andean waterways: resource politics in highland peru

Matt ias Borg Rasmussen

resource pol i t i c s in h igh land Peru

A N D E A N WAT E R WAY S

Culture, PlaCe, and natureStudies in Anthropology and Environment

K. Sivaramakrishnan, Series Editor

F.Rasmussen, Andean Waterways.indd 1 3/26/15 1:59 PM

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Culture, PlaCe, and nature

Centered in anthropology, the Culture, Place, and Nature series encompasses new interdisci-plinary social science research on environmental issues, focusing on the intersection of cul-ture, ecology, and politics in global, national, and local contexts. Contributors to the series view environmental knowledge and issues from the multiple and often conflicting perspec-tives of various cultural systems.

The Kuhls of Kangra: Community-Managed Irrigation in the Western Himalaya, by Mark Baker

The Earths Blanket: Traditional Teachings for Sustainable Living, by Nancy Turner

Property and Politics in Sabah, Malaysia: Native Struggles over Land Rights, by Amity A. Doolittle

Border Landscapes: The Politics of Akha Land Use in China and Thailand, by Janet C. Sturgeon

From Enslavement to Environmentalism: Politics on a Southern African Frontier, by David McDermott Hughes

Ecological Nationalisms: Nature, Livelihood, and Identities in South Asia, edited by Gunnel Cederlf and K. Sivaramakrishnan

Tropics and the Traveling Gaze: India, Landscape, and Science, 18001856, by David Arnold

Being and Place among the Tlingit, by Thomas F. Thornton

Forest Guardians, Forest Destroyers: The Politics of Environmental Knowledge in Northern Thailand, by Tim Forsyth and Andrew Walker

Nature Protests: The End of Ecology in Slovakia, by Edward Snajdr

Wild Sardinia: Indigeneity and the Global Dreamtimes of Environmentalism, by Tracey Heatherington

Tahiti Beyond the Postcard: Power, Place, and Everyday Life, by Miriam Kahn

Forests of Identity: Society, Ethnicity, and Stereotypes in the Congo River Basin, by Stephanie Rupp

Enclosed: Conservation, Cattle, and Commerce among the Qeqchi Maya Lowlanders, by Liza Grandia

Puer Tea: Ancient Caravans and Urban Chic, by Jinghong Zhang

Andean Waterways: Resource Politics in Highland Peru, by Mattias Borg Rasmussen

Conjuring Property: Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon, by Jeremy M. Campbell


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Andean WaterwaysresourCe PolitiCs in HigHland Peru

Mattias Borg Rasmussen

University of Washington Press

Seattle & London


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2015 by the University of Washington PressPrinted and bound in the United States

19 18 17 16 15 5 4 3 2 1

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,

including photocopy, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

University of Washington Presswww.washington.edu/uwpress

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataRasmussen, Mattias Borg.

Andean waterways : resource politics in highland Peru / Mattias Borg Rasmussen.pages cm. (Culture, place, and nature : studies in anthropology and environment)

Includes bibliographical references and index.isBn 978-0-295-99481-9 (hardcover : alk. paper) isBn 978-0-295-99493-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Water resources developmentPolitical aspectsPeruBlanca, Cordillera Region. 2. Water resources developmentSocial aspectsPeruBlanca, Cordillera Region.

3. Water supplyPolitical aspectsPeruBlanca, Cordillera Region. 4. Water supplySocial aspectsPeruBlanca, Cordillera Region.

5. Climatic changesEnvironmental aspectsPeruBlanca, Cordillera Region. 6. Blanca, Cordillera Region (Peru)Environmental conditions. I. Title.

hD1696.P54B537 2015333.91'6209854dc23 2015002178

The paper used in this publication is acid-free and meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi Z39.481984.

All photographs are by the author unless otherwise noted.


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For Elias


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Contents

Foreword by K. Sivaramakrishnan ixPreface xi

Acknowledgments xviiAbbreviations xxi

introDUction: A Sense of Urgency 3

1. atoq hUacanca river: Changing Horizons 25

2. qUerococha 3 Bases channel: Sharing the Flow 53

3. shecllaPata channel: Maintaining the Course 83

4. aconan channel: Arranging Infrastructure 113

5. santa river: Defending Life 141

oUtfloW: Time, Place and the Politics of Water 167

Notes 185Reference List 193

Index 209


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ix

Foreword

Climate change and the attendant awareness of living on a planet pro-foundly altered by human activity, evoked by the contagious concept of the Anthropocene, have come to occupy center stage in environmental scholar-ship. In this context, Mattias Borg Rasmussen provides a refreshing reminder that cultural processes of adapting large-scale events and long-term processes to local and regional struggles and aspirations remain use ful windows through which to view the issues of the day. He does this by offer-ing a study of a series of interconnected streams and flows of water in the high Andes of Peruhow they are constituted, understood, managed, and fought overto explain what he elegantly describes as the adaptation of climate change to local life.

The Cordillera Blanca, the White Mountain Range, along the higher elevations of the Santa River watershed in Andean Peru, has become the focus of considerable research on climate change and associated policy anxiety for remediation of such change and its adverse impacts. As Rasmus-sen notes, the people who have lived in the area for a while are somewhat perplexed by all the fuss. In a longer historical context of neglect and aban-donment of the region by the Peruvian state, they also worry if their more local struggles for water will be overtaken by global concerns and impera-tives. In this way, he situates what is essentially a study of water politics at a regional level within international pressures and their national mediation, in a landscape where water is abundantly present but poorly distributed to meet a variety of daily needs and livelihood demands.

That people have long-standing ways of dealing with aspects of these flows, like scarcity and variability, are important points that Rasmussen establishes through the examination of two rivers and three canals and how they constitute the waterways he is studying. He argues, valuably and origi-nally, that discussions of climate change tend to dominate and obscure older processes of water flow and management and cultural ways of repre-senting and using landscapes. As Rasmussen aptly and vividly describes,


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villagers, miners, and local officials in highland Peru do talk about the cli-mate and weather and noticeable changes in the environment that seem influenced by climate variability. However, they do so at some times only, and always seem to discuss climate in order to place their more basic con-cerns with livelihood and family, economic production, and state power in explanatory frames. In doing so, they seek to make sense of emerging crises and new phases in what they experience as a familiar history of abandon-ment by the national state in times that are less or more distressing to local residents and environments.

The Andean world is no stranger to fine scholarship on water in the form of rivers, lakes, gravitational flows, and redirected streams. Rasmussen follows in the wake of extant scholarship by anthropologists and histori-ans to take up some of the classic concerns of community formation, state-peasant relations, and the emergence of systems of water governance. But in this work, a careful ethnography of long-term settlers in their region is able to show the ways in which water and local livelihood are produced in intimate contests. Extended examination of particular events, often char-acterized by specific collective forms of movement such as walking or marching for demonstrations, creates an ethnographic encounter in which human mobility is correlated with the mobility of water itself along the slopes of these high-altitude villages. It brings the focus of this study onto the production and movement of water, and therein can be found its strik-ing originality.

A gripping story, well told, adds new dimensions to an august body of work on the environmental anthropology of water in Latin America. Evoc-ative ethnography brings to the fore the everyday strategies and frames people in these Andean mountain villages use to comprehend and manage the vast changes in their midst, even as experts from around the world travel to their homelands to understand glacial retreat and critical alterations to weather patterns that might be globally significant. Andean Waterways thus becomes relevant to anyone interested in how relations between climate and society take shape in specific locations as part of historical processes.

K. SivaramakrishnanYale UniversityMarch 2015


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PreFaCe: tHe ways oF tHe water

Andean Waterways explores questions emerging from the junctures of environmental and social change in highland Peru. It does so by tracing a number of waterways that traverse the high parts of the Santa River water-shed near the small town of Recuay. These waterwaysthree irrigation channels and two riversare sites of intense political and social struggles that open up questions that go beyond the particularities of place: the pro-duction of space, the governance of the commons, the politics of environ-mental change, and the deep histories of state and resource control. Only part of this story of scarcity and excess can be told by the measurement of water. The aim of this book is to understand how Andean waterways are constituted, their flows created or inhibited, and in the process show how climate change in its many different manifestations becomes part of social lives, enmeshed in economic and political processes.

