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Allison Caine, "Restless Ecologies: Climate Change and Socioecological Futures in the Peruvian Highlands" (U Arizona Press, 2025)
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- [00:00]
A
Hello, everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast, or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts, and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form, and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
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B
I'm Caleb Zakrin, CEO and publisher of the New Books Network. Today I'm speaking with Alison Cain about her book Restless Climate Change and the Socioecological Futures in the Peruvian Highlands. Allison is assistant professor of Cultural Anthropology at the University of Wyoming. Restless Ecologies follows alpaca herders in Peru, exploring the challenges they face to their way of life and their environment. Allie, thanks for joining me today on the New Books Network.
- [01:34]
C
Thanks so much for having me.
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B
I'm always excited to talk with anthropologists, in part because I feel like you get to do really cool stuff. You get to meet interesting people, go to interesting places. It's different than historians or other academics who obviously, they get to go to interesting places too, but it's oftentimes in dusty archives. Nothing wrong with that, of course, and I'm sure you do your fair share of that as well, but you really do get to explore the world as an anthropologist. And I was wondering if you could just start by telling us a little about you, your background and your work as an anthropologist.
- [02:12]
C
Sure. Well, yeah, I think that's really true. And what drew me to anthropology was those methods, right? We got to have in our methods toolkit just going places, meeting people and hanging out and really getting to know people. And that's just it's been such a privilege to have that be a part of my life. I grew up on a small island off the coast of Maine, pretty culturally homogenous, and it was only when I went to college and took my first anthropology class that I was like, wow, this is amazing. And everything kind of just developed from there. I ended up going to Ecuador in college and then visited Peru while I was there. Ended up going back to Peru as a Fulbright Scholar after college. And that really just kind of set me on this pathway to keep coming back. And, you know, there. There are various points, I think, where I was like, oh, maybe I'll, you know, see about working somewhere else in the world or maybe doing something else. And I just kept getting kind of called back to this place, to the Andes Mountains. And it's been, you know, such a. Such a privilege to have that be kind of the center of my career and the center of a lot of my. My life. So, yeah, it's a pretty. Pretty fascinating way to spend one's time.
- [03:33]
B
Absolutely. And, you know, obviously you have that. That personal connection that you've been cultivating, but I'm wondering, for this specific project, how did the idea come about to follow these herders, follow their life, follow their community, and also examine it in the context of just the broader ecology of the region in which they live?
- [03:54]
C
Yeah, absolutely. So, I mean, this relates back again to the Andes Mountains. You know, so much of what we know about the Earth's climate, right, comes from this part of the world. So just, you know, a few hours distance from where I ended up doing my fieldwork is the Kelccaya Ice Cap. And this is the site of an extensive climate science initiative where they've had, you know, teams coming there for decades and monitoring the changes happening to the Earth's climate, our sort of climate history. And so it's just. It's one of those places on planet Earth that generates so much knowledge about how our planet is changing and what our future could look like. And so for me, I really, you know, my primary motivation for this project was to write Climate Change from the ground up, Right. To go to this place that generates so much knowledge about our planet and to really understand how the people living there see the world and see their world changing and understand what is happening to them and really explore it within their own analytics, their own logics of how this world works and why we find ourselves in such a challenging moment in human history.
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B
Could you just describe a little bit the region that you were examining, just what it's like obviously there's alpacas, but you know, the other animals, the type of biome environment that that is there.
