Ethnos

Journal of Anthropology

ISSN: 0014-1844 (Print) 1469-588X (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/retn20

Climate Change, Water Practices and Relational

Worlds in the Andes

Astrid B. Stensrud

To cite this article: Astrid B. Stensrud (2016) Climate Change, Water Practices and Relational
Worlds in the Andes, Ethnos, 81:1, 75-98, DOI: 10.1080/00141844.2014.929597

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2014.929597

Published online: 13 Aug 2014.

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 Climate Change, Water Practices and
Relational Worlds in the Andes
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Astrid B. Stensrud
University of Copenhagen, Denmark

abstract Climate change translates into insecure water provision and produces new
uncertainties for farmers and politicians in Colca Valley, Southern Peru. Anthropological
studies of climate change have mainly focused on adaptation, resilience and so-called
indigenous traditional knowledge. This article argues that a stronger ethnographic
focus on material practices including knowledge practices can contribute to a
more nuanced understanding of climate change effects, responses and forms of water
management. The author aims to see responses to climate change as more than cultural
representations, and therefore focuses on water practices and the realities that these
practices make, as well as the relational webs of humans, environment, infrastructure
and other-than-human beings. The article explores different practices that enact mul-
tiple versions of water, and multiple yet related and entangled water worlds. The
author suggests that this has implications for how we understand politics of climate
and water: as tensions between singularizing practices and multiplicity.

keywords Water, climate change, nature-culture, ontology, Andes

Introduction
n October 2011, the villagers of Pinchollo in Colca Valley went up to the

I Hualca Hualca Mountain, rising 6025 metres above sea level in the southern
Peruvian Andes, in order to offer gifts to the mountain and to clean the water
channels. The irrigation commission organized the event, with the support and
participation from the local authorities: the mayor, the judge of peace and the
leader of the peasant community. After a mass in the Catholic church, they

Present address: University of Oslo, Norway.

ethnos, vol. 81:1, 2016 (pp. 75 98), http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2014.929597

# 2014 Taylor & Francis
 76 astrid b. stensrud

walked up to the foot of the glacier where the meltwater starts owing down
towards the village. The peasant communitys leader expressed the reciprocity,
affection and materiality in the relationship between the human authorities and
the mountain protector, who is called Apu:1

This is a ritual that we make for our Apu Hualca Hualca. We, the authorities, watch
over our people in Pinchollo. The organizers in the irrigation commission, together
with the mayor, and the leaders of the peasant community, we make an offering, a
ritual, so that he [Hualca Hualca] will receive with a lot of good will and affection,
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and so that we will not lack water in the next year. The water is fundamental for
us, for our plants, for the humans. We live from the water, and that is why we
make this offering, with a lot of affection and devotion. And I know that tomorrow,
the water will increase by 3 or 4 litres per second. We have this hope and every year
we do this.2

The leader of the irrigation commission was in charge of presenting the iranta,
i.e. a package of alpaca foetus, llama fat, maize, coca leaves, sweets, fruit, owers,
wine and maize brew, to Hualca Hualca, asking him not to forget the people, to
give them more water and to protect the village. A bunch of ice fell down, telling
them that Hualca Hualca was thrilled and saying: look, here is the water!
People shared drinks, made libations (tinka), played music and danced in
honour of Hualca Hualca. Later that day, the villagers stopped by a spring
called the window to make iranta and tinka. The villagers talked about the
human offerings made in ancient times: in times of crisis, a young girl would
be chosen to go into the mountain through the window as Apu Hualca
Hualca called upon her. The mountain is recognized as the source of life for
the people in Pinchollo in a quite literal sense, since the glacial meltwater is
their main water source. If there is no water, there is no life. Without Hualca
Hualca our village would not exist. That is why we make the tinka, one of
the men explained to me.
On their way down, women and men cleaned and repaired the canals with
shovels so that the water would ow more easily down to the village and the
elds. About 60% of the elds in Pinchollo are irrigated with water from
Hualca Hualca, while the rest of the land is irrigated with water from the
state-owned Majes canal. However, people are increasingly experiencing
glacial shrinkage and a general decrease of water in the springs, which are fed
by rainwater and meltwater. Several mountain springs have dried up completely
during the last few years, and people are starting to blame global warming, as
they frame water scarcity in new narratives that are promoted by national

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 Climate Change, Water Practices and Relational Worlds 77

and international NGOs and governmental agencies. Moreover, the ow of the

meltwater is more concentrated and intense, destroying the canals and eroding
the soil. Hence, the water gets lost in the Pacic Ocean and people cannot
contain it for irrigation use. One of the elderly men expressed his concern
about Hualca Hualca:

In August and September there is a strong ow that starts in the glacier, it is the melt-
water. The white snow can no longer be seen after September. There is less ice than
before. [ . . . ] If the glacier disappears, there is no life anymore; there is no village
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anymore. The mountain supports us. Who will contain the thaw? Earlier the snow
of Hualca Hualca reached the foot of the mountain. Now there is little snow.

Living with the highly unpredictable weather in the semi-arid Andean moun-
tain environment, the peasant farmers are dependent on water and the admin-
istration of it, including modern institutions of water management as well as
various other-than-human beings. Today, the effects of global climate change
produce new experiences of a rapidly and irreversibly changing environment,
and dwindling life sources lead to new uncertainties about the future. Global
warming produces effects on temperature, precipitation, seasonality, glacier
retreat and water supply in the Andes. Peru contains 70% of the worlds tropical
mountain glaciers, which are the most visible indicators of climate change due
to their sensitivity to increased temperatures and the visibility of their shrinkage
(Vuille et al. 2008: 80). According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change, there has been a 22% reduction of the total glacier area in Peru
during the last 35 years, and a reduction of up to 80% of glacier surface from
very small glaciers the last 30 years (Bates 2008). During the dry season
almost all the water that indigenous peasant farmers use throughout the
Andes is derived from the glaciers (Bolin 2009). For these people, climate
change is not something that may happen in the future but is an immediate,
lived reality that they struggle to apprehend, negotiate and respond to, as do
other indigenous people in the Arctic and the Pacic (Crate & Nuttall 2009).
Researchers, activists and politicians all over the world agree that this situ-
ation necessitates urgent ecological and political action. What is not necessarily
agreed upon, however, are which entities this action should relate to, and which
outcomes it could lead to? Ultimately, this divergence is about what kind of
world or worlds we live in and about who and what are included in the
ecological and political realities. The story of the Pinchollo villagers relation
to Hualca Hualca highlights the concern of this article: that ethnography can

