The mid-1950s were interesting years for students of Bolivian economic and political organisation. On the one hand, a precocious and remarkably bloodless revolution broke out, followed by agrarian reform (Dunkerley 1984, Dandler 1987, Grindle and Domingo 2003). Meanwhile, in academia, 1956 saw the publication of John Murra's doctoral thesis on the economic organisation of the Inca state, in which he described the distribution of ethnic settlements in the Andes as following a 'vertical archipelago model' – an elastic definition which Tristan Platt summarises as 'a dynamic model of the changing historical relations between Andean societies, the complementary ecologies they inhabit, and emergent state formations' (Platt 2009: 33). Murra elucidated how pre-Conquest South American ethnic nations generated and maintained a distinct system of control over territory that enabled smooth exchange of goods from a variety of places without a cash economy, and which helped ensure self-sufficiency for the group in question. It also
unfriendly to human life.
The term 'vertical archipelago' refers to a series of discontiguous, but ethnically homogeneous, settlements strewn throughout distinct 'ecological niches' (jungle, valley, arid high plain etc), all in communication with each other and populated by inhabitants consciously belonging to the same nation or group. These dispersed settlements would have as their axis a larger community and stretch of lands, usually positioned in the highlands where the bulk of the population was concentrated, but the 'islands' in distinct areas would allow the entire group to benefit from the possibilities afforded by different climates and conditions. The goods from these different areas would then be exchanged through the medium of kinship networks, tribute payments or ritual requirements: honey, feathers and fruit from the jungle, maize and coca from the valleys, potatoes and other tubers from higher levels, camelid fibres, dried meat, dried potatoes and quinoa from yet further up and fish, guano and mulli shells from the coastal areas. Pärsinnen (2003), Wachtel (1982) and others have described how this system was moderated and amplified by the Inca empire, whose nobility, under the influence of a central bureaucracy, organised the mass resettlement of people throughout the region. The reasons for this were many: to mobilise labour forces for the imperial grain fields, to bring shock troops in to quell frontier uprisings, to resettle skilled labourers in places where they were needed and to disperse people from 'troublesome' groups across sufficient distances to suppress potential rebellions.
The latter tactic of strategic forced resettlement to quash rebellion is not exclusive to South America: it was also used by the Roman empire in the second and third centuries (hence Asturian inscriptions in parts of Hadrian's Wall, see Collingwood and Wright
1965), and by Charlemagne in the ninth (Scholz 1970), but in contrast to these and other centrally coordinated transmigration programmes, the Inca system allowed for mitimaes (migrants) to return home to their communities of origin after a term was served, and to retain land rights there. It is even recorded that mitimaes returned once or twice a year in order to fulfil ritual duties and reciprocal labour (Lorandi and Rodriguez 2003).
Lorandi and Rodriguez among others point out that the enormous demographic changes caused by Inca rule should be considered in combination with other imperial interventions such as road building, language shift, architecture and communications technology. So, too, is it necessary to consider contemporary mass movement of people in the full national and global context of the early twenty-first century, even if there is an identifiable underlying pattern that gives it a distinctively Andean character. The national context is framed by an economy heavily dependent on extractive industries, themselves vulnerable to international price shocks, and by international aid contributions. The economic background is one of a globalised capitalism characterised by its 'predatory mobility' (Appadurai 2002), whose incursion is best answered, judo-style, with a feint in the form of household mobility. But beyond simply going where the work is, en masse, extended tapacareño peasant families spread out in a wide net across which they are able to interchange products.
Of course, the archipelago model as applied to contemporary Cochabamba works better as an heuristic device rather than a factual description of settlement patterns. Andeans on the move, settling in multiple locations while still retaining a sense of belonging to one central point or regional identity, is a historical constant. There was the ethnic
among other places. Later came the massive Inca resettlement project which organised the transmigration of tens of thousands of people and permanently changed the demographic face of the continent. The upset to the population caused by Spanish colonial rule, chiefly people seeking to escape the burden of obligatory labour service, caused many to leave their communities of origin. Then there was the break-up of ancestral lands in the nineteenth century and the dissolution of haciendas in the twentieth. Eventually we come to the present day, and migration seems to be a bigger concern than ever with Bolivian cities swelling and the countryside emptying. Fully 20-25% of the population now lives overseas.
The kinds of population flux and settlement pattern described by Murra have persisted to a degree through all the changes described above. That is, many indigenous peasant people in Bolivia – and many who are neither – still migrate from their communities of origin in such a way that their households form a chain across different ecological and economic niches, enabling a constant flow of goods, money and people between each point. Furthermore, even while living in places that are distant from their community of origin, it still plays an important role in their self-identification, and they visit it regularly, if not frequently.
In addition to being a strategy for resistance to the unpredictability of Bolivian economy and exploitative middlemen, or as a kind of 'weapon of the weak' (Scott 1985), this distinctive settlement pattern reflects aspects of both the pre-Inca archipelago and later systems of mit'a. That is, that 'permanent' migration often features the spreading out of family members across a maximum number of 'economic niches', in such a way that it facilitates intra-group trading and movement, but also that much rural-urban or rural-rural
migration is temporary, and still allows for migrants to participate in the economic, political and ritual life of their communities – perhaps not in the form of still having access to land, but rather in other ways.