ABSTRACT
Violence in Northern Potosi in general is neither excluded nor denied, neither used as a source of legitimacy nor expelled onto a putative periphery, but is located in an ‘other’ world in which it is harnessed to social reproduction, but at the same time recognized in all its ambivalence. This chapter emphasizes that masculinity is contradictory and unstable even within its violent manifestations, as the two images of bull and condor reveal. Femininity, like masculinity, is contradictory in the symbolic representations of Northern Potosi. The chapter elucidates the workings of symbolic dualism, other important features of the ways that marriage, masculinity and femininity are represented have been ignored, and that looking at animal imagery and its associations with masculinity reveals a very different picture. Dualism, found in virtually all spheres of social organization and symbolic representations, is a central concern for Andean anthropology.