- [05:25]
C
Sure. So I did my research in a community called Chilca. It's located at about 14,000ft above sea level, so very high, very dry, a very challenging place for plants, for animals, for humans. And so people there, there isn't much agriculture happening at that elevation. So people devote the majority of their livelihoods to taking care of their animals and bringing their animals out to pasture. So the primary animal of importance is the alpaca, of course, which produces a very fine wool that gets sold on the international wool market and comprises a large part of household incomes as well as sort of the community income. And then they also have sheep which are, I like to think of them as the sort of the checking account to the alpaca savings account. They're sort of quick money, they reproduce faster. You can sell a few off if you need quick cash for something. And then they have llamas. So they use llamas primarily as pack animals. So even though they don't have much agriculture up at that elevation, they do grow potatoes. And so llamas are very important to transporting those potatoes between the storehouses, between pastures to be processed into freeze dried potatoes. And then they also lend their llamas out for the tourist tracks that go around Ausangatte Mountain. And so those are the primary animals that they have. They did have cows for a period of time, but it turns out that, you know, dairy is quite difficult at that, at that elevation. So largely they've devoted themselves to alpaca herding.
- [07:04]
B
If there is a main subject of your book, it's Concepcion Rojo. Could you tell us a little about her and how you met her and what it was just like following her, engaging with her, learning from her?
- [07:17]
C
Yeah, she is an incredible woman. She took me in just a few days after I arrived in Chilca. You know, I'd gone there the month before. I was planning to be there for the year. And I presented myself at the community assembly in Quechua and explained who I was, why I wanted to be there, what I was interested in, learning about alpaca herding and about their landscape knowledge. And they sort of like gave me the keys to a storehouse in the downtown kind of Chilca area. And I lived there for about three days before Concepcion's son Mario came to fetch me and said, you know, my mom is very concerned about you living by yourself here. Like you need to be with people, you need to learn how to live in this place. And so he brought me up to where she was living at that time, sort of at the edges of the glaciers. It was during the dry season. And she took me in and she made it sort of her project to turn me into a proper alpaca herder. She was kind of known in the community as taking in strays. She had taken in a Japanese anthropologist a few years before I got there. And so she kind of understood what I was about, and she found it, you know, kind of amusing and really enjoyed kind of asking me things about the work that I was doing and where I came from, but also just, yeah, really, really put herself in charge of my education there. And just an incredibly generous, knowledgeable, incredible person who continues to be one of the great matriarchs of that community. So I was very fortunate to have ended up training under her wing.
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B
Can you walk us through what a day in her life was like? Obviously, it's not going to be the same every day, but as a herder, what is she doing? What's her average day like?
- [09:20]
C
Yeah, so actually, one of my chapters in my book is kind of framed as a day in the life, because I found it so fascinating how, you know, even when she woke up in the morning, she was just sort of instantly attuned to her animals. I write about how, you know, she would often kind of wake herself up because she has, like, whistled or uttered some sort of hurting command in her sleep. It's just. It's so baked into your being up there. And so she would wake up early in the morning, often, you know, get the fire going. You'd start to hear the animals outside moving around and the pasture, and kind of once you sense that they're ready to go, you know, it's a very quick process of getting up and out the door and getting them to where they need to go. So when I lived with her in the dry season, you know, as I mentioned, we were up kind of at the edges of these glaciated valleys, and so you would kind of do this very choreographed sort of migration with your animals in the morning where you'd call it to your neighbors and see where they were taking their herds. And then based on that, you would figure out where your herds were gonna go. The animals often kind of already knew where they were gonna go, and then you're kind of off and everything just starts moving right. And the sort of the task of the herder throughout the day is just kind of to keep those animals where they want to Keep them. Right. And the animals, depending on, you know, the season and what they're looking for, they're often gonna be kind of spilling out over into other valleys or trying to get into other parts of the community. And so, kind of depending on how the animals are doing, your work can be quite strenuous. You could be chasing sheep off of ridges and all of that. But if everyone's quite calm, often you're sitting on the hillside and working on some weaving. And in Concepcion's case, she often had me sitting there every once in a while, kind of peppering her with some questions. And she was telling me about, you know, her childhood and growing up here and the work that she does now. And. Yeah, throughout the day, you periodically run into other herders, other women who are out there with their herds, and you chat and exchange information about the environment, about the animals, about water. And then in the evening, the animals start to descend back to their sleeping place. You follow them back down, make sure everyone's there, and then it's time to start, you know, cooking the evening's meal. And so, you know, in many ways, it can be quite a quiet life up there. Often it's just you and your animals all day long. But you're also just. You're part of this broader community of women who are constantly just sharing information, sharing food. And it can be quite a vibrant social life, even if there are these quiet, long moments of being with your animals.
