Geoforum 57 (2014) 234247

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Geoforum
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/geoforum

Cultural politics and the hydrosocial cycle: Water, power and identity in
the Andean highlands q
Rutgerd Boelens
Dept. Environmental Sciences, Wageningen University, P.O. Box 47, 6700 AA Wageningen, The Netherlands
Dept. Social Sciences, Ponticia Universidad Catlica del Per, Av. Universitaria 1801, San Miguel, Lima, Peru

a r t i c l e

i n f o

Article history:
Available online 18 March 2013
Keywords:
Hydrosocial cycles
Socionatures
Water management
Cultural politics
Cosmology
Governmentality
Andes

a b s t r a c t
This paper explores interactions among water, power and cultural politics in the Andes. It analyzes the
hydrosocial cycle as the politicalecological production of a time- and place-specic socionature, enrolling
and co-patterning the social, the natural and the supernatural to reect dominant interests and power.
A case analysis locates community water control practices in Mollepata, Peru, in the broader historical
setting of Andean water empires. To see how local worldviews, water ows and water control practices
are interwoven, it unravels the meta behind the physical, examining contemporary expressions of the
ancient hydrocosmological cycle that intimately interconnects the cyclical dynamics of hydrology, agroecology, human lifetime and cosmology. Herein, bonds among mountain deities, Mother Earth and humans
are fundamental to guide water ows through this world, the world above and the world below.
Next, the paper analyzes the political behind metaphysical patterning of water ows. Since ancient
times, elites have striven to reinforce subjugation over Andean peoples by creating convenient histories
and socionatural order, connecting local water practices and worldviews to supralocal schemes of belonging, thereby deploying overlapping governmental rationalities.
Continued in contemporary, globalizing water politics and governmentalities, efforts to establish,
demystify or transform frames of water order are at the heart of water struggles. Here, dominant conceptual and cultural-political frameworks naturalize the strategic positioning of humans and nonhumans in
hydrosocial patterns that support water hierarchies and legitimize particular distribution, extraction and
control practices, as if these were entirely natural. Hydrosocial cycles are, however, importantly mediated
by counter-forces and alternative water truths.
2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

We control life, Winston, at all its levels. You are imagining that
there is something called human nature which will be outraged
by what we do and will turn against us. But we create human
nature (Orwell, 1984, p. 216).

1. Introduction
In Andean societies, as elsewhere, water represents potential
and power and is the source of collaboration and conict. Since
ancient times, as I will outline below, water is the symbolic and
material power linking time, space and place, by connecting origin,
life, destruction and regeneration. Water is a basic means of
q
Research for this paper was part of the activities of the international Justicia
Hdrica/Water Justice Alliance (www.justiciahidrica.org)
Address: Dept. Environmental Sciences, Wageningen University, P.O. Box 47,
6700 AA Wageningen, The Netherlands.
E-mail address: [email protected]

0016-7185/$ - see front matter 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2013.02.008

mobilizing people, the driving force behind local common property

institutions, and fuses people, place and production in socio-cultural systems and shared techno-ecological histories.1 This has
led to water user groups strong identication with local water
sources and territories, and water control has always importantly
colored processes of identity formation in numerous Andean communities (Arguedas, 1975; Gelles, 2000; Sherbondy, 1998).
At the same time, this intimate connection among water, space
and identity has fused struggles over material control of water use
systems and territories with the battle over the right to culturally
dene and politically organize these socionatural systems. Dominant groups efforts to take control over local water resources go
hand-in-hand with tactics to naturalize and commensurate
schemes of water-based belonging. Hereto, rationalizing water
control by standardizing and externalizing local perceptions,
rights, and rituals, in line with dominant interests, is a fundamental strategy.
1
See, e.g., Achterhuis et al. (2010), Boelens (2008), Boelens and Gelles (2005),
Gerbrandy (1998), Perreault (2008), Zimmerer (2000a) and Vera (2011).

R. Boelens / Geoforum 57 (2014) 234247

In this battleeld to establish water control and representation

regimes, hydrosocial cycles dynamically take shape, involving
material water ows and distribution; the rules and rights prescribing how to manage these ows from eld and underground
to cosmic levels; legitimate authority to govern these water
streams; and the discursive composition of water cycles as
de-politicized socionatural hybrids that t powerful actors
interests.
In the Andes, long before contemporary schemes of neoliberal
governmentality and the creation of globalizing neoliberal socionatures,2 the strategic building of simultaneously material and discursive human-nature constructs as hydrosocial cycles through
politics of identication and subjectication was fundamental to
the art of conducting subject populations conduct (Foucault,
1980, 1991; Dean, 1999). Struggles over water, therefore, involve
regimes of representation that aim to blend society and nature
together through water truth and knowledge claims, to dene the
order of things. Though thoroughly mediated in everyday praxis,
ruling groups strategic interest is to deploy discursive practices that
dene and position the social and the material in a human-materialnatural network that leaves political order unchallenged and stabilized. Here, knowledge of nature is not neutral but a human production, co-dening social and natural orders (Goldman et al., 2010. Cf.
Latour, 1993; Zimmerer, 2000b; Whatmore, 2002). Also water is a
socio-nature (Linton, 2010; Perreault, 2011; Swyngedouw, 2007,
forthcoming).
The paper, therefore, focuses on how different forms of
governmentality envision to enroll and align humans, nature
and thought within a network that aims to transform the diverse
social and natural Andean water worlds into a dominant water
discourse and governance system, structured according to outside truths, categories and frames of reference. I extend the
analysis of hydrosocial cycles to include conceptualization and
political use of hydro-cosmological cycles. First, to show how
cultural and metaphysical realities, through diverse worldviews,
dynamically contribute to peoples understanding of hydrological
cycles, welding social and natural to supernatural. Second, to
illustrate how analyzing metaphysical water reality construction
opens another window to scrutinize water politics and governance techniques (the art of government according to truth,
Foucault, 2008: 313). It resembles the ways in which contemporary (scientic and interventionist) water policy myths contribute to shaping those socionature representations that suit ruling
groups interests (e.g., disciplinary and neoliberal governmentality, Foucault, 2008).
This eld and literature research started in Perus Mollepata
region in 1988, with regular follow-up (long-term and shorter periods) in later years. Action-research involved group discussions,
interviews, and interactive water design, while archival and academic research was embedded in the coordination of international
research coalitions, such as WALIR Water Law and Indigenous
Rights (20012007), Concertacin (20052011) and, currently,
the Justicia Hdrica alliance (since 2009).
The section below introduces relevant connections among
water, power, hydrosocial cycles, and Andean identity politics,
and how these are linked to different forms of governmentality
respectively, truth, sovereignty, discipline, neoliberalism, as
arts of government (Foucault, 2008; Fletcher, 2010). The third section presents an anecdotal account of my own encounters with
diverging water truths in the Andes. I introduce Mollepatas Balcompata water problem case as piece of a larger conceptual-empirical puzzle, one that asks for transdisciplinary examination. The

