Jiwasa, the Communal We

Recovering a Lost Foundation of Aymara Culture



The author was interviewed for the January edition of the Quakers Today podcast. There is also an extended YouTube interview.

Jiwasa is a fundamental principle and linguistic code in the Aymara language that means “communal we.” In many ways, it relates with Quaker testimonies: community, integrity, peace, and harmony with nature. In what follows, I reflect on how Aymara foundations such as jiwasa have been suppressed or transformed through the influence of missionaries and Friends pastors from the United States of America.

I begin with an existential story of the eradication of jiwasa in Walata Chico, the Aymara community where I live with my family, my ayllu. In Bolivia there are several denominations under the umbrella of “Friends.” My family converted to the Evangelical Bolivian Mission Holiness Friends Church for a couple of different reasons: on my mother’s side, because of my grandmother’s nearly incurable illness; on my father’s side, because of an informal commitment he had made with an elder who attended the church. Both eventually became very conservative and doctrinal, even after fulfilling many communal responsibilities, such as hosting traditional community festivals.

My father married as a widower with two daughters, and my mother married at age 32. My half sisters grew up in a community engaged in family agriculture and raising livestock. One day, one sister told me that my father and mother had not attended the weddings of my older sister, Irma Hilari, nor my younger sister, Juana Hilari, and I began investigating the reasons. To clarify, marriage in the Aymara world is a highly formal and sacred event necessary to become jaqi, a full person. Most importantly, it serves to “jiwasify”: to bond both families together. Many relatives recount that on the day of the wedding, my father and mother went to work in the fields, while my older sister, surrounded by her guests, celebrated her special moment in tears. Their self-exclusion was motivated by religious reasons: members of the Evangelical Friends Church were forbidden from participating in worldly events.

In the name of the gospel, they separated themselves from the real world of Aymara communal cultural life. Pastors openly preach that believers must distance themselves from all worldly practices, that they should not participate in politics nor in unions (associations within the communities). These prohibitions are written in a small book called Doctrine and Discipline, produced by missionaries from the United States. Very often every action of a believer is evaluated according to this book, which contains mainly prohibitions rather than inclusions. It shows the reward for earthly suffering is in heaven where the streets are made of gold. My mother, Elvira Quispe Alanoca, who is 86 years old, still says that in heaven God is preparing for her a ten-story building made of solid gold.

Not only did the Friends Church but many other denominations also eradicated jiwasa, the “communal we,” in many ways through their doctrines. They argue that we are not of this world, that in heaven we will enjoy a palace of gold where food and wealth abound everywhere. The hymns have that theme, yet not a single Indigenous hymn has been composed since the arrival of the missionaries in 1919.

Jiwasa is like an algorithm developed for its own autonomy, but unlike Artificial Intelligence, it cultivates interdependencerather than independence. . . . The greater challenge is how we can preserve this kind of civilizational linguistic development as an alternative to the monolanguaging worldview, knowing that the language we use constructs, destroys, and gives life to our existential reality.

I attended the Friends World Conference in 2012 in Nairobi, Kenya, and I was deeply moved when one African Friend said, “We are so focused on looking at heaven that we forget the things we do on earth.” When one becomes religious, one can become obsessed with going to heaven and forget to live out the existential mandate while passing through this world.

When someone tries to think or reflect within these churches, the pastoral leaders label them as rebellious, disobedient, or as people who do not love God, and any return to communal life or jiwasa is associated with worldly behavior.

Evangelicals, under the argument of being Christ-centered, often forget to see the interconnection of reality and confine themselves only to the Bible as the “book of books.” The community life of jiwasa has a great deal of practicality among the Aymara through compadrazgo, ahijadismo, and fellowship gatherings, as foundational parts of the community structure. In the church, ayni is considered something bad: the word is interpreted as relating to worldly things. Yet indirectly, thanks to ayni, many Friends churches in various intermediate cities and communities have been built through community labor: mink’a.

In Andean civilization, being jaqi is another foundational element in the reproduction of communal life, dating back to the time of the Pre-Columbian Tiwanaku society. My sister was on the path to becoming jaqi through marriage. The church’s intolerance toward Aymara concepts and categories was constant. As Aymara people, we want to share with the world the foundation of the practicality of jiwasa through language. Language is not merely an instrument of communication; it carries an entire historical, cultural, and civilizational weight.