- [12:26]
B
I imagine she just must have such an incredible connection to or sense of, you know, what her animals are feeling or thinking and doing. What did you see in terms of the human animal connection between Concepcion and her animals, but also the other herders as well?
- [12:44]
C
Yes. I mean, that was one of the first things I realized when I was there is, you know, when you would ask people about the landscape or about the water or about the mountains, you would get a few interesting answers here and there. But people weren't generally that interested in talking about those things. What they really wanted to talk about were their animals, and they wanted to tell me all about their animals. And Concepcion, as I mentioned, you know, she felt in many ways that I was a sort of apprentice to the work of herding alpacas. And so she was very invested in teaching me how to. To be able to look at a herd of alpacas and kind of immediately sense the energy and sense what's going on. You can tell a lot by, you know, how the animals are moving and in which direction. Also these little cues of how their ears are positioned or how they're bowing their heads towards the grass and then certainly the sounds that they're making, right? So there's just sort of this constant sensory engagement with the animals that was really, really subtle, really nuanced, but gave the herders really detailed and robust information about the health of the grasslands, the health of the waterways, you know, the sort of seasonal changes that were happening, and then of course, these broader climatic changes that were kind of happening steadily over time. And so it was really incredible, art, incredible to witness and incredible to be trained in just a very small part of that realm of knowledge.
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B
You talk about how the communication between the human and the animals can change over time or change depending on certain conditions, that sometimes they have to go and chase a alpaca that's drifted off into another valley, or other times it's much easier to control the herd. What is it usually a signal of when the herd is not following the herder?
- [14:48]
C
So often what we find in drought conditions is that the animals become very distracted, very prone to wandering, very uninterested in following the cues that the herder is giving them. And of course, that makes the work of herding the animals incredibly difficult and taxing and exhausting. And so when you see in the Andes, these extended prolonged droughts that we're starting to see more of as the climate is changing there, you're getting these kind of ripple effects across animals and humans in landscapes, right? So the animals are starting to wander off. The herders are feeling like they are not being listened to. That creates a lot of frustration. That frustration can actually accumulate in your body and make you feel sick, right? So you're seeing kind of health impacts from that. And then, of course, there's more conflicts happening between herders who are in neighboring pastures, right? Because the animals are now traversing all of these boundaries that the herders have set for them because they're hungry, right? This is the drought. They want to find the grasses that are most nutritious for them, and those are starting to dwindle. And so they're starting to go further afield to find them. And so you just see everything start to get really, really tense, especially in that transition, kind of right before the wet season comes in and the rains start returning to the pastures. And that's just becoming a lot more intense, according to the herders there, as they're seeing those climatic changes over time.
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B
I want to move a little bit too away from just talking about the human animal relationship to talking about the, you know, the inter human, inter community relationships. How do you see gender dynamics playing out in this community? What is the kind of the role that women tend to play as you focus on the book?
- [16:48]
C
Yeah, so I think something that comes as a bit of a surprise to people is that women are the primary herders in these communities. We often associate animal husbandry with men and men's work. But in a lot of places in the world, the animals are the domain of the women of the household. And that's certainly the case in Chilca. And so the women are the ones who are taking their animals out in the morning, they're bringing them home at night, and they're spending their days, as I mentioned, in that sort of continuous sensory engagement with them. And so they just have this incredibly deep and robust sense of their herd and how their herd is adapting to different environmental changes and are able to speak to that in a really incredibly nuanced and fascinating way.
- [17:45]
B
You also examine religion and how religious ideas have changed over time. Obviously, there are, as you go through it, various beliefs that are very much centered in that community, centered on the various traditions that have developed over time. And then also there, you know, there is. They're open to outsiders, too, like. Like you and other anthropologists, but also other people that, you know, other religious groups that have been trying to convert people, trying to expose them to different ideas. How did you. Did you get a sense of what the. The religious ideas were and how. How they kind of combined different values and how that was changing their relationship to the land around them?
