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The Guinea Pig in the Andean Economy: From Household Animal to Market Commodity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 October 2022

Edmundo Morales*
Affiliation:
West Chester State University
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The guinea pig (Cavia porcellus) has been raised and consumed throughout the Andean subregion since before the arrival of Spaniards in America. According to sixteenth-century native chronicler Felipe Guarnan Poma de Ayala, the Incas and the indigenous peoples who preceded them used the guinea pig, or cuy, for ceremonial purposes (Guarnan Poma de Ayala 1980, 55). Hundreds of years later, on the brink of the twenty-first century, mass production of cuys outside their native habitat is turning these animals into an exchange commodity that is generating many economic activities.

Type
Research Reports and Notes
Copyright
Copyright © 1994 by the University of Texas Press

Footnotes

Fieldwork for this research note was funded by the American Philosophical Society and by a Fulbright research award.

References

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