Some General Observations...

1. Zip-off travel pants and photography vests are not cool. However,
they do serve the purpose of telling the locals who deserves to be robbed.
2. Andean music beats the pants off of Guatemalan marimba music.
3. Religious artistic achievement and church exploitation appear to be
positively correlated.
4. Wearing a double-breasted suits with no tail vent makes you look
like a goombah no matter what continent you're on.
5. Halloween costumes on little kids are cute anywhere, although the
costumes here are admittedly a little weak.
6. My quechua teacher doesn't get my stupid quechua puns. Come on!
p'acha mama should be the name of a local tailor!
7. Killa is quechua for moon. That means that the killa house isn't a
hotel run by rap aficionados. Sadly. Not that I ever actually thought
that or anything.

Social Sanctions, Municipal Bureaucrats, and my Moustache

Had a fascinating day today.

The family that I'm staying with is doing aid work on their
own--literally out of their own pockets--funding a school in one of the
rural municipalities right outside of Cusco. It's a place where there
has been a kindergarten and a primary school for 15 years, but until
they began paying teachers to go there, there was only part-time
instruction by a volunteer about 2 or 3 days a week. Now, the kids get
full-time instruction, and although there are occasional problems, the
kids probably will have much better opportunities than they have ever
had before.

These kids, by the way, have got to be the cutest things out there.
Until this morning, I was pretty convinced that our landlord's kids were
the cutest possible little people, but that is manifestly not the case.
Peruvian campesino kids are cuter than any gringo kids I've ever seen,
and even cuter, I think, than Guatemalan kids.

Among other things, we played games like "pull the white guy's funny
moustache" and "garbage train," which means the first person grabs on to
the back of the gringo's shirt and we make train noises while performing
a congo line-like dance and picking up garbage off the ground. In
reality, lots of train noises and not much garbage picking-up, but we
made a couple passes, which the kids liked anyways.

Fed them breakfast (bread) and lunch (bananas), because a lot of their
families are too poor to provide them with three meals.

I would be lying, by the way, if I took credit for any of this, except
for having excellent facial hair. My homestay family here is doing all
this stuff.

Between playing with the kids, I had a chance to talk to the community
secretary about local forest politics. According to her, they do a
little bit of reforestation, though they don't get any help from the
municipality or the province, and they only receive subsidized saplings
(not free) for planting from the central government. Even though, they
don't have any trouble with deforestation, she says, because they have a
good system for taking care of people who violate rules regarding
cutting trees. They ostracize them from the community socially and
exclude them from any community decision-making.

So nobody breaks the rules.

Fabulous. This is just the sort of thing I was looking for (but didn't
find) in Guatemala.

Got to go back there and find out more.

I also met with the provincial environmental bureaucrat. He didn't give
me a lot of information (like most municipal bureaucrats), but there is
one interesting thing going on in the province. They seem to be
starting a replanting program as part of a carbon-sequestration project
for which they will receive income. This is an incentive that I don't
think anyone has connected with our research before! Want to find out
more about that as well. Is it real, or is it just some bureaucrat's
pipe dream?

Subjective Rationality

I had an interesting conversation with Valerio, my Quechua instructor
today, in which he described this ritual which takes place North of
here, high in the Andes in the springtime.

As he described it, these two villages on either side of a pass in the
mountains meet in the pass and have a battle-literally-with traditional
weapons like slings.

He said that, as the tradition goes, the side that wins will have better
harvests that year.

He also described how this tradition seems to have been handed down from
the pre-incan Moche culture (if I remember correctly). The battle can
quite literally be deadly. He said that the year he went, he saw at
least one person killed and several others seriously injured, including
badly broken limbs.

This tradition is quite bizarre when viewed from the Gringo
perspective--I mean... come on! Getting killed for some anachronistic
religious belief?

And the really strange thing is that this thing is permitted by the
Peruvian government and even regulated. Apparently, the police look on,
and even regulate things, making sure nobody's smuggling in rifles or
dynamite--only traditional weapons are permitted.

But I got to thinking about how rational this may be, given the belief
system of the people in that part of the countryside. If they win, they
believe they will have a better harvest, and that might be a matter of
life and death for many people in the community. To corrupt Dr. Hans
Zarkov of Flash Gordon fame--"A rational transaction. One life for
many." There is a small probability that you get killed or hurt, but the
result may be, if you believe the myth, that your kids and folks and
uncles and aunts and cousins and friends all get fed and survive this
year, they all get to stay in town, nobody has to go to Lima and work in
a dirty, dangerous factory, and maybe you even make enough to buy some
Chicha during Semana Santa or a new radio or a healthy horse.

Maybe not such a bad deal, right?

The key is the belief system. If you buy in, it makes sense. If you
don't believe, it's ridiculous.

There are two points that occurred to me about this. The first one is a
philosophy of social science idea:

One could argue (I think successfully) that any form of rationality,
including economic rationality, is utterly subjective. Don't worry--I
won't be going all Postmodern/Kuhnian any time soon.

The primary difference between Exchequer Paulson and Karl Marx and those
campesinos up in the mountains is facial hair and goofy hats (for
examples, see my most recent photo posting, in the sidebar). But after
that, the primary difference is the fact that Paulson's theory about the
way the world works has a lot more systematically constructed evidence
than either of the other two theoretical approaches to explaining local
economic trends. Let's face it: neither "winning rock-throwing contest
= good harvest" or "communist revolution = workers' paradise" has a lot
of systematically constructed evidence going for it, while
"recapitalizing banks = much less recession" has some pretty strong
evidence.

Perhaps more importantly to the scientific endeavor, however, is my
second point.

