The Struggle for Water in Peru: Comedy and Tragedy in the Andean Commons (review)

Water is a hotly contested resource in many areas of the world, and the history of the struggles for it is of great interest to scholars from many fields. In the Andes, the largest mountain chain in the world, irrigation has been the economic mainstay for thousands of communities and millions of peasants, as well as for the Inca, Spanish, and postcolonial states that have depended on those peasants for labor and agricultural goods. Irrigation politics, as a window into important cultural, social, and economic processes, is attracting the scholarly attention of a growing number of historians and anthropologists. In The Struggle for Water in Peru, Trawick's goal is to read social history from a cultural landscape, telling "that familiar New World story of Conquest, Colonialism, and expanding global Capitalism from a hydrological, as well as an ethnic, point of view" (1). Drawing on the archeological and historical record, as well as on the archival and ethnographic materials collected over many years of research, Trawick finds that three communities in the southwestern Peruvian highlands are representative of more general historical processes, ethnic dynamics, and irrigation traditions within Andean society.

The first chapter immerses the reader in the importance of irrigation and its many functions, detailing the more general ecological, geographical, and hydrological features of the Cotahuasi Valley (Department of Arequipa). The second chapter goes into the history of the region as a whole. Moving from the archeological and historical evidence of Huari and Inca state expansion in this area, Trawick discusses demographic collapse and other major changes that occurred during the Spanish colonial period. Mining, mule caravans, and the rise of the haciendas are some of these changes; the haciendas expanded further after independence during the early nineteenth century, taking even more of the best agricultural land. The tragedy of the irrigation commons intensified after the Peruvian state entered the picture during the early 1940s. However, according to the author, "there are a few local villages that we can turn to where most of these changes never took place, whose tradition and way of life seem more intact" (70).

Each of the next three chapters is dedicated to studying a particular community: Huaynacotas, a relatively egalitarian "indigenous" community; Pampamarca, a "colonized" community with social inequality; and the town of Cotahuasi, the provincial capital, characterized by imposing haciendas and social decline. In Huaynacotas, the Quechua language is spoken by all and relatively few outsiders settled in the area. The differentiation of the peasantry has not reached the extremes of the hacienda communities of the lower valley. Here the "egalitarian tradition" of water distribution is based on proportionality or "equity"; that is, "no one is allowed to deprive others of water by using more than the amount to which he is entitled, nor can he legally get it more often than everyone else" (85). This situation is not intended to suggest an unstratified society. Although everyone receives an equal number of waterings, the size of land holdings varies, as does the quantity of water received. Even so, proportionality basically means that people take turns and collectively ensure that nobody cuts into line. It also implies that an individual's contribution to canal maintenance should be proportionate to the size of landholding. This egalitarian way of watering is bolstered by transparency in distribution, as well as by the community having autonomous control over the source of its water.

In Pampamarca, where five elite families have inserted themselves into a community mostly comprised of peasant families, landlords in each sector receive water first. Water is then distributed by what Trawick calls a "hierarchical pattern," according to the number of community offices fulfilled. Growing class differentiation between small, medium, and large landholders, inequity in distribution, and the loss of the traditional authority's power is linked to a pattern that...