996 he has been a member of the Proyecto Andino de Tecnologias Campesinas (PRATEC), an institution dedicated to the affirmation of Andean culture. He has taught at the Graduate School of Universidad Ricardo Palma in Lima (1995-2002) and is a founding member of the National Academy of Science and Technology (ANCYT).

ReVision – A Journal of Consciousness and Transformation
Spring 2002 Volume 24, Number 4
Reprinted with permission of the Helen Dwight Reid Educational Foundation.
Published by Heldref Publications, 1319 18th Street, NW, Washington, DC 20036-1802. http://www.heldref.org/html/rev.html
Copyright ｩ 2002