Dramatic Yawar festivals are designed to show the triumph of indigenous culture over colonial influence, but the number of condors injured and killed raises fears for the species’ survival

“We know there are up to 55 Yawar fiestas a year… and some condors are dying.  Undoubtedly it is a threat to a species that is at a very much reduced population level,” says Rob Williams, Peru co-ordinator for the Frankfurt Zoological Society, who estimates there may be just 300-500 left in the wild in Peru. “We are on a threshold and if we push the condors much further over this threshold, it will be very difficult for them to recover.”

This festival marries colonial influences with the Andean worship of the condor – considered a messenger between earth and the heavens.

How much longer the condor and the Yawar can continue to grace the Andes looks likely to depend on whether the festival can undergo another evolution to add that most modern of ideas – conservation – to the blend of local traditions and foreign influences that already constitute the Yawar fiesta.

Excerpt: “A pivotal theme in Silverblatt’s book is the dualistic nature of the Andean universe. She builds upon the received view that the Andean people divided their world into two complementary, gender-linked spheres. Silverblatt argues that gender was a metaphor for structuring social relations, and that social reproduction was possible only when the male and female spheres united. Each sphere was essentially a mirror image of the other, as illustrated by the bilateral system of descent and parallel transmission of inheritance. Gender parallelism resulted in strong gender and kin ties which allowed members to depend on same-sex relatives for their existence. In general, females were linked with the “forces of fertility” while males were coupled with the “implements of force” (Silverblatt 1978:46), but these divisions were relativistic, flexible and context specific. Sometimes tasks overlapped, the linkages were inverted, or males were symbolically females and vice versa (Zuidema 1990).”