Invoking the Earth Mother: Gender Equity, Land Rights and Media Activism Among the Aymara of Highland Peru

Abstract

Despite the push in contemporary anthropology to challenge or dispel the “naturalness” of gender associations, Aymara women are emphasizing their embodied relationship to the land within their environmental protest activity in Peru. These women have become the backbone of region-wide campaigns questioning the presence of extractive industries by declaring themselves defenders of a vital, animate landscape presence that they call Pachamama. In doing so, these women employ essentialist notions of women’s relational nature with the environment, as well as women’s roles as reproducers of culture. This ethnographic research examines indigenous notions of womanhood and how these are broadcast through radio as a medium of cultural transmission. Considering the multi-generational perspectives of Aymara radio activists on indigenous women’s mobilization as networked through media organizing, I evaluate the place of essentializing gender frameworks within the organizational mechanisms and community outcomes of indigenous ecological resistance. This research helps us understand how our differing human approaches to confronting environmental degradation result (or do not result) in meaningful solutions to the ecological crises that threaten our precarious habitats.