But if you can't see the future, says Marta Hardman, an anthropologist at the University of Florida, there seems less point in planning. Hardman has studied the Aymara for 50 years -- Miracle and Yapita were her students. When she first arrived among the Aymara of Peru in the 1950s, she was struck by the absence of a sexual hierarchy. People made much of remembering where you came from. That might mean your community or your ancestors, or your mother. Women were respected more than in her home town.
"I was suddenly treated as a full person," she says. And 50 years on, she can't help feeling that it is her native culture, not the Aymara, which is going against the grain. In English we are encouraged to ignore the past, she says. "We pretend it's not there, yet we're lugging it with us as we go."
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