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 78 astrid b. stensrud

contribute to disrupting the boundaries of the ecological and the political by

focusing on how nature and water are practised in different, but overlapping
ways. Water can be both countable units of litres per second and a living sub-
stance offered by a mountain being. Moreover, different practices including
knowledge practices and material practices give rise to diverse and entangled
worlds.
This article is based on ethnographic material generated during eight months
of eldwork in 2011 in Chivay and other villages located at different altitudes in
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the Colca-Majes-Camana water basin. Most of these villages are found in the
Colca Valley, in Caylloma province, Department of Arequipa. The method-
ology involved studying water at multiple scales and through various scalar
practices: mapping, surveys, interviews with local leaders and policy-makers
and most importantly participant observation among peasant farmers
and engineers in their daily life and water-related activities. In this way, I fol-
lowed the water in various practices, stories and relations to different insti-
tutions, technologies and beings. I suggest that water is good to think with
because it always ows between places, entities and persons; it can both
connect and disconnect, and is always in the relational in-between spaces.

Multiple Water Worlds

This article argues that current social analyses of climate change need to be
complicated by an ethnographic approach that allows for infrastructure, tech-
nologies, material objects, humans and other-than-humans to take part in the
dense fabric of relations with others in and through which we live (Braun &
Whatmore 2010: ix). In recent studies of climate change, social science scholars
have made valuable contributions regarding cultural perceptions of climate
change, as well as social and ecological resilience and adaptation in different
places around the world (Adger et al. 2009; Crate & Nuttall 2009; Hastrup
2009), in addition to analyses of the inherent inequalities in climate change;
the uneven vulnerabilities, double exposures and claims for climate justice
(OBrien & Leichenko 2000; Liverman 2009; Beck 2010; Mearns & Norton
2010). Some scholars have criticized the term adaptation for being inadequate
in explaining how people engage in creating political change (Sejersen 2009;
Cassidy 2012) or for directing attention away from the problems that cannot
be easily measured, such as peoples concern for non-humans both animals
and mountains (Orlove 2009: 160). Although indigenous knowledge is increas-
ingly recognized as complementary to scientic knowledge about the local
effects of climate change (Crate & Nuttall 2009; Marin 2010; Crate 2011), this

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 Climate Change, Water Practices and Relational Worlds 79

knowledge is often understood as symbolic representations of the world or as

belief. Contrary to this view, Cruikshank (2001) has argued that local narratives
should be evaluated not just as data, but as theory that might contribute differ-
ent perspectives to academic questions.
In todays Colca Valley, global warming mainly translates into water scarcity.
Recent analytical work on water in anthropology and geography is based on
assumptions that human environmental engagements are mutually constitu-
tive; that society and water make each other (Strang 2004; 2011; Linton 2010;
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Hastrup 2013). Jamie Linton argues that to understand what water is, we
should take the ecological, cultural and political dimensions into account: eco-
logical dimension as its importance for sustaining the ecosystems; waters cultural
dimension, as in the ways that water articulates with people to produce different
meanings and relationships; and the political dimension, as the distribution of
economic benets and affordances associated with particular modes of water
governance (2010: 7). Some scholars mainly focus on the political economy of
the hydrosocial cycle, by analysing property and power in water regimes
(Worster 1985; Swyngedouw 2004; 2009; Bakker 2010; Lynch 2012), or by focus-
ing on popular resistance against attempts to privatize the public water systems
(Albro 2005). Calling for studies that combine perspectives of political water
regimes and cultural waterscapes, Orlove and Caton (2010) have presented
water as a total social fact, related to value, equity, governance, politics and
knowledge. While agreeing that water offers us a prism through which to
study the world, I believe that we need a stronger methodological approach
that focuses on material practices.
Scholars in Science and Technology Studies (STS) propose to understand
water as having multiple ontologies by seeing social realms not as being separ-
ate from water, but rather, as being built, at least partially, in and through
engagements with water. Hence, it is argued that water is multiple, not only
in its meanings, but in its very materiality (Barnes & Alatout 2012). These
STS authors are inspired by Mols (2002) study of how the practices of
doctors, patients and laboratory scientists enact multiple, but overlapping, ver-
sions of a body and of the illness arthrosclerosis. However, while Mols multiple
bodies and arthrosclerosis are nature-cultures that are enacted in the very
specic conditions of a Dutch hospital, the water bodies in Colca Valley are
multiplied in other practices that are contingent on the particularities of that
place. Recent anthropological perspectives on relational ontologies emphasize
how nature multiplies in specic circumstances, for example as in Amerindian
perspectivism (Viveiros de Castro 1998), in Nayaka relational epistemology

