Aymara Indian Perspectives on Development in the Andes

Amy Eisenberg, Ph.D.

Photography by John Amato, RN

Kutarapxiw quqanakasxa, ukatxa phichantapxarakiw, quqa tunu lawanaks jikirapxi, ukatsi janipu-niw jiksupkit qhuya tunu saphanakasxa.

One should take pride in ones land and culture. There is a popular saying in Aymara, They cut our branches, they burn our leaves, they pull out our trunks . . . but never could they overtake our roots. This was addressed to the Spaniards.

- Aymara agriculturist of Chile

Aymara Indian Perspectives on Development in the Andes presents our collaborative research with the Aymara people in the Andes of northern Chile. We conducted ethnographic interviews with Aymara people in more than 16 villages from the coast to the high plateau, 4600 meters above sea level. With-in a multidisciplinary framework and with a detailed understanding of issues from the Aymara point of view, together we explore the enduring reciprocal relations between the Aymara and the elements of land, water, and the supernatural amid exogenously imposed development within their holy land. We discuss the paving of international Chile Highway 11, diversion of Altiplano waters of the Ro Lauca to the arid Atacama Desert coast for hydroelectricity and irrigation, mining within Parque Nacional Lauca, a UNESCO International Biosphere Reserve, and Chilean national park policies regarding Ay-mara communities and their natural and cultural properties within the protected area.

For Andean people, economic, spiritual, and social life, are inextricably tied to land and water. The Aymara of Chile are the indigenous people of the northern border Region XV, Arica y Parinacota, who are struggling to maintain their sustainable and traditional systems of irrigation waters distribution, agriculture, and pastoralism in one of the most arid regions of our world, the Atacama Desert. Inter-views with Aymara people reveal the social and environmental dimensions of the larger conflict be-tween rapid economic growth and a sensitive cultural and natural resource base. The Aymara help us to understand indigenous issues and their cosmological vision.

Aruskiptasipxananakasakipunirakispawa

We are human beings; hence we must communicate. We are obliged to dialogue, in spite of all the conflicts in which humans act, we also face and resolve with communication. The Aymara believe in the unity of humankind and that only as one can we make this earth a good place for all of us. Aymara perceptions and needs are the most important consideration in this study.

Development in the Andes must consider the individual and collective needs of the Aymara people. Environmental transformation must be grounded in a careful understanding of the Aymara and their way of life. This book attempts to contribute to that understanding.

Through the lens of visual ethnoecology, John Amato vividly and respectfully photodocuments details of Aymara life, culture and the environment.

Amy Eisenberg, Ph.D. is an ethnobotanist and botanical artist who works collaboratively with indigenous peoples internationally and nationally. She recently conducted organic sustainable agriculture and agroforestry research in Asia and the Pacific.

John Amato, RN practices Emergency and Intensive Care nursing. His exquisite photographic gallery can be viewed at: www.pbase.com/jamato8 ;

Aymara Indian Perspectives (Cloth, ISBN 978-0-8173-1791-1): $49.95 US $___________

Domestic shipping: $5.00 for the first book and $1.00 for each additional book $___________

Canada residents add 7% GST $___________

International shipping $9.50 for the first book and $5.00 for each additional book $___________

Enclosed as payment in full: (Make checks payable to The University of Alabama Press) TOTAL $___________

Account number __________________________Exp date___________ Daytime phone(___)____________

Full name ____________________________________ Signature___________________________________

Shipping Address_______________________________________ City___________________ State_____

(No P.O. Box) _______________________________________ Zip________________

Mail this form to: The University of Alabama Press, Chicago Distribution Center, 11030 S. Langley, Chicago, IL, 60628, OR, fax to: 800-621-8476, OR call, 800-621-2736

Illinois residents add 9.50% sales tax $___________

Bill my: ___Visa ___Mastercard ___American Express ___Discover

6 x 9 280 pages

ISBN-13:978-0-8173-1791-1

$49.95/Cloth

ISBN-13: 978-0-8173-8666-5

$49.95/eBook

Look - I managed to keep the number of words down to four even though I could easily make the title much longer.