The larger topics are Andean local-level water politics in the context of climate change and the emergence of new forms of state presence in high-land Peru. The perspective of political ecology is used to examine the politi-cal entanglements of the environment, the unequal distribution of resources, and the historical constitution of power. In asking how a flow of water is constituted, this book scrutinizes the social, environmental, and political processes constituting the materiality of this vital substance. Here, water never flows freely; it is always entangled, and its very material-ity is subject to political maneuvering.

This story, which looks at the waterways shared among villagers from Huancapampa, Ocopampa, and Poccrac in Recuay, takes place in an area of rapid glacial retreat that poses new challenges to the availability and pre-dictability of water. Importantly, these climate-change-driven transforma-tions also occur among people, who see themselves as being increasingly sidelined from the dominant cultural and economic centers in Lima, as national progress literally drives past on the highway between the major cities of Huaraz and Lima and flows by in the pipelines from the mining


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operations at nearby Antamina toward the coast. Tracing the pathways of the water, this book reveals how climate change becomes part of new Andean horizons, how it never comes alone, and how it never can be under-stood apart from its entanglement with local lives. This is therefore a book not about climate change per se but about local-level water politics in the context of climate change.

The Cordillera Blanca is a well-studied area due to its relative proximity to both glaciers and human populations. Consequently, this study is informed by work in the natural sciences on the Cordillera Blanca glaciers and water resources by geographer Jeff Bury, climatologist Mathias Vuille, and hydro-glaciologists Bryan Mark and his student Michel Barar, among others. My understanding of the area was further enriched by the excellent work of environmental historian Mark Carey. Although there is no absolute scientific consensus on the influence of climate change on hydrological cycles in the Andes or beyond, there is a general agreement that climate change is likely to impact such cycles.1

The use of water is the subject of long-standing interest and debate within the field of Andean anthropology. Irrigation techniques, cultural and symbolic worlds, state intervention, and local politics have all been examined as part of understanding the productive practices of the Andean peasants and herders and thereby the role of water in their livelihood strate-gies. Focus on the flows of water rather than its use will heighten our under-standing of ongoing struggles to secure water, and ultimately life, in the high Andes. The often contentious configurations of waterways highlight the intersections of different actors with different agendas in the everyday politics of managing water flows, either by containing them or (re)directing them. The waterways are located in rural areas populated by peasants, laborers, housewives, and miners who see themselves as being sidelined and who repeatedly describe their situation as one of abandonment by the state. It is the moments of intersection between state and local politics with regard to ongoing environmental management and change that provide the pivotal components for analysis. This study shows how water, time, and place are linked through personal action, technologies of irrigation, con-struction, and maintenance, and local governance and highlights the ways in which the Andean waterways connect themes of abandonment, environ-mental change, and the place that Andean peasants occupy within the ongoing construction of the Peruvian nation.


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This work began as a research project, Water in Movement, which formed part of Waterworlds, a larger research collective headed by Profes-sor Kirsten Hastrup at the Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen, and funded by the European Research Council. Drawing from empirical work conducted in the Cordillera Blanca of highland Peru, Water in Movement began by examining climate change concepts such as adapta-tion and resilience that have dominated much climate change literature.2 These examinations provided an important baseline for understanding the questions and challenges that climate change poses to social life and the social sciences.

As I learned more about how lives are led in the high Andes, I became increasingly uneasy with the assumptions implied by the terms adaptation and resilience dominant in much climate change literature. Externalizing climate change from social worlds, these concepts seemed to put too much emphasis on the direct relationship between climate change in all its abstractions and human action. How should we characterize actions that are not adaptive? How can we explain that strategies such as migration, which have long formed part of Andean life-worlds, have suddenly become adaptive measures rather than, for example, extensions of household strate-gies? This discomfortwhich grew out of continued dialogue within the Waterworlds Research Collectivemade me reconsider the design of the research and representation (see, for example, Hastrup and Rubow 2014). If, as Elizabeth Marino and Peter Schweitzer (2009) have highlighted, we are sometimes better off not asking about climate change when we want to understand what it means to live with it, then we must be careful about our presence in the field. The observation that has long been part of ethno-graphic field training, that the questions we ask influence the answers we get, holds true for research involving climate change.

For the first six months or so in the field, I deliberately did not mention climate change, curious to see whether and under what circumstances the concept would appear. I recorded fifty-two interviews, primarily with vil-lage authorities and others who seemed to have something at stake in terms of water access or use. In the interviews, I asked about the history of the irrigation channels, the maintenance they require, the conflicts that have arisen or are pending around different bodies of water, and any observed changes in the social environment. This often prompted people to talk about climate change either by name or by proxy. Some I interviewed a second or


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even a third time, talking more specifically about climate change using the specific term cambio climatico and about its associated phenomena and the more personal life histories of interviewees.

The interviews attain their pertinence in relation to other methods. Participant observation makes possible an understanding of everyday struggles and of situations that unfolded here via interviews, documents, GPS, and participatory mappings. Interlocutors showed me landscapes, irrigation channels, old landslides, and rocks split by lightning. The friction of the terrain (Scott 2009) occasionally made these walks tiresome, but even as I walkedsometimes feeling quite alone in the vast mountainsa tactile sense of the terrain grew. Anthropologists Jo Lee and Tim Ingold (2006) have explored ways of walking and what it does to sociality and sociability. Walking, they argue, is a particular way of being in the envi-ronment. It sharpens our awareness of the surroundings and of the details we encounter. They also suggest that it is through the shared bodily engagement with the environment, the shared rhythm of walking, that social interaction takes place. People communicate through their posture in movement, involving their whole bodies. Crucially, walking side by side means that participants share virtually the same visual field (Lee and Ingold 2006, 7980). Walking, then, becomes more than a mere connector of dots, or places: through walking, a shared space is created in a mutual exchange of experience and impressions as we walk. Sharing the spaces in a changing landscape proved crucial.

Elsewhere I have argued that we ought to ask how climate change is being adapted to cultural worlds rather than how people are adapting to climate change (Rasmussen, forthcoming). This is not meant to imply that receding glaciers, changing winds and precipitation, and alternating tem-perature intensities should not be addressed. Rather, we should not assume from the outset that these are of primary concern to people leading com-plex, holistic lives. Thus, when climate change is treated as the context of water, it is not understood merely as background. Originating from the Latin words con, or together, and texere, or to weave, the term context entails the weaving or creating of connections. As Roy Dilley (1999, 14) writes, connections made with one domain imply a series of disconnec-tions with another: contexts not only include certain phenomena as rele-vant, they exclude others as marginal or put them out of the picture all together. Exploration of how certain connections are established through


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practice and discourse reveals the emergence of waterways as specific ver-sions of water assigned with particular configurations of values, situated within certain social and historical contexts, and accordingly achieves specific purposes. We must seek to understand how climate change becomes part of social worlds, always located within, never set apart (e.g., Barnes et al. 2013; Hastrup 2013a).

