51 minutes Colour
Director: Carlos Pasini
Anthropologist: Michael Sallnow
This film is set in a community of peasant agriculturalists 2 1/4 miles above sea level in the southern Peruvian Andes. Concentrating on a single family, the film explores aspects of religious and secular life. The first part of the film shows a pilgrimage to a Christian sanctuary situated close to the residence of the most powerful of the Central Andean mountain spirits (Apus) illustrating the syncretism of Catholic and pre-Hispanic local religious traditions.
In the second part of the film we see a fertility rite for sheep, and the attempts of certain members of the community to procure government assistance for a motor road to the village which would link them more closely with the rest of Peruvian society.
This film portrays the Quechua of the village of Camahuara as being in a sense sealed off from the rest of the world, but it also shows how their way of life is integrated with the Peruvian economy. It has been criticised for emphasising that the desire for change is coming from inside the traditional society rather than being forced on it from without.
O. Harris, 1975. Review of the film. RAIN, 6, p.11. Reply by Michael Sallnow and further correspondence in RAIN, 7, 10 and 11.
B.J. Isbell, 1978. To Defend Ourselves: Ecology and Ritual in an Andean Village. Latin American Monographs No. 47. University of Texas Press, Austin.
O. Nunez del Prado and W.F. Whyte, 1973. Kuyo Chico: Applied Anthropology in an Indian Community. University of Chicago Press. (An account of a project of directed social change in a community about 19 km. from Camahuara.)
M. Sallnow, R. Whitburn and V. Cutler, 1978. The Quechua. Educational pack in the Land and People series intended for 1113 year old children (RAI/ILEA project). Basil Blackwell, Oxford.
W.W. Stein, 1961. Hualcan: Life in the Highlands of Peru. Cornell University Press, Ithaca.
P. Van den Berghe, 1977. Inequality in the Peruvian Andes: Class and Ethnicity in Cuzco. University of Missouri Press, Columbia.
