An icebreaker
High in the Peruvian Andes, the Q'ero people carry ceremonial knowledge often described as surviving from before the Spanish conquest, centered on reciprocity with earth and mountain spirits. Western workshops now sell versions of it, which researchers say strips it of context.
Leading a university expedition to the community that year, he documented Andean ceremonial knowledge that had survived there largely intact, publishing findings that first brought sustained scholarly attention to Q'ero tradition.
Continuing his father's fieldwork and trained himself within the tradition, he has published further studies of Q'ero cosmology and ritual practice, documenting concepts such as ayni from within the community's own framework.
In her ethnography of a Quechua highland community, she described reciprocity between people, land, and mountain spirits as the organizing principle of daily and ceremonial life across the wider Andean world the Q'ero belong to.