In short, this book shows how climate change matters only at certain times. This is in a context in which flows of water are altered by new hydro-logical regimes, while predictions about future water scarcity and even apocalyptic accounts circulate among the villagers, who must deal simul-taneously with a state apparatus that discursively and sometimes concretely keeps them in abandonment through its erratic and unstable presence in rural areas. Focus on how climate change is adapted to human lives rather than how humans adapt to climate change provides a better sense of the empirical realities of living with environmental change. Here, rather than adaptation policies attending to a particular problem, thereby creating direct links between this problem and the solutions at hand, adapting cli-mate change to human lives is a matter of making sense of the messiness of everyday life. Focus on how waterways are configured reveals that cli-mate change becomes relevant only under some circumstances and that the people of rural Recuay frame water politics differently on different occa-sions. Flows, networks, organizations, institutions, regulations, and aspi-rations become apparent as we look across scales of different modalities of water governance related to particular waterways. The intersections between environmental change and the states social and political abandon-ment of the villagers in rural water governance thus provide an analytical means of grasping the implications of the social, cultural, and political embeddedness of what could otherwise be considered large-scale pro-cesses of change. By highlighting the enduring moral issues that accompany the governance of water, Andean Waterways emphasizes how much is at stake for highland peasants in the resource politics of the everyday contes-tations over water.

The communities profiled here are situated differently in relation to the state, as villages, towns, and peasant communities (comunidades campe-sinas). Site-specific interactions with water include bridge construction, channel repair, and stream diversion. These activities demonstrate differing degrees of state presence (and absence), ways of talking about water and


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climate, configurations of time, place, and history, and engagements, aspi-rations, and confrontations among the villagers and between villagers and outsiders. Scale here is seen as a matter of perspective rather than mag-nitude (Strathern 2004 [1991]; Hastrup 2013c). Although the waterways exemplified vary widely in size, from the 347kilometer Santa River to the 1.5kilometer Aconan Channel, to those engaged in these matters, quanti-tative distinctions matter little in regard to the politics of water and life.


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aCknowledgments

A central argument of this book is that a flow of water is not a given but the result of complex interactions between different kinds of processes and actors. The same could be said of this work, which would not have been possible without the aid and engagement of quite a large number of people.

First and foremost, my agradecimientos go to the people of Recuay, without whom this would have been only a series of fuzzy ideas about being in the world. The events and narratives that unfold here are excerpts from their daily lives and struggles, and the people of Huancapampa, Ocopampa, Poccrac, and the Comunidad Campesina Los Andes de Recuay generously allowed me to participate, patiently explaining the many things that I did not understand. I will not name people here but merely express my heartfelt gratitude. This goes not only to these people who appear in these pages but also to the many whom I have for reasons of editorial clarity chosen not to include. I was generously allowed to use the photographs of some people. Apart from these exceptions, I have used pseudonyms to protect the iden-tity of the people involved. Finally, I would also thank the mayor of Recuay, Milton Len Duck Vergara, for keeping the doors of the municipality open to me at all times.

At the Mountain Institute in Huaraz, I found local knowledge and aca-demic engagement that were extremely helpful both in the initial phase of the research and during fieldwork. Jorge Recharte was always helpful, insightful, and kind, as was Florencia Zapata. Special thanks also go to Juanito from Vicos. Later, I was invited on an astonishing trip to Nepal for further discussions on glacial retreat in the high mountains. The Imja Gla-cial Lake Expedition was a fascinating meeting of disciplines, nationalities, and experiences. Discussing the glacial retreat of Yanamarey and Tunsho above Recuay with such distinguished people as Cesar Portocarrero, Alejo Cochachn, and Jess Gmez from the Glaciology Unit of the Autoridad Nacional del Agua (ANA) (National Water Authority) in Huaraz while


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looking at Mount Everest was indeed a privilege. The director of the Huas-carn National Park, Marco Arenas, helped me understand the changes the Cordillera Blanca is undergoing and kindly granted me permission to work inside the park perimeter.

The Pontificia Universidad Catlica del Per granted me permission to access the library and provided a space for discussions. Especially I would like to thank Augusto Castro, Flavio Figallo, Mara Teresa Or, and Tefilo Altamirano for their helpful and encouraging comments. This cooperation culminated during three exciting days in MarchApril 2011 at the inter-national conference Cambio Climtico y Escasez de Agua, with more than five hundred participants. I am also grateful to Columbia University and especially Ben Orlove for granting me the space and time for developing ideas at a crucial stage of writing. In this process, the engaging seminars of Beth Povinelli and Michael Taussig proved hugely important.

I am thankful for thoughtful and engaging comments made by Rudi Colloredo-Mansfeld, Penny Harvey, Henrik Vigh, Christian Lund, Cecilie Rubow, Rebecca Leigh Rutt, and Mark Carey. Karsten Paerregaard was an unceasing source of energy and encouragement. The project was conceived in the interface of our myriad encounters, and his wealth of ideas and knowledge about Andean matters has been vital for the outcome. During an enjoyable and intense week in Recuay, we gazed at the vanishing glacier at Pastoruri, escaped a fierceand very bigdog in Poccraccucho, talked of glaciers and Saint John, endured soroche, and engaged in lively discus-sions on how to understand it all.

The project formed part of a greater research endeavor at Waterworlds, headed by Kirsten Hastrup. The project has been funded by European Research Council (ERC grant 229459), and I have received additional sup-port for fieldwork and research abroad from Oticon Fonden, the Ryoichi Sasakawa Young Leaders Fellowship Fund, the Sasakawa Young Leaders Fel-lowship Fund ProgramSylff Research Abroad (SYLFF-SRA), and the Julie von Mllens Fond. This work has benefitted immensely from the research collective at Waterworlds: Kirsten Hastrup, Anette Reenberg, Frank Sejer-sen, Jonas . Nielsen, Frida Hastrup, Martin Skrydstrup, Cecilie Rubow, Christian Vium, Mette F. Olwig, Maria Louise Bnnelykke Robertson, Laura V. Rasmussen, Astrid Stensrud, and Astrid Andersen. And as admin-istrator of everything, Henny Pedersen was invaluable. At the Department of Anthropology at the University of Copenhagen, I have enjoyed com-


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ments and suggestions from Sara Lei Sparre, Birgitte Bruun, Trine Mygind Korsby, Dan Hirslund, Bjarke Oxlund, and Susan Whyte. Outside the Department of Anthropology, Adam French, Ben Orlove, Karine Gagne, Gustavo Valdivia, Gry Thorsen, Anne Line Dalsgaard, and Anja Marie Born Jensen have also provided me with helpful thoughts and opinions.

Finally, I would like to thank the engaging and engaged staff at the Univer-sity of Washington Press: Culture, Place, and Nature series editor K. Siva-ramakrishnan and executive editor Lorri Hagman have supported the manuscript and eased the editorial process. Comments from two anony-mous reviewers greatly improved the manuscript. Mary C. Ribesky, Tim Zimmermann, and Natasha Varner all contributed to making the experi-ence of working with the University of Washington Press very pleasant. Laura Iwasaki did a great job correcting language, and Barry Leveley has helped readers gain an overview by providing the two maps.

Twelve months away from home may seem like a long time, but not so much when you have an extra home in Lima. I am as always grateful for the many good times with plentiful ceviche and laughter with Oswaldo del Solar, Coco Rojas, and Alonso Rey, as well as Andrs Figallo and Diana Rosilloall the more so, as this has indeed been a shared adventure. I am very fortunate and lucky to have had the company of Gry, and I am looking forward to many more adventures to come. They certainly will come; they already have.

All errors and inconsistencies in the text are mine alone.


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abbreviations

ALA Autoridad Local del Agua (Local Water Authority)ANA Autoridad Nacional del Agua (National Water

Authority)CEDEP Centro de Estudios para el Desarollo y la Partici-

pacin (Center of Investigation for Development and Participation)

COFOPRI Comisin de la Formalizacin de Propiedad Informal (Commission for the Formalization of Informal Property)

FADA Federacin Agraria del Departamento de Ancash (Agrarian Federation of the Department of Ancash)

FONCODES Fondo de Cooperacin para el Desarollo Social (Cooperative Fund for Social Development)

JNUDP Junta Nacional de Usuarios de Riego del Per (National Junta of Irrigators in Peru)

LATA-II Liga Agraria Tupac Amaru II (Agrarian League Tupac Amaru II)

PROFODUA Programa de Formalizacin de los Derechos de Uso de Agua (Program for the Formalization of Water Use Rights)

PRONAMACHS Programa Nacional de Manejo de Cuencas Hidrogr-ficas y Conservacin de Suelos (National Program for the Management of Hydrographic Catchment Areas and the Conservation of Soils)

Q3B Querococha 3 Bases ChannelSAIS Sociedad Agrcola de Inters Social (Agricultural

Society of Social Interest)


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A view of the study area as seen from above Yanamito in Cordillera Negra.


