Karsten Paerregaard

The Show Must Go On: The Role of Fiestas in Andean Transnational Migration

Exploration of the migration history of the community of Cabanaconde, in Peru’s southern highlands, and the impact of transnational migration on the fiesta system calls attention to the role of the fiesta in strengthening migrants’ ties to the networks they draw on to migrate and adapt to their new settings in the United States. It also suggests that the transnationalization of the fiesta contributes to an emerging division of villagers into those who have access to migrant networks and those who do not. By serving as a public showcase for Cabaneños’ positions in migrant networks, the fiesta not only intensifies economic and social divisions within the community but also underpins the exclusiveness of those networks and reminds them and their fellow villagers of their new social status as both transnational villagers and global cosmopolitans.

In the Footsteps of the Lord of Miracles: The Expatriation of Religious Icons in the Peruvian Diaspora

One of South Americas most famous Catholic icons is El Señor de los Milagros (the Lord of Miracles), celebrated annually by more than a million people in Lima. Over the past three decades Perus fast-growing diaspora in Europe, the US, Japan and Argentina has made the Lord of Miracles the object of a global expatriation. Thus migrants in such cities as Madrid, Barcelona, Milan, Genoa, Rome, Milan, Los Angeles, New York, Washington DC, Tokyo, Kyoto and Buenos Aires organise annual processions to bring El Señor to the streets and other public places. This paper compares the different strategies migrants pursue to reterritorialise the Lord of Miracles outside Peru and obtain permission from the local authorities to organise Catholic processions. In theoretical terms, it examines how migrants use the icon to negotiate their position in the borderland between the diasporic link to Peru and their new identity as immigrants. It suggests that the globalisation of El Señor is part of a strategy Peruvian migrants use to gain access to public spaces in the host country and thus legitimise their presence and claim legal and political rights as immigrants.

Conversion, migration, and social identity: The spread of Protestantism in the Peruvian Andes*

This article discusses Protestant movements in a village in the Peruvian Andes. It tries to explain why villagers either reject or are attracted to Protestantism. The argument is that explanations traditionally proposed by anthropologists fail to account for the segmentation into competing denominations, the problem of relapse to Catholicism, and second‐ and third‐time conversion, and that new approaches are required to understand the nature of contemporary Protestant movements in Latin America. The article concludes that we enlarge our framework to include urban migrants and focus on the ties which link these migrants to their native village.

Peruvian Migration in a Global Context

Ayumi Takenaka is an assistant professor of sociology at Bryn Mawr College and at the Center for the Study of Inequality and Social Stratification, Tohoku University. Karsten Paerregaard is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Copenhagen. Ulla D. Berg is an assistant professor in the Departments of Latino and Hispanic Caribbean Studies and Anthropology at Rutgers University. The collective thanks them for organizing this issue.

Water Citizenship: Negotiating Water Rights and Contesting Water Culture in the Peruvian Andes

This article examines the implementation of Peru’s new water law and discusses how it produces new forms of water citizenship. Inspired by the global paradigm of “integrated water resources management,” the law aims to include all citizens in the management of the country’s water resources by embracing a “new water culture.” We ask what forms of water citizenship emerge from the new water law and how they engage with local water practices and affect existing relations of inequality. We answer these questions ethnographically by comparing previous water legislation and how the new law currently is negotiated and contested in three localities in Peru’s southern highlands. We argue that the law creates a new water culture that views water as a substance that is measurable, quantifiable, and taxable, but that it neglects other ways of valuing water. We conclude that water citizenship emerges from the particular ways water authorities and water users define rights to access and use water, on the one hand, and obligations to contribute to the construction and maintenance of water infrastructure and pay for the use of water, on the other.

The climate-development nexus: using climate voices to prepare adaptation initiatives in the Peruvian Andes

What are the lessons from development practice that adaptation interventions can use to engage vulnerable people? To answer this question, the paper reviews field data on perceptions of environmental and climatic change in a Peruvian mountain community and discusses the possibilities and limitations of using local climate voices to prepare for climate change adaptation. The data comprise two complementary household surveys. The first survey provides information on the community’s socio-economic situation, whilst the second survey documents the villagers’ climate perception. The data reveal a paradox in the way the community understands global climate change. The villagers who live on the margin of the global world and belong to the poorest economic strata in Peru are deeply concerned about global climate change that is impacting their environment. Yet when locating the cause of climate change they point to their own community rather the industrialized world and suggest mitigation actions rather than adaptation initiatives as answer to the problems it entails. The paper suggests that adaptation initiatives must understand this paradox within the larger socio-economic and discursive context that shapes the villagers’ agency and climate perceptions. It proposes an informed participation approach that listens to the local voices but that also informs them about the global dimensions of climate change and engages them in a critical dialogue about the importance of sustainable development and the possibilities of taking advantage of the new opportunities that the changing environment offers.