Attracting and banning Ankari: Musical and Climate Change in the Kallawaya Region in Northern Bolivia

Abstract: In the Kallawaya region in the Northern Bolivian Andes musical practices are closely related to the social, natural and spiritual environment: This is evident during the process of constructing and tuning instruments, but also during activities in the agrarian cycle, collective ritual and healing practices, as means of communication with the ancestors and, based on a Kallawaya perspective, during the critical involvement in influencing local weather events. In order to understand the complexity of climate change in the Kallawaya region beyond Western ontological principles the latter is of great importance. The Northern Bolivian Kallawaya refer to changes in climate as a complex of changes in local human-human and human-environmental relations based on a rupture of a certain morality and reciprocal relationship in an animate world in which music plays an important role. The study seeks to investigate and analyse the complex relationship between musical and climate change in different manifestations such as the construction and materiality of instruments, the musical sequence of the year and the poetics and aesthetics of qantu music. Musical and climate change are interrelated from a Kallawaya perspective. This will be discussed against the background of a global scientific perspective on climate change.