Abstract
Water scarcity is an issue that has always been present in the Ica region, even before the period of Spanish colonization. However, the region of Ica is currently experiencing its latest period of water scarcity intensification due to the proliferation and deepening of the neoliberal political-economic system that favors the privatization and commodification of land and water resources. This study will therefore focus on this latest period of intensification that started at the beginning of the XXI century, when Ica began to experience an arithmetic economic growth as a result of the booming agribusiness industry. This economic growth has contributed to the increase of the water scarcity, which particularly affects the rural, low-income population. One of the affected groups are the Subtanjalla’s smallholders, who constitute this research’s universe. Reflecting on my experiences and interactions with them, I will engage in an ethnographic journey that
scrutinizes the socioenvironmental complexities produced by the ubiquity of water scarcity. In this ethnographic work, I will highlight the array of relations and polyphony of voices of humans, in interaction with non-humans, that I encountered throughout my reflexive journey. These empirical encounters will be examined by deploying concepts that sprout from a political-ecology perspective, such as hydrosocial territories, biosocial becomings, hydrosocial
meshworks, precarity and expulsions. Therefore, this work is constitutes an empirically grounded ethnographic theorization of the effects that water scarcities have on the Subtanjalla’s
smallholders’ lives.
Resumen
La escasez de agua es un problema que siempre ha estado presente en la región de Ica, incluso antes del período de la colonización Española. En la actualidad, la región de Ica está
experimentando un período de intensificación de la escasez hídrica. Esto es causado,
principalmente, por el fortalecimiento del sistema político-económico neoliberal el cual favorece la privatización de la tierra y los recursos hídricos. Este estudio busca profundizar en el período de escases que se inició a comienzos del siglo XXI, tiempo en el que Ica comenzó a
experimentar una crecimiento económico aritmético como consecuencia de la floreciente industria agroexportadora. Este boom económico de la agroindustria ha contribuido al aumento de la escasez de las aguas superficiales y subterráneas, afectando especialmente a la población rural y de bajos recursos. Uno de estos grupos afectados es el de los pequeños agricultores del distrito de Subtanjalla, con los que volví a convivir por tres meses. A partir de este cohabitar desarrollaré un camino etnográfico que reflexione sobre las complejidades socioambientales producidas por la circunstancia de la escasez de agua. Durante este viaje etnográfico iré enfocándome en diálogos simétricos con los diversos actores, humanos en relación a
no-humanos, que he encontrado durante mi recorrido. Estos encuentros empíricos serán estudiados mediante la aplicación de conceptos académicos concebidos bajo el umbral epistemológico propuesto por la ecología política, por ejemplo, territorios hidrosociales, devenires biosociales, mallas hidrosociales, precaridad y expulsiones. De esta manera, este trabajo se constituye como un análisis etnográfico que busca teorizar a partir de experiencias empíricas del trabajo de campo, el cual se enfoca en los efectos que la escasez de agua tiene en la vida de los pequeños agricultores de Subtanjalla.
Acknowledgements
This thesis would not have been possible without the enormous support and encouragement received from my grandparents, Papa Lucho and Mama Reina, and the smallholders of Subtanjalla. Their openness to the world allowed me to revisit, physically and evocatively, places and imaginaries that have constituted every word here written. As they have thought me, it is due to them as well as to my Peruvian and Dutch families and friends that I have become who I currently am. I am truly indebted to them, especially to Lucho, Reina, Gilda, Pedrito and Nina, for allowing me to accompany them in the process of becoming ‘us’.
I would like to profoundly thank the CEDLA staff for letting me be part of this collectivity and for supporting me, before even knowing me in becoming a CMP Master student. I would like to especially thank Rutgerd Boelens, from whom I have greatly benefited. Learning from him, receiving his comments, and debating about concepts and ideas have constituted a pleasant and instigating reflexive journey. Also, I would like to thank Bente and Carmen for all their support during my time at CEDLA.
I would like to thank my classmates who have contributed to my learning process inside and outside the classrooms. Talking, debating, and sharing with them, whether in the library or a pub, have greatly contributed to enhancing the ideas here portrayed. Finally, I would like to mention the NUFFIC for providing me with the opportunity to be part of this wonderful life learning experience.
