Ayllu

Ayllu ( Quechua " family, extended family, village community " ) is the lowest political unit in the traditional society of the Andes. The term denoted in its basic meaning the extended family ( clan ) as a kinship community in a broader sense, however, the cooperative village community as a local community.

The ayllu is characterized by common ownership of land. Fields and pastures are either farmed together in the form of Minka or redistributed each year as a " loan " for individual management. Traditionally, the members of an ayllu pray addition to the general deities of the Andes to its own local deity ( wak'a ).

After the Conquest was the introduction of the encomienda and later the Hacienda, which was de facto a form of serfdom, smash the organization of the ayllu. A break with the Andean tradition meant the distribution of small plots as individual property in the course of land reforms, such as in Bolivia after the expropriation of large landowners from 1953. Land reform in Peru under General Juan Velasco Alvarado aimed turn it off, the ayllu in larger agricultural cooperatives to integrate. They drew on symbolism from the altandinen tradition and the anti-colonial indigenous resistance.

In remote areas, the organization of the ayllu in Quechua and Aymara communities has partly survived to this day and has even been revived ( eg on the cooperative- island community of Taquile).