The Fragility of Relations of Domestication: Humans, Llamas and Unseasonal Snow in the Bolivian Andes

This paper takes the context of an unseasonal severe snowfall in the highlands of Bolivia in 2002, to examine relations between Andean people and their llama herds. The approach taken here brings together two strands of anthropological writing on human-animal relations and the environment. The first emphasises animal domestication as a material and spatial relationship, drawing on the work of David Anderson who has worked in northern herding societies. Anderson writes of architectures of domestication, examining how the attention of many different species, and the artefacts of that attention, come to work together in a particular setting. The second strand of writing I use concerns the weather. Tim Ingold writes that rather than consider human and other life unfolding in a landscape, which suggests features of and things on the surface of the earth, we should speak of a ‘weather-world,’ for this conveys something of the medium in which life unfolds. Considering the ‘weather-world’, how it was transformed by snow in the Bolivian highlands and its influence on human-animal relations adds a temporal dimension to Anderson’s emphasis on architectures. It also highlights the fragility of relations of domestication – how the bonds between humans and animals can be broken and only re-established with effort. Given that extreme weather events appear to be on the increase, the ethnography presented here demonstrates one way in which climate change appears to be threatening the lifestyle of indigenous people in the high Andes.