2
See, e.g., Budds (2009), Fletcher (2010), McCarthy and Prudham (2004), and
Swyngedouw (2004, forthcoming).

235

fourth section reects briey on the diverse, interlinked domains

of water knowledge, to lend the anecdotal account, in Section 5,
a wider context of Andean hydrosocial/hydrocosmological cycle
conceptualization, and relating it thereafter to imperial politics of
truth, extraction and submission. While ancient empires applied
mythological thought to glue such networks together, Section 6
shows how today the globalizing empires of scientic and
expert-interventionist representation blend various hydrosocial/
hydropolitical system components regimes with authority to formulate fundamental problems, dene solutions and produce
truthful water knowledge. The conclusion argues how producing
material nature, producing strategic representations of the nature
of nature, and producing subject and subjectied populations, are
directly related. The latter, however, are not defenseless victims.
2. Water, power, identity, and socionatural water cycles
In the Andes, from Colombia to Chile, territorial management
and community water use systems, for irrigation and drinking
water, are interwoven with the cultural-political foundations of
past and contemporary societies (Gelles, 2000; Vos et al., 2006).3
Since ancient times, local peasant and indigenous communities have
made their agro-pastoral livelihoods in rugged mostly (semi-) arid
highland regions, often connecting high and low altitudinal zones
to combine different micro-climates, soils, ecosystems and production opportunities (Mayer, 2002; Zimmerer, 2000a).4 Maintaining
these interzonal water territories was increasingly complicated
when, over the past centuries, communities were forced onto just
the higher, less productive, unstable slopes, as powerful newcomers
occupied their valleys and disintegrated the vertical production
systems.
Because of these complex physical-ecological and adverse
political-economic operating settings, water users must collaborate intensively. Despite endless variety, community water control builds on mutual dependence. Fundamental tasks in
organizing for water are intertwined with bonds of rights and
obligations. Here, strong ties of identication among local collectives and their water sources and territories are common. Bonds
and arrangements tend to result from both internal negotiation
and collective defense of water vis--vis third parties, such as
landlords, neighboring communities, mining and agribusiness
companies or State agencies (Boelens and Gelles, 2005; Vera,
2011; Vos et al., 2006).
In such settings, water rights simultaneously embody power
relations and reveal how common hydraulic property is reafrmed, and how contested notions of identity and community
are given their actual substance.5 They are formed through processes of political and cultural creation and imagination generating
meaning in the context of unequal power (Roseberry, 1989: 14).
Since symbolic and day-to-day empirical matters are closely
interwoven in water ows, technology and institutions in the
Andes, water control offers signicant entrance points for
metaphysical and discursive power plays to dominate the empirical world. This struggle to conquer imagination is erce: who
establishes which rights and norms, and how these are legitimized,
by human schemes of representation but also supported by supernatural power relations. Also, given this interweaving of water,
property relations and identity formation, efforts to extract surplus
3
This is not unique for the Andean region, see e.g. case collections by BendaBeckmann (2007), Roth et al. (2005) and UNESCO (2006).
4
For an overview of academic research on historical and contemporary irrigation
water control in the Andean countries, see Boelens (2008). See also Trawick (2005).
5
For a comparative analysis with other regions, on water as a source of conict and
a bonding force among people, territory, production and identity, see e.g. Coward and
Levine (1987), Benda-Beckmann (2007), Chambers (1994), Ostrom (1992), and Roth
et al. (2005).

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R. Boelens / Geoforum 57 (2014) 234247

and water resources directly relate to the expropriation of identity and water culture: throughout Andean history, ruling groups
have aimed to supplant the diverse water cultures and rights to
make everyday water control graspable, by installing frames of
reference of dominant classes and cultures, presenting them as
objective, universal schemes of rational water culture and
belonging (Boelens, 2009; Gelles, 2010). Here, construction of
convenient histories, invented traditions and imagined communities (Anderson, 1983; Hobsbawm, 1983; Patterson, 1997)
is fundamental. This takes place as a confrontational process;
identity and subject-formation stem from Self and self-denition,
but also from confrontation with the Other and how the Self is
othered (Said, 1978. Cf. Cohen, 1986). Thus, to understand subjugated water cultures, it is crucial to also focus on the water
cultures subjugating them.
Cultural politics of water control must therefore focus on the
politics of disciplining, examining both dominant groups classication schemes to categorize others, assigning them their
identity, and the subject-formation by which Andean water
users turn themselves into subjects by internalizing outside
frames and models. As Foucault (1980: 39) argued, this subtle,
bottom-up power mode is characterized by its capillary form
of existence, the point where power circulates into the very
grain of individuals, touches their bodies and inserts itself into
their actions and attitudes, their discourses, learning processes
and everyday lives. To this respect, water control discourses
beyond just language and conceptual ideas put knowledge
and power to work to establish and legitimize water governance
practice. As practices, they form the objects to which they relate
(cf. Foucault, 1975). In water control and hydrosocial ow regulation, as socio-technical stabilizers (Boelens, 2009), discourses
strategically glue together social and technical, human and
non-human, physical and meta-physical, each with specic
meaning, aiming to secure a particular political order. Discourses
make xed linkages and standard relations among actors,
objects, categories, concepts, dening their identity and hierarchies, forcefully dening problems and their solutions.
This implies a common notion in Political Ecology and Science
& Technology Studies that boundaries between nature, technology and society are not pre-given; but products of human minds,
social conventions and actively constructed reality (Latour, 1991;
Goldman et al., 2010). Natural and social orders mutually constitute each other as hybrids (Latour, 1991, 1993) or naturecultures
(Haraway, 1991) (Cf. Whatmore, 2002; Zimmerer, 2000b). Precisely by naturalizing socionatural waters, hydrological cycles
and even water distribution systems (by locating them in nature)
deeply political water issues and decision-making are strategically
depoliticized (Zwarteveen and Boelens, 2011. Cf. Budds, 2009; Linton, 2010; Robbins, 2004). Formulating the relevant water cycle
elements and establishing their mutual interactions constructs
particular truths and conventions, to serve analytical (and often
strategic-political) purposes of framers. Masking this naturalizes
water policies, scientic models and approaches, which then
become truth-makers aiming to align actors, standards,
measurement instruments, points of view, etc., and prevent
alternative thinking and acting.
Therefore, this struggle to establish, demystify or transform
frames of water order is at the heart of water control. Powerknowledge colors the choice and contents of domains and their
fusion into hydrosocial patterns, such as hydrosocial cycles. Power,
thus, produces water reality, knowledge and truth claims, even
produces the ways in which truth is made true, establishing
regimes of truth (Foucault, 1980: 133). Hence, water conceptualization itself is an intrinsically social and political activity.
Formulating and implementing water governance is part of
this. It fundamentally deals with how to organize decision making

with respect to water access, use and management in contexts of

divergent interests, conicting normative repertoires and unequal
power relations, and how to produce socio-natural order via the
control over water resources, infrastructure, investments, knowledge, truth, and ultimately, water users and authorities. To establish this order, Foucault argued that governors have historically
engineered and applied different (interacting) rationalities. For
the Andean case I scrutinize four:
Deeply penetrating Andean water societies is the above-mentioned art of goverment based on truth (Foucault, 2008: 313),
whereby authority derives from supernatural powers, human-natural-cosmological life cycles and a meta-physical world order
(Sections 35). Second, colonial States as the Inca and Spanish
empires (also) profoundly based their control over water on
sovereignty, it was the property of the Sun King or the Emperor,
and through Him, the Crown distributed water rights to the lower
echelons. Legal force and territory-based Law (with legitimacy
given by God or the Nature-governing Sun) were central in these
States of naturalized Justice, even though enforcement was difcult. In Hobbesian ways, water rule and order was founded on
States monopoly over legitimate use of violence. Third, disciplinary governmentality works through normalizing power (Foucault,
1995), whereby deviant thinking and acting is oppressed. Subtly
inducing norms for proper, ethical behavior generates subjectied
subjects by invoking morality, guild, mental correction and selfcorrection. Water users self-correct in order not to be considered
immoral or deviant. Finally, neoliberal governmentality envisions to conduct peoples behavior by approaching them as rational
economic agents individual utility-maximizers who strategically
calculate costs and benets as to materialize personal interests.
Governors therefore would need to install the right economic
incentive structures (Fletcher, 2010). The latter (liberal-modernist)
governmentalities are not based on legal force or violence but on a
range of multiform government techniques to productively (and
economically) manage and direct society.
Given the above-elaborated, intimate connection among water,
power, identity, and cultural politics, it is remarkable that the
debates on socionatures and hydrosocial cycles have largely
omitted the domains of water knowledge and action that go beyond social/technical/natural. Framing or intervening in hydrosocial cycles that inform water power hierarchies and legitimize
particular distribution and control practices is simultaneously a
technical-biophysical, social-economic and cultural-political project, chaining bonds among the social, the natural but often also
the supernatural. A perspective on metaphysical concepts and
powers in hydrosocial analysis sheds light on both ancient and
contemporary water politics.
As shown below, a hydrocosmological cycle perspective
provides a new, different critique for, for instance, Wittfogels
well-known hydraulic hypothesis (1957) associating large-scale
irrigation infrastructure development with inevitable social differentiation and despotic rule. Critics have often argued that Inca
hegemony could not have been based on water control.6 However,
as I argue, water control was indeed fundamental to the Empires
hegemony, but Wittfogel neglected to analyze the intimate links
between physical-natural and metaphysical-cosmological water
control domains as crucial for strategizing towards hegemony.
Section 5 analyzes how Inca-imperialist hydrocosmological cycle
6
Many have refuted Wittfogels thesis (for an overview, see Boelens, 2008),
because of (a) its ecological determinism, (b) the hydro-political models static nature,
(c) lack of archeological evidence, (d) stating that social structure determines water
control and not vice versa, or (e) showing that most Andean systems were too small
and localized to account for State despotism. Chang (1983), for other empires, also
used metaphysical arguments to refute Wittfogels hypothesis, but I challenge his
reasoning for the Andean case because he misrecognizes water control power and
mechanically separates water control from metaphysics.

