Returning to Q'ero

In this book,socialanthropologistStevenWebster providesan ethnohistoryof sustainability among the indigenous Andean community ofHatunQ'ero since the 1960s. He first revisits hisdetailedecologicalresearchamong the remote Q'ero in the high Andes of Southern Peru in 1969-1970 and 1977. At that time, Q'ero was a community comprised of several hamlets in converging valleys based primarily on alpaca herding at about 4,300 meters, and composed of about 400 persons in about80families. He then relies onthe fewethnographies by other anthropologists to documentchanges in HatunQ'ero by 2020 ,spanning 1980-90swhenthe nation was immersed in agrarian reform followed by virtual civil war between Maoist guerrillas, the government, and the highland peasantry. Through all of these ideologicalandpolitical-economic developments the sustainability of Q'ero as an integral ecological and social community as well as afamously Incaic culturaltradition becomes aglobal as well as nationalissue. This book argues that while the commercial expansion of ceremonialandshamanist tourism can be seen as extractivistsimilartoindustrial mining, the assertive form of independence characteristic of the Q'erosappears to remainsustainable in the face of both theseextractive threats. While the Q'ero community is internally reinforced by their reciprocal relationship with the same non-human forces these forms of extraction seek to exploit, they are externally reinforced by the global as well as national rise of indigeneity movements. Ironically, given the moral force developed in some aspects of shamanist tourism, it can even be argued that it supports environmental sustainability against climate change, globally as well as in Q'ero. This book analyzes the increasing importance of indigeneity in the national politics of Peru as well as the other Andean nations in the last few decades, but it remains to set this form of identity politics in its wider "intersectional" context of social class and ethnic conflict in the Andes.