Most people aren't rational economic actors. We know that. When you
pull the lever to drop the 100 $1 bills and offer your partner one of
them, he (or she) says no. We get a lot more utility out of sticking it
to some jerk than we do from $1. What can you buy with $1, anyways? If
we were economically rational, we would never celebrate Halloween, right?

Broadly, we're neither very good at incorporating alternative types of
rationality into our models of human political behavior nor do we make
any attempt to address alternative types of rationality. We have a
pretty good idea what people will do when they're primarily motivated by
money and they have a broadly market-compatible set of beliefs about the
way the world works, but what if there is another type of utility that
moves people--maybe religious faith determines what utility people get
from particular types of action--or maybe people's understanding of how
the world works is totally different from that of the economists.

If you believe (like the Quechua speakers of some Andean villages) that
winning rock fights will make the harvest better, or that blood
fertilizes the earth, or (like the ancient Mayans) that giving your
crops to the priestly class will make the rains come next year, you're
going to do a lot of things that don't make sense to economists. And
fundamentally, that's a flaw.

In order to have a truly comprehensive theory of human behavior, we need
to have generalizable theories (take that, Kuhn!) which are capable of
incorporating alternative rationalities and alternative forms of utility.

IMF

I'll be interested to read more about these IMF loans to Iceland and
(maybe) Pakistan. The time has come to see if the Washington Consensus
(at least the dogmatic version) has reached its end.

As yet another birthday gift...

...McDonald's is opening in the main plaza in Cusco. Frankly, I would
rather a Taco Bell or a Pollo Campero (if I might be so bold), but I'll
take what I can get. They'll get plenty of competition from the local
francise of Bembo's, a Peruvian burger chain that's right across the
plaza and looks pretty slick (although I haven't actually checked to see
if the burgers are more than 5mm thick.) The only downside to Bembo's
may be that they lack the free WiFi that may make McDonald's my second
home.

For those of you who would complain about the opening of a symbol of
neo-imperialism in the heart of the old Incan Empire, I would suggest
that globalization works both ways--these same forces may bring us
really good papa a huancaina in Boulder.

They have, after all, already brought us the Pupusa place on North
Broadway--an El Salvadorian restaurant that's run by a bunch of Mexican
guys which was originally recommended to be by the American son of
Guatemalan immigrants while at a hostel in Guatemala, and which I have
since recommended to other Boulderites in Honduras, Guatemala, and the US.

They also serve Mexican coke.

There are probably more ways to get other countries into this story, but
I think my globalization schtick may be a little worn.

¡Feliz Cumpleaños a Mi!

Thanks to all of you who wished me a happy birthday... Maureen
commented on my facebook page that she hoped I would get a cake from my
family. I did, in fact, get two cakes. One last night at the house,
and one at the language school where I'm getting my Quechua lessons.
They were both pretty good, but the kicker was the Peruvian dish that
went along with the cake. I believe it was "Pollo al Aji" or something
like that. Mildly spicy casserole-like dish with potatoes (of course),
onion, cheese, and chicken over a bed of lettuce, served over rice. The
Peruvians really do know how to cook!

In other news, I've been taking some pictures of graffiti around town
(all ostensibly political, though some more than others) which I'm going
to upload to my picasa page. Since Emily has been asking for pictures
of my hat, I'm also going to put a picture of that up as well. I'll
also put a link in the sidebar.

Colin Powell

If he's endorsing Obama, apparently I voted for the right candidate...

Me, hats, and Harrison Ford

As Zane knows, one of the things that I admire about Sam Fitch is the
fact that he is one of the few people I know who can really pull off
wearing a hat with a brim in this day and age. I (like most admirers of
Indiana Jones) love the fedora etc., but (although I own like four
fedoras and the like) I feel a little silly wearing one.

Nevertheless, I find myself the owner of another Peruvian fedora
today--my second--after losing several layers of skin in a particularly
painful way at the hands of the thin Andean air and needing a hat that
will do a better job of allowing me to ward off a case of skin cancer
for a while.

I feel a little less silly, though, after having two conversations about
the hat.

The first was with Lucy, the mom in the house, who told me a story about
how a former student of the school that stayed in their house was robbed
in Venezuela but didn't lose any credit cards because he had them stored
in his hat.

The second was a conversation with the Canadian gal who is also staying
here. She was impressed with the purchase.

So I think I'll keep it. And I'll be putting a credit card or two inside.

Noqaq sutiyki gringo

Learning a new language from scratch is hard work! I am now able to
carry on a very basic conversation in quechua, and on a couple of
occasions, I have been able to understand a word or two here and there
spoken on the street by the locals. Wears me out, but it's kind of fun
to be picking it up, however slowly.

Between the dry air and the terrible sunburn I got the second day I was
here, I look like I'm developing some terrible skin condition. I've
lost about three layers of skin on the back of my neck. Emily tells me
that my grandfather would tell me to put suntan lotion on. She's right,
but I'm hoping it won't come to that (I hate the stuff). I'm hoping
I'll be able to track down a nice fedora with a brim, having stupidly
left my awesome crushable fedora at home in Colorado. The fact of the
matter is, there isn't much time when I'm not wearing a long-sleeved
shirt anyways, and wearing shorts would be like walking around with a
flashing sign that says "Tourist: Mug Me." I didn't even bring a pair.
Not that I exactly blend in here... So the only thing that needs
shading is my head. And a hat will do that.

I just want to avoid the floppy tourist-hat look. If you know what I mean.

Emily and I are definitely adopting dark-skinned children so my kids
don't have to deal with this curse of the pasty.

A day in Cusco by the numbers...

11,000 feet of altitude
12 panhandlers
14 pushy street vendors
10 miles walking
14 miles by taxi
5 shoeshine boys
7 gringos in photography vests
3 completely separate parades
20 bottle rockets
2 coffees
4 hours of Quechua
2 llamas