R. Boelens / Geoforum 57 (2014) 234247

construction served to encapsulate alternative origin myths, reduce

diversity of alternative hydropolitical cults and, this way, develop
a new socionatural world order (cf. Patterson, 1997).
In rather similar ways, as Section 6 illustrates, diverse contemporary Andean hydrocultural frameworks are currently being
forced to unify into one hegemonic expert-modernist representation of the hydrosocial cycle, naturalizing policy models as scientic and reinforcing elite and State control over local resources
(Boelens and Vos, 2012).7 In water-power-identity battles in the
Andean region, dominant control-externalizing agents deploy subtle
techniques of governance and modern myths strategizing towards a
one-water-world order, trying to win the hearts and minds of those
subject to their power (Lukes, 2005), in order to strategically replace
local conceptualizations (Boelens, 2009).
Yet, such powers are not beyond the inuence of those subject
to them. The latters efforts often aim for control-localization (cf.
Ploeg, 2008; Scott, 1990), challenging, at once, material water
expropriation and normalization of water views, rights and norms,
thus refusing to accept selfhood as a mechanical reection of prevailing power relations. Here again, hydrosocial patterning projects
are key. Hydrosocial cycles, constituted as local-national-global
hybrids, focus us on their political use and convenience either for
intervening agents and supralocal rulers or for user groups struggling for livelihood defense and rule-making autonomy. Therefore,
commensuration of particular hydrosocial cycles is closely connected to the politics of truth and issues of legitimate water knowledge and practices. In Andean water control, imperial command,
scientic research and policy-making, these battles produce permanent, clear results, separating legitimate forms of water knowledge, rights and access from illegitimate forms.
3. Probing for water in the Earths veins: diverging truths about
the nature of water and water problems
My rst contact with water control and Quechua peasant communities in the Andes was in the remote Peruvian district of Mollepata, Cusco, in 1988. At that time, the area was dry, with irregular
rainfall, making peasant families life extremely difcult since fundamentally they all lived from subsistence agriculture, while herding cattle in the puna the highest zone.
Early in the 20th century, the local landlord ordered the ve
(semi)serf communities belonging to his hacienda to build two
canals: La Estrella and Marcahuasi (Figs. 1 and 2). The haciendas mayordomos (foremen) made the comuneros (community
members) work in compulsory faena workdays.8 Canal construction
yielded many casualties when cutting through steep mountain rock
and building intake structures on snow-covered highland pampas
(altitude 4000 m), at the foot of 6271-m Mt. Salkantay. Communities
had to deliver free labor by shifts to construct the canals and irrigate
hacienda sugarcane elds. The canals brought some 500 ha of hacienda elds under irrigation. In exchange for their labor and expropriating most of their agricultural output, peasant families were
allowed a limited amount of water, at night only, to irrigate their
smallholdings.
During Land Reform (starting in 1968), the hacienda was subdivided among comuneros (holding individual titles within community property) and third parties. Because of the sudden
organizational vacuum and lack of authority the hacienda had
maintained a large organization to operate and repair the canal
systems the irrigation system fell into disuse and broke down.
In 1984, some 200 families from the communities took the initia7
For comparative analysis, see e.g. Swyngedouw (2007, forthcoming) on Spain;
Swyngedouw (2004) and Boelens (2008) on Ecuador; Budds (2009) on Chile;
Ferguson (1990) on Lesotho; Worster (1985) and Fiege (1999) on the USA.
8
Faenas (by faenantes) are collective working parties.

237

tive to rehabilitate the old 26-km-long La Estrella canal. They

approached Peruvian NGO CADEP (Centro Andino de Educacin y
Promocin) to support their difcult project. The challenge was to
build an inter-community organization capable of managing the
canal system, with democratic structures unlike prevailing patron-servant relationships. Communities wanted to bring 200 ha
under irrigation in a rst 5-year phase, and another 200 ha in a second phase.
Rehabilitating the ancient canal, however, faced many drawbacks. One major obstacle was in Balcompata, 2 km from the main
intake, near the mountain peaks of Umantay and Salkantay.
Throughout the rehabilitation effort, this 200-m stretch, crossing
a steep slope of gravel and stones, repeatedly collapsed. This place
could be reached only by some eight hours walk from the communities. For years, many faena days were spent to overcome this
huge problem, loading building materials on donkeys or simply
on the faenantes shoulders. Each time, right after reconstructing
collapsed canal sections at Balcompata, new landslides would
destroy it again.
When inquiring about this water problem,9 later when villagers
and technicians could reect on it, I heard several explanations:
Technicians explained that the Balcompata problem was technical and biophysical. The canal slope was steep and very unstable,
without rock or vegetation. The slightest ltration of water would
undermine the mountainside. On top of that, the canals hydraulic
and (concrete) structural design was not suited for that trajectory:
too heavy, not exible, and susceptible to dangers of ltration and
undermining. The comuneros agreed with this explanation, and
mentioned similar technical bottlenecks as root causes.
However, the NGOs social promoters emphasized other aspects
of the water problem. Beyond just technical issues, it was also
socio-legal and organizational-managerial. Rules were established,
but the actual concretization of water rights and organizational
framework lagged behind. Communities still lacked strong organization, with transparent leadership, clear roles and responsibilities.
Organizational capacity-building had just started, to ll the vacuum after the hacienda water-use organization breakdown. Also
here, comuneros agreed with this problem assessment, since they
had analyzed similar problems.
Political scientists related to the NGO did not deny the technical
and organizational problems contributing to the water problem,
but stressed that it was more than just internal management
affairs. The Balcompata case actually, the whole canal rehabilitation effort should be placed in its political and economic perspective. Since time immemorial, elites have abused local communities,
expropriating surplus labor and agricultural production. Although
haciendas were largely expropriated during land reform, parts
were still unaffected. Moreover, well-to-do classes from outside
the area obtained large land entitlements to the elds formerly
irrigated by the La Estrella canal affecting especially the Auquiorcco, Huamanpata and Marcahuasi communities (see Fig. 1).
La Estrella just like the other canals once rehabilitated, would
irrigate community members elds but also these ancient hacienda elds. Still prevailing practices of power abuse, clientelism,
and fear that their newly created water rights might ultimately
be expropriated by force and legal manipulations after delivering
thousands of faena days, were explained as basic reasons for not
overcoming the water problem to actually complete the canal.

9
Rather than giving a linear description of the irrigation development projects in
Mollepata since the 1970s (see, e.g. Hendriks, 1988; Boelens, 2008), here I focus on
Mollepatas Balcompata (and later Canal Nuevo) cases as diagnostic events events
that express more than the incidence itself; as episodes they form part of and
articulate larger socio-economic and culturalpolitical practices and ongoing historical processes (Moore, 1987).

