Hanne Cottyn

This article develops a historicising and comparative perspective on the transformation, formalisation, and negotiation of collective land rights in the Andean Highlands. It discusses and compares the trajectories of two highland areas situated across the Bolivian-Chilean border within the context of globally and nationally shifting frontiers of market and state integration since the late 19^th century. The case studies demonstrate a striking divergence in the context of the breakthrough of liberal land legislation in Latin America. Communities in the Bolivian province of Carangas were able to resist privatising pressures, while communities of the Arica highlands, once annexed and incorporated in Chile after the War of the Pacific, adjusted to a more homogeneous regime that left little room for communal land relations. Despite the stark contrasts, this article questions simplistic dichotomic framings of the unchallenged “survival” of communal land rights in Bolivia versus complete “disappearance” of communal arrangements in Chile. Empirical archival and ethnographic data point to the social reconfigurations and creative strategies through which the community as a collective legal entity and daily practice transformed. The article sheds light on the causes and longer-term implications of these regional trajectories within the context of a globalising land regime.

The Rural State approaches 20 th-century state formation in Peru-and its entanglement with capital accumulation-from the vantage point of rural societies and landscapes. Historian Javier Puente convincingly shifts the focus from the common historiographical emphasis on the more recent reorganisation and collapse of rural-state relations towards long-term continuities. While the title alludes to those relations in seemingly straightforward terms, Puente develops an elaborate argument about rural incorporation as a two-directional, negotiated process through which the state and the countryside have been "shaping and molding each other in intended and unintended ways" (p. 198). While reconnecting with Peru's rich tradition in rural studies, the book's central argument transcends its specific Peruvian contributions. While mostly framed in terms of "human geography", the book's explicit attention to the material implications of incorporating upland grazing economies also hints at recent debates that recast the state and capitalism as fundamentally ecological projects. Rural worlds emerge not as the residue of an emerging and consolidating state, nor as a blank canvas for one-sided interventions and reimaginations, but as both product and producer of state and capital expansion. Through in-depth ethnographic archival research, Puente is able to give 'the rural' a face. It is the face of San Juan de Ondores (Department of Junin), a face adapted to endure highmountain environments, marked by the daily labour involved in sheep grazing, and oriented towards wider networks of mobility, exchange, and solidarity. Situated in the higher parts of Peru's central sierra, Ondores presents one particular trajectory of how rural villagers engaged with successive cycles of incorporation within the national state apparatus and a globalising economy. While they did not control the terms of negotiation, villagers' repertoires of reaction and adaptation were oriented towards the protection of a minimal degree of collective political and ecological autonomy, most tangibly expressed in their decades-long struggle to recover control over the Atocsaico hacienda. Puente identifies a recurring pattern in the material and discursive reorganisation of the countryside, which is reflected in the organisation of the chapters. These cycles were supported by the production of new subjects-"indios" became part of "comunidades", later fragmenting into "campesinos". Yet they generated unanticipated results, giving way to conflict and politics

Entrado ya el siglo XXI, una creciente inseguridad y conflictividad en torno al agua marca la vida comunitaria en el altiplano boliviano. Ante la amenaza de un proyecto minero que podría afectar las fuentes de agua de Peñas, situada en el territorio indígena originario campesino Jach’a Marka Tapacari Cóndor Apacheta, la comunidad respondió con la adopción de una resolución de “cero minería”. La decisión en defensa del agua está literalmente soportada por una infraestructura: un sistema de 50 galerías filtrantes. Se trata de una extensa red de galerías subterráneas y acequias de riego en la superficie. Considerado “ancestral” por la comunidad, este sistema sigue facilitando la distribución de agua en todo el paisaje hasta el día de hoy. En un contexto de cambio climático, esta infraestructura ha adquirido un papel cada vez más importante dentro de la memoria, la organización y la defensa de esta comunidad y sus relaciones íntimas con el paisaje. Siguiendo un proceso comunitario de descripción y revalorización de las prácticas en torno a las galerías, trazamos la articulación de un paisaje múltiple –un paisaje en el que caben muchos paisajes– y las conexiones parciales entre estas versiones de paisaje. Conceptualizamos estas actividades como una forma de “infrastructurar” conscientemente “incompleta”, y observamos las fricciones que genera en el paisaje múltiple estas versiones con iniciativas guiadas por otras formas de “infraestructurar” el subsuelo andino.