- [18:26]
C
Yeah, that's a great question. So this is a community that historically has leaned heavily Catholic. And of course, Catholicism in this part of the world is sort of deeply interwoven with indigenous religious and spiritual traditions. But in the past 20 or so years, we're seeing a pretty major shift towards evangelicalism, specifically the Maranatha Church. And that really has created a shift in how people interact specifically with their landscape. Right. So this is a place where landscape beings have historically been really important members of the community. Right. They're social. They interact with humans, interact with each other, interact with animals in ways that are incredibly sort of generative of the community as a whole. Right. And there are all these practices around giving gifts and devotional offerings and things to the mountains in exchange for them taking care of you, providing the resources to live. Right. Water, pasture, things like that. And as the Maranatha Church and as evangelicalism has expanded in this region, we see less of those practices. So fewer people are giving offerings to mountains, to other landscape beings, and are now Understanding their environmental relationships within the sort of evangelical understanding of the relationship between humans and the earth. Right. So having sort of dominion over the earth, caring for the earth, but certainly not the earth itself, being agentive and being social. And so that really has shifted the social landscape in this part of the world.
- [20:20]
B
I feel what comes across quite strikingly is this sort of generational divides. The Concepcion being sort of representative of an older generation, and then newer ideas coming in that represent all sorts of ideas. But forms of modernization, Christianity, you know, new forms of Christianity, new ideas around land ownership. You know, as you describe it, the herders, they. They wake up in the morning and then they decide where they're going to take their herd. Obviously, you know, whose land it is that they are taking the herds on. Up for debate, but how, how do people think about, you know, the, the. The modernizing forces that are impacting their community?
- [21:07]
C
Yeah, well, I would say that people are becoming much more invested in a cash economy. Right. There's also a major shift that I talk about in the book from communal land tenure to privatized land tenure. So when I describe that practice of waking up in the morning and kind of asking where your neighbors are going and calculating where you're going to go, that all has kind of fallen by the wayside now. So people used to herd their animals in a commons. And so there was this community wide rotation of herds, and people had to sort of constantly be in contact with one another, constantly be in conversation about what was happening in the landscape, how to strategize around that, where to take their animals. And, you know, with the strains that were coming with a lot of the climatic changes, with sort of more interest in cash economy and wage labor, there's been a shift towards privatized land tenure. So now that they have these privatized land holdings, that frees up more time for them to pursue wage labor, to pursue other opportunities that take them away from their animals and, you know, down the valley to Pitumarca, to Cuan to Cusco, to other cities in the region.
- [22:27]
B
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- [22:47]
C
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- [22:58]
B
What does Concepcion see? You know, what is her experience like of all this change? Is it, you know, challenging for her in the way that, you know, change and, you know, modernization can be challenging for anyone of an older generation, or does she see it in a way that you found particularly interesting?
- [23:17]
C
That's a great question. I mean, there's sort of a mixed reaction, right? So for a lot, for her and for a lot of the women in her generation, they do miss coming across one another in the pasture, right? They do miss those kind of spontaneous interactions. You know, they agree that it's much easier to have their animals within their private landholdings, but it just affords them fewer opportunities to go out into the pasture and weave with their neighbors. Right. And so people say the work feels a lot lonelier now, especially if you live in parts of the community that are quite remote. You just don't get to interact with people in the same way as you used to. That being said, she's always been very interested in her children's future, her grandchildren's future and their success. And she's really enthusiastic about sending her grandchildren to school in the cities, to university. Right. There's, there's a lot of talk in this community about wanting more sort of quote, unquote, professionals. They want lawyers, they want doctors, they want their kids to train in these professions, these careers, and then come back to the community and contribute to the community as a whole. And so they feel torn. I think in many ways they see it as being a good change, but they do also miss some of the experiences that they had previously.
