Lubricating Water Metabolism: How Mountain Offerings Contribute to Water Sustainability in the Peruvian Andes

Abstract

This article examines how water's transformative quality shapes Andean offering rituals and how these in turn perform the hydrological cycle as a metabolic process that involves humans as well as superhuman beings. It enquires into the offering practices of an Andean community providing an ethnographic account of its water management and the tributes it pays to the mountain and the springs that supply it with water. Building on the concept of water metabolism, the article interrogates the offerings as a replica of the metabolic process that produces water. The argument is that by triggering a "change of matter" of the offering items the ritual transforms these into a gift to the deities that control the water. Moreover, invoking Roy Rappaport's study of rituals as regulators of humans' interaction with the environment, the article suggests that by enacting water metabolism, Andean offerings not only lubricate the hydrological cycle, but they also offer Andean people a window on their own agency and its bearings for their water resources. Reviewing the recent development in a neighbouring settlement and ongoing changes in the community's own water supply, the article concludes that the holistic calibration of the hydrological cycle as a metabolic process which engages both humans and non-humans makes Andean offerings emblematic of the effort to achieve water sustainability anywhere and therefore resilient to change.