Andean Waterways

"The Cordillera Blanca, along the higher elevations of the Santa river watershed in Andean Peru, has become the focus of considerable research on climate change and associated policy anxiety for remediation of such change and its adverse impacts. The author situates what is essentially a study of water politics at a regional level within international pressures and their national mediation, in a landscape where water is abundantly present but poorly distributed. Rasmussen takes a landscape of interconnected channels and investigates this topography of flows through a careful ethnography of long-term settlers in their region. Along the way he builds his chapters around each channel and with it a particular issue—community formation, state intervention, water management bureaucracy, conflicts over mining—to show the way water and local livelihood are produced in intimate contests."—K. Sivaramakrishnan, professor of anthropology and forestry and environmental studies, Yale University