he first time I saw Don Nazario Turpo, a Quechua-speaking Indian from the high mountain valleys near Cuzco in Peru, he was participating on a panel that I had helped organize at the University of Maryland at College Park. The topic under discussion was the uses of coca leaves in the daily lives and rituals of the Andes. The room was full of students, some of them surely attracted by the fact that Don Nazario was advertised as a pacu, a word that only roughly and deceptively translates as shaman.

The whole evening was pervaded by difficulties of translation.

The panelists, who also included the mayor of a town near Cuzco, and Jorge Flores Ochoa, a prominent Peruvian anthropologist, were arguing for the need to distinguish between drug trafficking and cocaine consumption -- American legal and social concerns -- and the traditional use of coca leaves among Indians of the Andes, a set of practices and beliefs as enmeshed in Peruvian life today as they were in the times of the Incas some six centuries ago. Don Nazario, sitting at a long table, was quiet and somewhat slumped in his chair, but alert. He was wearing the colorful knitted cap of the pacus, a poncho and the wide-strapped sandals of the Incas. A jaguar tooth hung beneath his shirt. One of the things that pacus do is serve and communicate with the apus, spirits that are believed to live in the landscape and influence the luck and health of the Indians of the high Andes. During one of the few instances Don Nazario spoke, regarding the use of coca leaves in offerings to the spirits, the English translator confused the word "apu" with the Spanish word "sapo," which means toad. So the word toad kept coming up at crucial moments of the discussion instead of the word spirit. As an observer, I wondered what the students were able to make out of this belief system based on reverence for, and communication with, toads.

As the event concluded, photographs were taken of the pacu in his striking attire. Don Nazario was left frustrated by the experience. He later said he felt that he was not able to engage the audience in a meaningful dialogue and was unhappy with the explanations given by the mayor on the etiquette of coca use. The mayor strayed on the fine points and "talked too much," like a politician. The event, with its farcical failures of communication and false impressions, was not uncharacteristic of what Indians confront all the time. This has been the case for Don Nazario in Peru, and also in Washington, where the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of the American Indian is availing itself of his knowledge.

If you are going to be an Indian in the West, it is best to be a shaman, with his aura of supernatural gifts and powers. It is an aura akin to that of celebrities and entertainers, able to hold and console in some way the angst and spiritual longings of others. But the role also comes with a burden. Don Nazario is often not seen for who he is, his humanity obscured by the thick veil of false perceptions we attach to the words "Indian" and "shaman."

He comes from a cluster of households -- 70 in total -- perched near the peak of Ausangate, a mountain almost 21,000 feet high and considered by the local Indians to have one of the most powerful apus in southern Peru. Don Nazario is 60 years old, married, with five children. His normal everyday routines are dominated by the task of tending a herd of llamas and alpacas, animals that constitute the center of the local economy. He wakes up around 3:30 every morning with the first cock's crow and goes to a stream nearby to fetch the water that will be needed in the kitchen. Then he works in the fields for hours, looking after the herds or planting or harvesting potatoes, according to the season.

Don Nazario did not begin the process of becoming a pacu until he was 40. His father, Don Mariano Turpo, a famous altumisayuq, the highest category of pacu, was worried that none of his children would follow in his path. Then, one rainy morning, Don Nazario was setting out, as he tells it, on a mountain trail with his herd of alpacas, his horse a few steps ahead of him, when a bolt of lightning struck the earth almost at the spot where he stood. The shock left him unconscious, he says. When he came to his senses, the alpacas were gone and his horse was lying dead on the path. Being struck by lightning is considered a supreme sign from the apus. It is in this way that they select the people who are to communicate with them as pacus. The bolt is thought to dissolve the body of the man, who is then reconstituted and reborn into his new role. After this experience, Don Nazario says, his father took him to his own huaca, the sacred space where he communicated with the spirits, and talked to his son for seven days, starting his initiation.

