Paerregaard, K. 2023. Andean meltdown: a climate ethnography of water, power and culture in Peru. University of California Press. ISBN: 9780520393929, 210p., $29.95.
(URL: https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520393929/andean-meltdown)
Jaime Hoogesteger
University of Wageningen, The Netherlands; jaime.hoogesteger@wur.nl
To cite this review: Hoogesteger, J. 2024. Review of “Andean meltdown: a climate ethnography of water, power and culture in Peru", University of California Press, 2023, by Karsten Paerregaard, Water Alternatives, https://www.water-alternatives.org/index.php/boh/item/372-andean
This book examines how climate change and the further integration of society into processes of globalization are transforming how people culturally relate to water, mountains, nature and each other in in Andean Peru. In this book Karsten Peerregaard first traces back the malleability of Andean religious imaginaries and how these have intersected with social identities and related power relations in pre-Hispanic, colonial and republican eras in the Peruvian Andes. This has been done through, amongst others, the incorporation of images of the powerful into their own cosmologies and the related adaptation of beliefs, social structures and human-water relations. Rituals and offerings play an important role in these adaptations by symbolically re-creating the relationships and interdependencies between and among the human and non-human agents through what the author has termed ‘replicating metabolism’. This latter mechanism stands central in the analysis of the case studies that are presented and analysed in the main body of the book.
The first cases that are analysed are the towns of Tapay and Cabanaconde in the Colca Valley. I especially liked the long-term analysis of these cases which incorporates field research that started in 1986. This longtime engagement with the cases allows the author to neatly show and illustrate how in these two towns the relation between people, water, climate and the ‘external’ world has transformed over the last four decades with important consequences on how rituals, culture and offerings are carried out and interpreted locally. Both towns have ‘developed’ in part through integration into the wider national and global economy and related culture. Out-migration, remittances (both national and international) and return migration coupled to economic integration through different means (mining, commerce, tourism) has played a key role in this process through which, amongst others, irrigation, water and the relations with the non-human has lost its centrality in community life and organization. The latter is partly also attributed to the increased presence and power of state agencies in this domain.
In Tapay, the community is shrinking and aging due to outmigration while labour in a nearby mining company and tourism have become the most important economic activities. Irrigation and related rituals, collective action and culture are rapidly changing though up until now the relations between the human and non-human (especially the mountains) have been maintained. The question is for how much longer, especially in view of the construction of a new water transfer to augment water availability in Tapay?
In Cabanaconde irrigation water supply changed from mountain (springs) to the state in the mid-1980s through access to water from the Majes canal. This, along with wider economic integration, brough about important changes. Villagers now pay taxes to the state, water tariffs to the irrigation community, and buy tickets for their water turns. Offerings and rituals have become less central in water management and for the community, but they persist incorporating new elements and adaptations. Offerings to the mountains and springs have become less central and have been joined by collective and individual offerings to the hydraulic infrastructures that now supplies them with water. These changes reflect into new symbolic and material water-human-non-human metabolic constellations and relations.
The third and fourth case that the author analyses are annual pilgrimages and related rituals that are paid to mountains. The first case focuses specifically on the analysis of new rituals by mostly urban dwellers that pilgrimage to the mountain of Huaytapallana near the city of Huancayo due to concerns with climate change and environmental deterioration. Led by ‘urban shamans’ new rituals, practices and imaginaries have emerged. The author shows the challenges and contradictions this new ritual brings, arguing that it has become an act of self-reflection about the role of humans in the planet’s future. The fourth case analyses how in the rituals around the yearly pilgrimage to the Quyllurit’i glacier in the southeastern highlands of Peru the notion of what is Andean, and what the Andean cosmovision is, get constantly renegotiated and redefined through the interactions between people of local rural communities, urban dwellers and international visitors. Beyond the religious and symbolic both of these cases also highlight the practical challenges such new pilgrimages bring along. These include the destruction of glaciers by participants, the large amounts of garbage that are left behind, and the large numbers of visitors that yearly impact the area; issues which local communities and authorities try to regulate through different means.
I especially liked the analysis and empirical description of Tapay and Cabanaconde because of its overview of change over the past 40 years, and because of its empirical richness which shows the complexity, embeddedness and dynamism of culture, rites and practices. These cases also give some very tacit examples of how climate change is affecting these communities especially through changing epistemologies of climate and very tacit transformations in agricultural production. I could relate less to the other two cases which are based mostly on a few visits of the author to these pilgrimages. These situational analyses are interesting but I found some of the empirical descriptions at times a bit tedious to read. What I also found sometimes difficult to place is that these pilgrimages are very much interpreted in terms of the notion of the human-non-human metabolism which implies some kind of religious/experiential connection between the human and non-human. While for some participants this might well be the case, I can imagine that for others, such pilgrimages have other meanings, such as a chance to make some earnings, an interesting cultural activity, a festivity, or way to fill in leisure time. A critical reflection on the multifaceted way these events are lived and experienced by its participants would have been elucidating and refreshing to better grasp their multidimensionality.
Overall a book that importantly contributes to a better understanding of how Andean rural and urban society in Peru has and is transforming through economic and cultural integration into national and international networks, culture and power relations in a context of a changing climate. A highly original and important book that helps us better grasp contemporary Andean Peru.