- [24:47]
B
And for the younger generations, do they want to stay or is it a situation like we see in a lot of places in the world? In America, for example, people in smaller towns, rural areas, the younger generations leave and then the towns slowly die off. What is it like there?
- [25:05]
C
I think for the past 10, 15 years, there has been quite a large outmigration of younger folks from the community. But a lot of these kids are coming back now, which is interesting to see. And a lot of them are feeling a lot of pride in being an alpaca herder and a lot of pride in contributing this really fine wool to international markets and to sort of that identity that they've cultivated as alpaca herders. And so you wouldn't see as much outmigration now as you might expect. I think there is a draw for People to come back. For many of them, it is a respected occupation, and they are interested in taking it up. I mean, that being said, a lot of folks are really invested in kind of diversifying their income. So they have their alpacas up in Chilca, but then they also maybe have a storefront down in Pitu Marca or do seasonal wage labor in the lowlands, you know, on coffee plantations or mines. And so there's, you know, there's an interest in doing a variety of different things, but definitely a large resistance, this idea of getting rid of alpacas altogether.
- [26:26]
B
Right? Yeah, it seems very much just so integral to the way of life, life there. And, you know, you know, so much of the book in the background is this. This connection to nature, this, you know, the connection to the landscape. You know, obviously you. You have photos throughout the book, But I'm sure it doesn't do justice with the actual experience is like being there. Can you describe a little bit just how the environment, how the landscape is like this really strong felt presence for the people there? It's just something that's always around. Like it's. I live in a city, so, you know, we don't really, you know, I have. I have the skyscrapers, I suppose. But I'm sure there's something extremely special about just being there in that environment. Could you talk about it a little bit?
- [27:11]
C
Yes. I mean, so this is. It's a stunning landscape. They're on the southern slopes of Asangatte, which is the highest peak in this mountain range, the Vilkanota. And you really do just feel the presence of these giants there, right? You're up there in the glaciers. You're up there right near these mountain peaks. At night, you can kind of see storms gathering over the mountains and thunder and lightning. And it really is incredibly powerful, a really powerful landscape. And I think, especially with those mountains there that are understood to be these social beings, you do have this sense of being watched over by them. And that's still, you know, for Concepcion, for a lot of her family members, that recognition of those mountains and these places and different rock outcrops and pastures, you know, it's important to recognize them and to be in relationship with them. Even if many of these practices, as I mentioned, are changing, but people still feel that there's a relationship there that is worth cultivating and worth maintaining. It's also a landscape, you know, that has a quite painful history for this community. For quite a long period of time, the community was dominated by three haciendas, which are private landholdings on which indigenous peoples, like many of Concepcion's ancestors, you know, grandfather, were conscripted into unpaid labor and abused and, you know, taken dispossessed of their lands, of their animals. And after the agrarian reform in the late 20th century, this land was returned to those families. And so that history, that sort of pain of being dispossessed of that landscape and then recapturing it, I think also kind of looms large in people's sense of their own attachment to that place, going on that.
- [29:21]
B
And just their relationship to the land, to the community. How do they. They think of their. And I'm sure it differs from person to person, but based on a lot of the conversations that you had with people, how do they think about their place in the broader Peruvian community? Do they, you know, do they. Do they feel connected to. To that political project in the same way that they feel connected to their local community?
- [29:48]
C
Yes, for sure. I mean, during the time that I was there, people had. Their main. Main source of information was. Was the radio, right? And so whenever you're out in the pasture, you have the radio playing sort of constantly, you know, music and then updates and. And news, and people were. Were largely informed through that form of media and. And certainly felt themselves very connected to what else, you know, was happening in Peru. I mean, there's also, I think, a sense in many of these communities of. Of feeling abandoned or, you know, kind of cast out from mainstream Peruvian society. And that's something that has, you know, had to be repaired over decades to varying levels of success. I think there are certainly many sort of campaigns on the part of the municipal government to bring resources to these communities, but otherwise, one could feel quite remote, quite unacknowledged up there.
