Overview

In the high Andean grasslands 4,500 meters above sea level, Quechua alpaca herders live on the edges of glaciers that have retreated more rapidly in the past fifty years than at any point in the previous six millennia. Women are the primary herders, and their specialized knowledge and skill is vital to the ability of high-elevation communities to survive in changing climatic conditions. In the past decade, however, these herders and their animals have traversed a rapidly shifting terrain. Drawing on the Quechua concept of k'ita, or restlessness, Allison Caine explores how herders in the community of Chillca in the Cordillera Vilcanota mountain range of the southeastern Peruvian Andes sense and make sense of changing conditions. Capricious mountains, distracted alpacas, and wayward children deviate from their expected spatial and temporal trajectories. When practices of sociality start to fall apart- when animals no longer listen to herders' whistles, children no longer visit their parents, and humans no longer communicate with mountains- these failures signal a broader ecological instability that threatens the viability of the herder's world. For more than two years, the author herded alongside the women of the Cordillera Vilcanota, observing them and talking with them about their interactions with their animals, landscapes, and neighbors. Emphasizing the importance of Indigenous knowledge and traditional ecological practices, Caine argues that Quechua understandings of restlessness align with and challenge broader theoretical understandings of what it is to be vulnerable in a time of planetary crisis.

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9780816554171

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Reviews

""This outstanding book marks the arrival of a new generation of ethnographic scholarship on climate change. Situating climate impacts within a broader context of Andean restlessness or, in Quechua, k'ita, Allison Caine's incisive storytelling provides essential analysis for what climate change has come to mean as a fact of life for rural communities in today's world. The author also writes with a kindness for her human and nonhuman interlocutors that is rare in anthropology today.""--Eric Hirsch, author of Acts of Growth: Development and the Politics of Abundance in Peru ""Restless Ecologies contributes to multiple fields--e.g., multispecies ethnography, anthropology of climate change, Peruvian studies, and environmental studies--though it perhaps sits most squarely within the tradition of Andeanist ethnography. The author's multisensorial exploration of the lived experiences of Quechua women herders and their relations with nonhuman kin/companions, her focus on the minutia of everyday life, and her insistence in writing climate change from the ground up, are particularly compelling and significant offerings.""--María Elena García, author of Gastropolitics and the Specter of Race

""This outstanding book marks the arrival of a new generation of ethnographic scholarship on climate change. Situating climate impacts within a broader context of Andean restlessness or, in Quechua, k'ita, Allison Caine's incisive storytelling provides essential analysis for what climate change has come to mean as a fact of life for rural communities in today's world. The author also writes with a kindness for her human and nonhuman interlocutors that is rare in anthropology today.""— Eric Hirsch, author of Acts of Growth: Development and the Politics of Abundance in Peru ""Restless Ecologies contributes to multiple fields- e.g., multispecies ethnography, anthropology of climate change, Peruvian studies, and environmental studies- though it perhaps sits most squarely within the tradition of Andeanist ethnography. The author's multisensorial exploration of the lived experiences of Quechua women herders and their relations with nonhuman kin/companions, her focus on the minutia of everyday life, and her insistence in writing climate change from the ground up, are particularly compelling and significant offerings."" — María Elena García, author of Gastropolitics and the Specter of Race

Author Information

Allison Caine is an environmental anthropologist and an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Wyoming. Her work has been published in Ethnos, Culture, Agriculture, Food, and Environment, and Allpanchis. Restless Ecologies is her first book.

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