La relación de depredación entre humanos y no-humanos en la ontología de los q’ero de la cordillera de Vilcanota, Perú

The anatomy of human and non-human (apus, pachamamas, the dead etc.) relations and dependencies manifests itself in different types of daily practices and rituals (agri-culture and herding, mobility, alimentation, ritual songs, shamanic and medicinal practices) and reveals ontological schemes of exchange and predation. Interestingly, both schemes can be expressed through the idiomatic expression of “feeding”. This implies that the purpose of relationships between personal beings is to feed each other through reciprocal practices (exchange) or feed on others (predation). In this paper, we analyze the scheme of predation among the Q’eros, which takes the forms of seduction, sexual intercourse, cannibalism and kidnapping. Different types of predation were grouped into three modalities (oblivion, breaking the taboo and otherness) that constitute the axis of the narrative and, at the same time, represent the origins or causes of these relations.