This article uses two case studies to illustrate how Andean irrigation development and management emerges from a hybrid mix of local community rules and the changing political forms and ideological forces of hegemonic states. Some indigenous water-control institutions are with us today because they were consonant with the extractive purposes of local elites and Inca, Spanish and post-independence Republican states. These states often appropriated and standardised local watermanagement rules, rights and rituals in order to gain control over the surplus produced by these irrigation systems. However, as we show in the case of two communities in Ecuador and Peru, many of these same institutions are reappropriated and redirected by local communities to counteract both classic 'exclusion-oriented' and modern 'inclusionoriented' water and identity politics. In this way, they resist subordination, discrimination and the control of local water management by rural elites or state actors.
The division of society and space into halves or “moieties” has been an important feature of Andean culture for centuries. Contemporary moieties are often regarded as the result of either an impervious pre‐Columbian conceptual model that has resisted Spanish influence or of marriage preferences. In this article I challenge these views, arguing that the ubiquity of moiety organization today can best be understood as the result of an indigenous imperial model of domination, the extractive uses of which continued into the Spanish Colonial and Republican periods. Based on a case study from the southern Peruvian Andes, I demonstrate that the continued use of moieties in Andean communities must also be understood in terms of the role that dualism plays in ritual action and other conceptual and social domains. I also explore the relationship between equilibrium and extractive ideologies, and between historical models and contemporary social process.
En los Andes peruanos, al igual que en muchos otros lugares del mundo, el agua de riego es un elemento clave para la producción agrícola y una fuente de importantes significados y conflictos. Considero que para entender un sistema de riego, primero es necesario entender a la comunidad. Como forma social predominante y productora de cultura en Ecuador, Bolivia y Perú, la comunidad andina debe entenderse como una entidad atravesada por conflictos inherentes a ella. Encarna, a la vez, una orientación cultural en donde la identidad local y la producción se vinculan estrechamente con los paisajes sagrados. En este análisis recalco que los sistemas de riego en la zona andina también deben enfocarse considerando las fuerzas regionales, nacionales e internacionales que penetran en la comunidad. Asimismo, es necesario tener en cuenta la profunda brecha cultural presente en la sociedad peruana contemporánea. Mediante el estudio de las raíces históricas, la lógica cultural y las fuerzas políticas de los modelos de riego estatales y locales en la comunidad andina de Cabanaconde, demuestro que diversos campos de conflicto -entre miembros de una comunidad diferenciada por un lado, y entre el Estado y la comunidad por otro- están Íntimamente vinculados.
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