Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in subsequent chapters of this book. The book describes Andean irrigation and rule-making, and presents normalization techniques and practices, and the cultural politics of participatory domestication. In the Andean highlands, water sustains numerous smallholder communities' livelihoods. Local water rights in the Andes assume the presence of State law, and define themselves in contrast and relation to it. This works in both directions, a fact that is usually ignored in positive-law analyses. State law also grounds its existence and survival in the active functioning of multiple, locally particular socio-legal repertoires. Ethnicity and identity in contemporary Andean society result from intensive interaction among different classes and cultures, on water-rights battlefields. Such issues as water subject- and identity-formation, cultural policy effects, or the politics of recognition of water rights and ethnicity, are not uniform, hegemonic patterns, universal categories of understanding or national products of the imagined community.