Peruvian alpacas killed by snow, Norwegian oil and consumer citizens: Can we get back to class and global solidarity?

The political authorities in Caylloma province (department of Arequipa, Southern Peru) has today declared a state of emergency for eight highland districts, where heavy snowfall is killing animals and making life hard for the peasant farmers and herders living there. These people – as most of the population in the Peruvian Andean highlands – are living in extreme poverty. The high mountain area of the Andes has always been a harsh environment to live in; semi-arid and unpredictable weather, strong rain and landslides often threaten the highland communities.

But the heavy snow and rainfalls that have created social emergencies in the recent years are unprecedented. The seasons are getting more irregular and unpredictable: rain, snow, frost and drought come at times of the year when people least expect it and ruin the agricultural cycle and the food production. In spite of heavy rain and snow, however, the general picture is that of melting glaciers, drying springs and declining water supplies.

(Photo: Municipalidad de Caylloma)

These climatic changes in the Andean mountains are caused by global warming. The latest draft report from IPCC states that it is “extremely likely that human influence on climate caused more than half of the observed increase in global average surface temperature from 1951 to 2010”.

I live in Norway, a country that boasts an environmentalist and peaceful attitude towards the world, and yet almost all our wealth comes from the extraction of oil and gas. But are Norwegians willing to sacrifice their wealth to save the global climate? The future of oil extraction is one of the heatedly debated issues before the upcoming elections. Norway’s oil company Statoil wants to expand the oil production to the scenic fishing area Lofoten and Vesterålen. Environmentalist movements and left-wing political parties are campaigning against this. The Green Party (Miljøpartiet De Grønne) has grown incredibly in popularity due to their unwillingness to compromise the earth’s future, and might for the first time get several candidates elected for parliament. The party that most clearly points to the connections between economic and environmental issues, however, is the Red Party (Rødt), who might succeed in getting elected one candidate from Oslo.

The Norwegian author Jan Kjærstad wrote today in thenewspaper Aftenposten about the shift from seeing Norway as a society to a company that should generate economic growth. The social democratic Labour Party (Arbeiderpartiet) used to be a workers’ party fighting for labour rights, solidarity, redistribution of goods, and equality of rights. Now that they have been in power for most of the last century, they are more concerned with saving the banks when they are facing financial crisis (which the banks caused in the first place). People are no longer seen as citizens, but as clients and consumers. This is a global shift. The sociologist Evalina Dagnino writes about how citizenship in Latin America used to be about rights and collective solidarity, but is now about individual responsibility as a private moral duty. The concept of citizenship that grew out of the social popular movements that fought for equality of rights in the 1970s and 1980s, has now acquired a neoliberal meaning and is now all about citizens as consumers. 

The anthropologist Anna Tsing also touches upon this problem of consumer identity in her article about global capitalism, which she calls “supply chain capitalism”, as a system that outsources production to diverse social- economic niches where goods and services can be produced more cheaply: “Such niches are reproduced in performances of cultural identity through which suppliers show their agility and efficiency. Such performances, in turn, are encouraged by new figures of labor and labor power in which making a living appears as management, consumption, or entrepreneurship. These figurations blur the lines between self-exploitation and superexploitation, not just for owner- operators but also for the workers recruited into supplier enterprises. Through such forms of exploitation, supply chain capitalism creates both great wealth and great poverty” (Tsing 2009: 171).

We remember Naomi Klein’s book No Logo about the power of branding. These issues are structural, and the world cannot be changed through shopping. Instead of changing consumer patterns, the whole system of how to organize the world economy would need to change. People shouldn’t be identified through consumption and brands, but according to what they do to make a living: as workers, artists, farmers, employees, students, informal labourers. In Peru and the rest of Latin America, also the self-employed, the market vendors, the small entrepreneurs in the informal sector, and the “precariat” identify with the working class and organize in union-like associations. In other words, we’re back to class. Why did we forget about class? Can we blame the postmodernists? 

(Thanks to Overheating-collegue Elisabeth Schober and the other participants in the Labour reading group for the inspiring discussions yesterday.)

Commodifying Water in Times of Global Warming

I was proud to get my picture from the World's Water Day in Chivay, March 2011, published on the front page of the NACLA Report on the Americas this spring. This was a special issue (volume 46, issue 1, 2013) called "The Climate Debt: Who Profits, Who Pays?"

The background of this issue is that nation-states in the Global South have historically contributed the least to carbon-dioxide emissions but are especially vulnerable to the consequences of climatic shifts because of the damage wrought by extractive industries and the limited resources to cope with such damage.

My article from Peru is called “Commodifying Water in Times of GlobalWarming”. It describes how climate change in the Andes is a kind of chronic disaster that creates winners and losers and leads to power struggles within a water regime that is influenced by individualized responsibilities. The struggle of poor and indigenous people for collective responsibilities in water management is in the article analyzed as an attempt to take control of an uncertain future.

