« San Carlinos » and « San Pablinos »
This article presents the cosmological and socio-historical conditionings of the relation to the border between two neighbouring rural Andean communities of the area of Chachapoyas (Peru). A pluridisciplinary analysis of this relation shows that the fixation of this border removes the social reality to a distance from the ideal situation of equilibrium between complementary « moieties » presented in the local cosmogony. The latter is distorted by this fixation of the border in an ideological discourse of claim to communitarian, identitarian and unitarian solidarity. This discourse hides the defense of privileges in the access to land, the search for social integration from part of immigrants and the rigidification of the local territorial limits by the central State. To develop his analysis and argumentation, the author resorts to the observation of current gestures and normative words, to oral mythical tradition, as to the historiography from written sources related to the local past, while confronting the specificities of each one of these different approaches with the subject of this article.