Amanda Daniela Cortez (Anthropology) was a 2026 HRI Summer Faculty Fellow. She spent five weeks in Cusco, Peru, to co-develop her ethnographic book manuscript, Framing Photographic Tourism: Indigeneity, Gender, and Multispecies Relating in the Peruvian Andes. It traces the lives of Quechua women and their llama, alpaca, and sheep kin as they navigate the politics of Indigeneity and multispecies relating in photography tourism.
Describe your research. What question or questions are you seeking to answer?
My research draws from anthropology, Indigenous studies, and animal studies to center the experiences of Quechua women and their llama, alpaca, and sheep kin as they navigate gendered and racialized violence within Cusco’s photographic tourism industry. Through multispecies and visual ethnography, I explore the ways in which the construction and regulation of Indigeneity in Cusco is a multispecies project. In other words, I focus on the ways that Quechua women present an image of Indigeneity in which animals are central to tourists and the state, and on the ways that the state, through local policing, attempts to control the image of Indigeneity presented to tourists. In both cases, multispecies relationships are instrumental: local police weaponize women’s relationships with their animal kin against them in order to control them and their multispecies relations, while Quechua women rely on their relationships with their animals to refuse state-sanctioned forms of Indigeneity and violence.
What drives your interest in the topic?
I initially became interested in this topic when I first traveled to Cusco in 2012 as an undergraduate study abroad student. At that time, I volunteered with a sustainable development program that aimed to create “healthier” living environments for families in rural Quechua communities. One of their projects involved building guinea pig cages in kitchens to keep the animals from roaming freely around cooking spaces as they typically would. Afterward, I felt that the program perpetuated problematic narratives of “backwardness” and “dirtiness” of Quechua peoples, especially regarding their relationships with animals. This led to my interest in the centrality of human-other animal relationships for Quechua women, as well as the role of these relations in the ways that the Peruvian state treats Indigenous peoples.
How did the Summer Faculty Fellowship support your work?
The Summer Faculty Fellowship allowed me to spend five weeks in Cusco this summer workshopping the first chapter of my book manuscript. During this time, I worked with two associations that represent the women as they work in photographic tourism to dialogue with association members about the contents of the chapter. With the funding, I was able to hold 27 focus groups with 55 women. Because of these conversations, I was not only able to solicit their feedback, but I was also able to take seriously their hopes for the book and ensure that the project is beneficial for them, the individuals who are most impacted by this work. This time was critical for my project as the book is a collaborative process and writing the manuscript would not be possible without funding to support multiple trips back to Cusco.