238

R. Boelens / Geoforum 57 (2014) 234247

Fig. 1. Map of Mollepata, Cusco, Peru. Source: own elaboration.

Again, several peasant leaders were asked about this perspective,

and recognized the validity of such an explanation.
Although comuneros basically agreed with such explanations,
some said these only partially described the nature of water
control in the region. Since starting the rehabilitation effort,
faenantes working in the high altitudes of Pampa Soray and staying
overnight at the workers camp at the foot of Mt. Salkantay had discussed the need for a human sacrice to the mountain god, the
Apu,10 to appease him, ask permission to work on his body and release his blood as irrigation water just as their ancestors were said
to have done. Several nights, comuneros and CADEP personnel had
arrived at the campsite in panic, having seen ghosts in Balcompata
(see also Hendriks, 1988). Some felt a basic component of the water
problem was the distorted relationship between comuneros and
deities, particularly Pachamama (Mother Earth) and the Apus of
Mt. Salkantay and Umantay. In the past, local comuneros would
gather for tribute to Apu Salkantay every time water became scarce
or when probing for water in the Earths veins, but this tradition had
been lost. Therefore, they were punished with water scarcity and
simultaneously too much water, the heavy cloudburst
10
Apu or Wamani: main protector of the local territory. They engender and
control water sources, and as such, life itself.

and rain- and hailstorms impeding the work, causing landslides

and breaking the canal. As in former days, when building the La
Estrella canal (19141931), things went wrong: that job took almost
20 years and because the landlord did not respect the mountain gods
it was only after many people had died during construction that the
Apu sent his water. Since that time, it has been perceived that the
Apu has rejected all human construction efforts to rehabilitate or build
new canals and he complains every time people hurt him without asking permission. He becomes angry and violent when they scratch his
skin and try to open his body. The Hatun Pago, the ultimate sacrice,
a human being, might content him and calm his anger.
Nevertheless, nally, in 1987, the Balcompata water problem
was solved. Instead of the open canal, the stretch was covered with
slabs of reinforced concrete. They also carefully lined and protected
the canal. For the rst time since the hacienda regime, water could
now pass smoothly through the stubborn zone. In 1988, water
reached the communities irrigation zones and fullled the longcherished dreams of hundreds of families.
Basically, the NGOs technicians working on the rehabilitation
project attributed this success to adapted technology. The slabs
were strong and could easily withstand rock avalanches. The lined
canal did not allow any leakage that might weaken the subsoil.
Canal protection included tree planting and natural vegetation

R. Boelens / Geoforum 57 (2014) 234247

239

Fig. 2. Canal systems in Mollepata. Source: Hendriks (1988).

strips along contour lines, and building interception ditches, drainage canals, and canal support walls.
In turn, their colleagues, the social promoters, accepted this
technical truth but added another: the collaborative work structure was nally in place, with clear objectives and operational rules
and responsibilities within the community and intercommunity
organizations. Capacity building and collective discussions had improved management capacity enormously. The intercommunity
organizations overall rights framework increasingly functioned
as the reference system for decision-making, and each community
started making its own internal regulations for future water
management.
The above explanations were acknowledged by those persons
with political science schooling, supporting the work of CADEP
from Cusco. They, however, emphasized that the power of the
State, the local landlord and the elites had further diminished in
the area. Communities were conscious of the fact that their labor

would no longer just be expropriated, had growing countervailing

force and were even replacing municipal authorities. Now, they
worked for themselves and could harvest their investments to gain
water rights.
In short, the various groups not only analyzed the water problem according to their own background and perspectives but also
placed the water solution in their own truth domain. And the
comuneros? They tended to agree with all of them, recognizing
however that water and water management is fundamentally a
multi-layered issue, and such domains cannot be separated in
actual practice. But they felt there was more under the mighty
Sun, and they added a supernatural or metaphysical explanation
to the foregoing clarications.
In their account, shortly before the problem was solved, the Apu
again showed his power and anger to the Mollepata faenantes. An
enormous landslide and stone avalanche occurred when reconstructing the canal at Balcompata. This time, the canal stretch

240

R. Boelens / Geoforum 57 (2014) 234247

collapsed again, and a peasant leader was buried under the debris.
Together, the laborers managed to dig him out and, although more
dead than alive, he was released from the Apus embrace and survived. They interpreted that the Apu did not demand a permanent
offering, but settled for the temporary human sacrice since, from
that day onwards, the stretch did not pose further problems; the
Apu released his blood, sending water to the irrigators
communities.
4. Domains of water knowledge and control
It is not my aim to verify these divergent Balcompata truth contents. Rather, I am interested in understanding how such claims to
truth are being used in practice, how they shape perceptions of
reality and also dene socionatural reality itself: how they form
part of particular hydrosocial cycle constructs and truth-knowledge-power triangles (cf. Foucault, 1975, 1980). In Balcompata,
actors denitions of knowledge and truth diverged according to
their social/disciplinary backgrounds. Nevertheless, the farmers
explanations illustrate that such domains of knowledge are not
necessarily mutually exclusive. And several truths (complementary, diverging or even contradictory) may come together and
relate as different aspects of the same phenomenon. Farmers
tended to see the water problem explanation in ve (not exhaustive) domains: technical-biophysical, organizational, socio-legal,
political-economic and metaphysical.
Depending on the analytical vantage point, different thematic
areas are highlighted and different perspectives used to understand the same, complex object, i.e. Andean water control, water
territories, or hydrosocial networks. The domains present diverse,
distinct but interlinked thematic elds of knowledge, conceptualization and interpretation, generating and applying particular focuses
toward imagining the real.11
The domains contents and their mutual interaction and composition as a framework to explain, intervene in, and (re)create socionature (such as hydrosocial cycles), is shaped by regimes of
practice and representation and the power they embody: from particular scientic disciplines to diverse farmers knowledge systems,
from water policy-truth regimes to localglobal chains of production and accumulation, for instance. Dening and categorizing
these domains contents and interconnections, based on particular
concepts and theories, is much more than a scholarly striving for
clarity or intellectual rigor; as mentioned earlier, it is also a deeply
political, ideological matter (Zwarteveen and Boelens, 2011). The
choice and classication of concepts and their interrelations do
not represent the nature of water control of (e.g., Mollepata) water
users perceptions but my own intentions to tame the wild profusion of existing things (cf. Foucault, 1966). They aim to serve my
analytical purposes, sprout from my situated knowledge (Haraway,
1991), and reect my background, interests, analytical skills and
eld experiences.
In modern science, commonly, these water domains have been
dominated (demarcated and encroached) by scientic disciplines
that separated them to produce water truth claims backed by the
disciplines own system of valuing, norms of correctness, and
methods of categorization, comparison and judgment. However,
not just the categories or concepts make alternative analysis difcult but also the boundaries that divide categories and obscure
trans-boundary linkages. For example, transdisciplinary conceptualization of water rights, contrary to their mainstream relegation
11
Compare Geertz, who stated that the law side of things is part of a distinctive
manner of imagining the real (1983:173). I conceptualize the notion of domain as a
thematic eld with particular codes, meanings, techniques and focuses. The domains
mutually constitute each other, they represent different abstractions from and
explanations of water control reality.

