School of Social and Political Science

Profile

Daniel Spotswood's research is about the personhood of mountains in the southern Peruvian Andes and the ways in which some Quechua-speaking people attempt to enter into reciprocal yet asymmetric exchange relations with them. For many of the interlocutors interlocutors, mountains are incredibly powerful persons who crystalize and control the flow of a life-giving and death-dealing “force” or “power”, called animu, that is unequally distributed throughout the region. Using ethnographic methods, the research is focused on the everyday ritual techniques that are employed in order to get the animu “opened up,” redistributed, and flowing again along less congested and contained lines.