Meanings and Materialities
Meanings and Materialities
Exhibition 6–15 June
Open every day 12:00-18:00Karsten Paerregaard
Throughout the Andean region people practice a precolonial custom of making offerings to the nonhuman beings they imagine inhabit the environment. Of special importance are gifts to the mountains which aim to appease these and ask them for favors. Due to global warming and the melting of the region’s glaciers and snowcaps it entails, however, the offering practice has become an issue of contestation. As the mountains’ freshwater deposits deplete, in some places people have begun to question the effect of the offerings or even stopped making them altogether. In other places, by contrast, people read the climatic drama they are experiencing as sign that the mountains demand more gifts prompting them to speed up their offering activities.
Reviewing ethnographic data from Peru’s central highlands the paper examines the annual pilgrimage to Mount Huaytapallana in which a growing number of participants bring gifts to the mountain expecting it to bring fortune, health, and prosperity. The aim is to discuss how climate change, glacier retreat, and the pollution which the gifts that the many pilgrims leave on the mountain transform the power relation between giver and receiver in Andean offering practices. The paper asks: what happens when the most precious object humans can give; that is, the gift to the gods, becomes an agent of harm and is viewed as trash? It argues that anthropogenic climate change and environmental degradation challenge the idea of reciprocity that drives mountain offerings prompting Andean people to rethink their own role in the give-and-take relation they engage in with the nonhuman world.
Karsten Paerregaard is professor emeritus of Anthropology at School of Global Studies, Gothenburg University. Paerregaard has conducted fieldwork in the Peruvian Andes and multi-sited fieldwork among Peruvian migrants in America, Europe, Japan, and South America. His current research is focused on climate-induced migration. Paerregaard’s sole authored books include Linking Separate Worlds. Urban Migrants and Rural Lives in Peru, Berg (1997); Peruvians Dispersed. A Global Ethnography of Migration, Lexington (2008); Return to Sender. The Moral Economy of Peru’s Migrant Remittances, UC Press (2015), and Andean Meltdown, A Climate Ethnography of Water, Power and Culture in Peru, UC Press (2023).