A Picaresque Critique: Disasters, Displacements, and Endless Itinerancy in Changing Climates
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Published
01-10-2026
A.J. Faas
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8758-5624
Abstract
In several «post-disaster» resettlements in the Andean highlands of Ecuador, displaced campesinos find not only their homelands but also their mobility practices unsettled. In the era of global warming and open-ended upheavals wrought by colonialism and the excesses of extractive capitalism, open-ended itinerancy displaces mobility as the field and problematic of critique and enquiry as it exposes cascading contingencies of precarity without end. This chapter is a variety of picaresque critique, storying the itinerancy of rogues (strange strangers) lost to their lands and communities as they reveal and embarrass the power relations that subtend the parameters of the possible. As I follow my interlocutors in their movements through space and time, I examine how they have iterated with stories —explicitly and implicitly— to enroll actants in political projects and more-than-human assemblages to realize otherwise possibilities in times of crisis and change. I conclude with a reflection on the need to story new politics of deservingness for both the itinerant rogues and the vitalist ecologies excluded from stories of the future.
How to Cite
Faas, A. (2026). A Picaresque Critique: Disasters, Displacements, and Endless Itinerancy in Changing Climates. Papeles De Identidad, 2026(2), papel 345. https://doi.org/10.1387/pceic.28096
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Keywords
displacement, itinerancy, deservingness, assemblage, storying
References
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Roncoli, C., Crane, T., y Orlove, B. (2009). Fielding climate change in cultural anthropology. En S. A. Crate y M. Nuttall (Eds.), Anthropology and climate change: From encounters to actions (pp. 87-115). Left Coast Press.
Sawyer, S. (2004). Crude chronicles: Indigenous politics, multinational oil, and neoliberalism in Ecuador. Duke University Press.
Schuller, M. (2021). Humanity’s last stand: Confronting global catastrophe. Rutgers University Press.
Swamy, R. (2022). Tranquebar. The tsunami, heritage tourism, power, and memory in a South Indian fisher village. Dialectical Anthropology, 46(3), 247-265.
Taddei, R. (2022). El campo de la antropología de los desastres en Brasil: Retos y perspectivas. En V. García-Acosta (Ed.), La antropología de los desastres en América Latina: Estado del arte (pp. 99-124). Gedisa.
Tsing, A. L. (2015). The mushroom at the end of the world: On the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. Princeton University Press.
Vaughn, S. E. (2022). Engineering vulnerability: In pursuit of climate adaptation. Duke University Press.
Bateson, G. (2000/1972). Steps to an Ecology of Mind. University of Chicago Press.
Bonilla, Y. (2020). The coloniality of disaster: Race, empire, and the temporal logics of emergency in Puerto Rico, USA. Political Geography, 78, 102181.
Burkett, M. (2018). Behind the veil: Climate migration, regime shift, and a new theory of justice. Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review, 53, 445-493.
Butler, J. (2016). Rethinking vulnerability and resistance. En J. Butler, Z. Gambetti y L. Sabsay (Eds.), Vulnerability in resistance (pp. 12-27). Duke University Press.
Chao, S., y Enari, D. (2021). Decolonising climate change: A call for beyond-human imaginaries and knowledge generation. eTropic, 20(2), 32-54.
Cuéllar, J. E. (2021). Waterproofing the state: Migration, river-borders, and ecologies of control. Comparative American Studies, 18(1), 59-74.
De León, J. (2015). The land of open graves: Living and dying on the migrant trail. University of California Press.
Faas, A. (2023). In the shadow of Tungurahua: Disaster Politics in Highland Ecuador. Rutgers University Press.
Farbotko, C., y Lazrus, H. (2012). The first climate refugees? Contesting global narratives of climate change in Tuvalu. Global Environmental Change, 22(2), 382-390.
Faria, C., Katushabe, J., Kyotowadde, C., y Whitesell, D. (2021). «You rise up … They burn you again»: Market fires and the urban intimacies of disaster colonialism. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 46, 87-101.
García-Acosta, V. (2018). Vulnerabilidad y desastres: génesis y alcances de una visión alternativa. En M. González de la Rocha y G. A. Saraví (Eds.), Pobreza y vulnerabilidad: Debates y estudios contemporáneos en México (pp. 212-239). CIESAS.