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maP 1 Recuay is located on the left bank of the Santa River in the southern part of the Callejn de Huaylas, with the white peaks of the Cordillera Blanca to the east and the Cordillera Negra to the west. All lines on the map are indicative.


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maP

2 Th

e study ar

ea with

the fou

r villages located east of Recuay. Th

e waterways e

xplored in ch

apters 1

5 are th

e three ch

annels

and the S

anta an

d Atoq

Huacanca R

ivers. All lin

es on the m

ap ar

e ind

icative.


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Andean Waterways


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Cerro Tunsho set against the dark skies.


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3IntroductionA Sense of Urgency

Clouds gather on the horizon. The peaks of the Cordillera Blanca are concealed as the color of the sky quickly changes. The earth is dry where we are sitting, and the grassy hills that surround the plaza and extend themselves toward the white peaks that are now disappearing behind the clouds are a dull, yellowish color. The rainy season has yet to begin, but perhaps today, after our meeting has come to an end, the clouds will release the much needed drops of water. Hopes are high in the crowd.

A group of peasants and one anthropologist are gathered on the plaza of the small Andean village of Poccrac. The men of the village wear worn pants in dusty colors and knitted sweaters or old sweatshirts to protect them from the cold of the early morning. The women wear pointed dark hats that shade their eyes, and their bare feet are tucked into black loafers. For up to an hour they have walked, either from the bottom of the valley, from behind the ridge, or from their houses on the highland grasslands known locally as the puna. These peasants, who would otherwise be tilling their dry soils, have come here to discuss vital matters. They are all users of an irrigation channel whose flow connects villages otherwise set apart by the rugged terrain. Water is not the only thing that connects these people; they are also compadres, comuneros, and cmpices, united through affinity, blood, work, and leisure. But today, water is their reason for being here. It is also mine.

Don Viviano is an older man now. A widower, he spends most of his time in a manada, a high-altitude residence, caring for his few animals. Wearing a baseball cap and a knitted white sweater turned gray from years of use, he gets to his feet, as is the custom here whenever one addresses the assembly. He is in trouble, he tells his fellow peasants. No hay agua. He


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has no water. The water holes surrounding his house are drying out, and water from the irrigation channel only rarely reaches his house. We know that water will be scarce. From now, in twenty years, maybe there will be no water left, he says and urges the crowd of peasants. They must work together to make the water flow. They must improve the channel, and they must get the local authorities to help. Making water flow again is impera-tive. After all, he ends, Agua es vida. Water is life.

That the flow of water is only partly predicated on the amount of water is not new either to the extensive scholarship on water in the Andes and elsewhere or to the peasants of the rural hinterland of small-town Recuay in highland Ancash, Peru. Water scarcity and excess are, however, taking on new shapes. Water is already seen as behaving differently, and predic-tions about a future lack of water due to receding glaciers and new patterns of rainfall circulate among the peasants. They know that they cannot deal with the situation by themselves because these are matters that go far beyond village affairs, but experience has taught them that counting on state authorities may not be advisable. Indeed, complaints of the state aban-doning them and their locality circulate alongside and entwine with their knowledge of the possible and impossible movements of the water. The abandonment therefore becomes more than a description of a material situation but rather a critique of particular modes of government that also infiltrate the movement of water. The flip side of state promises of progress and development, the idiom of abandonment provides a crucial backdrop as a vernacular conceptualization of the relationship between those who may govern and the governed.

In his eloquent short story Agua, Peruvian novelist and anthropologist Jos Mara Arguedas (1974 [1935]) reveals how water is entangled in local configurations of power as Andean villagers rise up against the malevo-lent Don Braulio, who deprives them of water, dignity, and life. In Peru, the governance of water has taken on new forms over the course of the twentieth century, and although old forms of oppression may have van-ished, water continues to be riddled with conflict. Today, the flow of water seems to be no less contentious a topic, as awareness of an imminent water crisis and a future of water scarcity encroach on life in the high mountains. The various configurations of water in the upper-slope villages of Recuay constitute the empirical entry points of the chapters in this book, which explore local-level water politics, abandonment, and the production of mar-


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ginality among a group of Andean peasants. These explorations occur at a time when climate change and governmental change pose new challenges to life and water in the highest parts of the Peruvian highlands.

Climate changea trended change in meteorological phenomena over timeis enmeshed in local matters of politics and the dynamics of social belonging. The waterways that crisscross the Andean highlands are an apt starting point for understanding the interweaving of nature and culture, capturing social, political, and environmental processes. The ways in which the flows of water are created, maintained, and defended illustrate the inter-sections of climate change and rural abandonment, the movements between the possibilities and restraints that influence life in the high mountains. The Andean waterways set the scene for an ethnographic inquiry into bodies of water that are deeply political and yet embedded in environmental phe-nomena beyond local control: How is the water distributed across the ter-rain? How do the residents of rural Recuay deal with the uneven distribution of water? What kinds of interactions emerge around water, and what role do different state and statelike institutions play in water governance? How does the temporality and spatiality of water influence the villagers capabili-ties for dealing with the bodies of water? And what does this tell us about the impact of climate change on Andean society?

entangled waterways: a PolitiCal eCology oF water

A growing body of literature on water within anthropology and environ-mental studies concerns local-level politics and everyday, routine engage-ments with water and the political forms that surround it.1 Building on Andeanist studies, the work of Paul Gelles (2000) and Paul Trawick (2003b) on water and power in southern Peru, together with Mara Teresa Ors (2005) engaging account of the Achirana Irrigation Channel in the coastal department of Ica, have provided the most direct inspiration for this book.2 First, they all explore questions of power in relation to water. Second, Or insists that water has histories and that we cannot understand current struggles for water without understanding the historical conditions that have created the present waterways. Indeed, it is a fundamental condition for local-level politics of water that the waterways relate to wider structures of power, domination, and oblivion. They relate to abandonment.


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There is a sense of urgency to the words Don Viviano spoke on the plaza in Poccrac. The urgency, however, is a complex composite with different temporal horizons. This book explores these temporal horizons through the everyday political maneuvers necessary for securing livelihoods in a context of increasingly scarce supplies of water, that is, the multiple ways that local politics and governance are interwoven with water infrastruc-ture and the seasonal flows of water itself. Water as a vital matter hinges as much on governmental arrangements as on biophysical availability. Under-standing how the water flows requires an understanding of local politics, or what constitutes the state in local affairs.

Water in different forms infiltrates the political, affecting equity, distri-bution, and modalities of governance. Particular bodies of water exemplify issues of state presence and absence, peasant and community water politics, and cooperation among a variety of users. In order to understand how the politics of water become entangled with social, political, and cultural mat-ters on a variety of scalesand therefore to understand the complexities of water politics in rural Peruone must situate these matters within the local and national political landscape. In other words, one must seek to under-stand how and why local political forms and in particular the idiom of abandonment are part and parcel of the ways in which the water flows across the rugged Andean terrain. Some specific concerns of political ecol-ogy and environmental anthropology are of particular importance for the present study.3

Political ecology is not a strictly delimited theoretical framework but should be viewed more as a tool for orientation in terms of research and analysis. Often placed strategically at the intersections of culture, power, history, and nature (Biersack 2006), political ecology lends itself to various disciplines such as geography, history, and of course anthropology. Con-trary to earlier anthropological approaches to human-environment rela-tions, political ecology insists on emphasizing power relations in mediation between different actors, entailing a focus on conflicts and cooperation. As a merger of political economy with cultural studies (Biersack 1999, 10), political ecology aims to move beyond static notions of environment and culture, concentrating instead on sociopolitical processes, the production of place, and the exercise of agency.

