La religión de la tierra en los andes centrales : Imágenes simbólicas y trasfondos ecológicos

This research explores the symbolic-religious imagery that the Quechua people of the Andes of
Ollantaytambo (Cusco-Peru) have about land, that is, an integral element of their environment which
they perceive as alive because productive, and whose (productive) benevolence they consider
necessary to propitiate by various religious rituals, in order to continue living in the high Andean
mountains. Specifically, we ascertain if Quechua worship to land may be included in a definition of
religion developed in reference to the ‘supernatural’ and the ‘divine’ as paradigmatic categories that
transcend not human power but especially physical Nature processes, and therefore also the
biological ones of the land. Under these analytical perspectives, we discuss the forementioned
general categories of anthropological religious theory, resorting on the other hand to a renewed
interpretation of the Quechua worship of land, by which this one is presented as a “religiousness of
immanence” in which topographical qualities of the andean environment and ecological facts relating
the latter to Quechuas prevail.

This research explores the symbolic-religious imagery that the Quechua people of the Andes of
Ollantaytambo (Cusco-Peru) have about land, that is, an integral element of their environment which
they perceive as alive because productive, and whose (productive) benevolence they consider
necessary to propitiate by various religious rituals, in order to continue living in the high Andean
mountains.