Stephen Andrew Berquist

This project investigates how political organization conditioned the production of climatic knowledge in late prehispanic Peru. Contemporary communities of the high Andes understand natural forces as capricious entities that must be socialized through both ritual practice and the production of “anticipatory infrastructures” that mitigate climatic and environmental perturbations. In my dissertation, I argue that this dispositif emerged through a series of political experiments aimed at integrating “capricious” pastoralists and traders into agrarian economies. Novel modes of human being-together thus extended into the socialization of other-than-human entities. To test this hypothesis, this project will conduct archaeological excavations and geophysical research into a series of anticipatory mechanisms associated with an expansive irrigation system located in the southern Jequetepeque Valley, on the North Coast of Peru. Preliminary excavations link this irrigation system with the coalescence of a segmentary polity incoporating both pastoralist “invaders” and agriculturalist “ancestors.” The research thus approaches the intersection of climate and politics in the centuries prior to the Spanish invasion, in an effort to understand the historical basis for specific traditions of Andean cosmopolitical thought.