Several studies have shown that indigenous peoples are among the most vulnerable to the effects of climate change, and attention has been drawn to indigenous knowledge as an important component of climate change adaptation strategies. This paper argues, however, that in order to take indigenous knowledge seriously, indigenous realities and understandings of climate change need to be taken seriously. This is because knowledge is not produced in an ontological void. Rather, knowledge is produced in relation to notions concerning the nature of reality and being. Moreover, in order not to make a mere instrumentalist use of Indigenous knowledge, this paper argues that the practical outcomes of Indigenous knowledge ought to be acknowledged, along with the ontological lifeworlds within which such knowledge is generated.

This paper is based on many years of ethnographic fieldwork with and among Aymara people in the Bolivian Andes and poses questions about how the partial connections between different ways of producing knowledge, of experiencing and explaining climate change, and of experiencing and generating realities are transformed into spaces of conflict, domination and resistance.

What we eat is our business, or so we generally believe. We also acknowledge that our individual failures to eat properly have a broader social impact, even if we’re not sure what to do about it. These tensions between individual choice, public well-being, and the wealth and strength of the nation were born in the Enlightenment. While states have always worried about the political implications of famine, only in the eighteenth century did the particularities of what ordinary people ate attract the attention of political theorists: it was in the eighteenth century that everyday eating habits became a matter of state concern. New theories about how to build economically successful states led to new ideas about the relationship between individual diets and national resilience—what we might call food security. Concerned to build healthy populations, eighteenth-century political and economic writers increasingly recommended potatoes as an ideal foodstuff. Potatoes had reached Europe in the sixteenth century, when Spanish colonists introduced this Andean tuber. In the Americas the potato has nourished ordinary people for millennia, and it was ordinary people in Europe and elsewhere who were largely responsible for transforming the potato into the global status that it has today.