Mattias Borg Rasmussen

Andean Waterways explores the politics of natural resource use in the Peruvian Andes in the context of climate change and neoliberal expansion. It does so through careful ethnographic analysis of the constitution of waterways, illustrating how water becomes entangled in a variety of political, social, and cultural concerns. Set in the highland town of Recuay in Ancash, the book traces the ways in which water affects political and ecological relations as glaciers recede. By looking at the shared waterways of four villages located in the foothills of Cordillera Blanca, it addresses pertinent questions concerning water governance and rural lives.

This case study of water politics will be useful to anthropologists, resource managers, environmental policy makers, and other readers who are interested in the effects of environmental change on rural communities.

Resource histories determine how particular parts of the environment come to be defined as valuable. As elsewhere, protected areas in Latin America link the governance of people, territory, and resources by reinterpreting and reclassifying practices and environments. Set in highland Peru, the article focuses on how such revisions imply contestation of both history and future. It explores particular modes of claiming space through an archeology of the claims to knowledge and legitimacy put forward by a national park and a campesino community, respectively. Claims to space entwine with social struggles about local development where territorial claims are based on different notions of history and interpretations of the esthetic and productive values of the landscape. While the park officials navigate interests of conservation, tourism, and extraction, the campesino community mobilizes a different set of values and interests based on their historical occupation of the territories. These processes of contestation over authority and legitimacy highlight different views on the role of landscapes in the history and progress of local communities. Conservation may not only dispossess people of their land and natural resources, but also of labor and territorial sovereignty. This case shows how an Andean campesino community counters such movements by a wide repertoire of legal and social actions that works simultaneously in legal and extra-legal domains. Paper works mediate claims to territorial sovereignty, people, and resources. These claims involve contestations over interpretations of history which, besides their oral forms, materialize in paperwork such as official communications, community records, and cadastral maps, as well as in visual representations, internal statutes, and deliberate history writing.

Glacial retreat reveals the unsettling effects of anthropogenic climate change, and challenges deeply seated cultural ideas about static landscapes. Glaciers have thus emerged as key signifiers of environmental loss. Because they are the outcomes of Westernized visions of the relationship between nature and culture, protected areas are important sites for understanding how notions of the Anthropocene come to reshape ideas about the future of glaciated landscapes. This article explores one particular conservation initiative, that of the establishment of the tourist and educational facility known as the Route of Climate Change in Peru’s Huascarán National Park. It asks how we can understand the production of conservation landscapes in a context where the framing of glaciers as an endangered species denies their fluctuating dynamics and imparts to them a directionality toward irreversible change. Focusing on the contentious production of conservation landscapes through interaction between the park administration and a local community, the article is based on ethnographic fieldwork consisting of semi-structured interviews (48), informal conversations, and participant observation over multiple visits to the area between 2013 and 2015. The study finds that while the production of new conservation narratives certainly resituates the sites in time and place, it also produces uncertain environmental futures that may be molded to secure a rapprochement between park administrations and communities based on mutual alignment of conservation and community practices. It is thus argued that an underlying shift in orientation—from preserving what is to countering what might otherwise come to be—results in the production of new imaginaries about conservation landscapes that are both a condition and an outcome of protected area management in times of glacial retreat.

Abandonment has become a performative idiom in Andean Peru, where it retains its purchase despite the investments of the state. Local development is tied to the desire to be governed. In spite of prolonged state presence, the villages' relationship to authorities is continuously and persistently figured as one of abandonment: villages are abandoned because someone is deliberately holding them in such unfortunate conditions. To figure abandonment in village politics is to draw on this idiom as an effective means of both communicating the historical experience of governance and putting forward morally grounded claims to local authorities. The idiom of abandon-ment is therefore both effective and affective as a critique of governance and a claim to citizenship.

Amid global climate change and an uneven global political economy that preys on natural resources, landscapes are reshaped at the confluence of land and water, concretely and abstractly. Focusing on the production of place, we suggest that at their point of convergence, there is relational ontology between land and water. This constitutive relationality is the basis of what we call an amphibious anthropology. By foregrounding temporality, movement, and ways of knowing, we aim to grasp the experience of places at the confluence of land and water and to probe into the specificities of life in such landscapes or into various amphibious anthropologies.

This article explores the potential construction of a water reservoir in Peru’s Cordillera Blanca. Proposed by a peasant group, it would serve important productive purposes but has its intake within the perimeter of a national park. Thus, different notions about practices and state-sponsored conservation efforts. Empirically tracing the efforts to      construct the reservoir, the analytical focus of the article is on how different ways of                knowing water within a particular landscape conjure and collide in the process. It is argued that the movement of water extends itself beyond the physical properties of the reservoir and irrigation channels as these are produced in encounters between different notions of the role of water in the landscape.

Since the early 1990s Peru has experienced an expansion in mining activities and an expansion in what the Peruvian ombudsman defi nes as socio-environmental confl icts. Th is article examines the dynamics through which an environmental issue is transformed into a matter of citizenship and social belonging during a weeklong uprising in defense of Lake Conococha. Highlighting the collective actions and personal narratives from participants in the region-wide blockade , the article therefore seeks to understand how dispossessions of environmental resources perceived as common property are cast in terms of individual rights that move well beyond the site of confl ict. It is th erefore argued that the actions to reclaim Lake Conococha were not only a battle for natural resources and clean water, but more fundamentally an attempt to repossess a citizenship that may be constitutionally secured but all too oft en fails to be a lived reality in the high Andes of Peru.

As in many other parts of the Peruvian Andes, the peasants of rural Recuay report receding glaciers, altered patterns of precipitation, and disappearing species of plants and wildlife among the many things that may unsettle the everyday. Susan Whyte's concept of uncertainty highlights the fact that climate change emerges in different ways in particular situations. It informs water politics and local lives but is not a priori the most important part of the story. Rather than adapting to climate change, people adapt climate change to their social worlds. Así como en varias partes de los Andes peruanos, los campesinos del Recuay rural dan parte de glaciares en retroceso, padrones de precipitación alterados, y la desaparición de especies de plantas y fauna silvestre entre las numerosas cosas que puedan perturbar lo cotidiano. El concepto de Susan Whyte de la incertidumbre acentúa el hecho de que el cambio climático se manifiesta de distintas maneras en situaciones particulares. Informa políticas sobre el agua y las vidas locales pero no es a priori la parte más importante de la historia. En vez de adaptarse al cambio climático, la gente adapta el cambio climático a sus mundos sociales.