Herding at the Edges: Climate Change and Animal Restlessness in the Peruvian Andes

ABSTRACT

This article examines the impacts of climate change on high-elevation Andean communities through the lens of human-animal relations. Andean herders and their animals coproduce hierarchical, cooperative, and antagonistic forms of social interaction, mediated through human-animal communication. The breakdown of communicative practice alerts herders to broader socioecological changes under persistent drought conditions. I illustrate this dynamic by following the chain of disruption: first as it emerges in daily herding encounters, and then as it ripples outward to impact community-level discussions on the future of pastoralism in the Andean highlands. I draw from the Quechua herding lexicon to show how microinteractional practices between humans and animals reflect the limits of hierarchical sociality in Andean ontologies and provide insight into the localised processes of socioecological fragmentation initiated by climatic changes. I suggest that the Quechua concept of restlessness (k’ita) provides a provocative analytic for evaluating the impacts of global climate change.

KEYWORDS:

• Peru
• climate change
• multispecies
• domestication
• communication

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the people of Chillca for their generous hospitality, kindness, patience, and insight throughout the duration of my research. I would like to thank Regina Tupayachi Arredondo and Adela (Urpi) Ríos for their assistance with the translation and interpretation of some Quechua passages. An earlier version of this paper was presented to the Andean Circle research group at the University of Michigan, and received insightful feedback from participants, especially Bruce Mannheim, Georgia Ennis, Joshua Shapero, Jennifer Sierra, Howard Tsai, and Barry Lyons. I extend my sincere gratitude to the editorial staff at Ethnos for their consideration of this manuscript, and three anonymous reviewers for their generous comments, which greatly strengthened this manuscript.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 I use pseudonyms for my interlocutors, but not for place names.

2 Fluctuations in yearly precipitation (seasonal onset as well as regularity, amount, and intensity) and longer periods of drought have been widely noted through the Andes in the past decade by both local community members and climate researchers (Haylock et al. 2006; Seth et al. 2010; Perry et al. 2014; Perry et al. 2017; Valdivia et al. 2010; Vuille et al. 2008).

3 There is not always a clear distinction between the realms of ritual practice and everyday life, particularly in the care of herd animals. Scholarship on Andean herding rituals attest to the powerful modalities of communication that produce human/animal relationships in ritualised encounters (Arnold & Yapita 2001; Flores Ochoa 1974; 1977; Palacios Ríos 1977; Ricard Lanata 2007; Rivera Andía 2014). Juan Rivera Andía, for example, explores the production of alterity and hierarchy through ritual practice (particularly through the modality of song), revealing how cattle branding rituals in the Chancay Valley of Peru delineate lo propio y lo ajeno by rupturing and reinscribing the boundaries of human/animal, youth/maturity, rural/urban, and local/national (Rivera Andía 2016: 170).

4 Indigenous and Native scholars have pushed back on the celebrated novelty of these approaches, however, citing the centrality of entanglement as an organising principle in Indigenous and Native ontologies and epistemologies (Tallbear 2011; Todd 2016; Whyte 2018). Indeed, anthropologists have previously acknowledged the Indigenous antecedents of contemporary anthropological theoretical trends, for example, framing the core tenet of the ontological turn as ‘taking seriously’ (Viveiros de Castro 2011) or taking ‘literally, rather than metaphorically’ (de la Cadena 2010: 361) the practices and presuppositions of Indigenous peoples – although, notably, this approach predates the ontological turn (Henare et al. 2006; Ingold 2000; Kirsch 2006; Nadasdy 2007; Povinelli 1995; 2001).

5 The hierarchical stratification of social organisation in the Andes has been cited as one of the crucial points of differentiation between Andean and Amazonian multispecies ontologies (Descola 2013; Sahlins 2014, 281). Catherine Allen suggests that this hierarchical sociality has been shaped in part by the unique political history of the Andes, particularly the expansion of the highly stratified societies such as the Inka empire (Allen 2016: 322). Critically, places, animals, and objects are not considered non-human persons: rather, the Andean world is constituted by ‘relationships between a diversity of beings and entities that coexist without having a human reference as something central’ (Bugallo 2016: 116, translation my own).

6 The literature on domestication explores the modalities of ‘trust’ (as ‘a peculiar combination of autonomy and dependency’) that emerge in human-animal relationships, particularly among herd animals (Ingold 1994). While some researchers emphasise cooperation between humans and herd animals (Stépanoff et al. 2017; Dransart 2003: 7), others emphasise a spectrum of relationality that includes various forms of habituation and ‘symbiotic domesticity’ (Anderson 2017).

7 Francisco Pazzarelli likewise notes in herding communities in northwest Argentina that an animal's wild excesses can start to spread and ‘infect’ others in the herd (2020: 90).

8 See for example Academia Mayor de la Lengua Quechua 1995: 240; Cusihuaman 2001: 139; González Holguín 1608: 98; Herrero & Sánchez de Lozada 1983: 347; Lira & Mejía Huamán 1984. K’ita also appears in an early Aymara language dictionary with the Spanish translation ‘herd animal without owner’ and monstrenco, a word that carries connotations of placelessness (Ludovico Bertonio 1612: 80,221).

9 Eugenia (Ch’aska) Carlos Ríos provides a thorough discussion of k’ita in reference to animal and plant communities and in relation to the terms sallqa and purun in her doctoral thesis on categories of thought in Hanansaya Ccullana Ch’isikata (Cusco) (Carlos Ríos 2015). A more extended discussion of the semantic nuances between the ontological states of k’ita and sallqa is certainly warranted but exceeds the bounds of this essay.

10 As Benjamin Orlove expressed in Lines in the Water (2002), forgetting is a deliberate social act in the Andes, one that constitutes an intentional denial of coexistence, shared history, and social equality. For rural Andean peasants, the fear of being forgotten is a fear of being intentionally forsaken and abandoned by those who might view them as inferior: a reflection of ‘their sense that they have been overlooked, that they are not merely at the bottom of an unequal and unjust social order, but have fallen out of this order altogether’ (Orlove 2002: 13).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Fulbright Association [Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship], the Wenner-Gren Foundation [Doctoral Fieldwork Grant], the University of Michigan’s Horace H. Rackham School for Graduate Studies [Rackham International Research Award], and the University of Michigan’s International Institute [International Institute Individual Fellowship].