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Available From UC Press
Andean Meltdown
A Climate Ethnography of Water, Power, and Culture in Peru
Andean Meltdown examines how climate change and its consequences for Peru's glaciers are affecting the country's water supply and impacting Andean society and culture in unprecedented ways. Drawing on forty years of extensive research, relationship building, and community engagement in Peru, Karsten Paerregaard provides an ethnographic exploration of Andean ritual practices and performances in the context of an altered climate. By documenting Andean peoples' responses to rapid glacier retreat and urgent water shortages, Paerregaard considers the myriad ways climate change intersects with environmental, social, and political change. A pathbreaking contribution to cultural anthropology and environmental humanities, Andean Meltdown challenges prevailing theoretical thinking about the culture-nature nexus and offers a new perspective on Andean peoples' understanding of their role as agents in the shifting relationship between humans and nonhumans.
Karsten Paerregaard is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology in the School of Global Studies at the University of Gothenburg. He is the author of Return to Sender: The Moral Economy of Peru's Migrant Remittances.
"Andean Meltdown makes a remarkable contribution to the study of the Andes and of climate change. With rich ethnographic detail, it reveals how environmental instabilities interrelate with changes in ritual practices and offerings to the powerful natural surroundings. A highly original and important work."⏤Cecilie Vindal Ødegaard, author of Mobility, Markets and Indigenous Socialities: Contemporary Migration in the Peruvian Andes and coeditor of Indigenous Life Projects and Extractivism: Ethnographies from South America