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Like many customary units of measurement [footnote 19], the pichu adopts the human body as a frame of reference, and hence is imprecise. Though such units have been used for millennia, they have been replaced in recent centuries by more precise and standardized measures. Market economies have often led buyers and sellers to press for exact weights and measures-an impulse that is strongly supported by governments that wish to regulate and tax such transactions. By coordinating inputs and outputs, industrial technology also encourages the standardization of measurement. These processes, found throughout the world, play out in a distinct way in the altiplano. Industrial technology is largely absent in the rural economy, and so there is often no need for precise measurement. It is enough to know, for example, that totora is planted in water "half a leg" deep. Nor have market economies fully imposed such standardization, especially granted the wish of rural people to keep the state at bay. In many marketplaces, women sell or barter the carachi and ispi that their husbands, brothers and sons have caught. They count the fish out by threes or fours or sell them by the huk'a, the mounded double-handful. To bring a scale for weighing would be to invite officials to inspect the scales and to charge a fee. Similarly, a mat-weaver can accept some variation in the volume of a pichu, since mats-made at home by hand, rather than by machine in a factory, and traded for foodstuffs or sold in small open-air markets-can vary a bit in size.
However, the managers of the reserve could not fit pichus easily into their bureaucratic procedures. It made enforcement more difficult. The officials who detained villagers with boatloads of totora found it hard to determine whether the amount stipulated in the contract had been exceeded. A quantity in cubic meters would be easy to assess, and some judgment could be made of the tonnage, by weighing a sample. A number of pichus, though, is not only harder to define. It also gives the villagers a definite edge up over the urban officials in estimating the amount. Moreover, CENFOR officials would have been embarrassed to send reports to their superiors that detailed the annual harvest of totora from the Reserve in so archaic and local a unit as the pichu. They would not be able to justify rates of extraction if they were reported in pichus per hectare, rather than metric tons or cubic meters per hectare. The solution upon which they settled was to issue contracts in pichus and to multiply the number of pichus by some constant to obtain the number kilograms for their final reports. (The staff never resolved their debates over whether a pichu contained 10 or 12 kilograms.) They were concerned nonetheless that an audit of their records would reveal that the contracts had been written in these non-standard units. Unlike the navy, who had been able to demand that the fishermen measure their boats in metric units, CENFOR--a weaker organization-- never reached this degree of control over the totora, an older and more established element in the village economy. CENFOR was also unable to impose its system of regulation over space on the villagers. The applications for a contract required the villagers to give a sketch map of the proposed extraction zone. Dominique and I reviewed a number of these sketch maps [footnote 20]. In drawing these maps, the villagers did not conceal their intention of continuing with customary practices. These sketch maps include houses, paths and other local features, but never the straight lines of the reserve boundary that figured so prominently in the maps drawn by CENFOR. Many of the sketch maps included the totora beds adjacent to their villages, where the local residents had always cut totora, rather than the more distant zones to which CENFOR wished to direct them. Others prominently displayed the floating islands, suggesting that the villagers would travel to them and ask the inhabitants for permission to harvest their reeds. In this regard, at least, CENFOR did not risk any difficulties with their superiors. Though the proposed extraction zones on the sketch maps looked nothing like the neat rectangles that CENFOR drew on its maps, the officials in Puno and Lima would have agreed that the crudeness of the sketch maps simply demonstrated the backwardness of the villagers in this remote region. Nonetheless, the CENFOR staff knew that the villagers did not travel to the areas to which they were assigned. Once, when I was discussing totora cutting with the reserve manager, he spoke to me about the villagers. "Se equivocan," he told me plaintively, "they make mistakes." The manager's statement suggested a hope that these mistakes would become fewer in number. Instead, CENFOR lost rather than gained ground. The agency issued 31 contracts in 1980 to villages in eight districts spread all around Puno Bay and on islands out in the Lago Grande. By 1984, the number of contracts had fallen to 13, all to villages in the district of Puno itself and the two districts immediately adjacent to it on the main highway. CENFOR granted its last contract in 1986. Steady opposition of the villagers to the reserve contributed to this decline. Early in the 1980s, some villagers who attempted to enter distant totora beds with no backing other than a CENFOR contract were confronted by the local villagers, who drove them out with poles, the same kind of pole to which Hilaria Quispe referred. Faced with incidents like these, some villages played under both sets of rules. They obtained contracts from CENFOR but also maintained customary rental agreements from traditional totora-owners such as the inhabitants of the floating islands.
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