Restless Ecologies in the Andean Highlands

Abstract

This dissertation explores the ecological knowledge practices and strategies of Quechua-speaking pastoralists in the Andean mountains of Peru who are facing rapid climate change. It reveals how people interpret ecological and social change in the routine practices of daily life and how they envision, plan, and bring about viable futures in the face of those changes. In the Cordillera Vilcanota mountain range of the southern Peruvian Andes the impact of global climate change includes glacial retreat and the increased unpredictability of seasonal weather patterns, both of which have profound effects for communities of alpaca herders that herd their animals on glacier-fed wetlands and rotate their pastures seasonally. In this region, women are the primary herders, and their knowledge and skill are vital to surviving under changing social and environmental conditions. Based on twenty-two months of fieldwork with high-altitude, glacier-dependent pastoralists, this research attends to the experiences of Quechua women as they respond to ecological change through the daily routine practices of herding animals. Herd animals become increasingly unresponsive to human cues under drought conditions and landscape beings cease to be frequent interlocutors under shifting realms of religious and economic practice. These breakdowns in communication between humans, herd animals, and landscape beings alert herders to a broader socioecological instability. The Quechua term k’ita (restlessness) articulates the spatiotemporal unpredictability of various phenomena that signals this disruption. In sum, particular forms of relationships linking humans, animals, and landscapes have been constitutive of life in the Andes, and their unraveling is indicative of the increased precariousness of that life in an era of climate change. In response, herders implement a range of strategies through which they reorganize and regulate relationships, including the strategic circulation of animals and labor as well as vital substances and essences. As they contemplate viable futures in moments of socioecological precarity, herders envision new assemblages of humans, animals, and places that draw on broader gendered and racial hierarchies and configurations of power. These findings have broader implications for future research on the impacts of climate change, by emphasizing the importance of ethnographically-grounded, bottom-up approaches to climate change adaptation that privilege the ontological premises and epistemological suppositions of indigenous people sensing a changing world. Furthermore, it demonstrates the ways in which daily, routine practices are the site of revelatory processes through which climatic changes become known and addressed.