What the book studies

The book Amor y personalidad en los aymaras is based on the doctoral thesis of Bismarck Pinto, “Concepto de amor y personalidad en universitarios aymaras del departamento de La Paz” (Concept of love and personality among Aymara university students of the department of La Paz), defended at the University of Granada, in Spain, in October 2008.

It deals with the relationship between the components of Sternberg’s triangular scale of love and the five major factors of personality, among students of Aymara origin from the Unidades Académicas Campesinas (UAC) of the Universidad Católica Boliviana San Pablo.

The results obtained show the lack of consistency of earlier research on Aymara personality: they establish that the way the Aymara see themselves and see their social relations is very far removed from the prejudiced considerations of those who have attempted to describe them without ever taking their own perceptions into account.

Moreover, the Aymara concept of love as the study describes it is devoid of the element of passion: it is constituted fundamentally as a “companionate love”, governed chiefly by the community demands bound up with work. It is likely, the author suggests, that this eradication of pleasure is the product of the harmful incursion of the conquerors’ religious thought, and then of the successive subjections of Aymara culture to colonialist ideology.

The starting point: Bolivia, the couple, the community

The introduction first situates the ground. The socio-economic situation and the ideological changes of society are profoundly modifying conjugal relations. In Bolivia, according to the data the author cites (Revollo, 1996), 70 to 80% of marriages end in divorce within the first three years; in the family court, 71.8% of the cases dealt with are divorces, 59% of them requested by wives and 41% by husbands; the highest rate falls between 25 and 35 years of age; 74% of divorces are granted by mutual consent, 26% for insults or ill-treatment. The ethnoracial composition of the country is recalled from the national statistics institute (INE, 2007): an Amerindian majority, Quechua and Aymara in the west, indigenous communities of the Bolivian east — mainly Guaraní and Mojeño — in the east, some 27.5% of mestizos spread across the whole country, and a smaller share of creoles.

Then comes what, for the author, makes the specificity of the ground: in the Aymara world, the family is subordinate to the community. Drawing on the ethnography of Carter and Mamani (1989) in the community of Irpa Chico, he recalls that marriage there fulfils a function of passage from one social category to another and determines a hierarchical order between the groom’s family and the bride’s; that children, although they have time to play, learn early on to work alongside their parents. The community is organised around work, so that all the social structures — the individual, the couple, the family, the ayllu — are subordinate to the care of the land; religious beliefs, rites and traditions maintain there the delicate balance between human beings and the hostile nature of the Altiplano.

Two further features are underlined. Aymara descent is bilateral: kinship is established through the maternal line as much as through the paternal line, the paternal kasta reproducing the local patrilineages while the maternal kasta weaves the web of female ties that connect them (Arnold, 1998). And the language itself carries the primacy of the common: Van den Berg (1993) notes that the root ay designates what is common — hence aymara, to have the same blood; ayllu, the local community; aynuqa, communal land; ayni, mutual aid. Nothing takes precedence over the community; and if ties are formed outside it, that is in order to secure support, protection and a social guarantee that one’s own milieu is not enough to offer.

The two instruments

The triangular scale of love

Sternberg built his scale in order to define what people mean when they say “I love you”, and to compare, from one region of the world to another, the place of the three components of the concept.

Sternberg maintains that there is no difference between the genders in the definition of love: the differences lie between cultures, and bear on the order of the components, not on the absence of any one of them. The introduction reviews the validations of the scale — 435 Dutch adolescents in Overbeek and colleagues (2007), 553 Korean students in Kwon (2006), with high internal consistency coefficients for the three components — as well as the cross-cultural work of Kim and Hatfield (2004) between Korea and the United States, which points in the same direction.

The five major factors of personality

The second instrument comes from trait theory — a trait being “an individual’s tendency to behave in a consistent manner in very different situations”. The introduction retraces its thread: Allport’s central and secondary traits, Cattell’s sixteen factors, then the series of studies which, from Fiske (1949) to Norman, Borgatta and Smith, invariably find five stable factors rather than sixteen. Goldberg (1981) named them the “big five”: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. In 1985 Costa and McCrae drew from them an inventory of 185 items, since translated into more than forty languages and studied in more than thirty cultures, and then a revised version in 1992, extended to 240 items.

The author does not conceal the objections made to the model: openness to experience remains the most problematic dimension and the most difficult to define in terms of behaviours; some studies have contested the independence of the conscientiousness factor, holding it to be a component of extraversion and neuroticism. Extraversion and neuroticism, for their part, are the two most consistent and most stable factors when the inventory is adapted to other cultures — hence the hypothesis that the five factors may be generalisable.

The state of research: a blind spot

The last part of the introduction takes stock of what is known — and above all of what is not. Studies of Aymara personality are rare and most often belong to anthropology or to philosophical speculation; their dominant tendency is to posit a predisposition to withdrawal and introversion as a basic trait. It is precisely that tradition which the thesis puts to the test, this time starting from self-perceptions.

On love, the finding is sharper still: no research deals with it specifically in Aymara culture. Marriage and family structure in the Andes have been the object of numerous studies, but the dynamics of affective relations have often been treated there as peripheral to institutions. History has described matrimonial customs and relations between the sexes before the conquest, under the colony and under the Republic; anthropology has analysed conjugal relations, their link with the cosmovision and with social organisation; sociology has taken up domestic violence; linguistics has explored the lexico-semantic organisation of the concepts bound up with the couple and reproduction. But there is no psychological research on love and sexuality among the Aymara of Bolivia, nor any published study on sexual attraction; sexuality, the author recalls, was until recently almost absent from Latin American social sciences, and its study there remains largely reduced to the question of gender.

Finally, the introduction recalls the work carried out in La Paz, several pieces of it with the author, that prepared the thesis: on incompatible philosophies of life and irrational beliefs among newly-weds (Peralta, 1998); on the rigidity of expectations in young couples and the central disagreement over the education of children (Clavijo and Pinto, 1999); on decision-making as the main problem, aggravated by gaps in level of education, background and income (Suárez, 1999); on the higher scores for intimacy and passion among adolescents of Western cultural roots than among those of Aymara origin (Trigo and Pinto, 2002); on the use of Sternberg’s scale as a diagnostic tool before and after couple therapy (Exeni and Pinto, 2006); on the differences in the construction of the conjugal bond between Mojeño and Aymara women (Ribera and Pinto, 2006); on the concepts of pleasure among students of both sexes (Villarroel and Pinto, 2005; Cooper and Pinto, 2007), following the Mexican work of Corres, Bedolla and Martínez (1997).