BOLIVIA’S CHIPAYA AND THE ALTIPLANO

The Chipaya are the living relic of an ancient past – the only remnant of the Tiwanaku civilization, which predates the Inca by 2,500 years.

 
For thousands of years Chipaya dress consisted of a poncho and wide brimmed hat for men and a hooded poncho for women. Women’s hairstyle, consisting of 62 braids, was found in centuries-old chullpas (burial mounds) further suggesting ancient origins.
Eloi Mamani Alabi, 37, returns from visiting a neighbour. Bolivia's Chipaya ethnic group live on a 12,000-foot-high tundra, edging the Coipasa salt desert, and are thought to be direct descendants of the Tiwanaku civilisation that predated the Inca.
Eloi Mamani Alabi prepares coca leaves as his wife steps inside their home. Coca is used amongst the Andean Altiplano people, serving both a practical purpose, to stimulate mental faculties and suppress appetite, and a ritualistic role.
Isabel Chino Condori works on a traditional Chipaya poncho.
The most significant modern addition to Chipaya life is the motorcycle. Distances that take days on foot can now be covered in a few hours. Petrol, however, remains prohibitively expensive.
Eloi Mamani Alabi outside his home in Chipaya village.
Samuel Mamani Chino gazes across the tundra as he prepares to go hunting for flamingos. More and more Chipaya youngsters are leaving their ancestral lands and crossing the border into Chile, looking for work in the saltpeter mines.
The sconi is the Chipaya hunting weapon of choice. Traditionally, it was made using flamingo tendons, though nylon is now used, attached to two lead balls. The weapon is flighted with volcanic rock.
Samuel Mamani Chino crouches on a patch of salty earth, where his poncho and hat will blend, camouflaging him. Here he will wait for a flock of flamingos to pass.
As a low flying flock of flamingos approaches, Jose Luis Mamani Chino leaps to his feet and swings his sconi throwing weapon - versions of which are used throughout the Andes. The bright threads are used to spot the weapon after it’s been flung.
Jose Luis Mamani Chino and his brother Samuel display the flamingo they have just caught. Flamingos are actually grey in colour, the pink pigment comes from the shrimp they eat. The Chipaya's dogs are used for hunting, helping to retrieve prey.
Jose Luis Mamani Chino prepares to take home his prey, a James's Flamingo. The bird's beaks are specially adapted to remove mud and silt from their food, which is almost exclusively shrimp and algae found in lakes. Chipaya Territory, Bolivia.
Eloi Mamani Alabi helps his youngest son, Jose Luis Mamani Chino, pluck two flamingos the boy has just killed with his sling. His sister leans agains the mud wall of their home.
Eloi Mamani Alabi helps his youngest son, Jose Luis Mamani Chino, pluck two flamingos the boy has just killed with his sling.
Isabel Chino Condori singes the feathers from a flamingo her son has caught. The Chipaya burn the evergreen yareta that grows at a rate of just 1mm a year but generates a lot of heat. Once plucked, the carcass will be gutted and the meat boiled.
Jose and Eloi rest after a hard day on the altiplano in their traditional circular Chipaya house.
 
 

Jose Luis Mamani Chino waits, motionless. The young Chipaya boy is pressed against the earth, one arm extended, his llama-wool poncho blending with the salt rich soil. A flock of flamingos flap lazily across the sky and he leaps to his feet, whipping a length of lead-weighted nylon called a sconi round his head three times before letting it go. One of the birds falters in its flight and plummets to the ground in a chaos of pink feathers.

As the 10 year old trots off to fetch his prey, I’m trying to square the whole spectacle with…well anything familiar. One tends to associate flamingos with the tropics. But we’re on a wind-whipped plateau high in the Bolivian Andes, snow-capped volcanoes breaking the horizon. And a little boy has just killed one of these iconic birds at 60 metres with a piece of string, some volcanic rock and a couple of lead balls. Presumably to eat it.

The Chipaya are the living relic of an ancient past. Anthropologists believe the tiny indigenous group to be the only remnant of the Tiwanaku civilization, which predates the Inca by 2,500 years. Their language and customs haven’t changed for millennia and they are cut off both geographically and culturally from the Quechua and Aymara ethnic groups that dominate the Altiplano, the world’s second highest plateau after Tibet.

The Chipaya seldom get visitors. They live in and around the small town of Santa Ana de Chipaya, on the starkly beautiful pampas that fringe the Coipasa salt desert, a smaller version of the Salar de Uyuni. The town itself is non-descript – adobe houses with corrugated iron roofs, a church, a cemetery. But most still live out on the plain, building circular homes of mud and thatch near the Lauca River, which swells and recedes with the passing seasons. It provides enough fresh water – just – to grow quinoa and tend llamas and sheep.

We leave Jose Luis to the hunt and meet his father Eloi Mamani Alabi, a 37-year old father of three, who welcomes us outside his conical home. He’s wearing the distinctive felt hat, white shirt and llama wool poncho by which Chipaya males are recognised. His wife’s poncho is darker and hooded. She sits at a loom, deftly manipulating the thick threads using a stick and a shell – Chipaya textiles are highly prized, fetching hundreds of dollars in the capital and can take weeks to complete. Their two sons Samuel and Jose Luis appear and their daughter Veronica peeps out shyly from the doorway.

Whether Jose Luis and his brother will still be here a decade from now is uncertain. “A lot of the young people are leaving this place,” Eloi tells us. “There is not enough land, not enough grazing for the sheep you need to raise a family.” The biggest problem according to Eloi is that the Lauca is drying up. “The river is the only reason we can live here,” he tells me. “If there is no more water, we must leave.” Many Chipaya cross the border to work in Chilean mines, or move to Bolivian cities like Oruro in search of work. But according to Eloi, they still feel like outsiders. “Our neighbours don’t want us – we are equal human beings, but they don’t recognize us.”

When I ask Eloi where the Chipaya came from, he says, “We have always been here. Before the chullpas we were here.” Chullpas are funerary towers that can be found scattered throughout the Peruvian and Bolivian Andes. Many still contain human remains, ancestors of the present day Aymara.

Anthropologists believe the Chipaya are direct descendants of the Uru ethnic group, which populated the Altiplano thousands of years before the Aymara came here. Like all indigenous Andean peoples, their religion is a syncretism of Christianity and animistic belief. They revere Pachamama, the ancient earth mother, an autochthonous deity whose presence is so ubiquitous in the Andes that when the Spanish sought to replace her with the Virgin Mary, Pachamama simply absorbed her identity.

After Jose Luis has killed another flamingo with the same relaxed assurance as the first, he sits plucking the birds’ feathers with his father. Veronica winds thread around a spindle, while their mother prepares a fire of dry tola brush inside one of the houses. As the afternoon passes, I am flooded with the sense of an ancient past, a way of living that endured on this unforgiving plateau for millennia. The feeling of suspended time soon passes though. Driving back through town, I spot some Chipaya boys who’ve climbed on top of a wall. I realize they are trying to get a mobile-phone signal.

Words by Johnny Langeneheim