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 80 astrid b. stensrud

(Bird-David 1999), or Yukaghir hunters animism (Willerslev 2007), where

human and non-human beings act relationally and become persons in these
relations. Such beings and persons are also a part of the relational world in
the Andes, where they also are affected by global warming, and should therefore
be accounted for in the studies of climate change effects. This approach would
demand to take ontological questions seriously about what there is in the world.
Furthermore, this means acknowledging the possibility of ontological conicts,
i.e. conicts involving different assumptions about what exists (Blaser 2013).
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In After Method, Law (2004) argues against the assumption that reality is a
determinate set of discoverable entities and processes. Contrary to these ideas
of a singular reality, ethnography lets us see the relative messiness of practice,
and that particular realities are constructed by particular practices. This is
what this article intends to do: to examine water practices ethnographically
and explore the outcomes of these practices. Multiple realities do not mean
that there are different and possibly awed perspectives on the same object.
Different realities are being created and mutually adjusted so they can be
related, and realities depend upon their continued crafting and enactment
in a combination of people, things, techniques and natural phenomena. The
absence of singularity does not imply that we live in a world composed of an
indenite number of disconnected water bodies, water-management insti-
tutions and political decisions. It does not imply that reality is fragmented,
but that the different realities overlap and interfere with one another, and that
their relations, partially coordinated, are complex and messy (Mol 2002; Law
2004: 45 69). Hence, the water in this article is not one singular kind of
water; there are many different, though connected and overlapping, waters.
The water is more than one and less than many (Mol 2002; Law 2004). This
approach implies considering how particular practices impinge upon and
relate to other practices that simultaneously exist. The philosopher Stengers
(2005a) calls this an ecology of practices, which does not have any ambition to
describe practices as they are water management as we know it, for instance
but as they may become and how they may connect. The different water prac-
tices and water worlds co-exist and are deeply entangled.
Today, global warming as narrative, experience and effect is making
water a highly politicized and controversial issue in Colca Valley, and conse-
quentially the multiplicity and entanglement of worlds is made visible. What
happens when these other water practices are made visible to which
degree are they allowed to participate in water management and would they
demand a part in politics? These questions are predicated on the need to

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 Climate Change, Water Practices and Relational Worlds 81

slow down reasoning and to provoke the kind of thinking that would allow a
cosmopolitics, which, in Stengers use, is understood as a space for hesitation in
the construction of a common world (Stengers 2005b). This cosmopolitics
could be indigenous, which in the Andes would mean the inclusion of moun-
tains and other earth beings as sentient actors in the eld of politics, and not
only as cultural belief (de la Cadena 2010). This article argues that we need eth-
nography to see responses to climate change as more than cultural represen-
tations. Instead, we need to focus on water practices and the realities that
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these practices make, as well as the relational webs of environment human

infrastructure technology non-humans. The article also describes how politi-
cal decisions about water management aims for singularization, yet the practices
of making this singularity produce new gaps and entities in the process and
hence more multiplicity.

Climate Change and Rights to Water

The availability of water has always been a pressing concern for the peasant
farmers in the semi-arid Colca Valley, where the economy is mainly based on
small-scale subsistence farming and animal husbandry. The slight rainfall
makes agriculture extremely difcult without irrigation, and the area is
known for the intricate system of irrigation canals and locally organized
water distribution systems (Guillet 1992; Guillet & Mitchell 1994; Paerregaard
1994; Treacy 1994; Gelles 2000; Vera & Zwarteveen 2008). Today, there are
approximately 10,000 farmers who cultivate and irrigate approximately
12,000 hectares of land, with an average of 1,2 hectares per farmer. The
Quechua-speaking peasant population in the southern Andes has been econ-
omically and politically marginalized throughout Peruvian history. Colca
Valley is a poverty-stricken area where a peasant family might lose everything
in case of a failed harvest: without savings and insurance, they would be depen-
dent on government relief, help from the community, expensive credit loans or
alternative income strategies, e.g. selling handicrafts in tourist markets. Since the
1970s, there has been a massive migration from the highlands to the urbanized
and industrial coast.
On 22 March 2011, a couple of hundred peasant farmers from all over the
Caylloma province travelled to Chivay to celebrate World Water Day.
Delegations from the irrigation commissions marched around the plaza with
slogans like Water is life/Long live water! and Water should not be
sold/Water should be defended! Afterwards there was a public assembly
about climate change, where the farmers expressed their concerns about the

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 82 astrid b. stensrud

changes in their communities, such as melting glaciers, heavy rain, oods, irre-
gular frosts, longer drought periods and decreasing water supplies. In the pre-
ceding month, torrential rainfall and unexpected frost caused extensive
damages to crops and infrastructure. However, the general experience in the
province was that of decreasing water supplies. The glaciers are the natural
reservoirs of fresh water, and the peasant farmers describe the earth as a
sponge where water is absorbed. The recent years short but hard rainfalls
eroded the soil and destroyed its storage ability, resulting in the drying of the
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highland cushion bogs called bofedales which serve as pastures for the
alpacas and also as retainers where water lters into springs and streams. The
farmers in Chivay overwhelmingly agree that the weather has changed
during the last 20 years: the rainy season starts later, while the frost which
is supposed to come in the dry months from June to August now appears
in February and March. The effects of global climate change are perceived as
a loss of stability in the known seasonal cycle of rain, frost, heat and drought,
as they are connected to the practices of sowing and harvesting:

The rain used to accompany us in the sowing, but not any longer, now the rain prac-
tically comes only in December, January, February, nothing more. It used to come in
September, October, when we were sowing potatoes, we sowed in the rains. So this
tells us that the situation of the year is changing. (60-year-old farmer in Chivay)

Since the melting glaciers, irregular rain and drying springs are seen as effects of
global warming, water scarcity is increasingly perceived as an irreversible con-
dition. The fear of a future water crisis provokes different responses and political
strategies, which vary with the different ways of engaging with water. Peasant
farmers in the Andes do not only have to respond to changes in the climate
and the environment, but to changing water regimes, economic policies and
institutional practices.
Perus rst water law of 1902 (Codigo de Aguas) gave landowners the right to
private appropriation of water. In 1969, the reformist regime of Velasco Alvarado
made a new water law (Ley General de Aguas) where all water was acknowledged
as a public good and state property. Since then, many modications have been
made, as well as attempts of privatization by several governments promoting
neoliberal policies since the 1980s. From 1993 to 2000, the Fujimori regime
made 15 pre-projects for a new water law, with the clear intention of privatization,
yet failed, in part due to the strong opposition from the irrigation organizations
(Ore et al. 2009: 52 53). In 2007, the Garca government adapted the water law to

