Water and exchange: the ritual of yaku cambio as communal and competitive encounter

In the southern Bolivian community of San Pedro de Condo a water‐exchange ritual serves to dramatize and reorder community rights and responsibilities while rain is sought. Focusing on water is symbolically important both for participants in the ritual and for this analysis because of water's associations with the commons, fertility, and sex. These elements also link water exchange to the encounter oftinku fa “ritual battle”), analyzed here as an analogous ritual of redistribution.