Caring for water in Northern Peru: On fragile infrastructures and the diverse work involved in irrigation

Abstract

The term control used to be central to the scholarship on modern water management. More recently, however, scholars have remarked that the world is too unstable and capricious for control to ever fully succeed. They propose that technologically facilitating water to flow depends instead on care. Building on this, we here propose that holding on to a single catch-all theoretical concept, even if it is ‘care’, does not suffice. Instead, analytical terms are better adapted – and re-adapted to local specificities. To exemplify this, we here present the case of the Huallabamba, a canal that makes horticulture possible in the arid valley of Motupe on the Pacific coast of northern Peru. In this case, while ‘control’ was hard to find, ‘care’ took different forms: the tinkering that compensates for the not-quite-modern character of the infrastructures; the adaptive managerial style necessary given the absence of information; the watchful, hands-on cuidar of the men who walk along the canal high up in the Andes, repairing what is broken, cautious lest they anger the spirits; the listening to and singing for water in the catchment area; and the activism that resists the invasion of mining companies. This open-ended list is not meant to travel as a theoretical grid, but rather to inspire others to propose locally salient analytical terms to explore the sites and situations in which they are involved.