There are two types of pacus, the altumisayuq and pampamisayuq. The words blend Spanish and Quechua concepts. Alto in Spanish means high, and pampa in Quechua means open space, like the valleys at the foot of mountains where people live. Misayuq is a corruption of the word for the Spanish misa, or Catholic Mass. The high and low pacus perform what are seen as vital functions for their communities, acting as intermediaries between humans and the forces and spirits that surround them, and preserving the harmony of the universe. The high pacu can communicate directly with the apus. The pampamisayuq makes offerings, known as despachos, to appease them. Don Nazario describes himself as a pampamisayuq, and whether he is in Washington or in his Andean household, he behaves, without deviation, according to the rules of his calling. He does not drink alcohol. When performing a rite, he always dresses in the required clothing: a chullo cap topped by a hat, a plain white shirt covered by a poncho, trousers reaching to his knees, the uchuta sandals of the Incas and a chuspa, or bag containing the prescribed ingredients for making offerings to the apus. A kind of smaller poncho serves as a sacred mat, where he places the offering. A despacho represents a perfect meal and gift for the spirits, its components assembled with painstaking attention to detail, presentation and symbolism. It is then burned because it is believed that through the smoke the spirits incorporate this offering.

Don Nazario has visited Washington three times in the last four years, twice as a guest of the National Museum of the American Indian. The museum, which is scheduled to open in 2004, has asked knowledgeable representatives of Native cultures to examine and explain the Indian artifacts in its collections. One of its permanent exhibitions will be called "Our Universes," and the beliefs and way of life of the Quechua speakers, descendants of the Incas, will be part of it. Don Nazario had never worked with a museum before, nor seen himself or his community as the subject of an exhibition. The exchange that evolved between the curators and him was, therefore, something of a mutual apprenticeship.

The Smithsonian's first contact with Don Nazario occurred in 1996, when the museum decided to return 13 ancient human bones to Indian communities in Peru. No direct link to any living population could be established, so the decision was made to stage a joint return to an area in Peru of great symbolic relevance to its present-day Indian communities. The place chosen by Indian representatives was Ausangate, the mountain where Don Nazario lives. The bones were flown to Cuzco, ancient capital of the Incas. They were placed in a white coffin and then carried on the shoulders of Indians for several days until they found their resting place in a grave on the slope of the mountain. The protracted ceremony was accompanied by despachos and dancing, with stops in 12 different communities along the way. Before the burial a 48-hour prayer vigil was held at a church in the village of Pacchanta. Don Mariano Turpo presided over the ceremony, chosen because of his reputation as an altumisayuq.

In this ancient world, a bureaucratic decision made in Washington -- not uncharacteristically -- took on a completely unexpected life of its own. The burial ceremony was interpreted by many of the participants as a sign of the imminent return of the Inkari, who presided for 150 years over the Inca empire. Millenarian beliefs of this sort are pervasive throughout the Peruvian countryside. Such beliefs, which have led to Indian uprisings in the past, are regularly celebrated in a variety of fiestas, in which Indians go to sacred spots to re-create ancient rites and reaffirm ancestral belief systems. They sacrifice animals and mark their faces with the blood, drink sacred chicha and dance and sing. The Inti Raymi, the feast reenacting the return of the Inca rulers, is the most important of these revivalist ceremonies. After the ceremony Don Mariano was invited to Washington by the Indian Museum. But being too old and frail to make the journey, he nominated his son, who had been present throughout the proceedings.

It was appropriate that the Smithsonian would choose to honor Don Mariano, who had advocated tirelessly for Indian rights in Peru. As Peruvian anthropologist Marisol de la Cadena points out, Don Mariano's entire life was driven by his determination to reach the capital city of Lima and make his voice heard by those who held sway over the fate of the Indians.

Don Mariano started down this road in the 1920s, at a time in Peru's history when a significant national discussion about what constituted Indianness began to take place. The participants were politicians in Lima, landowners in Cuzco, Indians like Don Mariano himself and the so-called Indigenistas -- those among the bourgeois elite who claim Indian blood but do not necessarily represent the interests of the Indian masses. At the root of the discussion lay the issue of land ownership: Who would speak for the "illiterate" Indians when it came to assigning land rights? Two systems of land tenure were at odds. On the one hand, the Indigenista hacendados, or ranch owners, held title to enormous expanses, where Indians worked as servants in conditions very close to slavery. On the other hand, the Indian peasants defended their age-old system of land tenure based on kinship affiliations. In this second system, founding ancestors were the key, the true givers of title to the land. During the Inca period, every time a new Inca ruler was installed, the mummies of his ancestors were brought out to bear witness to the continuation of the line and to assert the old system of rights, obligations and beliefs. For their descendants today, the preserved remains of the ancestors serve as a reminder of communal origins and an entire social order, including the system of land rights.

