Possessive Places: Spatial Routines and Glacier Oracles in Peru’s Cordillera Blanca

Abstract

This article examines the notions of personhood and property underlying relationships between humans and places in the Rio Negro watershed of the central Peruvian Andes. Through offerings, dreams, and divination, glacial peaks become active participants in social interactions with herders, contrasting with the regimentation of subjectivity involved in the notions of private property that inform common expectations for human–place relationships. I illustrate this argument through an ethnographic account of herders’ interactions with glaciers, starting with their routine work in the high grasslands and the accompanying ritual offerings to and divinatory communications with mountains, then moving to the appearance and communications of the same mountains in dreams, and concluding with an example of divinatory consultation with an individual mountain from a distance. In conclusion, I argue that the kinds of relationships herders form with glaciers are dependent on the spatial routines – the habitual patterns of movement and residence – that allow for their co-presence and sharing of substance.

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