For an environmental ethnography in human and physical geography : re-envisioning the impacts and opportunities of El Niño in Peru
Abstract
In 2017 El Niño Costero devastated the northern coast of Peru. This article seeks to learn from this experience for future large central and eastern Pacific-driven El Niño events. It directs attention away from dominant disaster narratives to reflect on the opportunities that El Niño rains have generated for desert livelihoods over time. We make a call for and set out the key elements of a historical geographical ethnography approach in environmental geography, which, as well as examining climate dimensions (paleoclimatology, dendrochronological, and atmospheric changes) of El Niño, also aims to consider its impacts on the livelihoods and management strategies of desert communities over time. We take as a starting point the responses of people who themselves come directly into contact with environmental change, yet whose agency and experiences are often marginal in knowledge production about El Niño. Responding to recent calls for qualitative geography researchers to be more explicit about how data are collected and analyzed, we explain how and why it is important to compare stakeholder interviews and climate records with newspaper archives and community memories of the 1983 and 1998 El Niño events. We illustrate that for desert populations in northern Peru, El Niño can represent abundance as well as disaster and make visible their role in managing change after El Niño flooding.
Citation
Laurie , N , Henderson , A C G , Rodríguez Arismendiz , R , Calle , O , Clayton , D & Russell , A J 2024 , ' For an environmental ethnography in human and physical geography : re-envisioning the impacts and opportunities of El Niño in Peru ' , Annals of the American Association of Geographers , vol. Latest Articles . https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2024.2377222
Publication
Annals of the American Association of Geographers
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
2469-4452Type
Journal article
Description
Funding: This work was supported by the Royal Society under Grant RG120575; the Natural and Environmental Research Council under Grant NE/R004528/1; the Scottish Funding Council under Grant SGS0-XFC090; and The Arts and Humanities Research Council under Grant AH/T004444/1AH.Collections
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