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House rethatching in an Andean annual cycle: practice, meaning, and contradiction
Author(s) -
GOSE PETER
Publication year - 1991
Publication title -
american ethnologist
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.875
H-Index - 78
eISSN - 1548-1425
pISSN - 0094-0496
DOI - 10.1525/ae.1991.18.1.02a00020
Subject(s) - contradiction , appropriation , opposition (politics) , sociology , habitus , period (music) , harmony (color) , meaning (existential) , ambivalence , aesthetics , epistemology , social science , political science , law , art , social psychology , cultural capital , philosophy , psychology , politics , visual arts
In the Andes, house rethatching is a labor process that creates more than just a new roof: it also produces a ritual imagery that gives form to, and is animated by, a tension between community and domestic life. This tension is expressed through the annual cycle as an opposition between a period of intensive interhousehold cooperation during the growing season and a period of appropriation by individual households during the dry season. House rethatching takes place during the seasonal shift from private appropriation to collective production, and is shaped by both of these opposed moralities, whose intersection and struggle animate the symbolism of the act and provide its practical grounding. On this basis I criticize attempts to reduce practice to a homogeneous set of dispositions through the concept of habitus, and seek to revindicate practice as a source of meaning.