ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with how one population made of the soaring, plunging Andean landscape a "single nest," and whom they feel themselves to be as its inhabitants. Making a home involves both physical adaptive work and cultural work to guide and motivate labor. Historically, Rapaz typifies the high part of an apparently unique Andean adaptive system, famously called "verticality." This term refers to a politically coordinated society built of stacked "islands" on the land, so that political societies of varied scale "sampled" the resources of high and low landscape. Rapaz's small-scale irrigated cultivation lies toward the bottom of the village's space and along the Checras riverbank. Some of the water is used to maintain six irrigated paddocks or feedlots on the riverbank. Rapaz has the usual institutions of a state-recognized town, including a small municipality, a justice of the peace, and a Comunidad Campesina or legally recognized peasant corporation of the commons.