- [30:59]
B
This project, and the math might be wrong, was 10 years in the making. So you saw quite a bit of change. And also, Concepcion, aging over that period of time, and what is it like for people growing old there? How are the elders treated? How do the older people think about their place in the world? I think in the world today, this is becoming such an important question. As so many societies are getting older. The average age is ticking up in almost every single developed society. So I'm wondering for a place like this, that you examine what is it like for them in terms of how they think about aging?
- [31:39]
C
One thing that I found really fascinating was, was how the process of aging up there wasn't considered sort of a process that unfolds on this landscape, right? It was very much a process that the landscape and People were going through together. It was almost impossible for women like Concepcion to talk about their own bodies and their own sort of physical process of aging without talking about all the changes that were happening to the landscape, all the changes that were happening with their animals, with their families. And I think there are many, many ways that women up there feel themselves to be kind of becoming sort of disconnected from the community or disconnected from the landscape, unable to do many of the things that they did before, and feeling a lot of anxiety about their role in the community, whether they can be effective herders, whether they can really take care of the herds in the way that they want to, whether they can really take care of their families in the ways that they want to. And so, I mean, that was pretty recognizable for me, I think, in many of the ways that people talk about aging around the world and kind of wondering about their own role and how that shifts over time.
- [33:09]
B
That's very interesting. And you also talk a lot about it in terms of the way in which they understand their relation, their health, their aging, in sort of connection to the health and the aging of the landscapes around them, of the depletion of the glaciers. I think what's so remarkable is just the sense of connectivity with one's landscape, with one's animals, with one's community in a way that just feels, in a way very. Just foreign to my own experience and understanding, which makes it so interesting. I'm curious if you could talk a little about, for you, going there, if you felt like it changed how you saw the world and how you experience your environment.
- [33:55]
C
Certainly, I think, as you say, one of the things you really get a sense of living in this. This community, this part of the world, is that entanglement, right? That deep, deep entanglement of humans and landscapes and animals. And I think the biggest thing that I learned, you know, in the process of. Of living there and being a part of that and. And studying it, is that we often romanticize that, right? We're like, oh, how lovely to be living in. In harmonious entanglement, you know, with your. With your landscape or with your animals. And in reality, it's incredibly difficult. It's really hard work. There's a lot of alterity there. There's a lot of difference that you have to bridge, you know, and there's a lot of antagonism and competition and hierarchy. And so it's not a peaceful sort of harmonious life. It requires a lot of labor to kind of keep those connections intact, to honor those relationships, to feed one another. To be fed. And that's something that I found really impactful about doing this research is, you know, especially as we see communities like Chilca navigating these seismic shifts in their climate, in their landscape, in their resource availability. Right. There's a lot of sort of nostalgia for how things were, you know, nostalgia for some harmonious past, and that really has never existed. If anything, the thing to be learned is that people there are just incredibly skilled at maintaining that connectivity even as things are shifting and going kind of wonky around them.
- [35:44]
B
Right, right. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I do feel like you describe that. So much of the book, I feel like, is the description of just dealing with these. These new challenges, whether it's environmental challenges or just social and economic challenges, as these kind of, you know, they're kind of getting it from all sides, but seem to be weathering the storm more or less pretty well. Do you have a sense of just the prospects for the future for the Chilca community? Obviously, it's impossible to predict exactly how things are going to change and how things will adapt, but, you know, it seems like it's on the path to changing and that in 10 and 15 and 20 years, the community could look very different, you know. Do you have a sense of what things will be like in the future?
- [36:36]
C
I mean, I wish I did. It's really impossible to predict for me, for the people who live there. The one thing that always sticks with me is, you know, Donna Haraway, staying with the trouble. And that's really. That's the one thing that I can confidently say about the community of Chilca and the people there is that no matter what unfolds, you know, people are sticking with it. They're staying with the trouble. They're really trying to continue living in that landscape that is so deeply meaningful to them and to keep cultivating those relationships with their neighbors and with their animals and with that landscape.