A growing interest in water and climate change in relation to the extrac-tion of minerals, oil, and gas and neoliberalism has provided fertile ground


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for scholars working between the environmental sciences, history, geogra-phy, and anthropology. In the Andean context in particular, Tony Bebbing-ton, Jeff Bury, Tom Perreault, and Jessica Budds have engaged in discussions of political ecology, especially the troubled relationship between peasant livelihood strategies, mining, and water.4 Mining transforms the land-scape and is a crucial entry point for exploring contestations not only over resources but also over the very valuation of the environment. The work of these authors on the entanglement of people, place, and politics is key to understanding the current transformations of the relations between the people, the state, and the environment that are currently taking place in the Andes.

These variants of political ecology seek to understand how water as a natural resource is contested. To an anthropologist interested in how people deal with issues of water in their everyday routines and political spectacles, these otherwise brilliant studies suffer to different degrees from two shortcomings: they treat water as a natural resource before anything else, and they pay only scant attention to what the state is to local people in all its muddy complexity. Water, however, is never just water, and the state is never just one state.

Water configures societies in particular ways and generates particular values (Hastrup 2013d). Whether in rivers, canals, or wells, water frames specific social worlds. Thus, water contains what Kirsten Hastrup terms agentive power. Rather than merely flowing through and being molded by humans, water, having deep imaginative implications, has the ability to create values: it carries peoples thoughts towards other shores, farther horizons, deeper meanings, and existential questions (60). Waters con-nectivity and materiality, which link it to themes of value, equity, gov-ernance, politics, and knowledge (Orlove and Caton 2010, 404), can bring together a variety of actors, institutions, and organizations with different agendas and aspirations. Water bridges nature-culture, allowing us to scru-tinize empirically and theoretically the connections and disjunctures that are created as we explore and explain the flow of water (Helmreich 2011).

Water is integral to the terrain, and the latter cannot be understood without the former. These are landscapes imbued with power and meaning, where water is a force that both shapes the terrain and is shaped by it. Types of landscape are often defined by the amount of water that is present: desert, semiarid, rain forest, bog, and, in the high Andes, the high-altitude


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wetlands (bofedales). Water crosses borders and connects institutions, interests, and aspirations of different scopes and scales. The term water regime formation (Orlove and Caton 2010) is a way of capturing the inter-play between topographic conditions, legislations, customs and habits, actors (groups and individuals), and climatic conditions that in conjunction enable and inhibit flows of water. Originating in hydrological science, the term water regime expresses how water flows through an ecological sys-tem, but the very metaphorical connotations of the eco-hydrologists seem to indicate that water can be governed by more than just friction, vegetation density, and slope inclination.5 The formation part of the term is impor-tant because it underscores that a water regime is always emergent. New conditions that affect the flow of water arise such as dynamic and divergent understandings of territory that shape boundary making, struggles among groups with conflicting interests, new forms of legislation, and new sites and forms of extraction. Ultimately, since the melting glaciers and shifts in precipitation may affect the flow of water, the term water regime forma-tion aptly captures how a flow of water, be it in a river, a carved-out irriga-tion ditch, or a channel, is contingent upon a variety of factors. The cases under scrutiny here show how the materiality of water is related to the power configurations in a given area, enabling actors and themes to emerge in new ways. This points to the vast complexity of the institutional, social, and political arrangements that come into play once water leaves the gla-ciers and underground sources or falls from the sky as rain and snow (see Carey et al. 2013).

Place must be at the heart of any political ecology (cf. Biersack 2006; Escobar 1999, 2001, 2006), as ecologies themselves are situated in certain landscapes. In terms of waters infiltrations of the political realm, a first step toward understanding the dynamics of topographies can be found in the work of the geographer Sarah Whatmore (2002) and others engaged in the analytical intersections of geography, science studies, and anthropology, in which landscape and place are the outcomes of particular practices of knowledge. Paige West (2006) provides an engaging account of conserva-tion in Papua New Guinea that takes nature, place, and space as social products intimately linked to the production of social difference (25). Mara Goldman and Matthew Turner (2011) argue that it is not sufficient to look merely at material interests if one is to understand social struggles over resources. To grasp how material substances come into being as resources,


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one must also go into the politics of knowledge, that is, the ways in which temporal as well as spatial understandings of the environment shape con-testations and outcomes (2). Therefore, in discussing waterways in the Andes, it is important to examine the different understandings of what constitutes water and how the flow of water across the terrain is being con-textualized and understood by different actors.

Water may come in many forms: fitful and trickling underground sources; in tubes, pipes, and channels; in rivers and streams; and as rain, snow, and hail. Each waterway requires different forms of action, presup-posing different but overlapping epistemologies and technologies of water. The practices that evolve around waterways are thus contingent on specific knowledges. This knowledge is embedded in social relations of power. Emphasizing knowledge, practice, and agency, Norman Long (2001) sug-gests that we pay particular attention to the interfaces, that is, the places where different actors, with their different bodies of knowledge and moral-ity, encounter one another.6 Interfaces within the waterways of the Andes exemplify ways in which environmental knowledge shapes engagements with water and how flows of water are socially constructed. Thinking of water in terms of its materiality, its connectedness to governance, and its ethical connotations helps to illuminate the different arenas in which it is pivotal to the emergent political modalities of rural life in the Andes.

This analysis follows the move within political ecology from govern-ment to governance (Budds and Hinojosa 2012), relying on recent anthro-pological state theory as well as an in-depth ethnographic description of the political maneuvering. Indeed, governance is itself a term that might highlight multiple stakeholders but conceal their varied agendas and per-ceptions of the end goals (cf. Orlove and Caton 2010, 405). By insisting on both the plurality of state and the multiplicity of local governance, political ecology is more than environmental politics with attention to inequality.

Due to recent political and environmental developments in Peru, water offers a promising avenue for scrutinizing the conditions of local gover-nance (Or and Rap 2009; Urteaga 2009a). This is partly because of a new legal framework from 2009, the Law of Hydrological Resources (no. 29338), which has changed the institutionality and governmental forms of water distribution, and partly because water is perceived to be increasingly scarce due to melting glaciers and changing precipitation patterns. The competing claims over water resources that have burgeoned over the past two decades


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are happening in an increasingly unclear context of overlapping institu-tional and legal arrangements for water governance (Bury et al. 2013, 372).

This book is about how people deal with their everyday encounters with one another and the state in the context of environmental change. Para-phrasing the title of a recent book by James Scott (2009), this is about the art of being governed. It is about how people may encounter a state that seeks to gain control over a difficult terrain through internal colonization and exploitation and about an impoverished rural population that finds itself increasingly superfluous within Peruvian society. The very material-ity of water and its distribution across the terrain serve as an entry point for scrutinizing the workings of power and the local constructions of water as a resource. The waterways are, in other words, both nature and culture, encapsulating environmental and social hierarchies and change. To the peasants there, water is tied as much to the state as to its high-altitude sources.

In different ways, the peasant communities and small villages jockey with each other for control of their own affairs and influence over the affairs of others. They feel abandoned by a state that, while investing modestly in local development on occasion, nonetheless falls short of the national promise of development and progress. This is the reality that climate change in its many different manifestations becomes part of.

states oF abandonment: loCal PolitiCs and vital matters

Local politics on the margins of the state does not exist outside the state but is shaped by its present-absence, its momentous appearance, and its inherent promise that things could be different. As a vernacular conceptu-alization of the relationship between the villagers and those who can govern on all levels, the idiom of abandonment by the state contains a paradox: while it expresses an urge to be considered part of a wider collective, it does not necessarily entail a wholesale acceptance of state intervention. This state of being resembles other Andean tropes such as forgotten villages (Orlove 2002), orphans of the state (Goldstein 2005), and being marginal-ized (Mitchell 2006). Accordingly, I refer not so much to material condi-tions as to a mode of governance that produces a certain kind of relationship. Ethnographically, abandonment is a part of how people describe their rela-


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tionship to wider structures of power, possibilities, and prohibitions in a particularly Andean idiom of state presence and absence (Goldstein 2005, 2012; Harvey 2010). Conditions of abandonment might be understood as suspended between material conditions, social imaginaries, and modes of governance (Povinelli 2011; Aretxaga 2003).

