Cultural Identity and Indigenous Water Rights in the Andean Highlands

Abstract

In the Andes, irrigation water is an important component of production, a source of both conflict and cooperation, and a key element of cultural identity. These different dimensions of water must be viewed together. This chapter argues that indigenous Andean culture and cultural identity continue to be key elements of local social relationships in rural peasant communities, and that these cultural orientations and ethnic identities are intimately linked to agricultural and pastoral production, in general, and irrigation water, in particular. The reasons that in the Andean countries most national laws and politics of state intervention in management of highland hydraulic resources deny or ignore the existence of customary law and the traditional uses and management of water by indigenous communities have to be understood within a larger historical and cultural context. Indeed, water laws and policies imposed by outsiders using external criteria that ignore the Andean context are linked to the region’s colonial past and to contemporary cultural politics.1