- [37:14]
B
I'm wondering, you teach at Wyoming, and I spent some time in Wyoming. It's also very mountainous, very rugged place where you can really feel like you get lost in the environment and just absolutely beautiful. And I'm wondering if you could just make some connections between your experience. I don't know if you actually live in Wyoming, but if you live in Wyoming. Yeah, if you live in Wyoming, what your experience is of being in Wyoming versus being in Peru.
- [37:48]
C
I mean, I do have to say, you know, the first time I flew into Wyoming, you know, for my job interview, I was looking out the window thinking, this looks Like Peru. It's very similar in many ways. But one fascinating connection is actually that there are quite a significant number of Peruvian herders here. So there are sheep ranches in Wyoming that hire sheep herders from Peru. And so I've been able to meet some of those folks. A lot of them are from more of the sort of central Andes. They're from Huancayo in Peru. But we've been able to talk about that sort of interesting connection between this place and somewhere else that is such a big part of my life. So, yeah, there are herders who have been here in wyoming for. For 20 years working on Wyoming ranches. And there's just that incredible connection between these two places, which was really unexpected.
- [38:47]
B
Yeah, that's. That's pretty funny in many ways. And I think that the, you know, there's so many connect. You know, we. I think oftentimes it's easy to, you know, to segment North America versus South America. But there are, you know, it is in a way, one. One. One big continent, you know, minus the Darien Gap, which uncrossable, basically, or very impossible to cross. But, you know, that connection is. Is. Is very, very much alive, I think, especially, you know, in relation to just the big nature and how much that cast this. This kind of shadow on the people that. That live in experience, you know, whether it's Wyoming or whether it's the Andes. I'm wondering for you if you could talk about future work that you intend to do looking at this region or if there's anything else that you plan on working on in the future in this same theme.
- [39:45]
C
Sure, yeah. So that connection, as you mentioned, between Wyoming and Peru in north and South America, I think that's such a strong pull for me right now in my research. I'm really interested in kind of knowing more about these life histories of people who come to Wyoming to herd sheep and then often go back and settle in Huancayo or Junin or other parts of Peru and establish lives there and sort of. What is that experience like? Do they dream of Wyoming? Do they remember this landscape in a certain way? Did they connect to it in unexpected ways? And how did their time up here shape their lives moving forward back in Peru? And so a lot of my research now is based here in Wyoming and understanding more about sheep ranching here and sort of the cultural heritage of that industry. And then of course, that connection between Wyoming and Peru.
- [40:49]
B
That sounds really fascinating. And I'm curious too, what it will be like interacting with your subjects or it seems like you already have started that process. But what it will be like interacting with your subjects, because so much of it seems like it's dependent on whether or not your subjects are willing to play ball. I'm assuming you had a good sense that you would be able to do your fieldwork there. But, you know, I wonder what would have happened if you had arrived in Chilka and gone to the council and then they decided that they didn't want you there. Does that. Does that cross your mind at all?
- [41:26]
C
Oh, certainly. And I mean, you know, there were definitely members of the community who were not interested in talking to me, and that's always fair. And you just. You give that space and you say, okay, I'm not gonna. I'm not gonna bother you for sure. I mean, the interesting thing about chatting with sheep herders up here in Wyoming who are from Peru is that they're all men, right? Which is a very different experience from my fieldwork, because I think one of the reasons why I had access to this space and to this community in the way that I did was because I'm a woman. And so I was allowed into these spaces that otherwise had been pretty inaccessible for previous ethnographers working on pastoralism in the Andes, which, you know, might explain some of the male bias as well. But I certainly, you know, I. I thought about that a lot and. And, you know, knew that there were just some parts of truth that I just wasn't. That weren't, you know, open to me, that weren't part of my story to tell. And I really respected that. And in many ways, I feel that, you know, in Wyoming as well, and that's part of what you navigate as an ethnographer, is just knowing boundaries and honoring them and respecting them and just being honest about the work that you're doing and the limitations to it.