The people of Huancapampa and the other villages may not technically be said to have been abandoned: roads, bridges, potable water, improved kitchens, schools, latrines, electrification (although only recently, in 201011, in Poccrac, Ocopampa, Shecllapata, and Cantu) are all evidence that the state is in fact present and active. Compared to overall figures for Peru, the area might even be said to be relatively well off, scoring decently on at least some poverty measures related to government activities. Salomon and Nio-Murcia (2011, 69) rightly point to improvements that have been made over the past decade in the Peruvian Andes. Nonetheless, in virtually every meeting on water I attended during the course of my fieldwork, at some point a direct reference was made to this mode of being. As Nelson, the acting mayor of Huancapampa, wryly commented after a prolonged discus-sion of obstacles to improving the system of potable water: Here they are keeping us in abandonment.

Abandonment as a descriptive term for living on the margins is not new in a country renowned for its centralized political structure,7 but it is taking on a new shape as state presence on the margins is being reconfig-ured in the wake of rapid economic growth. The social and political orga-nization of highland Peru is influenced largely by the state and by political and economic processes on the national level. As Colloredo-Mansfeld (2009) argues for Ecuador, the state is part of the ways in which people, territory, and resourcesand therefore waterare organized. Thus, to the peasants, the challenge does not consist in whether or not the state is there but is rather a matter of the conditions under which the state makes it pres-ence known.

To the people of rural Recuay, dealing with the authorities entails strat-egies and maneuvers for confronting a state apparatus that cannot be avoided but cannot be relied upon either. It is what Povinelli (2011, 15) calls a matter of governance, as how not to be governed like that, rather than how not to be governed at all. This is not about a society being against the state but about finding the right amount of state-ness in dealing with what is at stake. Abandonment therefore rests on an assumption that things


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could be otherwise, that the rural people need not be left outside the well-publicized economic progress and bright future that awaits the Peruvian nation.

As an awareness of potential state presence, abandonment gives James Scotts (2009) argument a twist in that it shows the Andeans capacity to elicit state care. Abandonment is an affective register that opens up a new language for grasping the effect of the contemporary state. It describes the relationship to the state in emotional terms, as people being ignored and excluded, highlighting a very specific way of being acted upon and framing a way of acting within.

Although often portrayed as a coherent unit, the state is an aggregation of many levels of bureaucracies, agendas, offices, and officials that may act in contradictory ways. The state has been conceptualized perhaps more accurately as an incoherent agent (Gupta 2012) with spectral and phan-tasmic qualities (Pedersen 2011, 61), working partly within the realm of magic (Taussig 1997). The elusiveness of the state lies in its paradoxical nature. Within the anthropology of the state, there is a growing consensus that states and communities are mutually constitutive, and one does not exist with the other. Partly a vast yet fragmented conglomerate of institu-tions, regulations, norms, and authorities, partly an outcome of hope, desires, aspirations, and imaginations, the state is both a concrete site and an abstraction. Adding to the condition of living discursively outside the tracks of modernity and development, abandonment, therefore, is also about how the state is imagined: to what degree should the state be involved, under what terms, and to whose benefit? And thus, which political powers may create or inhibit a flow of water?

Understanding how and why people talk about abandonment is to understand how state forms of governance perforate community politics. Following Colloredo-Mansfeld (2009, 6) in his rethinking of the opposition between local culture and national actor, community-based politics and structural power, I suggest a focus on the divergent ways in which the state makes its appearances, either as institutions and bureaucracy on different level of state administration or even as individuals in the form of mayors, peasant patrols, or other kinds of local authorities assuming statelike capacities in order to deal with local affairs. It is a complex social setting in which the states capacities may appear or disappear according to the pre-vailing conditions.


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The different scenarios of engagement and endurance that surround the origins and maintenance of the waterways are crucial for understanding how personhood emerges and citizenship is constitutedthat is, the flow of water is related to how the people of the Huancapampa area are situated within certain topographic and social terrains. Encounters with state, ter-ritory, and climate inform the ways in which they are able to engage with the different domains of the everyday. These intertwinings and assem-blages of actors, human and nonhuman, with different degrees of acces-sibility relate in different ways to the nature of their engagements with state authorities. Some capacities are outsourced, other needs are ignored, and all of these engagements are placed under harsh control. But from the point of view of the peasants of Huancapampa, it is hardly ever done with reference to their day-to-day realities. On the one hand, there is a clear expectation that the state ought to take care of the delinquents by enforcing law in the area, that they ought to ensure that food can be sold and pur-chased at reasonable prices, and that they ought to construct and maintain the infrastructure. On the other hand, experience tells people that reality is often different.

Finding the right amount of state presence is a difficult balancing act. Questions of abandonment get entwined in matters of local sovereignties, and, consequently, it is crucial to hold the issue of how to be governed against these everyday political forms particular to the Andes. In other words, capturing structural conditions and subject formation, abandon-ment highlights the continuous struggle over the very definitions of the value of life, nature, culture, and place in the Andes. Being a transversal figure that runs through the state apparatus, incoherent as it may be, water is an apt starting point for grasping these struggles. Thus, the production of marginality in terms of politics and social imaginaries feeds into the emergence of water regimes and the formation of waterways. Water poli-ticsthe politics of vital mattersare therefore part of a local setting in which water is never detached from its surroundings, never flowing freely.

tHe broken mirror oF reCuay

During the Andean summer, the square in Recuay once provided a spec-tacular scenic viewpoint for watching the sun set behind the Cordillera Negra. The last rays of light reflected on the white peaks of the Cordillera


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Blanca, strangely illuminating this small highland town. The Mirror of Recuay, as the townspeople refer to it, is now broken; the glaciers have retreated, and I did not see the reflection. But the people with whom I worked mentioned the spectacle from time to time when stressing that things in Recuay are not quite what they used to be. Here climate change is notorious, Don Mariano, a talkative, dark-skinned man with graying curly hair, told me when we first met on the balcony of the Recuay Munic-ipality after I had expressed interest in the more mundane aspects of water management. The broken Mirror of Recuay is not only a matter of a different evening light; it represents a future that seems to be fragmented. To be seen as Andean peasants in the eyes of the state attains new perti-nence, just as the lights of the mirrors reflection vanish and new horizons emerge in the high mountains.

Mountain regions are often mentioned as especially susceptible to cli-mate change, with melting glaciers disrupting livelihoods, cultural orienta-tions, and symbolic worlds (Orlove, Weigandt, and Luckman 2008; Bolin 2009; Cruikshank 2005; Rhoades 2008). In the Andes, a focus on water is implicitly also a focus on climate change. As the glaciers retreat, subtler environmental changes arise, such as alterations in temperature, precipita-tion, and winds, all of which alter the central element: water. These changes in turn are part of a social world that is itself undergoing rapid transforma-tions in terms of water management, land tenure, and state intervention. Suspended between national economic growth and local poverty, this transformation includes processes of social differentiation. Consequently, the availability, accessibility, and distribution of water in its liquid form, entangled with infrastructure and as vital matter, are crucial empirical and analytical focal points for understanding the ways in which climate change is permeating and perforating Andean society.

