Allison Caine, "Restless Ecologies: Climate Change and Socioecological Futures in the Peruvian Highlands" (U Arizona Press, 2025)

Feb 2, 2026

Allison Caine, an environmental anthropologist and assistant professor at the University of Wyoming, recounts two years living and herding with Quechua alpaca herders high in the Peruvian Andes. She explores k'ita, or restlessness, animal behavior and human-animal communication. Topics include gendered herding labor, glacier retreat, land tenure changes, youth migration, and shifting religious and communal ties.

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INSIGHT

Ground-Up Climate Knowledge

Allison Caine sought to

ANECDOTE

Mentor Who Made The Fieldwork Possible

Concepcion Rojo took Allison in days after her arrival and trained her as an alpaca herder.
Allison describes Concepcion as a generous matriarch and central figure in Chilca's life.

INSIGHT

Herding As Continuous Sensory Labor

Herding is a sensory, choreographed practice tied to animals' rhythms and neighbors' movements.
Days mix strenuous animal control with quiet weaving and social exchange among women herders.

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In the high Andean grasslands 4,500 meters above sea level, Quechua alpaca herders live on the edges of glaciers that have retreated more rapidly in the past fifty years than at any point in the previous six millennia. Women are the primary herders, and their specialized knowledge and skill is vital to the ability of high-elevation communities to survive in changing climatic conditions. In the past decade, however, these herders and their animals have traversed a rapidly shifting terrain.

Drawing on the Quechua concept of k'ita, or restlessness, Restless Ecologies: Climate Change and Socioecological Futures in the Peruvian Highlands (University of Arizona Press, 2025) explores how herders in the community of Chillca in the Cordillera Vilcanota mountain range of the southeastern Peruvian Andes sense and make sense of changing conditions. Capricious mountains, distracted alpacas, and wayward children deviate from their expected spatial and temporal trajectories. When practices of sociality start to fall apart--when animals no longer listen to herders' whistles, children no longer visit their parents, and humans no longer communicate with mountains--these failures signal a broader ecological instability that threatens the viability of the herder's world.

For more than two years, the author herded alongside the women of the Cordillera Vilcanota, observing them and talking with them about their interactions with their animals, landscapes, and neighbors. Emphasizing the importance of Indigenous knowledge and traditional ecological practices, Caine argues that Quechua understandings of restlessness align with and challenge broader theoretical understandings of what it is to be vulnerable in a time of planetary crisis.

Allison Caine is an environmental anthropologist and an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Wyoming.

Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network.

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