to the realm of law and regulation, would trace the concept as

encompassing multiple domains.12 Water rights become manifest,
simultaneously, in water infrastructure and technology, normative
arrangements, and organizational frameworks to operate water control systems, while the cultural and political domains of water rights
signicantly address the question of legitimacy regarding actors
inclusion in and exclusion from water use and decision-making
processes.
Here, the cultural-metaphysical domain (Greek: meta + physika = the works beyond the physical works)13 particularly focuses
on how rules, rights and duties attached to water ows and hydraulic infrastructure are closely linked to systems of meanings, symbols
and values, involving institutions and networks of human, nonhuman and supernatural actors and powers that inuence water
control. This domain often erroneously associated with only social
and not with, for example, technology is essentialized in romantic
representations and contested or ignored in natural sciences; for not
unraveling objective truths that can be veried or discounted. But,
as in Balcompata, the issue is not about whether water listens only
to modern knowledge or also to supernatural guidance. As long as,
in particular settings, it is an important reference frame for peoples
behavior, metaphysical institutions will crucially inuence actual
water control. In regions as Mollepata, water rituals and beliefs produce social reality, in terms of actually orienting human water use
practices (see, e.g. Gelles, 2000; Vera, 2011). Discourses enveloping
this domain, beyond just narratives, comprise power-knowledge
regimes constituting sets of precise rules, procedures, techniques
and practices. Lvi-Strauss observed that the logic used in mythical
thought is as rigorous as that of modern science, [. . .] the difference
lies not in the quality of the intellectual process, but in the nature of
the things to which it is applied (Lvi-Strauss, 1955: 66).
The Balcompata event expresses how water control necessarily
requires transdisciplinary understanding, interweaving multiple
domains some of which are commonly forgotten in scientic
analysis. As I have shown and will deepen (in Sections 5.3 and 6),
it also expresses how studying these domains separately may lead
to biased, romanticized and often depoliticized understanding. To
comprehend the Balcompata anecdote, in the next section I travel
through the complexities of a scattered cosmology, placing the anecdote in a local cosmological perspective; and then critically analyze
the role of power linking metaphysical and political domains.
5. The hydro-cosmological cycle and ancient imperial efforts to
colonize water truths
5.1. Amaru: waters constructive and destructive powers
In many communities water rites and myths play a fundamental role in the annual agricultural cycle. In several myths, water
appears as a deity (huaca).14 Rites involve praying for rain during
harsh drought periods.15 Many myths and festivals relate to
12
With transdisciplinarity I refer to a holistic approach that crosses the boundaries
of scientic disciplines while also incorporating vernacular, grassroots frames of
knowledge and representation.
13
Websters (1994:630). Also: supernatural, or: concerned with the ultimate
causes and underlying nature of things. Coward and Levine: Cultural ideas are often
central to everyday behavior in system operation (water sharing, mobilizing labor,
etc.) giving meaning to these activities beyond material consequences. Irrigation
rituals can highlight structural principles and underlying values that energize these
systems (1987:20).
14
Huacas refer to divinities and sacred places, and often relate to water sources.
15
Several rites aim to get the water angry so it will respond by raining. Some
communities make the water ght for this. Water from different sources is mixed in
one river or lake; the reaction the fury of water from land and sky can be violent.
In other rites they exchange Apus male water from mountain springs with
Pachamamas female water from lakes on the plains (see Arguedas, 1975; Cceres,
2002; Gerbrandy, 1998).

R. Boelens / Geoforum 57 (2014) 234247

irrigation. For example, water festivals (unu raymi) organize canal

cleaning and summon irrigators to assemblies to elect their water
authorities and distribute and evaluate tasks. For irrigation systems
to operate properly, it is common for communities to pay the local
Apu and Pachamama to start the irrigation season. Payments, often
near the water source or intake, usually include an offering of coca
leaves, wild fruits, liquor, sometimes with a guinea pig or bird. In
water myths and rites, different animals play major roles. For example, frogs (and previously black llamas) invoke rain. The animal most
associated with water in day-to-day stories may be the snake (amaru
in Quechua).
In Mollepata, mythical tradition is very fragmented and inexplicit, since most communities there are not long-standing. Even
so, myths and legends are quite common, lively and full of energy,
especially those involving water. They are not dealt with as complete mythical systems but as incidental events, as fragments that
seem not to t into a broader world-view. Metaphysical control often emerges suddenly, in times of despair and critical changes
such as droughts, landslides and violent rainstorms. At these
moments, communities turn inwards, to sources lodged within
their innermost being, where hidden patterns of identication
and communication, also with ancestors and deities, play important roles. Mollepata residents themselves refer to these events
as just superstition. However, these splinters of local mythology
do form part of irrigators actions.
One day, comuneros had found a snake in the Pampa Soray meadow, where the intake is located near Mt. Umantay and Mt.
Salkantay. Instead of killing the snake, they caught it and pulled
it through the whole canal, from the intake where the thawed
snowcap water ows in, all the way to the end of the canal, over
25 kilometers. They explained this by saying that, for water to
be plentiful once the rehabilitation work was nished, it was
important to drag the snake through the canal rst, so that
the water will follow the same route.

On another occasion, when La Estrella was already operational,

the canal dried up. A farmers inspection revealed a snake in the canal. Usually, when they nd snakes, they kill them or throw rocks
so they will go away. However, they carefully removed this snake
from the canal and let it take off into the brush, so the watercourse
would not be harmed.
In Andean mythology, amaru, the snake, represents water.16
Amarus waters can bring prosperity or catastrophes:
Snakes appear benecially, for instance, when water runs in an
orderly manner in irrigation canals meandering like a serpent.
This brings water down from the mountains, where the Apus live,
to fertilize Pachamama, reinforcing bonds among humans, deities
and nature.17
On other occasions, snakes show their dangerous side and punish people. Punishment involves disasters: oods, landslides, erosion and lost crops from saturated elds. Or snakes deny the
water so sorely needed to farm and survive. For example, Cceres
presents the story told by Musuq Llaqta comuneros in Peru, whose
irrigation aqueduct is out of order: One day, the snake was guiding the water along the aqueduct. Just before it reached the other
bank, someone spotted it and threw a big stone, killing the snake.
Since then, the water has never wanted to come back; it ran totally
dry (2002: 92). One can hear many similar stories (e.g., Gelles,
16
Chronicler Guamn Poma (1992(1615):243) says about amaru that the Incas
worshipped him as the powerful lord Snake capac apo amaro. To this day, water
mayors traditional staffs have snake-head symbols.
17
E.g., Valderrama and Escalante recorded the myth of Maska, Paruro (Peru):
wherever the [Incas] golden snake moved, instantaneously, a canal opened up, with
abundant water (2000:279).

241

2000; Vera, 2011; Zuidema, 1990), particularly when related to

abandoned Inca canals.
How are these widespread local narratives about amaru,
benevolent and destructive water force, related to the Balcompata
story? How to interpret the Mollepata comuneros reaction? Let us
have a closer look at the metaphysical explanation of water ows
in Andean cosmology.

5.2. The hydrological bond among divine, human and natural

communities
Water in communities traditional visions is commonly
controlled by Apus. Historically, ethnic identity has been strongly
related to worshipping a local mountain deity governing the territorys natural and supernatural resources.18 Most traditional worldviews share the strong bond among Pachamama, the local Apu, the
territory, its local kinship groups and the role of water uniting them
all. As such, they seem to form part of a pan-Andean representation
and worship that gives power and agency to mountains, the Earth,
and other elements of sacred geography (Boelens and Gelles,
2005). As in Mollepata, rags and remnants become manifest even today, although not as a complete, imperative order of things. In what
follows I have composed an outline,19 highlighting waters fundamental role:
Water is the main element of the Andean cosmos: the principle
that explains movement, circulation and forces of change, the
essence of life itself (Sherbondy, 1998: 212). Andean civilizations
have often based their cosmologies on empirically existing hydrological phenomena (Gelles, 2000; Zuidema, 1990). Mamacocha, the
Mother Lake (i.e. Ocean), as the womb of the universe, envelops the
world, links all waters together and they all ow back to Mothers
lap. Directly related to Mamacocha and the worlds waters is Ticsi
Viracocha, Andean creator deity (vital force and animating principle), who emerged out of Lake Titicaca. Viracocha engendered
the cosmos, and created three interrelated worlds and its driving
forces:
The spatial structure of the cosmos is divided into Kay Pacha
(this world), Hanaq Pacha (the world-above) and Ukhu Pacha (the
world-below) (see Fig. 3). Kay Pacha comprises three communities of living beings: nature (sallqa), humans (runas) and deities
(huacas). These communities wish to achieve a complementary,
reciprocal relationship (ayni). With other deities, water inhabits
Kay Pacha as a living being: as the Amaru snake and deity. Linking
Pachamama and Apus, Amaru symbolizes life and fertility. These
three are considered protectors of human and nature communities,
provided that humans maintain the reciprocal ayni relationship.
For example, when people take care of Pachamama, she repays this
through plentiful harvests. And if communities show their respect
to the Apu, he sends his water to use. Amaru must also be
respected, expressed in proper husbandry of water.
Human beings, thus, have a socionatural relationship of dependence on water, mountains and Earth. Herein, water owing
through underground rivers is the bloodstream of Pachamama
and Apus. When it ows through surface canals and rivers, it is
associated with semen. Next, rain represents teardrops from
heaven. Metaphors of blood, semen and tears show how water is
a vital liquid, ordering and unifying the cosmological body
(Arguedas, 1956; Sherbondy, 1998).
The cyclical symbolic process of the cosmos involves cycles of
both time and human, natural and divine life, while the hydrologi18
For comparative analysis, on water as a source of identication and structuring
bonds among local peoples, territory, sacred nature and cosmology in other regions/
continents, see e.g. the cases in UNESCO (2006).
19
For a detailed overview and other literature sources, see Boelens (2008).

