When the Winds Run with the Earth

Abstract

This report uses a conceptual frame of “weather-worlding” to approach, in an atmospherically attuned manner, people’s knowledge concerning the formation and transformation of weather conditions. It explores observed patterning in winds and rains as a product of more than a single generation’s understanding. New ethnographic fieldwork findings from Isluga, northern Chile, are juxtaposed with information from notes made during previous periods of fieldwork that we have conducted since the late 1970s and the 1980s. Comparisons with other anthropologists’ findings, seventeenth-century dictionary entries, and meteorological explanations are used to deepen the historical context for how people talk about winds, rain, and weather disruptions. While their observations of rainfall patterns concur with meteorologically collected data in important aspects, their accounts of disruptions to weather patterns provide a vivid portrayal of the winds’ unpredictable power to prevent precipitation from falling during the rainy season. People’s sensorial experiences of the winds emphasize the nonvisual, audible character of the elements, and our research participants personify bitterly cold westerlies as unruly, disruptive cannibal brothers. The text of this report coalesces round the themes of living in an arid land shaped by winds and what happens when the seasons are disrupted in a ceaselessly windblown atmosphere.