Pacha
aymara ; mot partagé avec le quechua
An Aymara word from the Andean highlands (shared with Quechua), which linguists usually render as “time and space”—but which the Aymara jurist and writer Fernando Huanacuni Mamani considers too limited. For Andean thought, *pacha* does not refer to time that passes or space that contains, two empty measures in which one would be placed: it is a living whole in which one takes part. Etymologically the union of two forces—*PA*, from *paya* (“two”), *CHA*, from *chama* (“force”)—the cosmic force from the sky and the telluric force of the earth, whose meeting is what we call life: the totality of the visible (*Pachamama*) and the invisible (*Pachakama*). *Pacha* is not the neutral framework of beings; it is their active belonging to the world.
Pacha no sólo es tiempo y espacio, es la capacidad de participar activamente en el multiverso, sumergirse y estar en él.
Pacha is one of those words translation butchers in the name of clarity. “Time and space”—the linguists’ rendering isn’t wrong, it’s just too small. Fernando Huanacuni Mamani, who compiled Andean vivir bien thought for the Andean Indigenous organization CAOI, warns that the word “goes beyond time and space”: it doesn’t name a framework, it names a way of being. Where our time flows and our space contains—two measures indifferent to what they hold—pacha isn’t what you’re placed in, but “the capacity to actively participate in the multiverse, to immerse yourself in it, and to be in it.”
The etymology Huanacuni offers already rejects the container: PA, from paya (“two”), CHA, from chama (“force”). Pacha is “the union of the two forces”— the cosmic from the sky and the telluric from the earth—whose meeting is what we call life: the totality of the visible (Pachamama) and the invisible (Pachakama). There isn’t a pacha first, then beings after: Andean time-space isn’t the empty precondition of things, but the very weaving where the visible and invisible hold together.
We say “according to Huanacuni / the CAOI,” never “the Aymara say”: a named Indigenous voice, carried by an accountable Andean organization (level 2), not the orality of an entire people. Pacha is a borrowing attested in Aymara, a living Andean language shared with Quechua; “living time” is our French way of approximating its measure, just as “tiempo y espacio” is, by the author’s own admission, a Spanish rendering that falls short.