242

R. Boelens / Geoforum 57 (2014) 234247

INTI
MAYU

A
AN

CH
PA

YACANA
APUS
(BIRTH &
REGENERATION)

PACARINA

KUYCHI
AMARU

(MATURITY &
RIPENING)

HAacas)
C
Aas, hu
P
Y , run
KAsallqa

PACHAMAMA
(DEATH)

H
UK
MAMACOCHA

CH
A
P

Vital force and

engendering principle:
Ticsi Viracocha

Principles of cosmic,
natural and human ordering:
(a.o.) ayni, tinku, pachakuti

canal intake
rainbow
mountain lakes & springs

irrigation systems and plots

(super)surface flows
subsurface flowes

Fig. 3. The Andean hydrocosmological cycle and worldview. Source: own elaboration

cal cycle plays an ordering role.20 Waters route symbolizes the

route of life through three worlds. Through ritual offerings and reciprocal action, humans must sustain balance and cyclic ows in the
hydrocosmological cycle. The cyclical order connects the scales of
time to space: particular places are associated with certain phases
of life:
 The oceans water, as a cosmic sea, surrounds and underlies the
Earth, and after owing through underground rivers, penetrates
the Earths surface from below. Then water appears on the
surface, in highland lakes, as springs (puquios) or as outows
from sacred caves (Sherbondy, 1998). The origin of time and life,
20

E.g., vila (1987)(1598), Cceres (2002), Guamn Poma (1992(1615)), and

Zuidema (1990).

pacarina (awakening, birth) is associated with lakes and springs

on mountains, summits and snowcaps (pacarisca), where the
Apus stay. This is the place of both birth and regeneration. Apus
control the water cycle by freezing the liquid of life in their iceand snow-caps and release it when they decide.
 Through irrigation canals and rivers, serpentine-shaped and
guided by Amaru, water reaches Pachamamas lands and fertilizes them.21 This is when life is planted and sprouts.
 Pachamama gets nature and crops to grow, ourish and ripen,
according to the respect she has been shown. Life ripens in
Kay Pacha.
21
In contemporary communities, many weddings are scheduled at the start of the
irrigation season (marriage between Apu and Pachamama, and fertility celebration)
and the Water Festival.

R. Boelens / Geoforum 57 (2014) 234247

 After ripening and harvest, death comes in the lowest part of

Kay Pacha: water dies in the desert, trickles directly underground, or is lost in Mamacochas sea. There, water continues
its underground pathway, in Ukhu Pacha, the netherworld,
where it often is symbolized by a bull (Puka Turu) rather than
a snake.22 After a long trip through underground rivers the
Earths veins (Yawar Mayu, River of Blood) water reappears
again in this world (Cceres, 2002; Sherbondy, 1998).
Apart from subterranean ows, water also circulates through
the sky, transported by the rainbow (Kuychi) and celestial river
Mayu (the Milky Way). In this world-above, Hanaq Pacha, water
is symbolized by Yacana, the black llama, a prominent constellation. Yacana drinks form Mamacocha and strolls along rainbows
and the heavenly river. Like snakes in Kay Pacha, this mythical llama guides water through the world-above (e.g., vila,
(1987(1598)); Zuidema, 1990). Clouds and rainfall, the llamas
teardrops, bring water back to the Earth, complementing waters
that Pachamama needs for nature and agriculture, or feeding Apus
sources. From here, again, with water, life, is reborn and Apus direct water down to fertilize Pachamama.
Waters different cosmological pathways form a socionatural
network traveled by gods and ancestors, engendering the human
world23 (Sherbondy, 1982, 1998. Cf. Arguedas, 1956). Ancestors, like
major bodies of the cosmos, were created in local water sources,
especially in mountain lakes. According to the particular worldview
of the Inca imperial regime, the universes most sacred elements
were created in Lake Titicaca.
For the Incas ... all peoples were created in Lake Titicaca where
Viracocha endowed them with the symbols of their ethnicity...
Viracocha submerged these ancestors in the Lake and sent them
along underground rivers to the points where they emerged to
the Earths surface. Interior rivers were, and are, conceptualized
as Pachamamas blood veins. Throughout the Andes other high
lakes were the origins of other communities . . . The ancestors
emerged at points where there were springs, lakes, rivers, caves,
mountains or large trees. All these were considered points of
communication with Earths interior waterways . . . Mountains
have snowcaps that form streams and rivers, but there are also
many mountains considered water sources that show no empirical evidence of being water sources. It is a widespread belief
that large subterranean lakes lie under mountains and that
these are the sources of waters that ow from the general direction of these mountains (Sherbondy, 1998: 212).
Local Apus, powerful mountain deities, control water and thus
lifes origin and continuation. This local lord, personication of
the territorys most important mountain, controls the central
source and the surface and subterranean hydraulic network originating there: all local springs, secondary lakes and streams in the
territory. Historically, wherever water left the underground network and surfaced, local humans and animals saw the Sun for
the rst time and communities were established.24 Ancestors traveled underground water routes both ways: when they died they sank
into bodies of water and returned to their source of origin (Arguedas,
1956; Sherbondy, 1982). Such water territories, combining hydrological, social, biophysical and cosmological representations, express
22
Arguedas (1956) recorded myths about winged serpents, Amarus, huge monsters
living in deep lakes, representing water, who were gradually replaced by black bulls
after Spanish Conquest.
23
After creating the universe, Viracocha disappeared into the Ocean, and deities
(Sun, Moon, Pachamama and Apus, and territory-bound divinities) continued to play
active roles (see, e.g., Garcilaso de la Vega, 2000; Rostworowski, 1998).
24
In many communities, water access and property rights nd legitimization in
these mythical-historical roots ancestors emerged from the sources and collectives
hold these waters and irrigated lands as a sacred trust (Sherbondy 1998:213).

243

powerful notions of origin and identity (Boelens and Gelles, 2005).

