ABSTRACT

This chapter traces water-rights' properties as encompassing five distinct but interlinked domains, thematic fields of knowledge, conceptualization and interpretation generating and applying particular focuses toward 'imagining the real'. The domains such as technical-biophysical, organizational, socio-legal, political-economic and cultural-metaphysical constitute each other. Andean water users commonly approach them as necessarily integrated facets of the same complex objects. Most water-policy schools almost exclusively concentrate on modernizing water laws, relating them to high-tech and rationally wished for neo-institutional policy models, with dramatic lack of insight into in-the-field water rights, largely resulting from these schools' objectivist tradition and political practice. Their mission is to socially engineer rational efficient water society by installing modern water rights and effective rule of law. The chapter argues that return-to-Pachamama utopia, mothernization, is fundamentally enslaved by the same modernist approaches it claims to question, essentializing Andean Otherness by exactly inverting modernization stereotypes.