Send message to Contributor

Contribution short abstract:

Andean communities have long been stereotyped as isolated, timeless, and closed, overlooking their dynamism, interconnectedness, and complexity. This paper challenges such narratives by exploring the economic, social, and cultural flows that link urban and rural spaces across multiple scales. Drawing on ethnographic research and photographic material from Puno, Arequipa, and Cuzco, I examine tourism, mobility, and rural/urban relations to reveal the Andes as connection sites where verticality mediates local and global relationships.

Contribution long abstract:

Since at least the modern era, literary and, later, academic representations of mountains and the communities that inhabit them have produced stereotypical narratives depicting these spaces as isolated and peripheral, populated by traditional communities impermeable to external influences. These idyllic, conflict-free rural imaginaries have persisted, even in altered forms. Often perpetuated by the tourism industry, such narratives essentialise mountain environments and their dwellers as static, unchanging places. In Peru, for example, both recent and historical narratives about the Sierra (i.e., highlands) have frequently relied on depictions of desolate and empty landscapes, self-sufficient and closed communities, and fixed, immutable identities—representations that ethnographic inquiry reveals to be profoundly superficial. The Sierra has always been and remains today a site of economic connections, flows of people, ideas, goods, conflicts, and knowledge—an intersection of urban and rural relationships that ties together Indigenous, national, and transnational worldviews. This paper reflects on the need to unwrite the vision of the Andes as exclusively local and closed and to overcome the dichotomous framing of urban and rural as discrete, unconnected spaces. Drawing on ethnographic examples and photographic material from my fieldwork, which began in 2013 in Puno, Arequipa, and Cuzco, I will discuss how tourism, internal, national, and international mobilities, traces of "rurality" within "urbanity," and the materiality of things, mediated by intersecting ontologies, contribute to a more complex, multifaceted, and non-essentialised portrait of Andean communities. In the Andean world, verticality is not unidirectional but a dimension of connection, linking local and global scales.