FINAL SCIENTIFIC REPORT OF THE PROJECT INDIGENOUS PEOPLE AND CLIMATE CHANGE

AIM AND DEVELOPMENT

Through case studies among different South American indigenous people in different climatological and ecological environments – an urban setting in the Bolivian Andes, a rural setting in the Peruvian Andes and the Peruvian part of the Amazon tropical rain forest – this project aimed to examine indigenous peoples’ notions of weather and climate change and the factors or forces behind them. Departing from a broad anthropological perspective the project also wanted to problematize dominant explanatory models within the modernist climate change discourse. What does “weather” and “climate” mean to different indigenous people and how do they formulate and re-negotiate these concepts to make them relevant in their contexts and situations? How do indigenous people perceive their situation and how do they act to improve it? By focusing on indigenous people with other ontological perspectives than those dominant in the modern West, the project wish to contribute to a critical and policy relevant production of knowledge regarding climate change and how to act in relation to it in a way that is relevant to local people.

Inspired by humanistic environmental studies, post-colonial studies and political ontology the project has interrogated the modern Western narrative about climate change for its hegemonic bias. The narrative’s universalistic assumption avoids moral distinctions between those who mainly contribute to global warming and the foremost victims for the consequences of climate change. Against the “global we” implicit in the modernist discourse the project suggests an research agenda that examines climate change as a moral landscape in which local and global agents negotiate understandings of agency, nature and power.

The project started 1st of January 2014 and it was intended to continue for three years. Unforeseen circumstances (parallel tasks and above all the distribution in time of different events of interest for the project), prompted us to extend the project a fourth year. During these years we have met regularly to discuss our respective case studies. In 2017 we also started to write a co-authored essay based on the experiences we had gained from our field studies.

IMPLEMENTATION

The first year was mainly spent reading and preparing for the field studies to be realized. We are all well versed in the regional ethnography and our reading was principally aimed at broadening our perspectives.

2014 and 2015 all project members participated in COP (Conference of Parties) that annually is arranged by IPCC (the climate change panel of the UN), which these years were arranged in Lima (# 20) and Paris (# 21).

The only project member attending the COP 22 held in Marrakesh in 2016 was Burman who had received an invitation to give a speech during the pre-conference. During the COPs and primarily the pre-conferences many representatives from indigenous people from all over the world participate which made these meetings particularly interesting for the project. In particular the meetings offered a unique opportunity to mingle and exchange viewpoints with a wide range of indigenous people and discuss issues relating to climate change, its perception and consequences.

The only project member who have done longer and continuous fieldwork is Burman Paerregaard and Rosengren, on the other hand, have made several shorter fieldtrips visiting Peru once or twice every year during the project. Burman’s fieldwork focused principally on a) the contradictions between Bolivia’s progressive policy of environment and climate and the extractivist resource policy since president Evo Morales was first elected in 2006, and b) how different agents understand the nature and causes of climate change. Since Paerregaard primarily has taken an interest in local people’s interpretation and relation to deglaciation (which constitutes a serious problem for the peasant population in the Andes) he has focused on rituals where climate conditions have affected conditions for the realization of annual offering ceremonies on the mountains of Huaytapallana in central Peru and Quyllur R’iti in south-eastern Peru. Rosengren’s case is of interest to the project because Matsigenka people have in their language no concept for ‘weather’ and even less for ‘climate’, he has consequently focused on how Matsigenka people locally perceive of and explain meteorological phenomena. Attention has also been paid to a) the consequences of these differences in relation to other social groups in the area, and b) how they are manifested in daily practices and in cosmology.

THE THREE MOST IMPORTANT RESULTS AND CONTRIBUTIONS TO INTERNATIONAL RESEARCH

Ideas of weather and climate are not everywhere meaningful concepts, which have led us to stress the following conditions:

1.    Even though climate change radically affect indigenous people, they see these changes as part of a more comprehensive process of social and political changes rather than as a particular phenomenon.

2.    The climate change discourse is not neutral, it can be used socially and politically to legitimize unequal power relations.

3.    Local and regional environmental conflicts and conflicts associated with the use of natural resources and climate change tend also to be “ontological conflicts”, that is, conflicts where distinct understandings of reality’s constitution are confronted. To understand such conflicts profound ethnographical insights in local cosmologies are needed.

NEW RESEARCH QUESTIONS

Burman’s study has generated a number of new research questions related to how the Bolivian urban climate movement mobilize support and legitimize the movement using concepts and symbols of Andean people. Burman is formulating a new project concerning the development of social movements, mobilization and political legitimacy.

For many people in the Amazon tropical rain forest ‘weather’ and ‘climate’ are no meaningful concepts. This does not mean that people are unaware of changes in the local environment. These changes are frequently spoken of in terms of deforestation rather than climate change although modernist meteorology sees a close connection. For Amazon indigenous people the forest constitutes the principal characteristic of their environment and during the thousands of years that people have lived in this landscape they have established close and apparently social bonds with the vegetation. Rosengren is now formulating research questions regarding how plants are understood and how they are attributed with agency and subjectivity and what this understanding of the nature of plants signify in a situation of deforestation.

THE INTERNATIONAL DIMENSIONS AND DIFFUSION OF RESULTS TO OTHER RESEARCHERS AND GROUPS OUTSIDE ACADEMIA

Social anthropologists rarely work in their home countries which also go for the project members. Since we have been working in Peru and Bolivia the main part of our material is international. In the gathering of our information our interlocutors have been indigenous people from different ethnic group primarily in Peru and Bolivia but also from other parts of the world since we have participated in international conferences. Besides indigenous people we have also spoken with relevant authorities in Peru and Bolivia and with academic colleagues in these countries.

Practically our engagement in the issue of climate change led to invitations to appear at special events and to participate in international conferences. We also regularly receive invitations to peer review essays from academic journals.

Besides our respective fieldworks we have also participated in a number of international conferences and meetings. At these occasions, we have presented our results and talked with representatives from various groups and organizations, which have enabled us to broaden our understandings of climate change processes in various parts of the world. Burman has between 2014 and 2017 participated in all together eight conferences, workshops and open lectures of immediate relevance to the project (in Sweden, France, Bolivia and Morocco), two of which was as specially invited speaker and key note. Burman has also participated in open panel discussions and in Sveriges Radio (the Swedish national radio) and other media. Paerregaard has been invited to participate in three workshops treating the relation between climate change and religion organized by the Center for Latin American and Latino Studies at the American University in Washington, D.C. The first workshop was located to Washington, D.C., the other to New Delhi, India, and the third to Lima, Peru. Paerregaard has also participated as researcher in a video treating deglaciation, religion and indigenous people in Peru (the film can be seen on Youtube). He has also written blogs and contributed to comments on web-pages and international media. Rosengren has participated in a number of conferences and workshops and been invited to lecture at the Catholic University (Pontifícia Universida Católica del Perú) in Lima and at the university in the Amazonian town of Atalaya, NOPOKI, that is attending specially to indigenous persons of the Peruvian Amazon.

In the project plan was included a common workshop to report back to the people we have been working with. Eventually we concluded that it would be more effective to diffuse our results individually through lectures at local universities and meetings with different organizations in our respective contexts in Peru and Bolivia as described above.