ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how Andean people make sense of climate change via the process of climate ethnography. However, rather than applying a multisited approach and investigating climate change as simultaneous global and local phenomena, one of several possible approaches described by Crate (2011), my aim is to make a strategically situated ethnography. Such an ethnography can be thought of as a foreshortened multisited project that attempts to understand something broadly about the world system and current globalization processes in ethnographic terms by understanding them in context of the local and its local subjects (Marcus 1998: 95). More specifically, a strategically situated ethnography identifies places that are of pertinent relevance to the chosen topic of research and that allows the researcher to draw on and use local insights to shed light on issues of global importance, such as climate change. To these ends, an Andean climate ethnography must document how the people of the Andes experience, interpret, and respond to such environmental change as melting glaciers, unusual temperature fluctuations, irregular precipitation, and growing water scarcity.