The article and the rest of the issue can be found on NACLA’s webpage: https://nacla.org/edition/8974

Overheating in the Andes (post.doc. project)

Overheating in the Andes: global connections and local articulations of climate change, capitalism and cosmopolitics

This project seeks to explore the intersections of climate change, economic politics, and identity formations in the Peruvian Andes. As the rest of the Global South, Peru contributes very little of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions; in a 2008 world ranking Peru was ranked as number 143 out of 215 with 0.38 metric tons of carbon per capita. Nevertheless, global warming is producing observable effects on temperature, precipitation, seasonality, glacier retreat and water supply in the Peruvian Andes. These climate effects are unevenly distributed, both geographically and socially.

Peru’s national economy is one of the fastest growing in Latin America, and the middle class has been growing during the first decade of the 21^st century. Yet, large parts of the population, like indigenous people in the higher parts of the Southern Andes, are still excluded from this growth, and find themselves increasingly vulnerable in terms of global warming and water scarcity. Peru contains 70 per cent of the world’s tropical glaciers, which are melting in an increasing speed. These glaciers are containers of fresh water and provide a large part of the water used for irrigation and consumption both in rural and urban areas. Therefore, the consequences of rapid meltdown could be devastating.

This research will be based on fieldwork in three places located at different altitudes in the Colca-Majes-Camaná watershed in Southern Peru: a poor herding community in the headwater basin; a province capital where state offices and NGOs are located; and a new town in the Majes irrigation project in the desert, which has developed over the last 30 years due to water channelled from the highlands and migrants coming to seek economic progress. The research will focus on how climate changes is perceived, experienced and articulated by people of different positions in these various localities. The project will scrutinize how people experience and deal with uncertainties and in which ways knowledge and actions are connected to global discourses and movements. 

This project is part of the research project "OVERHEATING. The three crises of globalization: An anthropological history of the 21st century", which is funded by ERC and based at the University of Oslo: http://www.sv.uio.no/sai/english/research/projects/overheating/index.html

‘Todo en la vida se paga’: Negotiating life in Cusco, Peru (Ph.D. thesis, 2011)

Summary: ‘Todo en la vida se paga’: Negotiating life in Cusco, Peru

This thesis is an ethnographic study of entrepreneurial activities and animistic practices in a working class neighbourhood in Cusco, a city in the Peruvian Andes. Drawing on more than two years of fieldwork, the thesis argues that the neoliberal economy of Cusco, at the beginning of the 21^st century, is embedded, not only in sociality, morality and forms of relatedness, but also in an Andean ontology which implies a particular way of seeing relations among persons, places and things.

After three decades of neoliberal restructuring of the economy, economic crisis, and a devastating civil war, today’s Peru is actually witnessing overall economic growth on the national level. However, this is an economy of deep inequalities, where as much as 70 per cent of the labour force works outside the tax system, depriving workers of benefits and protection. Cusco’s economy is characterized by a high degree of underemployment, self-employment, and informality. The thesis examines the activities of people who create their own micro-enterprises in this unstable urban economy. These micro-enterprises are utterly vulnerable in a world where profit margins are extremely low. In this context the thesis explores the cultural conceptualizations of money and profitability, as well as the ambiguous moralities in webs of credit and debt.

The central argument is that a particular Andean “animistic-analogic” ontology, in which mimetic practices constitute a significant part of being-in-the-world, shapes the ways people engage the contemporary neoliberal landscape of economic opportunity and constraint. Mobilising a local idiom ‘everything has to be paid for’, the thesis seeks to explain how the flows of energy and resources are enmeshed in circuits of reciprocal exchange and how the relations between people and other-than-human beings are central to local understandings of wealth generation and social responsibility. By not seeing “nature” and “culture” as separate, the author argues that other-than-human beings, such as the earthmother, mountain spirits, saints and crosses, are relevant and take part in Cusco’s urban economy.

In a world where personhood is accumulative rather than fixed, engaging in social and ritual relations is utterly important. In this light, the thesis explores the tensions between “independence”, social mobility, opportunity and risk on the one hand, and the security of being part of webs of relatedness, that entail more conservative values, on the other. Moreover, the thesis describes how relations of gender, class and kinship are created and negotiated in everyday acts of exchange, stressing the combination of entrepreneurial determination and community values.

The thesis analyses the urban entrepreneurial practices in light of current debates in economic anthropology as well as the work of Andeanist scholars linked to contemporary debates on analogism, perspectivism and the mimetic. This thesis contributes to the ethnographic knowledge of economic life in the Andes in a neoliberal context, and more broadly to the anthropological understanding of the interrelations between economy, sociality and cosmology. 

