Corn-llama duality and Andean religious syncretism

Abstract

Research is being conducted on how corn and the llama, extremely modest elements linked to everyday Andean life, had a prominent religious significance in pre-Hispanic Peru and continue to assume, in much of the Andean Quechua culture, syncretic connotations as a result of more than five centuries of cultural and religious transformations. Likewise, a religious duality is established between these - which seems to be the organizing matrix of the complex symbols of the Andean Quechua culture - that manifests itself in a series of symbolic relationships of opposition, complementation, and analogical and homological equivalence. The theoretical perspective is to conceive religion as a cultural system, with its subjective and symbolic dimension in the terms of Clifford Geertz, and with its objective dimension as proposed by Manuel Marzal. For the study, significant ethnographic work has been carried out in the peasant communities of Lorensayocc and Anansayocc in the Quinua district and in others in Ayacucho region. Additionally, chronicles and other ethnographic sources referring to Cusco and Puno, in southern Peru, have been reviewed.