A POSTCAPITALIST PARADIGM: THE COMMON GOOD OF ...

and acquire meaning. 149 While the young woman lives in the human dimension
of nature, her father moves between these two spheres of life.
The young hunter enjoys this relationship through the generous gesture
of sharing his food with the young woman and respect for her father. It
is important to draw attention here to this act of reciprocity, which we
will return to below. This symbiosis becomes more complex if attention
is paid to the “kinship network” established between the ukuy ants, the
machakuy runa, the young wife and her daughter: the girl establishes a
profound link between the human and nature, in its diversity of life
forms, incompatible among themselves from a viewpoint outside the
universe represented in the tale.
This coexistence, which seems solid to begin with, ends abruptly in
tragedy. The young hunter, on severing the life of the machakuy (runa),
causes a rupture in the process of becoming that guarantees the harmonic
culture-nature continuum. The tragedy is that this happens without
there being a deliberately destructive intention. On the contrary, the
destruction of the ants’ house to get his wife back constitutes a singular
event that prompts reflection on the general relationship between organisms
and their mutual environments and, in particular, on gender relations,
paying more specific attention to the value of the feminine voice
within a social order in which the masculine monologue reigns. In the
context of the story, the ability to discern and heed the feminine voice
is put to the test; it is a condition for maintaining a harmonic relationship
in a social world which includes and extends the social sphere with the
non-human. Ignoring her voice leads to rupture. The hunter’s forgetting
of the warning issued by his wife before he goes out hunting cannot be
understood in any other way. But even more serious is his destruction
of the ants’ house without heeding his wife’s outcries. It can be inferred
from the story that the young hunter loves his wife and wants her back,
but his deafness and the centrality of his ego end up destroying not only
149 On the relationship between the law and narrative, see Robert Cover’s suggestive
article, “Nomos and Narrative”, in Narrative, Violence, and the Law. Martha
Minow, Michel Ryan and Austin Sarat, eds. (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan
Press, 1995).
299