In the Balcompata case, scattered pieces of this hydrosocial puzzle
dynamically refer back to ancient hydrocosmological cycle
perspectives.
Parallel with perception of agriculture as a cyclical, Andean
worldviews also perceive time as cyclical, or rather spiral, and
not linear.25 Everything returns periodically but with major qualitative leaps forward. These leaps happen because of continuously
renewed experiences in the human-nature-deity network interaction. However, there are also violent breaks, expressed in cataclysms
(earthquakes, landslides and oods). They happen when the cosmic
cycle is under great stress, generally when humans forget their reciprocal obligations. To re-establish the cyclical/spiral hydro-cosmology, these catastrophes emerge to shake up Kay Pacha. Natures
forces, cosmological energies and human conicts26 join to re-establish balance. This cosmic re-ordering is represented by the Andean
concept of Pachakuti.
Pachakuti releases the built-up tension through telluric and
hydrological forces. This is, when Amaru, the water-serpent, shows
its other face, revealing its violent, poisonous side: water becomes
a powerful means of punishment. Amarus destructive waters
enable Pachakuti, conveying the discontent that the local Apu or
Pachamama feel towards people, as in the Balcompata case.
Pachakuti (i.e., returning the Earth) is a most fundamental
concept allowing re-composition of human-nature society. To reestablish the hydro-cosmological cycle and ask for Amarus
destructive forces to revert back into benevolent water ows,
humans make small offerings. But in exceptional cases, human sacrices were needed to console the deities. Currently, in situations
of extreme crisis, remnants of this (in Inca-times widespread) tradition come to the surface.
We see, then, that the above Andean principles, symbols and
metaphors (Pachamama, Apus, Amaru, ayni, Earths veins, Pachakuti,
etc.), placed within the hydro-cosmological worldview, seem to
give an explanation of local views coherence during the Balcompata incident. All metaphysical domain elements important in
the Balcompata water problem may easily be situated in the above
hydro-cosmological framework. It presents a possible explanation
of how local comuneros would trace their origin to territorial deities and water sources, building their hydraulic identity. Below, I
examine this assumption.

5.3. The colonization of truth about creation

Although the foregoing explanation attracts many scholars and
activists searching for an original, pan-Andean worldview, based
on human-nature harmony, radically different from the Western
predatory relationship with Nature, few contemporary communities would consider themselves represented by such discourse
alone; except for when they strategically use pan-Andean truth
regimes as counter-discursive arms (e.g., against water
privatization policies). Current practices and rituals cannot be
explained solely by pre-colonial frameworks. Also, beyond accuracy, essentialized visions may be dangerous, especially for groups
that lack power in presumed complementary, harmony-oriented
societies. As Mollepata farmers argued, water control cannot be
explained from just one of its constituting domains. Linking
metaphysical domain interpretations with, for example, a
25
The spiral cycle of time is concentric with the spiral cycle of life (birth, growth,
blossoming, death and rebirth), the spiral cycle of agricultural work (plowing, planting,
sprouting, ripening and harvesting), the hydrological cycle and the spiral cyclical
cosmological order.
26
Expressed in the tinku concept, the conict-ridden encounter between complementary components comprising the dual structure of Andean society and cosmology,
to re-establish balance.

244

R. Boelens / Geoforum 57 (2014) 234247

cultural-political domain view, offers other insights. Beyond the

question of truthfulness of pan-Andean water beliefs, I examine
how they express foucauldian truth governmentality and legitimize dominant views and power structures, deployed by agents
who use local truths to create hydro-social-political reality that
strengthens their political control over water and humans.
Manipulating the metaphysical domain is often portrayed by
Andean cosmology activists as a Western (neo)colonial phenomenon, but indigenous rulers also were great masters in metaphysical discourse strategies. Particularly the Incan empire knew that
appropriating local beliefs also meant appropriating the powers
attributed to deities. Since these beliefs orient local, water-related
human behavior, inuencing water metaphysical beliefs steers
societal practice (e.g., socio-organizational structures, technology
development, resource distribution), consequently, conquest of
local water truths was central to installing Inca religious supremacy and political-military power.
Local hydrosocial practices and beliefs were subject to imperial
identication and normalization politics aiming to foster subjugation combining the art of government according to truth and
according to the rationality of sovereign power (Foucault,
2008: 313). The diverse pre-Inca mountain cults, relating to local
water sources and territorial kinship roots, were symbolically
appropriated, unied and incorporated into ofcial State religion.
The Empire also installed a widespread State violence system
based on human sacrices. It used the most local and primordial
of religious beliefs for its own purposes, extending its legitimacy
and hegemony throughout the Andes (Gelles, 2000: 80). Simultaneously, in their scalar politics, local Inca deities were elevated
(up-scaled) to the status of primary gods to become world powers, legitimizing their mastering of the universe.
So, too, with water itself. In their cultural-political representation, Inca conquerors established hydrological linkages empirically existing or not between all Andean water sources and
Lake Titicaca, which it claimed as source of imperial origin. Hereby,
they strategically used beliefs that local ancestors originated from
local water sources (Arguedas, 1956; Sherbondy, 1998). Lake Titicaca, militarily and politically controlled by the Incas, was hydropolitically constructed as center of the universe,27 feeding through
subterranean rivers all local mountain lakes, springs and rivers:
these were made secondary places of creation in the worlds hierarchy. Through origin politics, the Inca Empire made itself the centerpoint of the hydro-cosmological-political order.
Section two referred to Wittfogels hydraulic despotism
hypothesis (1957) that, interestingly, pays important attention to
religion and priest-elites role to dominate societies based on
large-scale irrigation infrastructure development. However, he
(and even his critics) crucially missed the issue of the politics of
patterning the hydro-cosmological cycle as a strategic effort to
establish hegemonic rule (see Boelens, 2008). The Incas strategized
to create a powerful convenient history and an appropriate
hydrosocial cycle as truth governmentaliy techniques to incorporate and subject humans and non-humans in their socionatural
network reality. While the military conquest of neighboring tribes
water sources served direct material-economic purposes, their
ideological conquest served to legitimize occupation, centralized
hegemonic power and surplus extraction in the long term (Boelens
and Gelles, 2005).
Indeed, the effort to colonize Ultimate Truth creation of the
universe with particular human-natural-divine connections
appeared as a forceful governance strategy for Andean dominant
classes. The importance of water control in these processes to dis27

E.g., the legend of Inca ancestors Manco Capac and his brothers and sisters, who
after emerging from Lake Titicaca, established the worlds capital, Cusco: navel of the
universe (Guamn Poma 1992(1615)).

empower the dominated is remarkable. Obviously, subsequent

inuences of colonial, republican and contemporary cultural politics have added to interaction among current beliefs and water
ow patterning in Mollepata.28 But even when limiting this analysis
to pre-Conquest times, it clearly shows the need to place hydrosocial
cycle presentations in their multi-domain context to understand
their workings as reality-making powers.
6. The order of things: the politics of composing hydrosocial
cycles
Water metaphysics is exploited as an instrument par excellence to reinforce disciplinary power strategies. As Levi-Strauss
observed, this nds continuation through politics in modern
societies (1963: 204): there is a strong resemblance between
ancient mythical thinking and current political discourses. Inca
nobles, Spanish colonizers, Catholic priests, landlords, and the
latest policy-makers have all known the governance game, using
prevailing Andean practices and worldviews for their own
purposes. These days, through agribusiness, forest logging or
mining discourses, new myths and discourses are built on existing ones, envisioning to selectively appropriate Andean symbolic
and organizational patterns, and re-interpreting them to alter
water cycles and access local labor and natural resources. For
instance, in the name of market environmentalism and the
greening of capitalism (e.g., Bakker, 2010a,b; McCarthy and
Prudham, 2004), mechanisms are invented to marketize environmental services that presumably build on existing Andean
collaborative traditions (often, however, shaping new commons
enclosures; see Boelens et al., 2013). Or the myth of popular
capitalism (De Soto, 2000) is promoted, claiming to recognize
Andean rights plurality while, in fact, forcefully incorporating
local user collectives, identities and resources into the world
market water network (cf. Achterhuis et al., 2010; Boelens,
2009). These modern myths and discourses adding disciplinary
and neoliberal governmentalities to ancient power games aim
to shape hydrosocial cycles and mask political choices by claiming scientic objectivity. Mollepata, again, is full of governance
efforts to legitimize the profound re-patterning and re-allocation
of water ows as natural, rational, inevitable phenomena.
An illustration among many is the multimillion dollar hydraulic
mega-project Canal Nuevo (Fig. 2); started in the 1970s and rehabilitated ever since. A coalition of Mollepata elites, national government, foreign construction companies and international
nancing institutes, through a PublicPrivate Partnership, aimed
to redirect water ows according to criteria of efciency and productivity and bring modern technology and progress to remote
areas. State legal force neatly combined with (neoliberal)
governance by manipulating external incentive structures and
moralizing efforts to discipline and (self)correct water users.
Modern cultural politics framed the water user identity issue in
terms of beneciaries of development whereby comuneros would
become responsible water service clients and progressive
producers for the international market new moral schemes of
cultural-political belonging. At the technical and legal design table,
the Canal Nuevo governance rationally linked individuals and local
water society to national and global scales of governance. In fact,
however, the highland comuneros were included in the design as
laborers and (physical and moral) collaborators by providing
access to their territory, but their elds were excluded from the
new hydrosocial patterning benets: their waters would ow to
28
It goes beyond the aim of this paper to present a full or linear history of Andean
cultural politics, acculturation and its relation to water struggles and counteridentication movements; the paper concentrates on illustrations and diagnostic
events.

