Making Cheap Nature on High Altitude: A World-Ecological Perspective on Commodification, Communities and Conflict in the Andes

This chapter urges for a deeper historical, systemic and dialectical understanding of how capitalist development relates to the transformation of rural communities. It proposes a world-ecology perspective and adopts ‘commodity frontier’ as an analytical tool to explain the mechanisms and the paradoxes of the commodification of nature. Based on an extensive literature study in combination with insights from field and archival research in Puno, Peru, this chapter juxtaposes two historical episodes of expanded commodity production and community (re)organization in the Peruvian highlands. It examines the contestation over land and power in communal territories, and the attempts on the part of central governments and elite groups to neutralize these conflicts at the start of the twentieth century and during the last decennium. While literature on contemporary socio-environmental conflicts is booming and the parallels with the transitions of a century earlier are obvious, a comprehensive analysis of the historical interconnection of liberal and neoliberal land grabbing is lacking.