ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with fundamental aspects of Andean irrigation organizations will help understand how current community water control practices, strategies and rationalities are entwined with local livelihoods and subsistence economies. The author shows students slides of some typical systems, a built-in part of local agro-ecological context, so that students can discover social norms embedded in technology or in line with Geertz's interpretive anthropology irrigation systems. The irrigation system connects altitudinal zones and the canal's families and communities, fostering specific socio-productive relationships, inter and intra-community organization. Kinship solidarity and affection, household conflict management, elbow room and the whole definition of human agency and social ties within a kinship group follow a very different rationality compared to collective community action. Despite the author's sharp socialist critique of mestizaje politics and other culturalist solutions for indigenous communities subordination, also falls prey to revolutionary romanticism and indigenist historicism.
