ABSTRACT
A sacrifice or offering is predicated on the assumption that it is part of a twoway process. The people making the sacrifice assume that a rational being will sense the offering, and they hope that in presenting a suitable gift in an acceptable manner they can express thanks for prior benevolence or persuade this being to reciprocate in an appropriate way. In the Andes such offerings have ranged from a few leaves of coca to large sacrifices including the lives of animals and people. In making these offerings Andean people are interacting with the dead, mountain deities, saints and sacred objects and requesting these knowledgable beings to intervene in the world to the benefit of the supplicant. It is relatively easy for a critical observer from outside the culture to see this as the tragic outcome of misguided animistic beliefs. Truly modern rationalist readers may group this with belief in astrology, divine kingship, shamanism, the virgin birth, and life after death, claiming that all of these attribute nonexistent powers to non-sentient materials or imagined beings. Most sociologists (following Durkheim, Weber and Marx) would silently assume the falsity of these beliefs and concentrate on assessing how such ritual practices bound the society together, structured the social and economic world, or justified exploitation by a dominant elite. This is also the position adopted by Giddens (1984) who assumes that agency rests solely within the reflexive practice of knowledgable human beings, everything else being part of the structure within which people are socialised and which people’s actions continually reproduce and transform. This chapter seeks to question that assumption by using examples from recent ethnographic work, as well as historical and archaeological evidence, to demonstrate the importance of offerings made to ancestors and sacred places in the Andes. This analytical approach could perpetuate the external gaze of the scientific observer capable of identifying who the ‘real’ human agents are, but I start by assuming that the world is full of agency beyond that of human individuals. Throughout I stress an animistic approach that attributes agency to the landscape and the material world. This approach has major implications for the application of agency theory, particularly within archaeology.
