Andean Waterways: Resource Politics in Highland Peru

ANDEAN
WAT E R WAY S
reso u rc e politic s i n
h ig hla nd Per u
M at t ias B o rg Ra sm u sse n
Culture, Place, and Nature

Studies in Anthropology and Environment
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K. Sivaramakrishnan, Series Editor
F.Rasmussen, Andean Waterways.indd 1
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Andean
Waterways
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Resource Politics in Highland Peru
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Mattias Borg Rasmussen
U n i v ersit y of Wa sh i ngton Pr ess

Seattle & London
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2015 by the University of Washington Press

Printed and bound in the United States
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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Rasmussen, 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 2015
333.91'6209854dc23 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 ix
Preface xi
Acknowledgments xvii
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Abbreviations xxi
Introduction: A Sense of Urgency 3
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1. Atoq Huacanca River: Changing Horizons 25
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2. Querococha 3 Bases Channel: Sharing the Flow 53

3. Shecllapata Channel: Maintaining the Course 83
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4. Aconan Channel: Arranging Infrastructure 113
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5. Santa River: Defending Life 141
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Outflow: Time, Place and the Politics of Water 167
Notes 185
Reference List 193
Index 209
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Foreword
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Climate change and the attendant awareness of living on a planet profoundly altered by human activity, evoked by the contagious concept of the
Anthropocene, have come to occupy center stage in environmental scholarship. In this context, Mattias Borg Rasmussen provides a refreshing
reminder that cultural processes of adapting large-scale events and longterm processes to local and regional struggles and aspirations remain useful
windows through which to view the issues of the day. He does this by offering 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 Rasmussen 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 abandonment of the region by the Peruvian state, they also worry if their more
local struggles for water will be overtaken by global concerns and imperatives. 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 originally, that discussions of climate change tend to dominate and obscure
older processes of water flow and management and cultural ways of representing 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 climate 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 concerns 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 abandonment 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 historians to take up some of the classic concerns of community formation, statepeasant 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 characterized 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 striking originality.
A gripping story, well told, adds new dimensions to an august body of
work on the environmental anthropology of water in Latin America. Evocative 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. Sivaramakrishnan
Yale University
March 2015
x Foreword
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Preface: The Ways of the Water
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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 watershed 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 production of space, the governance of the commons, the politics of environmental 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 highland Peru. The perspective of political ecology is used to examine the political 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 materiality 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 predictability of water. Importantly, these climate-change-driven transformations 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 understood 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 strategies. Focus on the flows of water rather than its use will heighten our understanding 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, construction, and maintenance, and local governance and highlights the ways
in which the Andean waterways connect themes of abandonment, environmental 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 Professor 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 adaptation 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 strategies? 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 ethnographic 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 village 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
Preface x iii
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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 environment. 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 temperature intensities should not be addressed. Rather, we should not assume
from the outset that these are of primary concern to people leading complex, 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 disconnections with another: contexts not only include certain phenomena as relevant, 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 versions 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 hydrological regimes, while predictions about future water scarcity and even
apocalyptic accounts circulate among the villagers, who must deal simultaneously 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 climate change to human lives is a matter of making sense of the messiness
of everyday life. Focus on how waterways are configured reveals that climate change becomes relevant only under some circumstances and that the
people of rural Recuay frame water politics differently on different occasions. Flows, networks, organizations, institutions, regulations, and aspirations 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 abandonment 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 processes 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 contestations 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
Preface x v
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climate, configurations of time, place, and history, and engagements, aspirations, and confrontations among the villagers and between villagers and
outsiders. Scale here is seen as a matter of perspective rather than magnitude (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, quantitative distinctions matter little in regard to the politics of water and life.
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Acknowledgments
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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 identity 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 academic 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 Glacial 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 Huascarn 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 international 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 discussions 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 support 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 Sejersen, 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 administrator of everything, Henny Pedersen was invaluable. At the Department
of Anthropology at the University of Copenhagen, I have enjoyed comx v i i i Acknowledgments
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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 anonymous reviewers greatly improved the manuscript. MaryC. Ribesky, Tim
Zimmermann, and Natasha Varner all contributed to making the experience 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.
Acknowledgments x i x
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Abbreviations
Autoridad Local del Agua (Local Water Authority)
ANA
Autoridad Nacional del Agua (National Water

