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Better Not to Talk About It Better Not to Talk About It
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Dreams and Visions

Better Not to Talk About It

An Interview About the ‘Pishtaco’
Tomasz Pindel
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time 5 minutes
Tomasz Pindel:
an expert in Hispanic literature and a translator who was born in 1976. He has written a few books. The most recent one, “Historie fandomowe” [Fandom Stories], was published in 2019 and its theme is the community of Polish fantasy fans

It takes the form of a white-skinned, grey-haired man. It appears after dark or around mines. Researcher Elżbieta Jodłowska tells Tomasz Pindel about the pishtaco , which is feared by the inhabitants of the Andes to this day.

Since 2008, Elżbieta Jodłowska and Mirosław Mąka have been conducting ethnographic research in Peru, as well as exploring the country and climbing in the northern Peruvian Andes. One of the fruits of this research is their book Pishtaco. The Phenomenon of Cultural Trauma Symbolization in Andean Communities [Pishtaco: The Phenomenon of the Symbolization of Cultural Trauma in Andean Communities] (2016).

Tomasz Pindel: How did the pishtaco come into your life?

Elżbieta Jodłowska: It was actually the idea of ​​my master’s thesis supervisor, Prof. Andrzej Krzanowski from the Jagiellonian University. He’s a highly regarded and well-known archaeologist who initiated the Polish-Peruvian archaeological research trend. One day in class, he suggested: “How about writing something about the pishtaco , if you’re going there for research?” and added that he himself had been taken for a pishtaco on occasion. He sowed a seed of curiosity in us, so on our subsequent trips to Peru, we started asking questions about this figure.

Which can’t necessarily have been easy…

As it turned out, it really wasn’t that easy. Unless you weave the topic in with other ethnographic issues – less obliging, less troublesome for the interlocutors – obtaining information about the pishtaco doesn’t alway

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Tomasz Pindel:
an expert in Hispanic literature and a translator who was born in 1976. He has written a few books. The most recent one, “Historie fandomowe” [Fandom Stories], was published in 2019 and its theme is the community of Polish fantasy fans
Translation: Kate Webster
Publish date: 17.09.2021

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Machu Picchu. Photo by Fábio Hanashiro/Unsplash
Experiences

The Pishtaco Emerges from the Andes

The Origins of the Andean Bogeyman
Tomasz Pindel
Tomasz Pindel:
an expert in Hispanic literature and a translator who was born in 1976. He has written a few books. The most recent one, “Historie fandomowe” [Fandom Stories], was published in 2019 and its theme is the community of Polish fantasy fans

On the surface, it’s just another monster – the vampire’s Andean cousin, a superstition, an element of folklore. But in actual fact, it’s more real than it might seem at first glance. And much more dangerous!

Fans of South American literature might have encountered the pishtaco before in the novel Death in the Andes by Mario Vargas Llosa. Corporal Lituma is transferred to an Andean community run by terrorists from the Shining Path; there, he attempts to figure out this strange world and solve the mystery of a series of disappearances of local residents. In Peru, the novel got a hostile reception from many of those who identify as Andean. This is hardly surprising. The writer expressed negative views about Indigenous Andean cultures and indigenism – the trend postulating the primacy of native Inca heritage over the Spanish element in the country – so readers were perfectly justified in being wary. Some experts in Andean culture, however, considered the novel to be well constructed and valuable from an ethnographic point of view. In any case, pishtacos appear in Death in the Andes many times; through their objective description, they help to create an image of an Andean world that is foreign to both the hero of the novel and its author.

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