Salir Adelante: fattige kvinners kamp for bedre levekår i Cusco, Peru (min hovedfagsoppgave fra 2004)

Hele oppgaven kan leses her:

https://www.duo.uio.no/bitstream/handle/10852/16327/AstridxStensrudsxhovedoppgave.pdf?sequence=1

Her er sammendraget jeg skrev den gangen for ni år siden:

Fattige kvinner i Peru kjemper en hard kamp for å komme seg fram i livet. Denne oppgaven handler om kvinner i en bydel i Cusco, som benytter seg av ulike strategier, både individuelle og kollektive, formelle og uformelle, for å bedre levekårene for sine familier. Gatesalg i uformell sektor, bygging av sosiale nettverk og organisering i statlige hjelpeprogram som felleskjøkken, er eksempler på slike strategier. Gjennom å knytte sammen de to analytiske nivåene "struktur" og "aktør", samt kombinere et maktperspektiv med meningsaspekter, og går jeg inn for å vise den sosiale og kulturelle kompleksiteten i kvinnenes livsverden. Dette knyttes til strukturene klasse, etnisitet og kjønn, som legger grunnlaget for sosial differensiering. Kvinnenes sosiale posisjon viser tvetydigheten mellom klasse og etnisitet, mellom det rurale og urbane, og den komplekse relasjonen mellom kjønn som det konstrueres og kjønn som det leves ut. Med utgangspunkt i bydelens felleskjøkken analyseres det asymmetriske maktforholdet mellom kvinnene på grasrota og den statlige institusjonen PRONAA. Statlig paternalisme og kontroll møtes med motstand fra kvinnenes side. De forhandler om makt og krever respekt og autonomi. Dette analyseres i lys av interface, definert som møter mellom ulike livsverdener og kunnskapsfelt. Kvinnenes håp for framtiden er knyttet til mulighetene til å få arbeid, og politikernes tiltak for å redusere den store arbeidsledigheten. Da regjeringen lanserte et sysselsettingsprogram, ble det opprettet komiteer for kvinner i flere fattige bydeler. Formålet var å søke om støtte til prosjekter. Relasjonene mellom kvinnene på grasrota og sentralstyremedlemmene i regjeringspartiets kvinnekomité i Cusco, analyseres med fokus på sosiale grenser, symbolsk makt, forhandling mellom ulike livsverdener og handling (agency). Hegemoni analyseres som en dynamisk prosess, der konflikt, maktutøvelse, hverdagens motstand og politisk handling skjer innen felles referanserammer. Makt og hegemoni reproduseres, samtidig som kollektiv handling viser spirer til endring i bevissthet og politisk handling hos kvinnene.

Valle del Colca

Utsikt over Colca-dalen, 2011

Folk i denne dalen driver små-skala jordbruk og husdyrhold; de dyrker poteter, bønner, quinoa, erter, og mais, og de holder kyr, sauer, og i høyere strøk, llama og alpakka. Klimaet er tørt og bøndene er avhengige av vanningssystemer for å overleve. Mange lever også av håndverk og handel, og noen spesialiserer seg på å selge håndvevde tekstiler, vesker o.l. til turistene som kommer for å se på den vakre naturen og kondorene som svever i luften her hver morgen før de flyr ned mot kysten for å finne mat. Spørsmålene jeg stiller meg foran neste besøk er: Hvordan erfarer folk i denne dalen globale endringer i klima og økonomi? Hvilke handlingsstrategier tyr folk til når de naturlige vannreservoarene som isbreene er, smelter og forsvinner, når jorda eroderer og vannkilder tørker inn? Hvordan påvirkes den lokale økonomien av endringer i globale finansrelasjoner og nasjonale politiske prioriteringer? Hvordan ser folk i Colca-dalen for seg framtiden? Den nære framtiden om fem år, og den mer fjerne framtiden til deres barnebarn? Vil det fortsatt være mulig å skape seg et liv i dalen, eller vil enda flere følge strømmen av migranter til storbyen Arequipa, hovedstaden Lima, eller til USA?

Blogging om Peru

I dag har jeg opprettet min første blogg. Har ennå ikke bestemt om jeg skal skrive på norsk eller engelsk, men det blir nok mest engelsk etterhvert + noe oversatt til spansk for mine peruanske venner. Først og fremst planlegger jeg å blogge fra Peru, der jeg skal gjøre feltarbeid i flere landsbyer langs et vassdrag i det sørlige Andes. Reiser i annen halvdel av oktober og må kjøpe billett snart. Jeg gleder meg til å komme tilbake til Peru, til å se gamle venner og se hva som har endra seg siden sist. Gleder meg til å snakke med folk, spise god mat (ceviche på kysten og marsvin i fjellet), gå turer i fjell og daler, danse huayno. Jeg var i Peru for første gang i 1995, da jeg var bare nitten år. Siden den gang har jeg vært tilbake mange ganger, både på feltarbeid og ferie. I perioden 2001 til 2008 var jeg på flere feltarbeid (tilsammen ca 25 måneder) i en bydel (pueblo joven) i Cusco. I 2011 var jeg tilknyttet et forskningsprosjekt ved Københavns universitet som handlet om klimaendring og vannforvaltning i Colca-dalen i Sør-Peru. Nå har jeg en post.doc-stilling ved forskningsprosjektet Overheating ved Universitetet i Oslo, og skal tilbake til Colca-dalen for å forske på sammenhengene mellom miljø, økonomi og kultur.