Endowed with the natural eloquence considered a sign of his powers, Don Mariano became a prominent Indian political leader in the region. He rejected being called Indian in favor of mestizo -- one of mixed blood -- and with it the prejudice attached to the term. It was a radical conceptual attempt at eliminating any differences with the mainstream population of Peru, which considers itself mestizo. He suffered persecution and imprisonment as he fought to obtain title to the lands he and other Indian campesinos had occupied for generations. The struggle came to a favorable end for the Indians in the 1960s with the land reforms promoted by the government of Gen. Juan Velazco Alvarado.

Don Mariano died this year at 90. While ceremonies are planned in his honor, discrimination against Indians in Peru still persists. As Don Nazario tells the story, when his father went down to Cuzco for the first time, he had to sleep on the streets, like a dog, and was treated no differently. Now history is repeating itself. As Don Nazario is explaining this in Cuzco, having for seven hours hitchhiked and walked in hip-deep snow down from Ausangate to be interviewed, he is stopped by a policeman who asks him to show the contents of his bag. The policeman suspects that Don Nazario may have stolen the colorful poncho and the chullo inside. Don Nazario bears this inequity with stoicism, showing no emotion as he opens his bag. In the marketplace, a vendor calls out: "Be careful of that Indian with you, or he'll steal your camera."

The marketplace is a jumble of color and tiny wooden stalls, each specializing in certain goods: cheap sweets and sodas, bright carnival costumes and masks, arresting ponchos and textiles for tourists, piles of potatoes of exquisite purple and red, produce of vivid green and yellow. A few stalls sell the goods used by the pacus, including plastic bags of ready-made despacho offerings. Very few tourists are in sight. It is mostly a local crowd, making weekly purchases. Don Nazario has left behind a troubling household scene. Southern Peru has been pummeled by the worst winter storm of the century. The livestock are dying from exposure, and his family and neighbors do not know whether they will be able to afford the rituals that are due to be held soon. These are of paramount importance, since they are meant to ensure the fertility of the animals in the coming spring. The whole community gathers, and the food and drink will cost a great deal. Don Nazario is wearing the traditional uchutas, and his feet are deep blue with cold. He is asked what he thinks about the trips he has taken to Washington, which he sees as part of the surco, or path, that his father marked for him. The mountains are covered by paths carved by the herds as they find their way to pasture; and the pacu also carves his surco as he becomes more adept at handling the duties of his position. Don Nazario explains his belief that his surco in Washington requires him to assist with the preservation of his culture while ensuring it is not misrepresented.

As part of his surco, Don Nazario is also compelled to learn from his experience in Washington, and he is as curious about what he sees here as the locals are about him. During one of his visits, right after September 11, 2001, he asked to be taken to the Pentagon to see for himself the destruction inflicted on the building. He was surprised that the structure symbolizing the nation's military might did not have near the physical stature of the monumental Inca fortresses of the Andes, with their imposing walls of giant boulders perfectly fitted together.

Don Nazario is more worldly than bias might presume, following international events with a tiny transistor radio in his mountain home, and as a guest in the nation's capital, he resists conforming to others' expectations. Like his father, he refuses to be categorized. Last year, at a conference of traditional medicine held in Washington, he was asked repeatedly to teach what he knows. "I do not run a school and I am not in a sacred space here," he said flatly. "What I know is a gift from the apus and cannot be passed on." He often stays at a hotel, paid for by the Smithsonian, but prefers to stay with Peruvian archaeologist Ramiro Matos, a curator at the Indian Museum. There, he can eat food more familiar to him, often a meal of potatoes and stew and tea made from boiled corn silk or oregano leaves. Washington is too charged with electricity, he says, causing him fatigue and insomnia. When at Matos's house, Matos says, Don Nazario prefers to sleep in the yard on the bare ground.

When he is at the museum, a normal workday involves looking at the artifacts the curators display for him. Don Nazario is honest about what he knows and what he doesn't know, expounding on what is familiar to him -- a Nazca pan flute predating the Incas, chuspas and decorated ceramic vessels from various periods.