The peaks of the Cordillera Blanca are the highest in the Peruvian Andes, with Mount Huascarn reaching an altitude of 6,768 meters above sea level. It is the most extensively glaciated mountain range in the tropics. Mountain glaciers are natural water towers (Bury et al. 2008, 323) that are highly sensitive to changes in both precipitation and temperature. They therefore provide some of the clearest and most visible evidence of climatic change.8 Studies of climate change in the Andes reveal the weak spots along the watersheds that are each affected in different ways by the receding ice and changing precipitation as well as the increased danger of unstable gla-


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cial lakes.9 The at-risk include small-scale farmers and herders, towns and cities, hydropower infrastructure, and large-scale irrigated estates on the coast (Vergara et al. 2007). Climate change is thus increasing pressure on water resources in the Andes as well as perforating social landscapes.

When Don Viviano rose to his feet on that early afternoon in Poccrac to complain about the lack of water in his manada, his claim could be backed by scientific studies. Although climate change impacts are highly diverse, even between neighboring watersheds (Barar et al. 2012), some of Don Vivianos observations resonate with the emerging and ever-growing literature on the changing hydro-reality of the Cordillera Blanca. First, with regard to water quantity, the irrigation channel that runs past his house in Anas Cancha has its intake on the Yanamarey-Querococha watershed. As described by Bryan Mark (Mark and Seltzer 2003; Mark and McKenzie 2007), this watershed has seen a drastic increase followed by a decrease in water flow. When the glacier melt-off is accelerated due to climate change factors such as temperature, humidity, precipitation, radiation, and wind, people below will see an increase in water in their rivers and channels ini-tially, because more water is no longer stored in the glacier. After the dis-charge peak, when the glacier approaches a new equilibrium adjusted to the climatic conditions or, as is predicted to happen with low-lying glaciers such as Yanamarey, disappears completely, the melt-off will then decrease and the outflow to rivers and irrigation channels will stabilize at a new, lower level. The flows of these waterways are then dependent to a lesser extent on glacial melt and to a much larger extent on seasonal variability in precipitation. Hydrologists have found that the Querococha watershed is in phase 3, meaning that water is decreasing toward a new hydrological equi-librium (Barar et al. 2012).

There is no similar study of the Atoq Huacanca watershed where Huan-capampa is located. However, geographer Alton Byers (2000, 60) has com-pared a 1936 photograph of Tunsho with shots taken in July 1998 to document land-use change and glacial retreat. July is in the austral winter and dry seasonmeaning that snow is unlikelybut Tunsho has clearly visible glacial cover on its southwestern slopes. The glacial retreat evident not only on Tunsho but on all of the Cordillera Blanca aside, Byers notes that the pastures seem to be in a better condition at the time of the most recent photograph and that the native tree species, quenuales, have been replaced by the exotic and ubiquitous eucalyptus and, to a smaller extent,


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pines. These trees are also known to have a negative impact on the soils ability to store water. For our purposes, the important point is that the Atoq Huacanca, which to some extent used to be glacier fed, is now reliant on surface water and underground springs.

This brings us back to Anas Cancha and the second point in Don Vivi-anos observation: not only is there no water in the channel (for reasons other than climate change, indeed) but the sources are drying up. Alpine hydrology is a complex matter, and there is still little understanding of the relationship between glaciers and alpine wetlands (Viviroli et al. 2011, 475). A study of alpine wetlands from the Quelcayhuanca Valley above Huaraz estimates a loss of 17.2 percent of wetlands between 2000 and 2011 (Bury, Mark, Carey, et al. 2013, 368; Polk and Young 2013). This loss followed an initial increase in wetlands, meaning that water released during the glacial retreat is moving downslope. Again, it is not possible to directly transfer these numbers to Anas Cancha, where Don Viviano struggles to meet his water needs, but the correlation between glaciers and lower-altitude water sources is a critical conclusion, particularly when it comes to grasping emerging water realities. The pressure that he and his neighbors have put on water sources by breeding animals and opening up drainage ditches for the water is another major component for understanding the slow disap-pearance of his water (Jess Gmez, personal communication).

There is no water, Don Viviano told the crowd that afternoon. Experi-ence has taught him that matters of water can and must be solved by the community, that even though water might flow differently, there could and should be water for everyone. In other words, Don Vivianos efforts dem-onstrate that the increased seasonal variability governing water, as described by the abundant literature, intersects with local forms of neglect and engagement.

One day I was sitting in Poccrac, talking with Don Francisco about life in the high parts of the puna. An old man now, hat cocked sideways and a straw in his mouth, he has lived through both the abuses of the landlords of the past and expulsion from the lands where he was born following Gen-eral Velascos 1969 agrarian reform, implemented in Ancash in the early 1970s. Don Francisco is now a faithful member of one of the evangelist con-gregations in Poccrac. To him, everything happens for a reasonincluding the increasingly bare rock that changes the color of the Andean Cordillera, which is visible from where we are sitting. We looked down onto the plaza


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of Poccrac, where people were gathering for the coming Virgen de la Mer-cedes celebrations. They are not only for the current residents of Poccrac and their friends and relatives from the neighboring villages but also for Lima migrants, who were returning to visit the lands, mountains, and peoples of their childhood and youth. They are the sponsors of the celebra-tions this year.

We turned away from the lively gathering, looking once again toward Tunsho and the rest of the broken Mirror of Recuay. Don Francisco reflected:

It must be happening by permission from our Divine [Lord]. He is stipulating the descent, the coming. Now, Judgment Day. It cannot be anything else. . . . The world is moving forward; it is because there is a lot of disorder. . . . Some dont believe in God; they are dedicated to stealing, to making themselves rich, cheating the poor. There is no compassion: everybody must seek for himself. We are insulting God. We dont believe; everybody is dedicated to having. [That is why] He is controlling and taking down the entire Cordillera [Blanca]. . . . In my opinion, [in twenty years, Poccrac] will be deserted.

Our concern here is not with comparing scientific to local knowl-edge on current changes to glaciers and water resources in highland Peru. Studies on climate change in the Andes agree on most issues: changes are happening (e.g., glacial mass is diminishing); changes are unevenly distrib-uted, meaning that water availability in one watershed cannot be directly correlated to water availability in a neighboring watershed; and changes are sometimes poorly understood, such as the relationship between gla-cier mass balance and underground water or new patterns of wind and precipitation.

The point that can be made at the intersection between the perspectives of Don Viviano, Don Francisco, and Don Mariano and the scientific studies is that climate change is both momentous and momentary, both deeply implicated in the everyday and yet relevant only at particular times. In Don Franciscos prediction of the imminent decay of Poccrac from a nonlinear cause-and-effect perspective, it becomes hard to distill climate change from social change. Indeed, there are no climate change impacts in their own right, only new entanglements. The aim is therefore to understand how these entanglements permeate and perforate the politics of water, and thus, how


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the waterways themselves are entangled in different notions of history and landscape, belonging and exclusion, environment and the very value of life.

reCuay: at tHe Center oF tHe margins

On a rainy afternoon toward the end of my fieldwork, I interviewed the Mendoza sisters in their home on the corner of the plaza. I asked what the town used to be like. One of the sisters explained:

Recuay was beautiful. Good families, good houses. At the time of the earthquake, almost all the families left Recuay. All the houses in Recuay were abandoned. And more people have come down from the rural areas. Many families also left because of terrorism. So the houses didnt matter to them anymore. They have fallen down, they have crumbled. . . . So before, there was a lot of social life in Recuay. There were the good families: Bojorquez, del Pozo, Valenzuela, Molina, Agero. The richest in Recuay were the Agero and Ycaza families because they had the gold mines. They were the most moneyed in town, because in those days, a lot of gold was circulating.

During my visit to the Gonzales sisters in their house on the corner of the square, I experienced a taste of the Recuay they remembered. Sitting in the same chair that renowned archaeologist Julio C. Tello had used when passing by Recuay on his way to and from the excavations in Chavn de Huntar, looking at the pictures of late family members who had been important traders, ministers, and high-ranking officers in the republican army, I got the sense of a bygone time. Recuay, the sisters lamented, had been taken over by the people of the slopes, and the splendor of the town was slowly being reduced to a state of moral and physical decay.

