Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality,
and to see the links to virtual rooms.
Log in
Accepted Paper:
Paper short abstract:
The alpaca wool industry has historically relied on sustaining a vision of pristine, untouched productive landscape that have helped sustain the social abandonment of highland communities while opening up the area to other forms of capitalist exploitation away from prying eyes.
Paper long abstract:
Alongside gold and mercury, alpaca wool emerged as a key Peruvian export since the colonial era. This commodity, long narrated and valued as “uniquely Peruvian,” saw a new level of growth after 1836 when a British industrialist deciphered how to industrialize the production of alpaca thread. Despite the industrialization of thread and the later development of capitalist agrobusiness, the bulk of alpaca wool production has remained de-industrialized, carried out by indigenous herders and weavers living in the Peruvian highlands. Because of its associations with Andean indigeneity, this industry has been simultaneously a celebrated and contested national industry. Taking a historical and ethnographic approach, I illustrate how shifting national attitudes towards Peru’s Andean indigenous populations have influenced how alpaca wool is valued. This valuation oscillates between erasing its indigenous connections while emphasizing alpacas living in an untouched, pristine natural environment, or celebrating indigeneity and its connections to a natural landscape that has remained pristine since pre-Hispanic times. Regardless of which perspective is in vogue at a certain moment in time, this industry relies on sustaining a vision of the Andean highlands and those who inhabit it (humans and nonhumans) as ahistorical and unimpacted by human action. This view of the highland landscape, central to the alpaca wool trade, has worked to either perpetuate the social relegation and abandonment of the highlands and those who inhabit them—making them ripe for other forms of capitalist exploitation like mining—or, more recently, obscuring the environmental climate change is having all beings inhabiting the highlands.
Placing Capitalism: Economic Regimes, National Geographies, and the Environmental Imagination of Postcolonial Latin America
Session 2 Friday 23 August, 2024, -