Karsten Paerregaard Books

"Using case studies from four field sites in the Peruvian highlands where the author has conducted long-term fieldwork, Andean Meltdown offers an ethnographic account of how Andean people make sense of and adapt to climate change. Karsten Paerregaard investigates how climate change prompts them to not only reorganize their daily activities, adjust their ritual traditions, and reshuffle their worldview, but also take action to protect and gain control over their water resources, the environment, and ultimately their lives. Examining the multiple ways climate change intersects with environmental, social, and political change in Peru, Paerregaard also explores how the state and other external actors influence Andean people's climate experience and perception and how new practices and imaginations emerge from rapid environmental change. The book's claim is that climate change and its impact on Andean society must be investigated within the broader context of current social, political, and cultural change in Peru"--

Peruvians Dispersed presents an anthropological study of transnational migration to the United States, Spain, Japan and Argentina. Karsten Paerregaard spent a total of one year living with Peruvian migrants in four continents which allowed him to make ethnographic in-depth descriptions of Peru's many migrant communities and at the same time discuss how immigration and labor market policies in the Global North both thwart and spur migration from the Global South. The book also offers an innovative contribution to the methodological debate about multi-sited field research, which in recent years has become prominent among scholars studying processes of globalization, transnationalism and multiculturalism. Because of the wide span of social groups in Peru that migrate and the global dispersion of Peruvians in America, Asia and Europe; the study of the Peruvian migration offers a unique opportunity to rethink current attempts to theorize transnational and diasporic migration and develop the methodological and analytical framework for a global ethnography.