Invoking the Earth Mother: Gender Equity, Land Rights and Media Activism Among the Aymara of Highland Peru
Cavagnaro, Kellie
0000-0002-1161-0491
:
2023-07-18
Abstract
Despite the push in contemporary anthropology to challenge or dispel the “naturalness” of gender
associations, Aymara women are emphasizing their embodied relationship to the land within their
environmental protest activity in Peru. These women have become the backbone of region-wide
campaigns questioning the presence of extractive industries by declaring themselves defenders of
a vital, animate landscape presence that they call Pachamama. In doing so, these women employ
essentialist notions of women’s relational nature with the environment, as well as women’s roles
as reproducers of culture. This ethnographic research examines indigenous notions of womanhood
and how these are broadcast through radio as a medium of cultural transmission. Considering the
multi-generational perspectives of Aymara radio activists on indigenous women’s mobilization as
networked through media organizing, I evaluate the place of essentializing gender frameworks
within the organizational mechanisms and community outcomes of indigenous ecological
resistance. This research helps us understand how our differing human approaches to confronting
environmental degradation result (or do not result) in meaningful solutions to the ecological crises
that threaten our precarious habitats.