Authority)
CEDEP
Centro de Estudios para el Desarollo y la Participacin (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)
Liga Agraria Tupac Amaru II (Agrarian League
Tupac Amaru II)
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ALA
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 Hidrogrficas y Conservacin de Suelos (National Program for
the Management of Hydrographic Catchment Areas
and the Conservation of Soils)
Q3B
Querococha 3 Bases Channel
SAIS
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 The study area with the four villages located east of Recuay. The waterways explored in chapters 15 are the three channels
and the Santa and Atoq Huacanca Rivers. All lines on the map are indicative.
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Andean Waterways
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Cerro Tunsho set against the dark skies.
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Introduction
A Sense of Urgency
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louds 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 imperative. 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 predictions 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 abandoning 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 malevolent 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 vanished, 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 mar4 Introduction
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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 phenomena beyond local control: How is the water distributed across the terrain? 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 capabilities for dealing with the bodies of water? And what does this tell us about
the impact of climate change on Andean society?
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Entangled Waterways:
A Political Ecology of Water
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A growing body of literature on water within anthropology and environmental studies concerns local-level politics and everyday, routine engagements 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 infrastructure and the seasonal flows of water itself. Water as a vital matter hinges as
much on governmental arrangements as on biophysical availability. Understanding 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, distribution, 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 matters 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 understand 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 ecology 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. Contrary to earlier anthropological approaches to human-environment relations, 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 extraction of minerals, oil, and gas and neoliberalism has provided fertile ground
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for scholars working between the environmental sciences, history, geography, and anthropology. In the Andean context in particular, Tony Bebbington, 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 landscape 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 connectivity 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 scrutinize 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 interplay 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 system, 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 important 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 formation aptly captures how a flow of water, be it in a river, a carved-out irrigation 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 glaciers 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 conservation 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 contestations 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 contextualized 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, presupposing 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) suggests that we pay particular attention to the interfaces, that is, the places
where different actors, with their different bodies of knowledge and morality, 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 government to governance (Budds and Hinojosa 2012), relying on recent anthropological 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 perceptions 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 governance (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 institutional 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. Paraphrasing 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 materiality 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 highaltitude 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.
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States of Abandonment:
Local Politics and Vital Matters
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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 conceptualization 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 marginalized (Mitchell 2006). Accordingly, I refer not so much to material conditions as to a mode of governance that produces a certain kind of relationship.
Ethnographically, abandonment is a part of how people describe their rela10 Introduction
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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 2010
11, 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 discussion 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 reconfigured in the wake of rapid economic growth. The social and political organization 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 presence known.
To the people of rural Recuay, dealing with the authorities entails strategies 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 wellpublicized 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 phantasmic 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 institutions, 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 prevailing 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, territory, and climate inform the ways in which they are able to engage with
the different domains of the everyday. These intertwinings and assemblages of actors, human and nonhuman, with different degrees of accessibility 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 purchased 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, abandonment 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 politicsthe 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 spectacular 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 Municipality 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 pertinence, 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 climate change, with melting glaciers disrupting livelihoods, cultural orientations, 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, precipitation, 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 transformations 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 gla14 Introduction
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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 initially, because more water is no longer stored in the glacier. After the discharge 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 equilibrium (Barar et al. 2012).
There is no similar study of the Atoq Huacanca watershed where Huancapampa is located. However, geographer Alton Byers (2000, 60) has compared 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 Vivianos 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 disappearance of his water (Jess Gmez, personal communication).
There is no water, Don Viviano told the crowd that afternoon. Experience 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 demonstrate 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 General Velascos 1969 agrarian reform, implemented in Ancash in the early
1970s. Don Francisco is now a faithful member of one of the evangelist congregations 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
16 Introduction
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of Poccrac, where people were gathering for the coming Virgen de la Mercedes 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 celebrations 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:
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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.
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Our concern here is not with comparing scientific to local knowledge 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 distributed, 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 glacier 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
Introduction 17
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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:
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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.
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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 JulioC. 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 transportation and the emergence of neighboring Ctac as a commercial hub as
18 Introduction
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factors in Recuays steady loss of relevance as the regional center of commerce 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 terrain, and the production of these margins calls for an exploration of forms
of governance through a focus on state legibilities (Scott 1998) and illegibilities (Das 2004), on vernacular statecraft as forms of appropriation of statelike 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 possible the renewed presence of state agencies and nongovernmental organizations (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 landscape 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 irrelevant 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
Introduction 19
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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 collaborators 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; Paerregaard 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 countryside 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 Huancapampa 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 households. Earlier, people of Huancapampa were known for their skill in weaving 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 Comunidad 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 represent their households and participate in meetings, communal work, and
20 Introduction
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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 perimeter, 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 neighboring 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.
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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 politics of people and waterthat is, the ways in which peasants and other actors
Introduction 21
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move the water and the ways in which the water moves the peasants
begins in chapter 1 by tracking a path along the Atoq Huacanca River. This
chapter discusses the kind of landscape the people of Recuay inhabit, paying particular attention to the social production of space and the question
of time connected to particular landscapes. Chapter 2 is a historical scrutiny 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 communities of the Andes and internal politics seen as vernacular statecraft.
Chapter 4 moves to Huancapampa and the Aconan Channel, a recent construction project that moves the politics of water from the peasant community to the village and opens up space for discussion of the implications
of state decentralization and legislation for the water infrastructure. Chapter 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 politics 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 circumstances, 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.
22 Introduction
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Dawn over Atoq Huacanca with a view of Tunsho on the horizon.
3/26/15 1:59 PM

