Sofia Lana

SOFIA LANA, then a graduate student at University of California, San Diego, California, was awarded a grant in Aprill 2021 to aid research on “Glaciers, Climate Change and Socioenvironmental Politics: Governing Landscapes and Endurance in Bolivia’s Altiplano and Argentina’s Central Andes,” supervised by Dr. Nancy G. Postero. This research project interrogates the socio-political, discursive, and material dynamics of glacial melt in Mendoza, Argentina and La Paz, Bolivia, home to some of the fastest melting glaciers on Earth. Through 12 months of ethnographic research, this dissertation suggests that policies and discourses equating melting ice to catastrophe homogenize complex and diverse experiences of glacial melt, while also abstracting glaciers from their emplaced relations. In both countries, fieldwork was conducted with different stakeholders — Indigenous peoples, animal herders, scientists, mountaineers and the mountain tourism industry, miners, and NGO/government employees. Results demonstrate that melting glaciers not only reinvigorate territorial and resource disputes (particularly as nearby urban areas face droughts), but also provide an opening to redraw the conditions of dispute amongst multiple and unevenly situated actors. Yet, as global narratives of melting glaciers and ruinous futures become enmeshed with historical characterizations of these sites as uninhabitable deserts or abandoned wastelands and the development of mining, tourism, and real estate projects, they place Indigenous peoples’ and animal herders’ territorial claims at risk. By looking at territorial claims in each site, this project shows that melting glaciers become conduits through which to contest whether and how these glacial valleys were co-produced and by whom.