Performing Symmetry in Andean Weather Forecasting: The Practice of Cabañuelas, Beyond Divination and Suffering

Abstract

This paper analyzes a practice known as Cabañuelas—an Indigenous way of anticipating the next year’s rainfall by interpreting a series of signs in the current year. The knowledge and gestures associated with this practice have traditionally been understood according to the classical division between pragmatic techniques and magic rituals, an approach that I set aside in favor of considering Cabañuelas as a hybrid practice involving multiple kinds of beings and agents. It can also be understood as part of a complex of practice together with the offerings to the earth in August, and in addition to the reading of the coca leaf and the molten lead—all of these being practices that share an observational, prospecting, and performative character. Based on this, I put forward the idea of empowered agents, challenging the view of suffering Andean actors hopelessly subjected to super/natural forces or idiosyncratic conditions they cannot control.