Longer means more important, right? Especially if all the buzz words and tropes can be included. It's hard for some to resist the grand academic subtitle. Using a long subtitle is a great way to pad the title space.

Here's an example of the full whizz-bang:

"Don't tell it all: Short titles lead to greater interest and academic impact, long titles repel potential readers by saying too much, or getting tangled, or repeating words and becoming repetitive"

Having said all that in my title, what more would I need to say? And why would anyone bother to read the whole paper if it existed?

A great paper on the subject does exist, but was not written by me. Here it is:

A. Letchford, H. S. Moat, and T. Preis (2015) "The advantage of short paper titles" Royal Society Open Science (26 August 2015,DOI:10.1098/rsos.150266).

After looking at citation records for scientific papers with longer and shorter titles, in a huge sample of 140,000 papers, the authors suggest three possible explanations for the correlation. They also note (in the abstract) that papers with shorter titles may tend to be written more clearly, and indicate (in conclusion) that they plan to study the relationship between stylistic attributes of content and citation frequency.

It's quite a revealing study overall. Some papers with long-winded titles do get cited a lot, but on average, it's probably better to go with a shorter title.

That is not the whole story though.

Different high impact journals seem to favour shorter or longer titles on average. It's probably good to go with the flow of the journal you want to publish in... if it's a good journal.

Last month I had the good fortune to attend a conference in Paris:

15th International Conference of the European Association of Southeast Asian Archaeologists ,

6 -10 July 2015, Universit Paris Ouest, Nanterre la Dfense (EurASEAA15).

I presented a paper in a session on plant and animal domestication, and enjoyed a variety of archaeology papers by participants from many different countries.

The conference was organised by an organisation called NomadIT :

" NomadIT is a team of down-to-earth freelance administrators, event organisers and IT specialists who work remotely using internet and email technologies to assist NGOs, educational and voluntary sector organisations to run their organisations and events. "

Although the organiser works remotely, there were enough actual people helping at the campus venue. They looked like graduate students doing summer part-time work. They set up desks, posted emergency notices about room changes, organised bad coffee and limited snacks. Their nationalities were obscure. French? English? Other? They seemed able to speak to everyone.

It would have been nice if the helpers could have been introduced as part of the conference, rather than being practically anonymous. On two mornings, I passed through a fruit market in Nanterre Ville on the way to the venue, and could buy stawberries and cherries to distribute to other conference members. I wanted to generate some discussion through some good-tasting fruit. I'm an ethnobotanist. I was happy to have an excuse to buy something in the local market.

A conference is a temporary community where good communication is what ultimately determines success. We come together from remote regions of the world, and should use the conference to listen and learn and make connections, formally and informally. The conference is an opportunity for serendipity -- a plan for the unplanned.

This conference did well enough with a limited budget. Who knows, perhaps it did very well. I am sure the experience was different for every person who joined.

Though happy in my in my job, I do sometimes wonder what other people earn doing similar work in other countries... and how that might relate to the local cost of living. This is not a very useful exercise.

It would be more useful if I could judge the scientific and educational value of using some of my income to regularly employ an editor to look at everything I write, even though I am an experienced writer, am also active as an editor, and am not expected to produce work for high impact journals (though it would be apreciated, of course).

The basic expectation is that I produce work of relevance for my research discipline and for society in general, through a variety of ways, in academic and non-academic publications, by attending conferences, through teaching, and through museum exhibitions.

So... how much should I expect to pay for an editor? Someone with experience in publishing and writing generally?

Recently I discovered a website called Payscale.com. I joined and then asked for a report on what I should pay, as a 'university', for a publications editor in Australia (the concept of 'employer' being an individual does not seem to be recognised).

