Around Charazani, Bolivia
Kallawaya healing knowledge
Andes; knowledge passed across generations
The Kallawaya live in Bautista Saavedra Province, north of La Paz in Bolivia, in the valleys of the Apolobamba range around the small town of Charazani, at roughly 2,700 to 5,000 metres. Throughout the Andes they are known as travelling healers. According to UNESCO their roots go back to before the Incas, to the Tiwanaku and Mollo cultures. The oldest trace is a tomb at Niño Korin, close to Charazani, from the Tiwanaku period, roughly 600 to 1000 AD. It held snuff trays, tubes interpreted as enema syringes, a mortar and bundles of guayusa leaf that still contained caffeine after all those centuries. That leaf does not grow in the Andes but in the Amazon lowlands. According to the anthropologist Joseph Bastien the tomb also held a skull with three drilled holes around which the bone had grown back: the patient had survived the operation. Under the Incas the Kallawaya held a special place. According to the chronicles they carried the Inca's litter, and the chronicler Guaman Poma drew them doing so at the start of the seventeenth century. The historian Thierry Saignes searched the archives of La Paz, Sucre and Seville for their past. In his view the Kallawaya formed a chiefdom of their own before the Incas, on the eastern flank of the Andes, from the Carabaya and Apolobamba ranges to the warm hills towards the Amazon. Carabaya and Callawaya are two spellings of the same name; the Spaniards later split the area into a Peruvian and a Bolivian half. A Kallawaya chief, Ari Capaquiqui, is said to have found the Inca the way to the lowlands of the 'Chunchos' and was allowed to travel in a litter himself in return. Strikingly, no chronicler mentions the Kallawaya as healers. Only in 1766 did the canon Martín Landaeta describe men from Charazani who crossed the whole viceroyalty with sacks of resins, incense and medicinal herbs. Saignes therefore thinks the travelling healers arose only in colonial times, perhaps not until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In 1889 the department of La Paz sent a list of the plants of the 'Callahuaya' to the World's Fair in Paris. Around 1900 healers from Chajaya and Curva travelled on foot, by train and by boat as far as Argentina, Chile, Ecuador and Peru, and according to tradition some treated workers for malaria and yellow fever during the building of the Panama Canal. The French ethnographer Louis Girault heard that these were seven men from Khanlaya, who travelled through Peru and Ecuador and by steamer along the Colombian coast to Panama and stayed a few months. Stories that Kallawaya healed people in Tokyo, Paris or Rome, even a pope, his informants called inventions, although they did not mind them going round. As doctors and pharmacies spread during the twentieth century, the healers were opposed: some were arrested, others dismissed as witch doctors. In 2003 UNESCO proclaimed the "Andean cosmovision of the Kallawaya" a masterpiece of intangible heritage, and in 2008 it was inscribed on the representative list.