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 Climate Change, Water Practices and Relational Worlds 83

the Free Trade Agreement with the USA (del Castillo 2011: 94 95) and, in 2009,
the Law on Water Resources (Ley de Recuros Hdricos) was passed. In president
Garcas words, the law should bring modernity to the use of water in our father-
land, modernity in the daily use of water in the households; we should all prepare
ourselves to face a difcult future of the water (ANA 2010: 1). This idea of mod-
ernity is embedded in the neoliberal project of achieving progress through creat-
ing a free market. Although all forms of water are still acknowledged as state
property, the new law has given ample space for private actors to intervene in
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water management, with openings for private investments and operators of

hydraulic infrastructure (del Castillo 2011: 100).
While the 1969 law primarily dealt with water for agricultural use, the 2009
law integrates different uses of water, including human consumption and indus-
trial use. The intention was to encompass the increasing water demand due to
the growth of urban populations, export agriculture and mining industry (del
Castillo 2011: 91). The law is based on the principles of Integrated Water
Resource Management (IWRM), which during the last two decades has
become a global paradigm for implementing water-management policies
(Orlove & Caton 2010). IWRM is based on the idea of holistic, integrated
decision-making, by balancing competing demands: domestic, agricultural,
industrial and environmental. On the one hand, the law recognizes the funda-
mental right of humans to consume water, and on the other hand, it emphasizes
its economic value and the importance of efcient resource use (ANA 2010: pre-
liminary title, article 3, principle 1, 2, and 9). What the law and IWRM in
general does not do is to question what is meant by a right or a commodity
(Orlove & Caton 2010: 410). However, the law can be translated and accommo-
dated to local practices, and it is yet to be seen which effects this law may
produce.

Institutionalization and Payments for Water

As part of the IWRM-inspired reorganization of the national system for
water management, all water administration is joined in one institution the
National Water Authority ANA (Autoridad Nacional del Agua), which deals
with all kinds of water (including underground and atmospheric water) and
all water uses (population, agriculture, industry). The administration rests on
water basins (cuencas hidrogracas) as units for management. In the Colca-
Majes-Camana water basin on the western slope of the Andes in southern
Peru, water streams ow from the headwaters and down towards the Pacic
Ocean, and on its way the waters form a river called Colca, which changes its

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 84 astrid b. stensrud

name to Majes and Camana further down. Water basins are not necessarily
unproblematically dened, however; they vary in scale, may contain smaller
sub-basins and connections of groundwater, and they can be modied by infra-
structure. Since 1954 water has been transferred from the Colca basin to the
neighbouring Quilca-Chili basin that provides water to Arequipa city, to the
EGASA hydroelectric power plant and the Cerro Verde copper mine. More-
over, water from Colca River is taken into the Majes canal system, which con-
sists of 100 kilometres of canals and tunnels on the south side of the Colca
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Valley. This water is led from the Condoroma dam in the highlands to the
pampa of Majes, where 15,000 hectares areas of former desert have been
made fertile and now produce agriculture products for export and animal
fodder for large-scale dairy production. During the last 30 years, a new city
Villa El Pedregal has grown there, and it is now the location of the adminis-
tration ofce for the water basin.
Water management in Colca involves several institutions. The distribution of
water among farmers is locally managed by 31 irrigation commissions (comisiones
de regantes), which according to the new law have changed their name to users
commissions (comisiones de usuarios). They are represented by a regional private
non-prot association: the Water Users Organization of Colca Valley JUVC
(Junta de Usuarios Valle del Colca). JUVC has its mandate from the state and
relates to the water administration ofce ALA (Administracion Local de Agua),
which is the local branch of ANA. Moreover, the above-mentioned Majes
canal is operated by AUTODEMA (Autoridad Autonoma de Majes), under the
regional government of Arequipa. In 2011, the World Bank-funded irrigation
programme PSI (Programa Subsectorial de Irrigacion) started working for the
modernization of irrigation technology in Colca. There are also different man-
agement systems for potable water. In the province capital Chivay, drinking
water is administered by the state company SEDAPAR (Servicio de Agua
Potable y Alcantarillado de Arequipa), while in the other villages there are munici-
pal ofces or locally elected committees called JASS (Juntas Administradoras de
Servicios de Saneamiento) in charge of this. All water users in Peru have to navi-
gate in this institutional plurality and negotiate their rights and duties as they are
obliged to pay different water taxes for different water uses (agricultural, indus-
trial and human consumption) to different institutions. For example, the farmers
pay an irrigation water tariff to JUVC, which is calculated according to land size
and whether it is regulated water from the Majes canal, unregulated water from
natural springs and streams, or mixed water from both sources. However, when

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 Climate Change, Water Practices and Relational Worlds 85

the tariffs were introduced in the 1990s, JUVC was met with strong sentiments
of distrust and opposition among the farmers. As the JUVC engineer said:

