Hugo ROMERO, Universidad de Chile, Chile
This paper presents beliefs and knowledge of indigenous peoples who inhabit the central Andes and who have always worshiped Illapa or God of climate, lightning and thunder, that controls the occurrence of droughts and floods and daily, seasonal and annual changes of rainfall, and, as consequence, water and lives. The local communities organize their territories according to the principles of correspondence, complementarity, reciprocity and circularity (Estermann, 2013), which are also applied to the understanding and management of local climates. Indigenous Andean people still maintain a complex cultural system based on relationships between climate changes, variabilities and uncertainties, the distribution of ecological belts, sense of places, knowledges and production practices, symbols and cosmovisions that represent ways of adaptation that are today severely threatened by the implementation of modern economic activities in thses natural and cultural landscapes.
Complex socio-climatic systems are examined from case studies developed in the Salar de Atacama, where a series of ayllus of the Likan Antai people (Romero and Opazo, 2019), are struggling to conserve their territories, mainly devastated by copper and lithium mining companies (Liu et al., 2019). For this people, the main threat corresponds to the loss of communal resilience to cope with climatic variabilities and changes, caused by excessive extraction of water, abandonment of traditional land uses and the increasing weakness of the ancestral system of beliefs and values (Liu et al., 2019; Salas Carreño, 2021). For Andean communities, uncertainty and change have been always interpreted as opportunities rather than threatens, whose positive or adverse effects depend essentially on the accomplishment of moral obligations that link society with nature throughout the fulfillment of the demands formulated by Illapa in a series of religious ceremonies (Romero et al. 2017).
Mots clés : Cultural climatology, Illapa or the God of Climate, values and knowledge systems, Andean communities
A104541HR