ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at some ritual acts that take place in San Pablo de Lipez as Carnival draws to a close. It explores the dynamics between past and present that operate in a rural Bolivian celebration of Carnival. People there do not verbalize much about the ceremony in question, but archival documents and ethnohistorical evidence suggest a link between it and the payment of tribute to the Bolivian state in the nineteenth century. Carnival celebrations immediately before the start of Lent in the Christian calendar are a feature of the Andean region and form an obvious focus for examining the significant timing of things in that context. Various anthropologists have concurred in the idea that memory is not just an individual faculty, but is also something that is social or collective. An Andean preoccupation with quadripartition may account for the quartering of one sheep at Carnival, but not for the two that are quartered at the karcharpaya.