People saw the Junta as an entity that only collected the water tariff, and they didnt
want to pay the tariff. People didnt understand why the Junta was charging for the
water; they were saying that the water is given to us by God or the mountains, so
why should we pay for something which is ours? But little by little we have been
changing this, by generating trust through courses, teaching, visits to the commis-
sions, and supporting projects for building irrigation infrastructure.
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These farmers live in a relational world where all human and other-than-human
entities are interdependent. Water is given to the humans by the mountains, and
thus this water belongs to the Apus and the territories and people that they are
guardians of (Allen 1988; Gose 1994; Gelles 2000). People receive water and reci-
procate by giving food, coca leaves and alcohol. Similarly, when the farmers pay
the tariff to the JUVC, they expect something in return cement, services and
support as part of a mutual reciprocal relation. In addition to the irrigation
tariff, however, the farmers are also obligated to pay a state licence to ANA
for the right to use water. ANA has the legitimate power to charge taxes
without offering more than the right to use water, which is state property, as
well as promises to protect these rights. The new law extends these water-
use licences beyond irrigation: the Law on Water Resources covers the forma-
lization of all uses of water; industrial, mining and population usage, including
drinking water and the right to spill used water.
The political move towards efciency based on integrated management and
water basins as administrative units proposes to take plural uses and interests
into account, but aims for singularity and standardization. Inspired by the
World Bank, ANA also aims to create a new uniform and national water
culture in which all citizens should participate in responsible and efcient
water management in irrigation and household usage. However, in these
efforts to singularize, more disjunctions are actually produced. In the practices
of politicians, administrators, engineers and technicians who create, promul-
gate, interpret and execute laws and regulations, there are always gaps and
new understandings that emerge in transactions and translations. These govern-
mental employees relate to farmers and other water users, who have to travel to
specic places, gather specic papers, present applications and payments to
specic ofces and negotiate with persons higher in hierarchy, in order
to get their licences and formal rights. While the intention is to make water
management more orderly and easy, there are always new complications,

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 86 astrid b. stensrud

unintended consequences, popular demands and in-between solutions that

appear. People constantly relate pragmatically to various knowledges and
values in different situations. For example, the engineer who works for JUVC
knows and respects the local power of specic water springs and Apus, while
he also respects scientic knowledge and applies technical solutions to water
issues. This is not always a contradiction. On the contrary, these diverging prac-
tices often tend to overlap and contribute to producing the entanglement of
worlds. The eld of politics consists of the tensions between the singularizing
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practices and the multiplying practices, which are constantly negotiated.

Calling for Rain

Irrigation becomes even more crucial in Colca with the shortened rain
seasons, and the irrigation commissions are important actors in local economic
and political community life. Each year they elect a water allocator called
regidor, who assigns a certain amount of hours for each eld according to the
farmers requests. Each morning during the months of water scarcity,
October to December, the regidor directs the ow of water in the canals by
closing and opening gates. He also ensures that nobody takes water without
permission. However, the regidor is not only responsible for negotiating with
the farmers; he also maintains good relations with the water sources and
water bodies, and make the appropriate offerings to the mountains, springs,
reservoirs and canals. The infrastructure is built and maintained in collective
work parties, where all members are obligated to participate in order to have
the right to use water. The leader of the commission in Yanque, one of the vil-
lages in Colca Valley, explained that the farmers and the water are interdepen-
dent there is no life without water and humans need to work to make the
water ow: The commission is the only solid organization here, because the
water unites us. [ . . . ] Everyone attends the meetings and everyone participates
in the collective work, because the water obliges us. Water is not seen as a
passive substance that is acted upon by humans; water is part of the human
non-human collective; it takes part in sociality and work activities. Moreover,
it emerges from these practices, as well as it enables practices. When people
in Colca say that water is life it is not metaphorical. Water is essential for
the production of food and bodies and is related to as an animate substance
and a female life source that connects humans, plants, animals and spirits. Val-
derrama and Escalante, who studied water in Yanque in the 1970s, say that
water is a vital force, principle of life, a living being which, like ourselves, par-
ticipates in the universe (1988: 206). According to Treacy, who studied

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 Climate Change, Water Practices and Relational Worlds 87

irrigation in the neighbouring village Coporaque in the 1980s, the people there
described irrigation as teaching the water to ow over an uneven surface: yaku
karpay, yaku yachachiy means to irrigate is to teach the water (1994: 113). In ritual
practices in Colca Valley today, water is enacted as a sentient and responsive
being, respectfully called Mama Choqueshisha. In daily speech, people normally
refer to the names of concrete water bodies and their properties. Particular
springs and lakes can be particularly powerful and should be approached
with caution. Rain can be thinking, as a woman in Chivay told me in October
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2011: We are already beginning to sow, and therefore the rain should now be
thinking and ripening.
In a world where water has the ability to think, learn and react, it can also
respond when it is called upon by specic techniques. To call the water
(llamar al agua) is a technique that performs the hydrological cycle in order
to call the water from the ocean and make clouds and rain. The ritual expert
(paqu) puts seawater brought from the Pacic Ocean in a small container,
and he covers it with a piece of cotton. After libations and invocations, he
places these items together with a starsh from the ocean into the
spring. In one of these callings in Chivay August 2011, the paqu said that the sea-
water will call for more water, and explained that the cotton is clouds, so that
there will be rain. He continued: This is water from the ocean. It will be
absorbed by the mountain and all of this spring, so that the water will continue
to come out.
I argue that this portion of seawater, although separated, is part of the Pacic
Ocean, and therefore the oceans properties can be enacted, like the ability to
make clouds. Allen describes the principle of consubstantiality in the Andes:
the assumption that all beings are intrinsically interconnected through their
sharing of substance (1997:75). In the Quechua language, the ocean is called mama-
cocha mother lake and is associated with the origins of the world. In the high-
lands, the lakes are seen as minor parts of the ocean and as origin of other water
sources (Sherbondy 1982). Miniatures are powerful in the Andes: they are con-
densed matter with the ability to bring forth both the physical form and the vital-
ity of the miniature (Allen 1997). As condensed matter, the cotton clouds can give
rise to rainclouds and the seawater can bring forth water in the springs. The
calling of water is embedded in a relational world of consubstantiality between
persons, things, landscape and water, and it is considered important that the
uids and substances that make up the world should be kept in balance. The
mayor of Canocota village near Chivay described the world as interwoven by
water veins and as an earth sponge that absorbs water:

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 88 astrid b. stensrud

The globe is pure water. Underground there is water, there are veins that come out
like this, and they are vents, just like the volcanoes. [ . . . ] In the rain season, the rain-
water is stored there and then the water comes out. The rainwater gathers, it is ltered
in the earth, which is like a sponge or a mattress.

