A trade relationship termed compadrazgo,or simply conocidos,is reported between regular trade partners; typically between those who live in complementary ecological areas (Browman 1990: 404-405;Flores Ochoa 1968; but see ;Nielsen 2000: 437-438;Nielsen 2001: 182-183). For example, if a llama caravan driver from a particular area of the puna and a farmer in a mid-altitude valley with a variety of products have regularly exchanged goods over the years, and then they teach their children of the relationship using fictive-kin terms; a tradition of mutualism is established between herder and farmer that can potentially last for generations. The relationship offers stability and predictability to both sides of the exchange in barter rates, types of goods, and quantities to be exchanged.
The nature of this encounter is critical to understanding Andean reciprocity relationships and the degree of alienability of goods being exchanged (Burchard 1974;Mayer 1971). As mentioned above, the caravan driver has mobility and choices in terms of travel routes and communities where to partake in exchange. The maintenance of long term exchange partners through compadrazgois therefore a constraint on caravan autonomy. Two characteristics of compadrazgo relationships appear to underscore the embeddedness of the interaction:
Barter relationships are often cemented with a yapa:a little bonus given to the buyer that takes the form of an over-reciprocation to assure future transactions (Browman 1990: 421;Sahlins 1972: 303). The magical powers attributed to the yapanotwithstanding, Sahlins' (1972: 308-314) develops a functional economic explanation for over-reciprocation where it serves a similar mechanism to price fluctuations in market-based societies. When an over abundance of product A relative to product B exists in a barter situation based on traditional equivalencies (hence, a lower value for A may result, in a market system), the provider of product A may over-reciprocate and thus, based on the morality of reciprocal arrangements, guarantee future compensation from the trade partner.
The primitive trade partnership is a functional counterpart of the market's price mechanism. A current supply-demand imbalance is resolved by pressure on trade partners rather than exchange rates. Where in the market this equilibrium is effected by a change in price, here the social side of the transaction, the partnership, absorbs the economic pressure. The rate of exchange remains undisturbed - although the temporal rate of certain transactions may be retarded (Sahlins 1972: 311).
The discrepancy that must be resolved synchronically in neoclassical market economics is resolved diachronically in reciprocal arrangements (Danby 2002). Browman (1990: 421) does not believe the over-reciprocation device described by Sahlins is in evidence in the Andes. As Browman observes, there is ethnographic evidence that suggests that barter rates do, in fact, fluctuate in response to supply and demand. The arrangement described above is one possible configuration that occurred in prehistoric circumstances, however, and it is a possible means of assuring the long term persistence of exchange relationships (Burchard 1974;Mayer 1971).
If seasonal fairs and aggregations were a feature of the prehispanic altiplano, as discussed by Browman (1990), interactions may have taken notably different forms in those contexts. Seasonal fairs may have had the significance of religious festivals in the contemporary Andes where the devout sometimes travel for weeks in order to arrive at auspicious times. Fairs and cultural occasions may, then, have been blended with economic transactions.
Scheduled festivals with elaborate dances, music, and costumes are a major cultural contribution in contemporary altiplano communities like ParatÃa (Flores Ochoa 1968) and despite the lack of simple material correlates for archaeological study, cultural items like song and dance were probably significant features in a variety of prehispanic reciprocal exchange contexts (J. Flores Ochoa 2005, pers. comm. July 2005). Despite the relative marginalization of altiplano cities in the modern economy (or perhaps a reflection of this marginalization), traditional festivals endure as important cultural features in the Titicaca Basin. Citing early twentieth-century sources, Browman (1990: 409) reports that at major shrine at Copacabana, Bolivia, between 40,000 and 50,000 "traders" would converge at times scheduled to coincide with ceremonies at the shrine.
If economic transactions occurred in association with these festivals in prehispanic times, either as a central feature or relegated to the periphery of the cultural events, the transactions may have assumed certain characteristics of marketplace exchange. These characteristics would have included public knowledge of barter equivalences and perhaps more immediate, synchronic exchange due to the short time period of convergence at the festival. As mentioned, however, marketplace concentrations do not necessarily imply true "market economies" with fluctuating prices reflecting supply and demand (LaLone 1982). Assuming that economic transactions that may have occurred at these fairs did not create moral conflict (by debasing sacred ceremonies with lowly economic transactions, in a Euro-American perspective) they would have created an excellent context for the transfer of both cultural goods and prestige items, and for the control of certain exchange practices by administrators or elites. Nevertheless the problem remains that dedicated agriculturalists with harvest goods for exchange would have been absent from these fairs on the altiplano because dedicated agriculturalists would not have the schedule or the herd demographics that would have permitted them to initiate long distance caravans. Therefore a variety of strategies probably developed to allow the transfer of products with the emergence of caravans that traveled, on the large scale, according to schedules dictated by seasonal gatherings, harvest schedules, and other economic and cultural circumstances. These developments imply the emergence of something of a continuum between the more alienable exchange that occurred in seasonal gatherings, and more inalienable barter that occurred in the intimate exchange context of compadrazgorelationships.