Andean Waterways: Resource Politics in Highland Peru

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Andean Waterways: Resource Politics in Highland Peru

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ANDEAN

Culture, Place, and Nature

K. Sivaramakrishnan, Series Editor

F.Rasmussen, Andean Waterways.indd 1

Culture, Place, and Nature

The Kuhls of Kangra: Community-Managed

Wild Sardinia: Indigeneity and the Global

Forests of Identity: Society, Ethnicity,

Border Landscapes: The Politics of Akha

From Enslavement to Environmentalism:

Ecological Nationalisms: Nature, Livelihood,

Tahiti Beyond the Postcard: Power, Place,

Property and Politics in Sabah, Malaysia:

The Earths Blanket: Traditional Teachings

Nature Protests: The End of Ecology

Enclosed: Conservation, Cattle, and

Being and Place among the Tlingit,

F.Rasmussen, Andean Waterways.indd 2

Resource Politics in Highland Peru

Mattias Borg Rasmussen

U n i v ersit y of Wa sh i ngton Pr ess

F.Rasmussen, Andean Waterways.indd 3

2015 by the University of Washington Press

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or

University of Washington Press

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

F.Rasmussen, Andean Waterways.indd 4

F.Rasmussen, Andean Waterways.indd 5

Introduction: A Sense of Urgency 3

1. Atoq Huacanca River: Changing Horizons 25

2. Querococha 3 Bases Channel: Sharing the Flow 53

4. Aconan Channel: Arranging Infrastructure 113

5. Santa River: Defending Life 141

Outflow: Time, Place and the Politics of Water 167

F.Rasmussen, Andean Waterways.indd 7

F.Rasmussen, Andean Waterways.indd 9

F.Rasmussen, Andean Waterways.indd 10

Preface: The Ways of the Water

Andean Waterways explores questions emerging from the junctures of

F.Rasmussen, Andean Waterways.indd 11

operations at nearby Antamina toward the coast. Tracing the pathways of

F.Rasmussen, Andean Waterways.indd 12

This work began as a research project, Water in Movement, which

F.Rasmussen, Andean Waterways.indd 13

F.Rasmussen, Andean Waterways.indd 14

F.Rasmussen, Andean Waterways.indd 15

F.Rasmussen, Andean Waterways.indd 16

F.Rasmussen, Andean Waterways.indd 17

F.Rasmussen, Andean Waterways.indd 18

F.Rasmussen, Andean Waterways.indd 19

Autoridad Local del Agua (Local Water Authority)

Autoridad Nacional del Agua (National Water

Centro de Estudios para el Desarollo y la Participacin (Center of Investigation for Development

Comisin de la Formalizacin de Propiedad Informal

Federacin Agraria del Departamento de Ancash

Fondo de Cooperacin para el Desarollo Social

Junta Nacional de Usuarios de Riego del Per

Programa de Formalizacin de los Derechos de Uso

Querococha 3 Bases Channel

Sociedad Agrcola de Inters Social (Agricultural

F.Rasmussen, Andean Waterways.indd 21

F.Rasmussen, Andean Waterways.indd 22

F.Rasmussen, Andean Waterways.indd 24

F.Rasmussen, Andean Waterways.indd 25