Waiting for ‘development’
Discover the 2025 awarded project "Waiting for ‘development’: Cusco’s new international airport and the Yanacona farming community (Cusco, Peru)", selected by the Louis Dumont Fund for Research in Social Anthropology.
The project
Located at the intersection of the anthropology of infrastructure and the anthropology of waiting, this ethnographic research focuses on the new international airport project planned since the 1970s by the Peruvian government on the land of the Yanacona peasant community, located in the Chinchero district (Urubamba province, Cusco region). Since then, local peasants have been anticipating the airport’s construction, seen as an opportunity to improve living conditions.
The analysis explores how community members’ expectations regarding the airport project are embodied in political and economic practices, generating profound transformations at the local level. These expectations are not limited to mere projections of the future but actively reconfigure material reality by reshaping land use, political relations, and economic dynamics.
The study is based on fieldwork initiated in 2018, combining ethnographic observation with an analysis of governmental archives and documents produced by community members in connection with the airport project. This case study demonstrates how infrastructure can play a central role in the social transformation of rural Quechua societies even prior to its construction, as inhabitants begin to form networks around invisible but anticipated technological objects planned by the state.
Marcos Lopez Aguilar
Marcos Lopez Aguilar is a PhD candidate in Social Anthropology and Ethnology at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), under joint supervision with the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú (PUCP). Affiliated with the research centre Mondes Américains, he has been conducting long-term ethnographic research since 2018 among Quechua populations in the Chinchero district (Cusco region, Peru), focusing on the controversial construction project of an international airport. His research offers an anthropology of expectation, examining how anticipated infrastructure reshapes social practices, territorial relations, and political and economic dynamics. He has also taught in the anthropology master’s programme at PUCP.
