Rain/harvest/wellness: The impact of climate change on health experiences of subsistence farming communities in southern Mexico

Abstract (English)

In recent years anthropologists have emphasized attention towards relationships with non-humans, including plants, animals, and spirits. These relationships are critical to understanding how some humans conceive of and experience reality, including their own health. Scholars debate the roles of these relationships, the causal effects, and the epistemological and ontological consequences. I propose to examine these roles, effects, and consequences through an analysis of loss of these relationships.

This research is situated among a subsistence farming community in southern Mexico whose traditional crops are increasingly threatened by climate change, including erratic rainfall, and who often migrate away from their ancestral lands and crops due to these changes. This farming community grows landrace crops–crops that are locally adapted to the region after growing there hundreds or thousands of years. This interaction with plants over millennia has embedded them in the cosmologies of the farmers, including in beliefs about health. These crops–ancient cultural heritage–are threatened by the changing climate, resulting in a dislocation of farmers from traditional practices, foodways, and belief systems related to these landscapes and these crops. How will this dislocation affect the health experiences of farmers whose health cosmologies are intimately bound to these lands and crops?