García-Acosta, V. (2022). La antropología de los desastres en América Latina: Estado del arte. Gedisa.
Ghosh, A. (2021). The nutmeg’s curse: Parables for a planet in crisis. University of Chicago Press.
Ginsberg, A. (2002/1956). Howl and Other Poems. City Lights Books.
Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chtulucene. Duke University Press.
James, E. C. (2010). Democratic insecurities: Violence, trauma, and intervention in Haiti. University of California Press.
Jessee, N. (2020). Community resettlement in Louisiana: Learning from histories of horror and hope. En S. Laska (Ed.), Louisiana’s response to extreme weather (pp. 147-184). Springer.
Kingman Garcés, E., y Bretón Solo de Zaldívar, V. (2016). Las fronteras arbitrarias y difusas entre lo urbano-moderno y lo rural-tradicional en los Andes. The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, 22(2), 235-253.
Liboiron, M. (2021). Pollution is colonialism. Duke University Press.
Lizarralde, G., Bornstein, L., y Dhar, T. (2025). Shelter from the storm: Ethical dilemmas in the era of climate change. Columbia University Press.
Maldonado, J. (2019). Seeking justice in an energy sacrifice zone: Standing on vanishing land in coastal Louisiana. Routledge.
Maldonado, J., Scherer, C., Bronen, R., Petereson, K., y Lazrus, H. (2013). The impact of climate change on tribal communities in the US: Displacement, relocation, and human rights. Climatic Change, 12, 601-614.
Marino, E. (2015). Fierce climate, sacred ground: An ethnography of climate change in Shishmaref, Alaska. University of Alaska Press.
Marino, E., y Lazrus, H. (2015). Migration or forced displacement? The complex choices of climate change and disaster migrants in Shishmaref, Alaska, and Nanumea, Tuvalu. Human Organization, 74(4), 341-350.
Marino, E., Jerolleman, A., Jessee, N., Weyiouanna, A., Topkok, M. S., Keene, E., y Manda, S. (2022). Is the Longue Durée a Legal Argument?: Understanding Takings Doctrine in Climate Change and Settler Colonial Contexts in the United States. Human Organization,
81(4), 348-357.
Miller, T. (2017). Storming the wall: Climate change, migration, and homeland security. City Lights Press.
Morton, T. (2010). The ecological thought. Harvard University Press.
Murgida, A. (2013). Cambios socio-ambientales: Desplazamientos de las poblaciones históricamente postergadas en el Chaco-Salteño. Cuadernos de Antropología, 9, 35-63.
Murgida, A. M., y Radovich, J. C. (2022). Las conceptualizaciones sobre incertidumbre y riesgo en la antropología social argentina. En V. García-Acosta (Ed.), La antropología de los desastres en América Latina: Estado del arte (pp. 65-98). Gedisa.
Murra, J. V. (1968). An Aymara kingdom in 1567. Ethnohistory, 15(2), 115-151.
Oliver-Smith, A. (2020). What is a Disaster? Anthropological Perspectives on a Persistent Question. En A. Oliver-Smith y S. Hoffman (Eds.), The Angry Earth: Disaster in Anthropological Perspective, Segunda edición (pp. 29–44). Routledge.
Roncoli, C., Crane, T., y Orlove, B. (2009). Fielding climate change in cultural anthropology. En S. A. Crate y M. Nuttall (Eds.), Anthropology and climate change: From encounters to actions (pp. 87-115). Left Coast Press.
Sawyer, S. (2004). Crude chronicles: Indigenous politics, multinational oil, and neoliberalism in Ecuador. Duke University Press.
Schuller, M. (2021). Humanity’s last stand: Confronting global catastrophe. Rutgers University Press.
Swamy, R. (2022). Tranquebar. The tsunami, heritage tourism, power, and memory in a South Indian fisher village. Dialectical Anthropology, 46(3), 247-265.
Taddei, R. (2022). El campo de la antropología de los desastres en Brasil: Retos y perspectivas. En V. García-Acosta (Ed.), La antropología de los desastres en América Latina: Estado del arte (pp. 99-124). Gedisa.
Tsing, A. L. (2015). The mushroom at the end of the world: On the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. Princeton University Press.
Vaughn, S. E. (2022). Engineering vulnerability: In pursuit of climate adaptation. Duke University Press.
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