Paper short abstract:

The new Cuzco airport in Chinchero (Peru) is bringing fragmentation to familiar and dynamic geographies now reified and commoditized by privatization processes. This paper explores the potential of local cultural categories and practices to fix spatial ruptures and to rethink notions of territory.

Paper long abstract:

In the Peruvian Andes indigenous peoples have historically related to the land through well-rooted categories and institutions such as the ayllu (kin group in re-productive and affective relationships with a given territory). Historical events and social change brought about by the various "modernities" have transformed the ayllus into peasant communities in a different relationship with the State. These communities partake of a wider national legal framework that dissolves cultural difference into homogenising notions of citizenship.

Nowadays, the (tourism-driven) construction of the new Cuzco airport in Chinchero is encouraging a process of de-territorialization, of shattering of old patterns of spatial organization, movement across the space, and social relationships. It is replacing them with private ownership of the land, spatial disjunction, political fragmentation, and geographic reorganization. And this is all happening in a new space arising from the logics of economic production, technical efficiency, and rational compartmentalization.

This context forces us how to rethink notions of "territory" in Chinchero, when the airport and other developments like land privatization, or the heritagization of cultural landscapes and archaeological sites are shattering well established bonds between the villagers and the land eroding a sense of place. This paper asks: how is the airport transforming customary territorial patterns and movement practices among Andeans? How does it force us to rethink the new territoriality arising from the airport and that challenges pre-established concepts of indigenous peoples? What Andean categories and place-making practices could be helpful to fix the spatial ruptures and the fractured geographies of Chinchero?