เครื่องรางเอเคโก (ตุ๊กตาชาวแอนดีส)EkekoIqiqu

The Ekeko is the Tiwanakan god of abundance and prosperity in the folklore of the Altiplano, and in Bolivia he is the figure the Alasitas fair is built around. That fair opens on 24 January in La Paz and runs for a month; in Peru the main festival is 3 May, in Puno, on the Machallata hill. Elsewhere the Ekeko's festival falls in October under the name Calvario.

Four named scholars argue about what he was before the colony. Ernesto Cavour, in his book Alasitas, points to anthropomorphic and zoomorphic figures in stone, mud and gold found in the Bolivian departments of La Paz, Oruro and Potosí, made from basalt out of the pre-Columbian mines on the shores of Lake Poopó and andesite from the Copacabana peninsula. Carlos Ponce Sanginés works on humped, phallic figures he places in the Inca period and reads as the colonial Ekeko's predecessors. Antonio Paredes Candia takes them for the remains of summer-solstice festivals. Arthur Posnansky observed that around 22 December the Tiwanaku population offered miniatures of what they wanted to their gods.

The story Bolivians tell puts him in 1781, during the siege of La Paz. As Antonio Díaz Villamil narrates it, Paulita Tintaya, an Indigenous girl working for Doña Josefa Ursula de Rojas Foronda, had been given a small Ekeko by Isidoro Choquehuanca before she left the hacienda where they grew up. Isidoro, serving in the Indigenous army besieging the city, left food by the statue outside the house each week without saying so. Paulita and her employer survived the siege on it. Tradition holds — La Paz tells that story as the origin of the Ekeko's power to provide.

What the figure is offered is specific. Banknotes are clipped to him. Grain is given for good harvests. Statuettes with the mouth opening are given a lit cigarette — in the most recent form of the practice, once a year, to secure a full year of prosperity.

Cast in plaster, painted, then loaded. The Ekeko goes in a place of honour in the house and is added to rather than replaced: more miniatures, more banknotes, a cigarette on the day. Miniatures bought at Alasitas can be blessed by the men and, less often, women working the fair as shamans, and at midday on 24 January the Catholic Church blesses the gifts at the main cathedral in La Paz. Small Ekekos ride on key rings and necklaces and are not offered anything.

Sold across western Bolivia and southern Peru, and central to a fair that fills streets and parks across central La Paz every January. In March 2011 Elizabeth Salguero, Bolivia's Minister of Cultures, nominated Alasitas along with two other Bolivian festivals to UNESCO for recognition as intangible cultural heritage. In 2016 the Feast of Alasita and the miniatures of the Altiplano of Puno were declared Cultural Heritage of the Nation of Peru.