Herding at the Edges: Climate Change and Animal Restlessness in the Peruvian Andes

Abstract

This article examines the impacts of climate change on high-elevation Andean communities through the lens of human-animal relations. Andean herders and their animals coproduce hierarchical, cooperative, and antagonistic forms of social interaction, mediated through human-animal communication. The breakdown of communicative practice alerts herders to broader socioecological changes under persistent drought conditions. I illustrate this dynamic by following the chain of disruption: first as it emerges in daily herding encounters, and then as it ripples outward to impact community-level discussions on the future of pastoralism in the Andean highlands. I draw from the Quechua herding lexicon to show how microinteractional practices between humans and animals reflect the limits of hierarchical sociality in Andean ontologies and provide insight into the localised processes of socioecological fragmentation initiated by climatic changes. I suggest that the Quechua concept of restlessness (k’ita) provides a provocative analytic for evaluating the impacts of global climate change.

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