Description
Book SynopsisA critique of the global emphasis on water’s economic value and extractivist policies, based on an ethnography of a watershed in Peru
Trade Review'This superb ethnography invites us to 'slow down' the assumption that water is either a resource or a vital force and attend to how its multiplicity implies a politics of entangled worldings. This book will change how you think about the politics of water!'
-- Mario Blaser, Associate Professor of Archaeology, Memorial University, Canada
'Though many recent researchers have examined water through a climate change lens, this highly original book is distinctive in examining climate change through a water lens'
-- Ben Orlove, anthropologist and Professor of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, New York
'This book expresses the power of ethnography. Using her kaleidoscopic notions, Astrid Stensrud presents an analysis of a politics of water that empirically emerging from multiple worlds to transform political ecology and political economy into pluriversal analytics'
-- Marisol de la Caden, Professor of Anthropology at UC-Davis, California and author of 'Earth Beings: Ecologies of Practice Across Andean Worlds' (Duke, 2015)
'An exemplary ethnographic analysis that, focusing on 'waterworlds' in Peru, illuminates the many and diverse ways that people conceptualise and value water, engage with water, and compose human and non-human relationships through water'
-- Professor Veronica Strang FAcSS, Executive Director of Durham University's Institute of Advanced Study and author of 'Water, Culture and Nature' (Reaktion Press 2015)
'A powerful engagement with contemporary anthropological debates on the heterogeneity of water. Working with a multiplicity of water practices, Stensrud makes a compelling case for recognizing the intrinsic value of remaining open to difference in the face of climate change'
-- Professor Penny Harvey, University of Manchester
Table of ContentsMaps and Figures
List of Acronyms and Abbreviations
List of Words in Quechua and Spanish
Series Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Water and Watershed Politics
1. Engineering Water Flows
2. Colonising the Desert
3. Water Payments
4. Water Uncertainties and Disasters
5. Water Efficiency
6. Legible and Illegible Water
7. Owning Water
Conclusion: Water Multiplicity
Notes
Bibliography
Index
