Based on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork in the Peruvian Andes, this dissertation examines climate change adaptation as a site and source for the (re)production of global vectors of power through cultural, political, and economic fields. It argues that while climate activists link issues of social justice to the protection and management of environments, neoliberal institutions additionally are finding ways to durably fortify their own domains of power and influence in these processes. Further, this dissertation examines how ideologies of Science, as a purportedly neutral, antipolitical way of managing the world, render invisible and compound the existential threats already facing climate-impacted campesinos and Indigenous Quechua communities. I examine these issues through multiple fields: through the lens of uneven and racialized labor, through the cultural production and management of value objects at risk, and through the transformation of lived, porous spaces, into natural laboratories. This project engages with fields of STS, Anthropology, Geography, and Critical Development Studies, emplacing new arms of racial capitalism in “local” climate projects.

For individuals whose conditions of daily life are undesirable, even painful, turning attention away from these experiences can serve as a form of relief, and ultimately a method for more long-term coping with their lifeworlds. Building on Thomas Csordas's somatic modes of attention, this paper looks at the way different modes of attention are actively sought with and through the body for a particular group former heroin addicts turned ultra marathon runners. The individuals introduced, instead of undergoing attentional relief through the reception of narcotics, alternatively found they could achieve a reportedly comparable form of relief with an active body's movements through a psychologically gripping and meaningful landscape. Explicitly comparing running ultramarathons to the feeling of being high, these runners find temporary relief through the ephemeral suspension of the demands of both life and the embodied expectations of sober moral transformation. Ultimately, this presentation interrogates what it means to be high, and demonstrates the needed consideration of landscape and space in therapeutic modes of attention.