Yanantin
The law governs in binaries that serve as one-size-fits-all, with little room for nuance, context, or circumstantial differences. As a result, there is an expectation of conformity without any attention to the unique challenges particular communities may face owing to social positionalities and historical experiences of marginalization and oppression. The either/or framing is also being positioned as a framework for engagement with AI, where people in positions of sociopolitical disadvantage turning to use these tools to access a level playing field are shamed for their choices, instead of the makers of these tools being held accountable for their design decisions. On the one hand, AI arrives with promise, making language and knowledge more easily accessible and available in ways like never before. On the other hand, those who use these tools for exactly this access and availability are being shamed for their choice. Very often, these people are disadvantaged in terms of class, caste, race, indigeneity, migration status, linguistic abilities, and health status among others. Their use of AI is often shamed for demonstrating complicity through participation in Big Tech’s extractive ways. In reality, these people make legitimate choices based on the options available to them, and the questions around accountability and power should be more meaningfully directed to those in positions of power that are building this technology. Yanantin, a principle from the Quechua community, gives us an opportunity to practice this.
Before we proceed, we want to note that Yanantin is a living philosophical and social principle within Quechua-speaking communities across the Andes. It is embedded in agricultural practice, ceremonial life, textile production, and governance structures that continue to operate today. What follows is an engagement with Yanantin’s governance logic as documented by scholars working in and with Andean communities, offered as a provocation for AI governance discourse, not as a claim to comprehend what only those who live within it can know. We invite correction and deeper engagement.
Understanding Yamantin
In the ayllu communities of the Bolivian and Peruvian highlands, the most fundamental unit of social and cosmological organization is the pair, rather than the individual or group. For instance, couples govern together, moieties are paired, and life and landscape are mapped in complementary halves, such as hanan (upper) and hurin (lower). Each is incomplete without the other. The Quechua term for this principle of complementary pairing is yanantin. It reminds us of the idea that a thing is only itself in relation to its complement, that governance, like existence, is inherently dual.
The root of the word Yanantin is “yana,” meaning companion, helper, or the dark counterpart, and the suffix “-ntin,” which in Quechua marks inclusiveness or totality, is where the pair is a unified whole. Yanantin is the principle through which Andean communities understand relationship, in that they recognize that things exist not as isolated entities but as paired complements, where each completes and requires the other. This is not a Western understanding of opposites as binaries, where contraries are meant to engage and end in one cancelling or overcoming the other. Rather, in Yanantin, complementary elements constitute a single, unified reality. In community governance, Yanantin principle is instantiated through complementary leadership, where authority in many ayllu communities is held by a couple (the qhari-warmi, man-woman pair), whose governance represents the complementary integration of different kinds of knowledge and responsibility. The man who governs without his complement is understood as governing incompletely.
Yanatin is about bringing opposing aspects together to produce, generate, and create a third that is neither one nor the other but the dynamic product of their complementarity. The emergent idea is not a compromise of one with the other or an overcoming of one over another, but rather, something new, a third thing that is generated purely by their encounter.
What Yamantin unsettles in AI governance
AI governance frameworks are built on a series of implicit pairings that are understood as oppositions rather than complements: technical experts and affected communities, innovation and precaution, industry and civil society, developers and regulators. These pairings generate adversarial governance architectures: comment periods that pit industry against critics, audit processes that position auditors against the audited, regulatory frameworks in which compliance is understood as constraint imposed from outside. Yanantin asks whether these relationships are better understood as complementary: whether technical expertise and community knowledge are not adversaries but a pairing, each incomplete without the other, whose governance products depend on their genuine integration.
This is not a call for consensus or the elimination of conflict. Yanantin does not deny difference. Instead, it ask us to shift the way we understand difference. The hanan and hurin moieties are genuinely different, as they have different ritual responsibilities and relationships to the landscape, as well as streams of knowledge. Their complementarity depends on the maintenance of these differences. An AI governance framework built on Yanantin will not flatten the difference between technical and community knowledge, or between regulatory and industry perspectives, but rather seek to design structures in which their genuine complementarity, i.e., their mutual completion, produces better governance than either could alone.
Yanantin also challenges the individualist ontology that underlies most AI governance frameworks. Current rights, liability, and harm assessment frameworks scaffolding the AI lifecycle are all organized around individual entities, such as individual developers, deployers, users, and victims. The concept of collective harm, communal benefit, and relational accountability is treated as an edge case that is at best to be addressed through class action mechanisms or community impact assessments that are grafted onto an essentially individualist structure. Yanantin tells us that this is backwards in that complementarity is the fundamental unit and that governance organized around individuals is missing the actual structure of social life.
Finally, the qhari-warmi governance model, which is complementary dual leadership, directly challenges AI governance's leadership structures. International AI governance bodies are led by individuals (chairs, secretaries-general, commissioners) or undifferentiated groups (committees, working parties). The principle that governance authority is inherently paired, where no single person or single kind of knowledge can govern completely, has not been explored or sufficiently centred in any major AI governance framework.
References
Allen, C. J. (2012). The hold life has: Coca and cultural identity in an Andean community. Smithsonian Institution.
Urton, G. (2013). At the crossroads of the earth and the sky: an Andean cosmology. University of Texas Press.
Cereceda, V. (2010). The semiology of Andean textiles: the talegas of Isluga. Chungara-Revista De Antropologia Chilena, 42(1), 181-198.
Platt, T. (1986). Mirrors and maize: the concept of yanantin among the Macha of Bolivia. Anthropological history of Andean polities, 228-259.
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