This process of construction reflects an evolution that contains a whole structure or system of communication specific to the civilization to which it belongs. It allows for the transmission and transfer of foundational elements of a particular kind of reality. The Indigenous languages of original cultures Abya Yala and Tawantinsuyu (in this particular case, jaqi aru or Aymara), show a distinctive feature: they are languages shaped by jiwasa, by the “communal we,” in contrast to languages whose structure is built upon the selfish, “individualistic I,” a tendency that has deepened since the mid-twentieth century. Gabriela Veronelli calls this “monolanguaging.”

The “we” of Spanish or English has no particular importance, but it does in many Indigenous languages of the Abya Yala continent. The construction of the ayllu, marka, laya, and suyu, territorial organizations before the invasion, was built on the basis of a jiwasa-forming language. In jaqi aru there are three types of “we,” which, if contrasted with English, are jiwasa, nanaka, and jiwasanaka. These have been simplified into “inclusive we” and “exclusive we,” but when analyzed through the philosophy of language, these forms reveal the persistence of a jiwasa communicational model through various morphemes that cluster around the word.

For example: Pachamaman wawapätänwa means “We are children of Pachamama.” Kunjamakis sarnaqatask jilata? Walikiskaraktanwa translates to “How are we, brother? We are well too.” Kullaka, janit usuntktan? Askinjam qamasitaskiwa is “Sister, are we not getting sick? We are living well enough.” And Yatiqt’apxañäni means “Let us learn.” These expressions connote a type of deeply inclusive intercommunication. When translated into Spanish, the foundational meaning is lost and reduced simply to “I and the other humans.” These morphemes display the same linguistic ending that Carlos Lenkersdorf identifies in the Tojolabal language among the Maya through “tik,” with which people use this kind of we language to “we-ify” both formal and informal conversations.

Furthermore, if we look to Africa, we find the Ubuntu language worldview, where the foundational structure is “I am because you are”; in reality, without the other, we are not. Community life requires the other. This use of the plural has been devalued not only by the church but also by modernity, under the pretext of producing self-centered and even nihilistic individuals.

The American anthropologist Bruce Mannheim notes that “Quechua is the only language centered on the other.” We can paraphrase this by saying that the Aymara communication system is centered on jiwasa, the “we-being” or “communal we”; this is why it is difficult to separate oneself from the other, the principle of jiwasa always includes even the enemy. In this regard, early scholar of Aymara grammar Martha Hardman, when examining issues related to violence, remarked that “with language we construct our worlds,” indicating that the modern world speaks against violence yet uses violent language.

In a basic imperative in an individualistic language, one says, “don’t do it,” whereas in Aymara one says, “let’s not do it,” where responsibility falls on us and not just on an individual. Similarly, when a person says: “it’s my life”; “I know what I’m doing”; or “I am responsible for my life,” the “we-oriented” language encourages transforming these expressions into collective ones: “it is our life”; “we know what we are doing”; “we are responsible for our life.” Other examples are expressions, such as “we ourselves will eat” or “we ourselves will cook,” that are commonly used by bilingual Aymara speakers. This linguistic matrix is constantly “we-ifying,” opening possibilities for the reproduction of life as an opening toward the Pacha, the boundless or infinite dimension of existence. Jiwasa does not apply only among humans but also to the visible and invisible. In the worldview of Indigenous peoples, all existence participates in we-being: uywirinaka, illanaka, and ispallana: life givers.

Jiwasa is like an algorithm developed for its own autonomy, but unlike Artificial Intelligence, it cultivates interdependence rather than independence, the latter being the guiding principle of freedom in the Western world. The greater challenge is how we can preserve this kind of civilizational linguistic development as an alternative to the monolanguaging worldview, knowing that the language we use constructs, destroys, and gives life to our existential reality.

In sum, to structurally transform ways of life, we need a language rooted in the reproduction of life, one that affirms a “we-centered” reality, allowing for communal rather than individualistic coexistence. We must keep promoting languages and realities that speak through our shared lives.

The church once held community as a commandment in the time of the Apostles, but over time this has become individualized. In the Aymara worldview, language is modulated in a way that allows many possibilities and alternatives toward “we-ification,” living reality or existence with the same importance as one’s neighbor. It is not a closed worldview like those that have condemned human beings as inherently destructive or selfish. By revisiting jiwasa, we can say that a man is also communal by nature.