Always Already Sustainable: How Alpaca Wool’s Associations with Andean Indigeneity Help Define it as Environmentally Sustainable,

Talk given as part of Tufts' Hoch-Cunningham Environmental Lecture Series.

Abstract:

It is estimated that fast fashion produces, globally, around 5 billion pounds of textile waste annually. In the past two decades, ethical and slow fashion markets have expanded in response to demands to make this notoriously exploitative industry more environmentally and humanely sustainable. Alpaca wool has become a favored material in these markets for its luxurious qualities and always already sustainable nature. Despite its over two-hundred-year existence, the alpaca wool industry relies on the herding and animal care practices of Quechua-speaking herders in the Peruvian highlands. I argue that this persistence of indigenous forms of breeding and animal care are not only read by fashion industry actors as an assurance of sustainability, but this essentializing view of indigenous peoples as stewards of the environment obscures the ways in which extreme poverty, state abandonment and climate change make alpaca herding itself an unsustainable practice.