ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we report how bilingual Aymara-Spanish speaking people talk about weather phenomena and the increasing unreliability of expected seasonal weather events in Isluga, a community in the highlands of northern Chile. We use strong winds as a case study in weather-worlding. During the cold and dry windy season, exceptionally strong westerlies prevent rain-bearing clouds from entering Isluga territory. Softer easterlies bring in moisture-bearing clouds from Bolivia, ushering in the warmer rainy season, during which precipitation can fall as rain or snow. Sometimes the boisterous westerlies intrude into the moist season, preventing rain from falling. Isluga residents personify the winds as cannibal brothers and they describe wind directions in relation to the social organization of Isluga territory. These factors formed the basis for a rain-calling ceremony introduced as a ritual practice in Isluga from the 1920s onwards, in response to episodes of drought during the rainy season. This ceremony is now no longer observed because many Isluga residents have converted to an evangelical form of protestantism, which forbids such practices. People nonetheless still use a cycle of saints’ days to keep track of constancies and inconstancies in seasonally occurring weather events. The chapter ends with a consideration of how people in the Americas used a calendrical awareness to check seasonal variations and to track changes. Our investigation of people’s spatial construal of temporal weather experiences explores how they use past events to compare with present occurrences or future possibilities.
