Clayton Whitt
I am a sociocultural anthropologist who focuses on how people experience and respond to environmental change in the western Bolivian highlands. My primary research explores how people in an agricultural community in the Andean highlands of western Bolivia experience and respond to climate change and other environmental problems and how these experiences and responses are reflected in local politics. I contextualize these environmental problems within other changes occurring across broader geographies, including Bolivia’s rapid economic growth, political transformations, new development projects, and spatial linkages formed by migration to other areas. I also look at how farmers in my field site experience and respond to the explosion of the global quinoa market, which has presented them with new economic opportunities but comes at a time that agricultural land in the area is degraded from overuse and polluted irrigation water.