Chuspa

A chuspa is a hand-woven pouch, roughly the size of two spread hands, hung from a woven strap over the shoulder. It is warp-faced weaving in camelid or sheep wool, patterned in bands and figures particular to a region and often to a community, and it is made by hand by someone the owner knows. What it holds is coca leaves.

That combination makes it one of the most used ritual objects in the Andes without ever ceasing to be an everyday one. Coca is chewed through the working day and it is also the medium of nearly every formal exchange there is. A chuspa is opened at the start of a conversation that matters. Leaves are taken from it and offered to the other person before any are taken for oneself, and the offer is not optional.

The unit that matters is the k'intu: a small number of whole, unbroken, undamaged leaves, selected deliberately, held together face up, breathed over, and then either given to another person or laid down as an offering. Selecting them takes a moment and is done in company, visibly, so that the care is part of what is communicated. A torn leaf will not do.

Weaving one is skilled work and takes time, so a chuspa carries information about who made it and where they are from before its owner says anything. A person's bag is recognised in the way a face is.

Coca chewing in the Andes is very old, and woven bags for carrying leaves come out of dry coastal burials of considerable antiquity, well before the Inca. The Inca state took control of coca production and distribution and used the leaf as a good it could grant, which concentrated it without inventing it. The colonial administration then spent decades arguing about whether the leaf was an idolatrous drug to be suppressed or a commodity to be taxed, and settled substantially on taxation, which is why coca survived the conquest when so much else did not.

Through all of that the bag stayed the same kind of object. Catherine J. Allen's ethnography of Sonqo, in the southern Peruvian highlands, describes a community in which adults carry a chuspa as a matter of course, in which offering from it structures work parties, negotiations, courtship and grief, and in which someone without one is not fully participating. The bag is not brought out for ceremonies. It is simply present.

This is worth stating because Andean material is often presented as a set of survivals: fragments of a destroyed religion, retrieved and re-enacted. The chuspa is a useful corrective. It is continuous, ordinary, unremarkable to its users, and it carries more ritual traffic in a week than most of the objects that get photographed.