Several ethnographies describe how people in the Andes explain and enact the
connections between water, land, life and death. Gose (1994) describes how
water is the key link between the realm of death and the realm of agriculture.
Dead bodies go to the underworld within the mountains where they are
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dried out to provide the living with water. The expelled water contains a
pure vital force that plants can absorb and convert into life (Gose 1994: 130
131). Everything is interdependent: humans, non-humans, plants, water,
bodies and mountains. However, to keep the seasonal cycles in motion and
to ensure that the dead give back water to the living, humans have to engage
in ritual work, drinking and libations (Gose 1994; Harris [1982] 2000). As all
life and beings are of the same substance, it takes practical work to make the
cycle of life going, where the entities in the world are continuously transformed
and emerge from specic practices. It requires action to make plants become
plants, and to make water emerge.

Harvesting Water: Infrastructure and Technology

The calling of water can be seen as a way of gaining a sense of control of the
surroundings. This, however, becomes increasingly difcult with the new
uncertainties that follow from climate change. Due to irregular and hard rain-
falls and erosion, the ability of the earth to be a water-absorbing sponge is dete-
riorating. The leader of the water users commission in the highland district of
Callalli was concerned about this:

Today there are no snowelds, and thus there are no water mattresses that are depos-
ited under the mountains, within the Apus [ . . . ]. Sometimes it rains a lot, it falls in
January, February, but it rains as if it were raining on a mirror or on a rock or on
cement or something. It is raining, but it runs directly to the streams and rivers and
water basins and those waters go directly to the Pacic Ocean.

To prevent a water crisis, people engage with different knowledges, technol-

ogies and infrastructures. Projects of sowing and harvesting water, which
usually consist of tree planting and the construction of micro-dams, have
become very popular during the last few years as a response to climate
change. The micro-dams collect rainwater that is distributed in irrigation

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 Climate Change, Water Practices and Relational Worlds 89

canals when it is needed, and are therefore seen as important replacements for
the glaciers that disappear. However, building a dam is not a straightforward
process in a world populated by sentient beings. In Canocota, a sub-district
of Chivay where 60% of the land depends on rainwater for agriculture, the
municipality is planning a project to harvest water by turning and damming a
lake called Casaccocha. According to the mayor, the project is very difcult
and complex to carry out, for two reasons: rst, they have to calculate costs
and benets to apply for money from the regional government. Second, Casac-
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cocha lake, located at the foot of a mountain, is known to have powers. In

order to bring this water to the village, we have to beg for permission from
the Apu rst; we have to ask and pay its respective offering, the mayor said.
In a village meeting, he argued that they should make a church mass in the
name of the Apu, and thereafter an iranta (offering): only then can we go on
with the project, and if God wills, nothing will happen. Humans have to
relate respectfully to the various entities in their surroundings, and infrastructure
cannot be seen as separate from the interconnected world of soil, water and
other-than-human beings.
The Colca farmers are proud of their hydraulic infrastructures, which consti-
tute a complex network of hundreds of kilometres of canals and pipes, connect-
ing the springs, lakes, glaciers, micro-dams and reservoirs with the pastures and
elds. Infrastructure can solve many problems, but also create new conicts, and
water can be stopped, redirected and measured, and thus regulated, formalized
and controlled. In 2011, the municipality of Coporaque engaged in a project to
provide more water for human consumption in the village, by installing a water
pipe that would lead clean water from the mountain springs to the houses.
However, the farmers and herders who lived in the mountain area contended
that the new pipe would leave them with less water for irrigation, because in
contrast to the old canal, this pipe hindered the escape of water along the
way. At one point, the water was divided into an irrigation canal for the
lower elds and a drinking water pipe. The engineers installed a device for
measuring the amount of water (in litres per second) for each usage, but they
were not sure about how well it would work in practice. The relations
among the engineers, farmers, the pipes and other materials involved in this
project are essential for the maintenance of life itself, but also for the mainten-
ance of social relations. In fact, the JUVC engineer pointed out to the engineers
employed by the municipality that we engineers just see the technical sides, but
we forget the social. The pipes recast relations between those who are able to
tap into the ow and those who see the ow diverted away from their farms

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 90 astrid b. stensrud

(Barnes 2012). Similarly, after the Majes canal was constructed in the late 1970s
to derive water from the highlands to the lowland desert of Majes, the peasant
communities along the canal in Colca Valley saw the water owing by them
while they experienced drought. When their petitions to get allocations of
water were not heard, a group of men from Cabanaconde resorted to dynamite
to make a hole in the canal (Gelles 2000). Today there are 26 valves in the Majes
canal that provide the elds in Colca with irrigation water. The daily amounts of
water that each irrigation commission are allowed from each valve are regu-
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lated, measured and controlled by the ALA administration and AUTODEMA.

Measurements, Money and Modern Water

The volumetric water ow rate (caudal ) is measured in litres or cubic metres
per second through different methods and technologies. When a new commis-
sion of water users was created in Callalli in 2011, the JUVC engineer taught the
members the volumetric method and the oating method for measuring the
water ow in the springs and streams. Their aim was to measure, calculate and
register how many litres of water that owed passed a certain point in one
second. These methods did not require expensive technology: just a stopwatch
and a bucket or a oating object and measuring tape. In traditional irrigation
methods, based on gravity and furrows, water is measured in practised time
and performativity: how many hours it takes to ood a eld. This time
depends on the speed and volume of the water ow, the soils absorption
capacity and the farmers skill to direct the water with a shovel. New irrigation
technologies, on the other hand, work more in line with the counting of water
in separate units. The World Bank-funded irrigation programme PSI
encourages farmers, through teaching and nancial support, to transition
from traditional irrigation methods to drip and sprinkler systems. These new
technologies are embedded in narratives about modernity, rationality and ef-
ciency. The engineers tell the farmers that the water gets lost by evaporation
or seepage in the traditional canals. As one engineer explained: with traditional
irrigation you use 30 35% of the water, and you lose 60 65% along the way in
technied irrigation the efciency is 70 75%. Measurement in units per cent or
in litres per second splits water up into parts that can be counted in standar-
dized forms. Measurement brings forth water as disconnected and abstracted
from time cycles and irrigation as a social activity. Metres express the social indi-
viduation that lead people to feel that their resource use takes place detached
from the wider social and economic arrangement (Strang 2004: 230). I
suggest that measurements of water contribute to the production of what