R. Boelens / Geoforum 57 (2014) 234247

large productive farms: the downstream valleys capitalist enterprises. From there, following neoliberal rationality, Mollepata
water ows would transform into export commodities and,
embedded in agro-food chains as virtual water, link to the transnational hydrosocial cycle, driven by global market forces (see
Allan, 2003; Boelens and Vos, 2012).
Obviously, detailed patterning of humans and non-humans,
institutions, management scales and water practices, through governance techniques converging into a predictable hydrosocial control and governance system (hydro-political dream schemes) is an
illusion. The Canal Nuevo experience expresses this dramatically:
after many years of construction, the canal collapsed as soon as
it was inaugurated. A minimal portion of the 1800 l/s design capacity went through the canal, and only for a few days. Since then, the
canal is dry. Still, conviction that the myth must become reality is
powerful. Its illusive character does not make its power illusory,
but generates powerful contradictions in everyday practice. Expert
teams continue to conduct surveys to rehabilitate the dream that
materialized as a nightmare. Communities, in turn, have successfully rehabilitated their La Estella and Marcahuasi canals, and
refuse to collaborate with efforts to rehabilitate the experts white
elephant.
While Andean user collectives face hydrosocial models and
policies powerfully working to normalize and control-externalize
their management systems, they are not defenseless. They
engage in multiple forms of resistance to defend their resources,
rights and decision-making faculties (see, e.g., Bebbington et al.,
2010; Castro, 2006; Gelles, 2000). Their counter-conducts also
question the disciplining regimes through which they are engaged as objects and subjects of governmentality, challenging
the very politics of truth (Foucault, 2002, 2007; Cadman,
2010). Often, also, water users internalization of formal truths
and structures is only appearance. They may incorporate these
elements into their own water views and practices but assign
them a different strategic signicance, rejecting the categories
in which the dominant want to enclose them and at the same
time using them for their own purposes. From pre-Conquest
times up to now, production of water-truth has proven to be
useful not just to dominate but also to resist. Local communities
and coalitions, apart from material opposition to altering their
water ows, use a variety of metaphysical arguments, as
weapons to counteract hegemonic water policies. For example,
Gelles shows how communities around Cabanaconde, Peru,
strategically re-appropriated Andean water mayors practices
and rituals and dual irrigation-organizational structure once
seized by Inca, colonial and hacienda regimes to extract local
resources to ritually attain abundant water and to resist elite
and State interference in local affairs (Gelles, 2000). Boelens
(2008) details how myths around local hero Huanchor, against
Spanish colonization, continue to symbolically nurture resistance
against mining and drinking water companies that encroach
peoples water rights in San Mateo de Huanchor, Peru. Vera
(2011) presents various cases of communities reviving and
reshaping their ancient water legends to counteract encroachment by large-scale hydraulic infrastructure and mining projects.
Here, the question of whether water-truths (social, physical and
meta-physical) are true may be interesting for scientists, but is
not always that relevant for water policy-makers and dominant
power-knowledge regimes, nor is it for counter-movements of
local water user organizations.

7. Conclusions
As in other regions, water struggles in the Andes manifest
waters political nature as well as the ways in which water, infra-

245

structure and nature are closely connected to cultural meanings

and identities. Irrigation systems, for instance, as in Mollepata,
more than just ditches linking the hydrological cycle to agro-productive, institutional management systems, are simultaneously
political and cultural constructs embedding local knowledge, values, property arrangements, power relations and bonds of belonging. They are also the result of ongoing internal negotiations and
harsh conicts with outsiders local views, truths and norms
are shaped in multiscalar contexts of struggle.
These struggles take place, simultaneously, in a variety of
domains that constitute each other as integrated facets of the
same complex water issue. As such, hydrological cycles are
simultaneously natural and social constructs as chains of
human and nonhuman elements constructed by the human mind
and by human material intervention. Shaping water control,
dening water rights, or composing hydrosocial cycles, therefore, are technical and profoundly social and political activities.
Beyond just naming and analyzing water ows, they chain
bonds of the social and the natural together in particular ways,
envisioning to construct precise patterns: how water should be
distributed, how humans and non-humans need to be ordered
in socio-technical hierarchies, how this is legitimized by moral
and symbolic orders, in ways that can either strengthen or
challenge the status quo.
My conceptual use of the hydro-cosmological cycle extends the
concept of hydrosocial cycles. It does so, rst, by intimately linking
diverse water cultures, rights frames and worldviews to the socionatural construction of hydrological ows requiring analysis that
goes beyond patterning of social and natural. Second, it provides
a new, additional entrance to analyze how metaphysics links to
(water) politics and power; it offers a tool to examine ancient
and modern myths and discourses that attempt to normalize and
subjugate actors to control by the dominant groups in water
society.
This paper has shown how myths, discourses and practices
around hydrosocial cycles and water control are put to work as
sociotechnical/socionatural organizers and stabilizers, constituting an art of government according to truth (Foucault, 2008) that
aims to conduct water users conduct. In contemporary water politics, as I show, this governmentality based on worldview/cosmology and revelation of the worlds order overlaps with other
foucauldian government rationalities according to sovereign
power, neoliberal economic rationality and discipline
(Foucault, 2008; Fletcher, 2010). Often in conjunction, they aim
to create and proliferate belief that particular production modes,
policies and water rights orders are self-evident. While contested
in everyday practice, they commonly strategize to connect local
hydrosocial practices and beliefs (technical, operational, cultural)
to wider identication politics: to foster resource extraction, political incorporation and normalization. From the technical-physical
to the meta-physical, they envision to compose and glue together
convenient water truth orders: enrolling and aligning diverse
social, natural and even supernatural Andean water worlds in
one hydrosocial governance network, structured according to
outside rules, truths and reference frames. A particular patterning
of the hydrosocial cycle normalizing local systems in the empires
or nations imagined framework, or the global water experts and
market network is of major interest to rulers of these spaces,
and simultaneously strongly contested.
These hydro-political dream schemes are imaginary, the
meticulous conguration of all human and non-human elements
into an actually hegemonic nature-society patterning in which
they all work towards a coherent, predictable system is an illusion.
Nevertheless, existing power hierarchies (continue to) actively
design such schemes in which the actors are acted by the network that holds them in place (Callon, 1991: 154). Moreover, as

246

R. Boelens / Geoforum 57 (2014) 234247

I show, their properties are experienced as real and have forceful

material and distributive consequences.
In Andean waterscapes, however, water myths and discursive
practices function both to stabilize the status quo and to mobilize
against water-power hierarchies. Throughout history, control over
mythical and discursive water reality and water-based materialsymbolic constructions of origin and distinctiveness have been crucial for ruling classes to dominate and for counter-movements to
challenge this dominance. Local water communities react, modify
and also strategically use the ruling symbolic order. Below appearances of uniformity and formality, local collectives as trans-local
networks strategize their ways to resist and construct their own,
alternative orders, questioning the self-evidence of formal State,
science or market-based frameworks for analyzing and regulating
water ows and hydrosocial networks. Here, economic-material
and political-symbolic orders and struggles interweave in the
effort to defend their water rights and livelihoods. These water
battles have no nal outcomes but rather characterize opposing
forces and strategies.
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