Paper short abstract:

The paper explores how climate change challenges religious practices in Peru’s highlands. It suggests that the growing participation in Andean offering ceremonies and the impact this has on the environment and glacier melt prompt people to reconsider the meaning of the sacred.

Paper long abstract:

Drawing on ethnographic field data from Peru's central highlands the paper explores how Andean people attribute religious importance to mountains in a context of climate change and, in particular, how they make sense of the environmental impact that the offering ceremonies they conduct to the mountain deities are causing. Due to glacier melt and water scarcity Peru is one the most climate vulnerable countries in the world. On this background the paper asks: How does this vulnerability influence religious practices in the Peruvian Andes? How does the growing interest in offering ceremonies in Peru and the anthropogenic effect it has on glacier melt and water scarcity challenge Andean people's ideas of the sacred? In more general terms the paper argues that global warming points to an inherent contradiction in all offerings: the giver's material imprint on the ceremonial site jeopardizes the recipient's wellbeing. The paper concludes that even though glacier melt highlights an intrinsic tension between Andean people's religious belief and offering ceremonies and questions the illusion of the sacred that fuels these practices it also offers them a new perspective on the relation between nature and humans.