Allison Caine realized she wanted to study anthropology when a professor told her the field was about listening to people’s stories. Her recent book, “Restless Ecologies: Climate Change and Sociological Futures in the Peruvian Highlands,” is full of them. The book explores the ways of life in Chillca, a small community on the flanks of Mount Ausangate in Peru, 14,000 feet above sea level.
In this village of 350 people, women are the primary pastoralists, tending to herds of alpacas, llama and sheep. But as the glaciers around Chillca melt and the village moves toward privatizing its herding lands, Caine’s book examines the changing relationships between people, animals and the landscape.
Caine, an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Wyoming, first became interested in pastoralism in the Andes during a research Fulbright scholarship to Peru. After studying Quechua, she spent two years conducting immersive fieldwork in Chillca for her doctoral thesis, work which eventually expanded into “Restless Ecologies.”
At a recent panel about melting glaciers hosted by the Instituto Cervantes in New York, Caine spoke about her work alongside Robin Bell, the Marie Tharp Lamont Research Professor at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, which is part of the Columbia Climate School. Bell discussed the importance of including more voices in science, like the expert herding knowledge of the women of Chillca. Work like “Restless Ecologies” directs “how we look to be resilient together,” said Bell.
GlacierHub sat down with Caine to talk about her anthropological methods, her thoughts on language and translation, and what we can learn from Quechua stewardship of the environment.
This conversation has been edited for concision and clarity.
You open the book with the Quechua concept of the “uqhu,” which is both the word for an alpine wetland and a symbol of relationality and intertwining connections. How does that concept guide your anthropological approach and the book?
It’s funny how books come together—the introduction is always the last part. The opening scene of the “uqhu” was inspired by reading the work of Karina Yager, who writes about wetlands as social spaces. Spaces that are not wilderness areas, but that are deeply cultivated through relationships with animals, people and the land itself. When thinking about the book’s beginning, I just kept returning to the favorite place of the woman that I lived with, Concepción. That was Illachiy, a wetland whose name means revelatory, or to shine a light upon. I wanted to think about all the relationships that were flowing through the wetland in a different way. Wetlands are a nexus of relationships: material, social and spiritual, all in this teeming, peaty, watery, subterranean thing. I tried my best to make a lot of that interrelation happen, but translation is always partial.
In Chillca, and among Quechua speakers generally, mountains and significant landscape features are considered social entities, or Earth beings. This is recognized by the Quechua words “apu” and “pukara” (“pukara” loosely translates to mountain deity or fortress, and an “apu” is conceptually similar, but larger and more powerful). Can glaciers be an “apu” or “pukara”?
A glacier can be “apu” or “pukara!” In the community where I was, people didn’t talk about glaciers separately from peaks. So when you’re talking about Apu Ausangate, the biggest mountain there, you’re referencing both the mountain itself and also its glacier, which is part of its generative power. What makes the “apu” powerful is that it provides water for the grasslands, the people, the households. Glaciers are built into the inherent being of the “apu” or “pukara” itself.
Speaking of translation, the book works with three languages: English, Spanish and Quechua. What aspects of Quechua grammar and syntax differ from English? How have they shaped the translation of the text?
[Quechua] is very different from English. It took a long time for me to get a handle on it, and I still have to work very hard at it. It’s an agglutinative language, which means you add infixes or suffixes that change the meaning of the word, so that it can be reflexive. There’s even a suffix that indicates whether you know a piece of knowledge because you witnessed it or because you heard it from someone else. So you don’t have to say, “Susie told me that the alpacas are running off today.” You can just say, “the alpacas are running off today,” and then add the suffix, “si,” if I heard it from someone else or “mi” if I went and saw it.
But it also can indicate the pacing or the timing, or the broader social context. Understanding how temporality and spatiality get decoded in the language is really important for getting the nuances of how people are in relationship to an environment that’s changing.
The book focuses on sensation, especially sound, like the highly specific calls of herders to their animals. Why did you choose to emphasize this? And, on a different note, do the people of Chillcha attend to the sounds of glaciers?
This type of research feels very quiet, which I found really powerful, because in those moments of quiet you actually realize there’s a lot going on. [In Chillca] sound is such a critical part of how people communicate with their environment, whether that’s the whistles they’re directing toward their animals, or blowing coca leaves and reciting incantations to Earth beings. It’s an important part of how they attune to their environment.
As it relates to glaciers, there is the sound of water: how much water and which direction it’s coming from and how fast it is. All of that is deeply baked into the experiential work of herding and reading the landscape, knowing where to send your animals. We’re not often close enough that we can hear the sound of glaciers rumbling, but people interact with glaciers through the sound of glacial output.
Each chapter begins and ends with a folk song from Concepción Rojo Rojo, who is an alpaca herder featured prominently in the book. How does incorporating folklore and song directly affect an anthropological text?
I mention this in the book: Concepción was not prone to long monologues. She would give little snippets here and there of her emotional landscape and stories, scattered throughout her dedicated training of me to become an alpaca herder. Her songs, for me, were just beautiful. They tell so much about her history with that landscape. Huaynos are such a powerful poetic genre, and I wanted to have that be a documented part of the story.
To read more of the stories from Chillca, the book is available here, with code AZFLR for 30 percent off all domestic purchases.
