“Who Would Watch the Animals?”: Gendered Knowledge and Expert Performance Among Andean Pastoralists

Abstract

In recent decades, global and regional pastoralist development initiatives have articulated their project goals within the broader objective of climate change adaptation. Development programs in the high Andes have sought to diminish pastoralist vulnerability to the impacts of shifting seasonal weather patterns and glacial retreat. Despite the increase in attention to the gendered distribution of climate change risks and strategies globally, women alpaca herders in the Andes continue to be sidelined in discussions around animal health and pasture management. I argue that women’s marginalization reflects the ways that pastoralist expertise is ascribed and reproduced in interactional encounters. Andean women herders lack access to the social, political, and economic resources necessary to perform expertise in a ratified way, and as a consequence are left out of critical decision-making processes around climate change adaptation. An attention to women’s herding work yields insight into pastoralist knowledge and skill as distributive, relational, and embedded within social networks that are at increasing risk of fragmentation.