Asphalt and Concrete in the Andes: Shifting patterns of social relations, water and sediments on an agricultural terraced landscape in Southern Peru

Keywords: Critical Physical Geography, Latin America, Agricultural Terraces
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

Agricultural terraces and canals are ubiquitous across the Southern Peruvian Andes the patterns of their use and disuse a product of indigenous engineering and social and environmental historical processes. Their maintenance is important to not only farmer subsistence and local food security, but also landscape stability in the form of repairing wall collapse and preventing sediment erosion. Labor practices, such as kinship-based labor exchange and community canal cleaning, heavily contribute to strengthening social relations across generations and ensuring the agricultural productivity of the terraces through time. Semi-structured interviews with farmers from the Valley of the Volcanoes, Southern Peru in summer 2019 illustrate the uneven alterations and continuity of these integrated physical and social relationships, and their impact across the landscape. This paper will use a critical physical geographic lens to focus on the challenges and opportunities presented by twentieth- and twenty-first-century engineering, such as road construction and concretization of canals, and how they contribute to spatial shifts in people, labor practices, water and sediments on the terraced landscape amid a changing climate. It will additionally outline these complicated relations to the landscape as mediated by situated perspectives, local differences and broader social processes, specifically looking at age, gender, class, and strength of local social ties as well as historical processes related to post-colonial power. Approaching these though a critical physical geographic lens enables the integrative analysis of social and geomorphic processes and form on the landscape.