Potatoes have a soul in the Andes. There are "dead corpse potatoes" (aya papa), "potatoes of the bad-dead" (papa de los gentiles), which share the characteristic of not being domesticated. There are also deshydrated potatoes (chuño) that are almost dead. How does this inform us about how the dead, for the populations of the Andean communities, still participate in life? Here is the main point of this article. The conceptions of life and death are anchored in a set of practices that go beyond the human world, into a practical and productive logic that gives them meaning. According to these conceptions, death is closely associated with fertility, with the vital force which animates plants and individuals and does not disappear altogether after death but continues to circulate. This is a central point in how Andean people conceive the world. This article relies on bibliographic data drown from agronomy and ethnology about the Andes, which is supplemented and illuminated by data from the region of Cusco (Peru), including primary ethnographic data’s.