The website generates a scenario job based on my answers to a series of questions, and describes the roles of publications editor as:

Ensuring adherence to a style guide, correct formatting and consistent use of language within a document; reviewing, rewriting and editing the work of other writers; developing story or content ideas; and holding a Bachelor's Degree. Supervisory Role: No. Skills should include Technical Writing, Writing Procedures & Documentation, Proposal Writing, Grant Writing, Scientific Writing. (my precis)

That's all rather more than I expected. I just want someone to read and edit my work, one-to-one. Still, I am after a benchmark to think about, so I looked further into the report.

The website automatically selects relevant profiles of existing subscribers to the service and uses these to generate a range of estimates.

For the particular job category I asked about, the site reports that there is much variability in compensation levels, so the estimates are not rated as highly accurate or reliable - a realistic caveat!

Here are the estimates given:

Base salary per year ($AUD): 60,607 (i.e. c. 5.8 million yen per year).

Hourly rate: $29.14 (i.e. c. 2,774 yen per hour)

This estimate was based on 165 profiles of people in the Payscale.com database.

The hourly rate looks reasonable to me, relative to pay scales and living costs in Australia and Japan, but I doubt that there are many jobs available for publication editors with a base salary that is so high.

For such a salary, the person would need to be managing editor of a very high impact journal that is able to attract high-paying authors or subscribers.

If many editors, proofreaders, and translators can submit profile information to Payscale.com (or a similar site), we might be able to get a more global view of what they are able to earn and expect in different countries.

That would be useful for all of us here at the Research Cooperative.

If you can recommend - for members of our network - other websites with information on pay scales, please comment on this blog post!

At the PCST list, PB Jarreau wrote last week:

--

PhD Candidate, Manship School of Mass Communication

Last week I received a copy of a book by Ben Yagoda (2004):

The Sound on the Page: Great Writers Talk about Style and Voice in Writing. Harper: New York, London, Toronto and Sydney.

Ben Yagoda was (and perhaps still is) a teacher of non-fiction writing at the University of Delaware, USA.

I like this book. I like this author. He is writing about something that is difficult to define, that others have avoided writing about for reasons that he explains well.

He puts our efforts as writers in historical perspective.

I'd like to re-read my own papers after finishing this book, to understand my own writing better.

Here's a key statement, from page thirty-six:

"After all my years of teaching and being taught, I am convinced that there is only one specific, consistently reliable tip writers in training can be given: read your stuff aloud, if not literally, then with an inner voice attended to by the inner ear."

The need to read and hear our own writing is something I try to tell my own students.

When I first started building the Research Cooperative website, I wrote a poem to the same effect. The title is:

Read it.

Please do.

It's just a poem. It won't bite.

Dear Members and Visitors,

Our network attracts on average around 100 to 200 visitors per day. What do you all do with your time when visiting our network?

I looked at some Goggle stats for our site (7th Feb 2013 to 8th Feb 2015, a period of two years).

Conclusions:

(1) Most visitors run away within a few seconds (thanks for finding us!)

(2) A significant number of visitors stay long enough to look at two or three different pages (see "session duration" and "page depth" below). That only requires two or three minutes.

(3) Very few visitors (including members) stay long enough to log in, write a message, or find someone who can help or who they can give help to.

Conclusion: we are not very successful attracting people who really need the social connections that are possible through our network.

Why is this?

Your opinons about the network are valuable, whether good, bad, or indifferent. Without your feedback, we cannot develop the Research Cooperative effectively.

Here's my comment for Falling Fruit , a project aiming to crowdsource data in order to map fruit trees located in public spaces. The idea is to make free food sources more widely known. Nice in theory but...

Falling fruit from public trees in a particular community might already be known by the community. How can this app help local communities advertise trees available within the community, while protecting those trees from overharvesting by outsiders who learn about them through the Falling Fruit network? When we map trees, can we limit access to people within a certain defined area, as identifed by the IP address of each computer or mobile device?