Variability and climate change impacts on the rural productive systems and on peasants’ living conditions and development – a vision from the rural population of Cuzco and Apurímac
| Areas | : | Natural resources, extractive industries and social conflict |
|---|---|---|
| Researcher/s in charge | : | Gerardo Damonte |
| Execution time | : | February 2010 - July 2010 |
Presentation
Andean rural populations and, in particular, the peasant communities of the Peruvian southern Andes, are characterized by their cultural traditions, adapting to the high environmental variability conditions, typical of the tropical highland ecosystems of the central Andes. These cultural traditions materialize in agricultural and livestock production and food safety systems and strategies and in forms of social organization that support and make them possible, configuring one single, characteristic socio-cultural rationality. Despite the fractures and partial dismantling processes it evidences, it is possible to understand it as a constellation of codes and segments of socially effective semantic systems. From this point of view, the different expressions and materializations of the adjustment of these societies to the high environmental variability must be understood as expressions of one and the same cultural logic and, therefore, supported by a culturally specific knowledge of the environment and its change dynamics.
