Description: This book explores how Quechua alpaca herders in the Peruvian highlands sense and make sense of climate change through subtle shifts in their interactions with humans, animals, and landscapes. It draws our attention to complicated practices of being-in-relation in a time of global instability. By analyzing climate change from the ground up, this book asks what the alpaca herders of the Andes can tell us about the state of the planet.
Review Quotes: "This outstanding book marks the arrival of a new generation of ethnographic scholarship on climate change. Situating climate impacts within a broader context of Andean restlessness or, in Quechua, k'ita, Allison Caine's incisive storytelling provides essential analysis for what climate change has come to mean as a fact of life for rural communities in today's world. The author also writes with a kindness for her human and nonhuman interlocutors that is rare in anthropology today."--Eric Hirsch, author of Acts of Growth: Development and the Politics of Abundance in Peru
"Restless Ecologies contributes to multiple fields--e.g., multispecies ethnography, anthropology of climate change, Peruvian studies, and environmental studies--though it perhaps sits most squarely within the tradition of Andeanist ethnography. The author's multisensorial exploration of the lived experiences of Quechua women herders and their relations with nonhuman kin/companions, her focus on the minutia of everyday life, and her insistence in writing climate change from the ground up are particularly compelling and significant offerings."--María Elena García, author of Gastropolitics and the Specter of Race