City Shoe, Country Sandal: Somatic Geographies and Kinesthetic Translations Among High-Altitude Quechua Athletes in the Peruvian Andes
Creators: name: Foster, Andrew
Publisher: name: My University
Year: 2022
Subjects: subject: Semiotics
subject: Embodiment
subject: Indigeneity
subject: Sport
subject: Peru
subject: Anthropology and Archaeology
subject: Social Sciences

description: Anthropologists have long examined the ways people wield technologies, institutions, and environments to shape and transform their bodies according to culturally specific notions of health and wellness. Yet half a century after Mauss argued that techniques of the body are assembled for the individual not by themselves alone but by all their education, we know little about how people communicatively harness their environments to assemble embodied actions. In this dissertation, I examine athletic recruitment and training among Indigenous endurance runners and their coaches in Cusco, Peru, and challenge contemporary notions of embodied potential by re-positioning the body as a semiotic entanglement that comes to life dialogically. I argue that we can only understand the manner in which humans learn to move through their environments by attending to the communicative acts that structure and scaffold their embodied learning. For both the Quechua youth and expatriate talent scouts in the Peruvian Institute of Sport with whom I work, the “gift” of athletic excellence is envisioned and cultivated with talk. In the Andes Mountains, Quechua communities revere the storied peregrinations of their barefoot ancestors, who once shuttled swiftly across the Inca Empire. Roaming talent scouts scouring these mountainous crevices now attribute this endurance to the thin air of high-altitude ecologies, which is purported to endow peripatetic inhabitants with aerobic excellence. Drawing on twenty-five months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted during a national recruitment campaign to mobilize competitors for Peru at the 2019 Pan-American Games, I track migrating Quechua athletes and circulating expatriate coaches as they navigate the transition from rural Andean life rhythms to the vexing challenges of professional sports training. At the nexus of their training is the perceived need to overcome “cosmovision,” a fatalistic reticence stereotypically attributed to Indigenous Andean peoples. Quechua trainees are consequently tasked with training the entirety of their bodies, including the verbal skill of articulating their gift to themselves and others, as if their eloquence might incrementally catalyze a desire to triumph. 3,400 meters above sea level at the Elite Performance Center in Cusco, they willingly weather cascades of blistering shouts designed to “open” their bodies to the pains and passions of athletic self-transformation. My close attention to the communicative practices of coaching, talent scouting, and sports habitualization in a state-sponsored residential training facility shows how the body is voiced into being by a heterogeneous network of social actors vested in channeling its productive capacities. While anthropologists in the throes of a post-structural hangover have turned away from language towards materiality, my dissertation foregrounds the relation between language and the body to show how human-environment interactions are communicatively envisioned and cultivated. By positioning the Indigenous body specifically as the instrument and outcome of this cultivation, I reveal emergent modes of Indigenous citizenship, making original contributions to studies of embodiment, Indigeneity, and decoloniality.