Despacho

A despacho is made in order to stop existing. A specialist lays out a sheet, places elements on it, wraps the whole into a bundle, and the bundle is then burned, or sometimes buried, so that what was assembled is transferred rather than kept. Nothing about it is intended to survive, and there is no such thing as an old despacho.

The elements are numerous and their selection is the specialist's work. Coca leaves are central, as they are to nearly everything in this region. Fat, seeds, wool, sweets, small figures, metal foil and other materials appear according to who is making it, where, and for what. The atlas does not set out that assembly, and the omission is deliberate: the order and the choices are the specialist's knowledge, they vary between practitioners who would disagree with each other, and a reference entry that laid out a sequence would be presenting one person's practice as the tradition's.

The recipients are Pachamama, the earth, and the apus, the mountain powers of a particular place, which are named individually and are not interchangeable. The reasons are concrete rather than abstract: an illness, a journey, a new house, a herd in difficulty, a dispute in a family. This is a working practice, done because something needs doing.

The despacho makes most sense inside the wider Andean pattern of reciprocity that Catherine J. Allen described in the Quechua community of Sonqo. Nothing there moves in one direction. Labour is exchanged, coca is exchanged, hospitality is exchanged, and the exchanges are remembered and balanced over years. The earth and the mountains are inside that system rather than outside it: they give pasture, water and increase, and what is owed back is given in the same currency of attention and material.

On that reading a despacho is not a payment to a deity in the transactional sense a Western reader might reach for. It is a contribution to an ongoing relationship with parties who are, in a real sense, neighbours, and the failure it guards against is not divine anger so much as a relationship falling out of balance.

Which is why the commercial version raises a genuine problem rather than a snobbish one. Despachos are now assembled for visitors in Cusco and elsewhere, performed on a schedule and paid for in cash by people who will leave. Practitioners and communities disagree, sometimes sharply, about whether that is an extension of the practice or a hollowing of it, and the argument is theirs. What can be said from outside is narrow: the object being sold is real, the specialists doing it are frequently real specialists, and a transaction with someone who is not going to be there next year is a different kind of thing from the one the practice is built out of.