ABSTRACT
This chapter emphasizes harvest collection and disbursal through the storehouse, an administrative system with a marked feminine symbolic association. The archaeological and ethnohistoric record gives many reasons to see cycles of storage and redistributive disbursement as the very pulse of Andean political economy. Exceptionally, Rapaz still practiced redistribution, ritual and all, through an active communal storehouse and Andean ritual precinct well into the twentieth century. These institutions resemble the colonial era sapci or communal storehouse as described by Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala at the start of the seventeenth century. Rapaz in the early twentieth century had a supra-household sphere of exchange based on separate endowments of pastoral land and on 'community fields' in each of the agricultural sectors. A mystique of safety, plenty, nurturance, and enjoyment clings to Pasa Qulqa. Raywan and raywana have been commonly translated mother of food' from the days of Peru's idolatry trials up to the present.