- [42:48]
B
I feel that even non anthropologists can learn from anthropologists in terms of how to just approach going to places that are completely different from where they might be coming from. Obviously, over time, they'll notice these connections as you're finding these connections between Wyoming and the Andes. But is there any advice that you have just on going to a place that's completely different and soaking up the culture, the history, the people in a way that is, you know, sort of allows you to check any biases that you might have at the door?
- [43:24]
C
That's a great question. I think the biggest thing is being comfortable with discomfort. It can be profoundly uncomfortable to be the new kid somewhere, right. Wherever that is. And certainly with ethnographic research There are months where you feel like you're completely new to this place and people don't really know what to make of you. And you're not quite sure if this research is going to go anywhere. And it can be a profoundly kind of isolating experience. Experience. But the sort of, you know, sitting with that discomfort and constantly reminding yourself that it's just part of it and that it's temporary is really, really helpful. And I always reminded myself when I was, when I was doing this research, you know, sometimes it was quite lonely and quite cold and quite terrifying, honestly, to walk up to strangers in the pasture and want to talk with them. And I just reminded myself of the incredible gifts that it brings and the people that you're able to meet, people like Concepcion who just are just incredibly big hearted, kind people who will be interested in the work that you're doing and be an ally to it in many ways. And so it's a hard thing to say. You know, I, I have this conversation with my students all the time where they're like, how, how do you do this kind of work? And it's, you just, you just do it. You put yourself out there. And the, the rewards are incredible in terms of just being able to meet unbelievably kind, generous people.
- [45:08]
B
Yeah, it's so interesting in many ways. And, and I find, I find, you know, talking with anthropologists, you just, I mean, to sort of echo what I said at the very beginning, it's just like you just are doing something that's very different than other people in the social sciences and the humanities. You're getting, you're connecting with people in a very different way, which is, just makes the work, I think, absolutely fascinating. I'm wondering, you know, you being there, obviously you're, you're studying their way of life, what questions that they have for you. What were people most interested in about your life and about your beliefs and your ideas, certainly.
- [45:52]
C
So, you know, the United States is kind of a place that looms large for people. You know, they see it on tv, they consume a lot of our media, our movies and our shows. And, you know, a lot of the questions were kind of oriented around that, you know, what is your town like? What are people like there? What do they do? You know, women were always interested in, you know, how old are women when they get married there, how many children do they have? Sort of just understanding kind of like what the lifespan looks like for, you know, quote unquote, typical American woman. And of course, I couldn't be sort of representative of the entire American experience. But I think they found it really interesting to kind of just hear how we live our day to day lives and how we organize our time and our, you know, our family lives and our careers. And so there was a lot of that. And then of course, you know, one. One point of intrigue for people was like my contact lenses, you know, things like that that are, you know, just kind of odd little rituals that I would be doing in the mornings and kind of asking me more about that.
- [47:02]
B
That's. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And you know, I wouldn't think about the contact lenses, but it does make so much sense that there would be something like that that would just be very interesting. And of course, like, you know, it's good sometimes, I think as a. It's good sometimes to get those questions and have people, you know, non Americans, you know, I'm an American as well, but non Americans hearing what they have to say about how they perceive us and how they see us. I've definitely been thinking about that a lot recently, how we're perceived. So, you know, Alison, it was really wonderful to get the chance to speak with you about this book. You know, there's a lot. You go into so much more obviously in the book. You go into so much more detail and you engage a lot with other anthropologists, theories and research that, you know, we didn't talk about as much. So there's that in the book as well. But yeah. Thank you so much for being guest on the New Books Network. And it was really wonderful to get the chance to speak with you about Chilca and Concepcion and just these incredible alpaca herders that you got the chance to spend time with.
- [48:10]
C
Well, thank you so much for having me. It was a pleasure.