Water, Life, and Loss: Aguasociality and Environmental Change in the Peruvian Andes

Abstract

Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in the Colca Valley community Yanque, this article investigates how small-scale farmers in the Southern Peruvian Andes relate to water and environmental change in intimate ways. It explores how the circulation of water in Yanque binds bodies, soil, crops, and mountains together – in a particular aguasocial sense. Building on the particularities of the Yanque waterworld, neo-material and posthuman scholarship that focus on more-than-human entanglements, and studies within the anthropology of water that foreground water’s relationality, I argue for the need of ethnographic attention to aguasocialities. Attending to aguasocialities, my argument goes, implies a focus on more-than-human relations; likewise, it recognises water’s potential to be social in its own right, and contributes with alternative stories to the dominant Anthropocene narrative by localising it, bringing in water and inviting to think the world differently.