The Rules of the Game and the Game of the Rules: Normalization and Resistance in Andean Water Control

This book is about the power of water as much as about the power of water ontologies and water identities, and about the power of the Water Lords’ policy and expert communities, those who are legitimized and endorsed to define and construct ‘the others’ and their problems. Naming and norming, and the legally or scientifically awarded faculty to put water things and users in their place, are basic to the global and Andean water power games, particularly whenever such names, norms, and network positions and relations are accepted as ‘natural’ or ‘inevitable’: when they become ingrained in everyday water control relations and people internalize not just the names but also their corresponding norms and positions. What is the norm, who is normal (who is abnormal), and what is the normal behavior of water rights and users in water control networks and practices? Throughout Andean history, the authority to define and categorize ‘others’, their positions, properties and property rules, has directly reflected the images and societies of the Definers themselves, their positions, properties and property rules, and the interests they have in naming, norming and mastering these others and their properties. In today’s modern society, apparently, the most subtle and ingenious namers, normers and network-builders stand the best chances to materialize their interests – particularly if the norms that are adopted do not seem to be theirs but ‘locally or self-fabricated’.