This introduction begins at the Bruges 2018 Triennial Liquid City, where the research and design collective Rotor, the Ghent Centre for Global Studies, and Anna L. Tsing organised an interdisciplinary workshop on the trajectories of displaced species. Looking back to the collaborative reflection that emerged during the workshop, and the pandemic since, this special issue recalls invasive species from within the broader field of multispecies research. It proposes a relational, entangled approach to expose and examine the contradictions and instabilities that shape the more-than-human entanglements through which humans recasts certain non-humans as ‘invasives’. Interweaving the journeys of crabs, moles, rabbits, and fungi in and out of human-designed worlds, this article formulates three sets of guiding questions for the special issue. Our questions inquire into the conceptual and scientific frameworks, the material infrastructures, and the repertoires of human reactions to disturbances, exposing how species invasion initiates relations of correspondence that exceed categories of ‘invasiveness’.

Accompanying a shipment of potatoes in 1845, a fungus-like traveller unintentionally made it to Europe, after having maintained a low profile for centuries in Latin America. Decades later, scientists identified this stowaway as the basic ingredient for an outbreak of potato late blight and gave it a name—Phytophthora infestans. By following the potato on its travels back and forth between its cradle in the Andes and its development into a monocrop food staple in Europe over the last centuries, we trace the transatlantic trajectories of its fungal companion. We explore when and why a fungus such as P. infestans became known, and feared, as an invasive species, after centuries of spontaneous and invisible co-existence with the potato in Latin America. Why could P. infestans suddenly come out of its companion’s shadow to cause a large-scale outbreak of the disease in Europe in the 1840s? How did it become a driving power for the development of plant sciences and related technological innovations in potato agriculture up until today? Since the late eighteenth-century, specific agricultural, scientific, and political practices have enacted a logic of ‘potato modernity’, subjecting the potato to an artificial monoculture regime. Abruptly interrupting centuries of multispecies co-habitation of a fungus, the potato, and humans, P. infestans was invented as an invasive intruder that needed to be contained and conquered.

Common land rights are nowadays identified as a pivotal action terrain for building sustainable development and climate resilience. This often leads to an idealisation of these common land systems and the people that manage them. This article presents a research strategy that elaborates on the notion of frontiers to unpack peasant resilience and common land rights as the outcome of a long history of peasant adaptation, resistance and self-reinvention within a globalising world. It presents an empirical comparative analysis of common land rights in European and Andean peasant communities in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Desde finales del siglo XX, el emblemático oso andino se ha vuelto protagonista de nuevas agendas científicas y políticas de conservación en los Andes colombianos. Este artículo presenta un análisis ontológico, multiespecie e histórico de los encuentros entre diferentes formas de conocer la naturaleza en el páramo de Chingaza, un área protegida al este de la ciudad de Bogotá. Los programas enfocados en la conservación de la única especie de oso descrito por los taxónomos para Sudamérica han generado tensiones con las comunidades campesinas, quienes dan cuenta de la existencia de dos tipos de oso. Sin querer “corregir” a los científicos naturales que descartan esta posibilidad, este artículo pretende abrir posibilidades conceptuales que entienden al oso como una entidad de contacto en un páramo múltiple. Combinando métodos etnográficos e históricos, trazamos las trayectorias más largas y silenciadas detrás de las prácticas que subyacen la conservación del oso andino en Chingaza hoy en día. Observando una reorientación reciente en los diálogos científicos e institucionales con comunidades campesinas, sugerimos un giro hacia una conservación cosmopolítica capaz de articular los mundos campesinos en la alta montaña.

Este trabajo examina los cambios y continuidades en la movilidad transfronteriza de pastores de la provincia de Carangas (Bolivia) en un contexto de formación de Estado y expansión mercantil. Hacia finales del siglo XIX, la frontera que conecta comunidades altiplánicas con los valles, ciudades y puertos del Pacífico se convirtió en un terreno -geopolítica, económica, y simbólicamente-en disputa. Se sostiene que frente el creciente -aunque frágil- control estatal y la intermediación por nuevas elites en circuitos económicos transnacionales, prácticas y redes de movilidad e intercambio andinas operaron como una estrategia subalterna de participación negociada. En un escenario de marginación, el despliegue de prácticas transfronterizas andinas parece ofrecer un amortiguador contra una asimilación completa a los ritmos estatales y mercantiles.