According to Matos, during one of Don Nazario's visits to the museum's Suitland facilities (where the collections are kept), Don Nazario was taken to a wooded space designed to serve as a ceremonial site and asked to give a blessing. A spokesman for the museum contends that Don Nazario proposed the blessing. Don Nazario says he felt he was being asked to perform, and although he wanted to please his hosts, he could not conduct a blessing in an arbitrarily designated place. He also was not equipped with all the necessary despacho elements, including alcohol, which is prohibited in the museum. The request, he said, had put him in a very uncomfortable position, and he was on the verge of tears. To violate the rigorous etiquette of the despacho would endanger his life because he could incur the wrath of the apus. Finally, an exception was made and some red wine provided, and Don Nazario performed the blessing despite his misgivings. On another visit, Don Nazario brought with him several chullos made especially by his father, one for each curator and one for the director of the museum. He offered the chullos to everyone, asking them to put them on, "so that we can all think better, me included."

He tries to communicate what he knows, but he expects reciprocity and doesn't like being left in the dark over things he finds interesting. On his first visit to Washington for the groundbreaking ceremony of the museum in September 1999, Don Nazario could not understand why the North American Indians present at the event were dancing. Despachos and dancing do not go together in his experience, and he was frustrated because there was nobody available who could explain this to him.

Don Nazario was similarly frustrated at the inauguration of Peruvian President Alejandro Toledo in 2001. It was a spectacular ceremony, staged in Machu Picchu, "the lost city of the Incas," and dignitaries from several countries were in attendance. Don Nazario had been approached by members of the presidential office and asked to perform a blessing. He arrived in Machu Picchu the day before the ceremony. He was accompanied by Aurelio Carmona, an anthropologist from Cuzco, who is also a pacu. They both prepared for the ceremony by taking a bath in the sacred lakes near Machu Picchu. They made sure that the despacho was properly assembled and that it contained the fetuses of a llama and an alpaca, representing the animal kingdom; llama and alpaca tallow; two coca leaves joined by a single stem; corn of different colors, representing abundance; the sun and the moon in the shape of small tin likenesses; bells, which symbolize transition; and other elements representing money and the human eye, symbol of the pacu's vision. Red earth and virgin soil were included to ensure good health, and starfish and mussels, to protect against drought. The sacred chicha, to be drunk from Inca vases, had been prepared two months previously. Qero Indians from outside Cuzco had also been invited to participate. But according to Don Nazario the ceremony went very wrong because neither the Qero Indians nor he was allowed to finish the ritual with the crucial burning of the despachos. "At that moment," Don Nazario says, "the misfortunes of President Toledo began . . . Also, I was not allowed by the officers surrounding wiracocha [great lord] Toledo to approach him and impart my benediction as we do it in my community. Our apus distanced themselves from him. I even thought that his health would break and that the people surrounding him would not be effective in government. When I returned to my community, my father and I made several despachos for the health of the president. We hope that our apus will listen and that wiracocha Toledo will do well." The only ritual that Don Nazario could complete properly that day in Machu Picchu took place in the morning, and concerned the injured knee of the president, which caused him to limp visibly. It was something that Don Nazario noticed and decided to remedy from a distance, by performing the appropriate despacho. President Toledo never learned about this. In the afternoon, the limping was no longer apparent to Don Nazario, and he concluded that the treatment had been effective.

While Don Nazario has followed his surco in Washington, the entire world seems to have been steadily invading Cuzco and the environs of Ausangate. Half an hour's surfing through the World Wide Web will acquaint one with innumerable "mystic traveler" programs offered by all kinds of agents, vying for the tourist who seeks the gaudily esoteric. Prominent among such packages are those catering to New Age clients. For many travelers, Cuzco has become the new center of pilgrimage, displacing Tibet for the new millennium. And Cuzco, unlike Tibet, is said to emanate a feminine type of energy. Cuzco is the place to go to watch a solstice, to "reinvent the body," to do yoga on the Inca Trail.

"Perched high atop a precipice overlooking the magical citadel of Machu Picchu," said one typical Web testimonial, "it suddenly dawned on me I had entered a land of multi-dimensional reality -- stairways to heaven, organic caverns, stones with soul! The ancient city was a rocky exaltation, a mass dominated by form."