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 Climate Change, Water Practices and Relational Worlds 91

Linton calls modern water, which is not complicated by ecological, cultural or

social factors a virtue which has made it relatively easy to manage. Moreover,
modern water is marked by an idea of universality, since all waters, in whatever
environmental, social or cultural circumstances they may occur, are reducible to
this abstraction (Linton 2010: 8).3
The future scenario caused by climate change produces the idea of fresh
water as a nite resource, also leading to the urgency of counting the units of
water available. The abstraction of water from local environments and the con-
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struction of a universal countable substance not only enable control, but also
commodication. In 2011, the ALA administration began to implement the
new Law on Water Resources in Colca, whereby they measured and registered
every source in order to formalize the user rights. The need to register all uses of
water and pay the state licence was presented as securing a right for the future.
As water becomes scarcer, the municipalities need to secure their provision of
drinking water and defend it against predators such as mining companies or
luxury tourist hotels owned by foreign companies. Therefore, each municipality
needs to apply for a license to use a certain amount of drinking water measured
in litres per second, and they also need to invest in measurement devices and
pay for the licences. The ALA engineers insisted to the local politicians and
municipal workers that they should think about the dwindling water sources
and their childrens future. However, several mayors see it as morally wrong
that people who live in extreme poverty have to pay for the right to use
water that comes from the springs and is channelled in infrastructure that
people themselves have built and paid for, without any state support. State prac-
tices are experienced as arbitrary: ANA guarantees use rights, yet extends gov-
ernmental control and thus threatens local autonomy.4 When ANA aims to
register every measurable unit of water used in the country, it is a way of
making legible all uses of water along a standardized scale. The aim of such
standardization is to transform water use into closed systems that offer no sur-
prises and that can best be observed and controlled (Scott 1998). However, this
is practically impossible to achieve, simply because, as in all projects towards
singularization, more differences and hybrids will emerge in the encounters
between state agencies and other practices. Tariffs and taxes have generated
resistance throughout the Peruvian history, and regulations can be circum-
vented, directly opposed, pragmatically adapted or translated into new mean-
ings. The farmers and engineers working in Colca see the law as made for
the coast, as the JUVC engineer put it. He has to accommodate some of the
regulations to the local reality of peasant farmers irrigating tiny elds in steep

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 92 astrid b. stensrud

terrains with water from different natural springs. The messy local practices can
nevertheless be ignored in ofcial accounts that continue to singularize.
In Colca Valley, measuring abstract water and relating to water-in-the-
environment are not mutually exclusive practices. In the ethnographic vignette
from Pinchollo, the villagers talked about water as a vital life force, but also in
terms of litres per second. Increased awareness about climate change as well
as water use by mining companies downstream have prompted local commu-
nities in the headwaters to appropriate practices of measurements and regis-
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tration to gain control over the water in their territories. Callalli was the rst
district to make an inventory of all their water sources and hydraulic infrastruc-
tures to have a basis for claiming support from the state in case of water crisis.
The rest of Caylloma province plans to follow suit. The mayors in Caylloma are
starting to formulate new demands based on the political claim that water is the
wealth of their province. They demand that mining and hydroelectric compa-
nies should pay a royalty payment called Canon Hdrico, since they use water
that is born in Caylloma territories. The idea of the Canon Hdrico is analogous
to the Canon Minero, which is the royalty paid by the mining companies to the
affected communities. The Canon Hdrico implicates alternative ways of dening
ownership to water. Unlike land and minerals, water is not located, but perme-
ates wider systems in highly dynamic ways, making it difcult to separate out
(Strang 2011: 178). People in the headwaters claim a more uid form of owner-
ship, and appropriate commodifying practices. This claim for Canon Hdrico res-
onates with local modes relating to water. Since water is given to humans by the
Apus, who are the owners and guardians of Cayllomas territories and inhabi-
tants, these waters belong to Caylloma in specic ways.
Following Mol, I argue that the different attributes of water as dened
according to source, space, time, policies, rituals, use, measurement and
ow are not aspects of a single Water with an essence (e.g. H2O) that
hides. Rather, they are different versions of water that practices and technol-
ogies help to enact; they are different and yet related as multiple forms (Mol
1999: 77). Various practices produce different versions of water: measured
water, regulated water, contaminated water, drinking and irrigation water,
shared water, our water, given or stolen water, threatened and nite
water. These are performed not only as perspectives, but multiple realities of
water. Furthermore, water can also be a responsive and agentive being: as
Mama Choqueshisha, sentient lakes, rain that can be called upon, and irrigation
water that learns to ow. These beings are not given and bounded entities, but
always emergent as part of world-making practices, and connected to other

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 Climate Change, Water Practices and Relational Worlds 93

ways of world-making. Different water practices are not only part of a cultural
diversity, but expressions of a relational way of engaging with the world. What
if this relational world was taken seriously in questions of ownership and prop-
erty, value, control, rights and obligations? Marisol de la Cadena invites scholars
to take seriously the presence in politics of those actors, which, being other than
human, the dominant disciplines assigned either to the sphere of nature or to
the symbolic elds of knowledge (2010: 336). This move collapses the taken-
for-granted conceptions of what ecology and politics are. I suggest a rethinking
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about the notion of the political and to discuss whether the political can be
expanded to include material objects, non-humans and other-than-human
beings (Braun & Whatmore 2010; de la Cadena 2010; Stengers 2010). Making
the other-than-human beings part of the public sphere challenges conventional
ideas about what kind of world we live in. This is what Stengers calls a cosmo-
politics: a politics where cosmos refers to the unknown constituted by these
multiple, divergent worlds and to the articulation of which they would even-
tually be capable (2005b: 995). Global warming happens in this cosmos:
humans and other-than-human beings, such as mountains and springs, are
affected by climate change and are thus taken into account in local responses
in Colca Valley responses that exceed the boundaries between the ecological
and the political.

