Paper short abstract:

Matsigenka people have no notion of ’weather’ though they have concepts for rain, wind, sunshine etc. The conceived causes for these phenomena differ radically from those of modern meteorology affecting life in ways that radically differ from how weather affects life among modernist people.

Paper long abstract:

Even though people in the modern West may perceive 'weather' as an obvious category of the physical world this is not a notion that is universally shared. Among, for instance, Matsigenka people, who live in the Peruvian Amazon, 'weather' as a collective category that includes various atmospheric phenomena does not exist although they are familiar with most of the meteorological events that modernist people incorporate in the category of weather, that is, the individual phenomena of, e.g., rain, wind, sunshine. In the animist world of Matsigenka people the atmospheric phenomena that according to Western notions are included within the category of 'weather' are caused by forces that is not recognized within modern meteorology which signifies that Matsigenka people relate to these phenomena in ways that radically differ from how they are experienced in the modern West. Thus, even though Matsigenka people's world is "weathered" it is so in a way that is radically distinct from the modern Western world.

In this paper I will discuss Matsigenka people's understandings of atmospheric phenomena in relation both to how it is associated with everyday practices and to modernist meteorological notions. With regard to the latter issue a prominent problem of exposition is how to make intelligible that which does not exist locally (which in this context means 'weather') in a way that does not impose a particular understanding of the world that is not part of local peoples' understandings.