Cuzco has begun to transform itself to receive these types of tourists. To open a car entrance at a new hotel, part of a marvelously engineered ancient Inca wall was destroyed. A city paper in English is available everywhere. Reading a copy, you're apt to come across an ad promising instant enlightenment. You follow the trail to the address listed, knock at the door, are received by a European woman with an exotic-sounding name, and practically before you can get a word out, she offers you a three-day package of hallucinogenic therapy.

There are plans underway to build an international airport near Cuzco. If this happens, the pressure already bearing down on the locals from tourists seeking esoteric experiences will increase exponentially. There are plans as well for opening a factory to mass-produce the ponchos that are now the work and livelihood of hundreds of Indian artisans. The social and economic impact of such plans would prove as devastating now to the Indians as similar ones were in former European colonies in Asia and Africa, in ages gone by.

For Don Nazario, his family and neighbors, the impact takes a different shape. Tourists are arriving on horseback on so-called ecological tours in the high-altitude valleys where Don Nazario keeps his herds. The tourists' horses compete for grass with llamas, vicunas and alpacas, and each year herders like Don Nazario have to take their stock farther and farther into the mountains to find suitable pastures. Horses scare the herds and scatter them. It can take entire days to bring them back together. But perhaps most worrisome to Don Nazario is the increasing presence of some American Pentecostal and Mormon missionaries, who are proselytizing in the area. Some missionaries have declared diabolical the old customs that he represents, and instigated young converts to reveal the sacred places, or huacas, where the most important despachos to the apus are performed.

The last time I saw Don Nazario was several months ago in Washington, during another of his trips to the National Museum of the American Indian.

We talked mostly about ponchos, which for Quechua Indians are symbolic dictionaries marked by a series of identifying motifs and signs. According to the poncho that you wear, you declare who you are and where you come from. You literally walk wrapped in the world as you know it. I had with me a poncho that he had given me on a previous visit and two old Argentine ponchos made of vicuna wool, which I inherited from my father. He examined the last two very carefully, feeling the texture, appraising how the seams were done and the overall craftsmanship, and discerning whether the wool was from the vicuna's flank and back or from the more coveted underbelly. One of the ponchos was made of the latter type of wool, and Don Nazario handled it expertly throughout our conversation. He was particularly interested in the fringe, and held it close to his eyes on several occasions. "This is a very old poncho," he said, "maybe an Inca poncho." I then laid out the poncho Don Nazario had given me for him to examine, and he proceeded to explain: Red bands represent the pampas, and are masculine. In general, strong colors represent positive, masculine values. Light colors such as white and lilac represent women and the feminine. But these taxonomies are pliant. The snow, for instance, although white, is male because it collects in the highest points of the mountains, realm of the apus. Some stripes represent veins, the heart and life; others, flowers, lakes and the wind. The colors of the fringes represent the rainbow, and lines woven into the fabric clearly separate what represents human endeavor and what pertains to the world of the spirits. The yarns in the fringes that are plied to the right appear in ponchos used by ordinary people; those plied to the left appear only in ponchos used by pacus. In ponchos made by men there are no animals. Only women can introduce them in their weaving. The buttons that are sewn to the side of the chullo, that part of the cap that protects the ears, are considered to be eyes, which allow the wearer to see in all directions.

I brought him some raw potatoes. Don Nazario knows potatoes well, since it's in the Andes that they originated. He plants them, harvests them; they constitute one of the staples of his diet. "Oh yes," he said in Quechua. "We've seen these potatoes in our valley. They are worthless. We call them anchi papa [water potatoes]; they are pure water, no taste, no nutritional value, and are very infertile." They are the genetically engineered potatoes that we eat in North America. The global economy has already shipped them to Ausangate, where they are not popular.

Many scholars desire to work with Don Nazario. He is an intellectual and a cultural translator who does not disappoint. And yet it seems to me that the odds are against Don Nazario's surco. He lives during a time in which our language is dominated by concepts such as "globalization," "sound bites" and "hegemony," and words like "shaman" are seen to represent magicians at the service of our grand expectations. In such times, a desire to learn quietly about ponchos and how to rear llamas or to tackle the more ambitious project of understanding a pacu, appears to be an indulgence for useless remnants of the past, "an archaic utopia" in the dismissive words of Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa -- one separated from us by geologically thick layers of noise.