Conclusion
Helmreich (2011) argues that water has become a theory machine and an
explicit gure for anthropological theorizing in terms of its liquid and bound-
ary-blurring form. Rather than thinking through water metaphorically, I
prefer to think through the ecology of emerging and interconnected water prac-
tices. By focusing on how water is practised rather than how it is represented,
we can see how water is performed into being in various ways. John Law asks
how to think the in-between, and I propose that water is always in between
persons, things, institutions, places, mountains, plants and other beings, dyna-
mically (dis)connecting and reconnecting. Water exceeds the boundaries
between the social and material that standardized measurements, bureaucratic
management and political decisions often take for granted. I have aimed to
see practices as they connect in new ways: how offering gifts to springs and
measuring litres per second are interconnected practices as both of them
relate to local water scarcity. However, instead of seeing different actors strug-
gling over the same resource, we could see how the same person can relate to
different waters. Water is not an abstract resource that can be separated from

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 94 astrid b. stensrud

the relational world in which it partakes, and I suggest that engaging ethnogra-
phically with multiple water practices and water beings destabilizes the bound-
aries between nature and culture, or ecology and politics. Political struggles to
defend water resources in the Andes are not motivated by desires to recover a
pure nature separate from human activities. The farmers in Colca Valley rather
want to have a role in the making of the environment where they make their
livelihoods (cf. Li 2008).
These farmers employ a variety of practices and technologies to deal with
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insecure water provision, which global warming translates into in todays

Colca Valley. An ethnographic focus on material knowledge practices can con-
tribute to a more nuanced understanding of climate change effects, responses
and different forms of water management. Knowledge practices are always
changing and emerging, whether they are indigenous or scientic, and local
indigenous knowledge practices might thus be more than data by contributing
to enrich anthropological perspectives. In the Andes, mountains, earth, ice,
water and human bodies are consubstantial and inseparable from each other,
yet enacted as different beings through specic practices. Different practices
can produce multiple versions of nature, and multiple waters, like modern
water and relational water. There are some potential ontological conicts
between modern water and relational water, reecting incompatible under-
standings about the constitutions of worlds. However, different worlds often
connect and overlap, and persons and political demands often take part in
more than one water world.
In the demands for the Canon Hdrico, a version of water that is detached
from the environment and lled with economic value is appropriated in
order to attract money to the region. At the same time, the claim is embedded
in a version of water that is relational in the sense that it belongs to the moun-
tains and their territory (including humans and other-than-humans). Hence,
these versions of water are entangled, although not mixed, in the same political
demand. The strategies of calling, harvesting and measuring water, as well as the
demand for the Canon Hdrico, can all be understood as attempts at gaining a
sense of control and predictability of water supplies. Although this is precise,
it is not necessarily sufcient to understand what is at stake; by seeing water
as relational we can learn about ways of dening ownership that is neither
private nor public. Hence, local responses to commodication processes can
be understood as more than just peasant resistance against privatization and
more than merely representing indigenous cosmologies. By exceeding the cat-
egories of politics, religion and ecology, indigenous water practices as well as

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 Climate Change, Water Practices and Relational Worlds 95

the affective relations to Hualca Hualca and other mountains in Colca articulate
other worlds that demand a place in politics: a pluriversal politics (de la Cadena
2010). These worlds are continuously in the making, always emerging, and thus
precariously entangled with each other. Simultaneously, multiple waters are for
various purposes constantly being made into singular units of H2O, litres per
second, irrigation water, economic resource, a lake or a glacier. The tension
between the processes of singularization and multiplication constitutes a politi-
cal eld of negotiation. Hence, striving for a better understanding of the politics
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of climate and water should entail a specic attention to world-making prac-

tices.

Acknowledgements
Earlier versions of this article have been presented in seminars organized by the
Waterworlds programme, led by Kirsten Hastrup, University of Copenhagen, and
in an EASA workshop organized by Marianne Lien, Simone Abram and Gro
Ween in 2012. I am grateful for all the questions and comments from the participants
in these forums. During the spring of 2013, I took part in the Sawyer seminar at Uni-
versity of California, Davis, and was highly inspired by conversations there. I am
especially indebted to Penny Harvey and Marisol de la Cadena for their detailed
reading and inspiring comments on the latest versions of the article. Many thanks
to Tara Sarin for proofreading. Finally, I thank the anonymous Ethnos reviewers
for their helpful suggestions.

Funding
The research for this article was part of the project From Ice to Stone, nanced by
the Danish Council for Independent Research (FKK) [grant number 09-069200], and
led by Karsten Prregaard at the Department of Anthropology, University of
Copenhagen. The nal version of the article was written as a postdoctoral fellow
at the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Oslo, funded by the Nor-
wegian Research Council [grant number 222783].

Notes
1. Apu means Lord in Quechua, and they are powerful beings and guardians of the
territories they overlook. It is often translated to mountain spirit, yet I prefer
Apu in order to avoid connotations to religious belief.
2. All translations from Spanish and Quechua are made by the author.
3. See also H2O and the Waters of Forgetfulness by Ivan Illich, who states that H2O is a
creation of modern times.
4. For a discussion of hydraulic societies and the importance of controlling irrigation
water for state building, see Wittfogel (1957) and Worster (1985). See Lansing
(1991) on the tensions between traditional control through the water temples and
the simplied bureaucratic model of irrigation control in Bali. For a discussion of
state control versus local irrigation practices in Colca Valley, see Gelles (2000).

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 96 astrid b. stensrud

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