The provincial capital of Recuay is located on the western bank of the Santa River, and until the middle of the twentieth century, it was a thriving mining town and the center of cattle production in the upper part of the Santa watershed. Some years ago it was decided to redirect the main road going from Lima to Huaraz through Recuay so that travelers no longer passed through the town center. The decision changed the course of the towns history. The townspeople often mention the faster means of trans-portation and the emergence of neighboring Ctac as a commercial hub as


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factors in Recuays steady loss of relevance as the regional center of com-merce and cultural activities. People also express a sense that this small highland town of miners and ranchers has gone from being the center of its own universe to being on the margins of Peruvian society.

The margins of the state, write Veena Das and Deborah Poole (2004), are not just a physically distant place but something that is produced in encounters between a centralized state power and a dispersed population. The margins of the state are therefore distributed unevenly across the ter-rain, and the production of these margins calls for an exploration of forms of governance through a focus on state legibilities (Scott 1998) and illegibili-ties (Das 2004), on vernacular statecraft as forms of appropriation of state-like techniques (Colloredo-Mansfeld 2007, 2009), and, thus, on community politics and everyday encounters with state institutions as they play out in relation to water.

Coinciding in time and space with the agrarian reform of General Velasco, the devastating earthquake on May 31, 1970, which struck at 3.23 Pm, left most of the Callejn de Huaylas in ruins. This conjuncture made pos-sible the renewed presence of state agencies and nongovernmental orga-nizations (NGOs) in rural Ancash (Bode 1989; Mayer 2009; Oliver-Smith 1986). The tectonic movements, along with the expropriations of land, marked a rupture in terms of state presence in Recuay and accelerated an already ongoing process of social and ethnic reconfiguration. Today, only a few of the old families remain in Recuay. Like many other small highland towns, Recuay has, in other words, been resituated in the regional land-scape with new actors appearing on the political stage (Cameron 2009). The local bourgeoisie have emigrated to Lima, primarily, and economic life has been reduced to basic agrarian production and largely destructive mining activities. But worries of abandonment are not directly linked to the relative economic decline, although this does not make the regions economic troubles any less serious.10

Before the agrarian reform of 1969, the state was distant and often irrel-evant in Recuay and manifested itself primarily through military enrollment and demands for collective unpaid work contributions ( faenas) for road construction (Gose 1994, 58). Locally, the actual power lay with the elite (cf. Nugent 1997, 2001). In a study of the historical formations of cattle rustling in Chumbivilcas, in southern Peru, Deborah Poole (1987) shows that the difference between those who maintained and those who broke the


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law tended to collapse in this area far from the national center of power. During the course of my fieldwork, I came to realize that cattle rustlers are central to understanding social life in Recuay and that even some of my col-laborators and friends engaged in this activity with great skill.11 The violence of the attacks has contributed to an exodus of people from certain places such as Shecllapata, but cattle rustling is not the only reason for leaving.

A national phenomenon, migration has changed the social topography of Peru since the middle of the twentieth century (Degregori 1986; Paer-regaard 1997) and has been one of the main strategies for escaping rural abandonment. People in Recuay have been displaced and are moving out, and what was formerly a prosperous mining center has turned into a town struggling for survival as economic activities have moved elsewhere. A popular outburst (Matos-Mar 2004 [1984]) brought people from the coun-tryside to the cities, and Recuay has to a large extent been taken over by the rural peasants of the area. Among my interlocutors from the upper villages, many have access to homes both in Recuay and on the slopes.

The territory opposite Recuay is home to four villages: Huancapampa, Ocopampa, Poccrac, and Cantu. A fifth cluster of houses, Shecllapata, can hardly be termed a village anymore, as it contains only two households. With fifty-seven households (237 people), Huancapampa is the largest of the four villages and is divided into Huancapampa proper and Aconan, also known as the upper neighborhood (barrio arriba). While Huanca-pampa is a nucleus by the intersection of the rivers, Aconan stretches along the old road to Conchucos. The three villages located uphill have diminished in size and now hold between twelve and twenty-five house-holds. Earlier, people of Huancapampa were known for their skill in weav-ing baskets and hats (Gamarra A. 1943). Nowadays, they do not weave reeds, except for the occasional ropes from ichu that are used for tying up animals, hanging clothes, and the like. The majority of people are engaged in a diversified, mixed economy with some agricultural production mainly for their own consumption, some livestock, and some salaried work (see Rasmussen 2012).

A third of the households in the four villages are members of Comuni-dad Campesina Los Andes de Recuay, a collective proprietor of the land that allows for relative autonomy in its internal affairs. It is a rather small peasant community with only fifty active associates (comuneros), who rep-resent their households and participate in meetings, communal work, and


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social gatherings. Its lands are located on the puna grasslands, and its lower borderlands are at an altitude of 3,4004,000 meters above sea level. The majority of the members of Comunidad Campesina Los Andes de Recuay have their main houses in one of the villages outside the community perim-eter, with additional houses being scattered over the puna area immediately next to the allocated pastures. These manadas used to be inhabited more permanently, but nowadays people stay closer to the urban center of Recuay at the bottom of the valley, where they have easier access to the main road, markets, leisure activities, and education. Recuay is home to two schools, the Institute of Technology, which educates topographers, a hospital, and local government institutions.

While only fourteen households live on a more or less permanent basis within the territory, half the members of Comunidad Campesina Los Andes de Recuay reside in the adjacent villages, and the remainder live in neigh-boring Acpash, Recuay, or Huaraz. Those who are not members manage plots that are either private property or accessible through a tenancy system that requires the annual sharing of surplus. The territory of the four villages under study is thus a mosaic of individually owned plots of land and larger areas leased to individual households, a communally owned territory divided into common fields, and individually managed plots for agriculture in the lower part and individual pastures in the higher parts. These are the terrains that the waterways must traverse.

andean waterways: tHe struggle For water in tHe andes

Each chapter in this book scrutinizes a different waterway, emphasizing the particular configuration of actors, histories, territories, and environmental conditions that enable or inhibit the water and showing that water quantity is but one factor in understanding how people deal with the challenges of climate change. This is not to underestimate the devastating disruptions to the hydrological regimes as glacial retreat alters the Andean horizon but rather to emphasize the historical, sociopolitical, and environmental contingencies that pose a very complex series of challenges to life in the high Andes.

This ethnographic exploration of the dialectical relationship of the poli-tics of people and waterthat is, the ways in which peasants and other actors


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move the water and the ways in which the water moves the peasantsbegins in chapter 1 by tracking a path along the Atoq Huacanca River. This chapter discusses the kind of landscape the people of Recuay inhabit, pay-ing particular attention to the social production of space and the question of time connected to particular landscapes. Chapter 2 is a historical scru-tiny of the Querococha 3 Bases Channel and explores the intersections of land tenure and water management that together produce the flow of water. Chapter 3 focuses on the conflict that evolved around the Shecllapata Channel concerning the sovereignty and dependence of the peasant com-munities of the Andes and internal politics seen as vernacular statecraft. Chapter 4 moves to Huancapampa and the Aconan Channel, a recent con-struction project that moves the politics of water from the peasant com-munity to the village and opens up space for discussion of the implications of state decentralization and legislation for the water infrastructure. Chap-ter 5 changes scale, examining the social movements that developed along the Santa River in December 2010 in defense of the water that issues from Lake Conococha. By way of conclusion, the final chapter addresses the poli-tics of climate change by considering the ways in which the materiality of the Andean waterways is perforated by the different temporalities of water governance. Climate change thus emerges as context in different circum-stances, modifying the way that water, its absence, presence, and duration, infiltrates social lives along the course of the channels, evoking different horizons for action and bringing new futures into the present.


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Dawn over Atoq Huacanca with a view of Tunsho on the horizon.


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andean waterways: resource politics in highland peru

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