Table of contents
1. Introduction ... 7
1.1 About my pueblo... 7
1.2. About the concepts ... 9
1.3 About which questions to ask ... 11
1.4. About the methodology... 12
1.5. About the chapters ... 14
2. About the relation between people and water ... 17
2.1. A singular and multiple I ... 19
2.2. Preceding encounters ... 24
2.3. A single and multiple water ... 28
2.4. From diversity to difference ... 34
2.5. Final considerations ... 37
3. Water scarcity, in between a problem and a circumstance ... 40
3.1. From a matter of fact to a matter of concern ... 42
3.2. A territorialisation around water ... 47
3.3. More than territories, places of convergence ... 52
3.4. A subjugated hydrosocial territory... 59
3.5. Final considerations ... 65
4. About the end of the world and the water to come ... 67
4.1. Old smallholders in the midst of the redistribution/recognition dilemma ... 71
4.2. When expelled from home ... 77
4.3. Is there more water to come? ... 82
4.4. Final considerations ... 85
5. Conclusion ... 87
5.1. Lessons from the theory ... 87
5.2. Lessons from the methods ... 89
5.3. Lessons from the process of answering the questions ... 91
5.4. Lessons for the future ... 93
Bibliography: ... 95 Appendix A ... 100 Appendix B ... 102 Appendix C ... 103 Appendix D ... 104 Appendix E ... 105 Appendix F... 106
Is there any water to come? Ethnographic theorizations of the smallholders’ perceptions of water scarcity in Subtanjalla, Ica-Peru
1. Introduction 1.1 About my pueblo1
Despite having been away for almost fifteen years, I have always thought of Subtanjalla as my hometown. Subtanjalla, a small town composed of 19019 inhabitants according to the 2007 census, founded on February 10th in 1959, and located at kilometre 296 of the Southern Pan-American highway (Nuestra comuna, 2017), was where I grew up.2 My grandparents, in company of my uncles and aunts, raised me there; while my mother was unwillingly absent because she was working in Lima carving a better future for us. Subtanjalla was my town, my family’s town. Despite my absence during so many years, I still remember the day in which I had to leave. It was a bright summer Sunday of January 2003. I was thirteen, and I had to move because living in Lima would offer more educational possibilities, and because I wanted to be closer to my young brother, who was living with my mom Gilda and Pedro, her partner. Despite being away for so long, I still recall that leaving felt as if I were to be disengaged from a greater me. As if part of me was to stay behind, captured in an unreachable memory that would never come back as it was.
I also remember that separating myself, in distance and in emotion, from my town and people also triggered the complexification of things that I previously saw as normal. I recall that before leaving Subtanjalla, it was normal to wash myself, or the dishes and clothes, in a plastic washbasin, so I could spend less of the water stored in an old metal cylinder. It was also normal to wake up at six, to help my grandparents fill multiple plastic recipients with water. It was normal to use the dirty water to flush the toilet. But then, in Lima there was tap water the whole day, and everything was suddenly easier. I therefore sensed that living in Lima was going to make my life a bit different, but different enough to distance myself from my family in Ica. In spite of that fear, gradually and unawarely, I inured to my Limenian life. As time went on, I realized that more time passed between my quick visits to my grandparents’ place in Subtanjalla, resulting in years of sustained absence.
1
In this case I have chosen the Spanish word pueblo due to its double meaning: town and people.
As I grew up, I realized that my absence was not only physical but also perceptual. I was not interested in, and subsequently not up-to-date with, the events that were occurring in my town. Nonetheless, years later, as a bachelor student I decided to go back, at least conceptually, to my place. Thus, I began reading articles and books related to my region, Ica. Through my readings, I comprehended that, as stated by Maria Teresa Oré, water scarcity in Ica had
undergone periods of intensifications like the cotton boom in the thirties and forties, the Pampa de Los Castillos struggles (2005, p. 130-131) in the fifties, the Agrarian Reform consequences (2005, p. 153) in the seventies, and the last one being the privatization of land and water resources (Ore & Damonte, 2014, p. 172-173) in the nineties.
My readings of academic texts contributed to restore my proximity with my family and part of my town. Though, the more I talked with them, the more I realized that the Subtanjalla where I lived had diluted throughout the years that I had not visited it. Also, I became aware that Subtanjalla was experiencing a new period of deprivation; a period that started at the beginning of the XXI century, when Ica underwent an arithmetic economic growth (currently it is among the regions with the highest economic growth in Peru), as a result of the booming agricultural exporting industry (Cancino, 2012, p. 23). As my grandmother Reina told me, this economic growth was contributing to the increasing scarcity of surface water and groundwater, which particularly affected the rural and low-income sector of the region’s population.
Thus, having this situation in my head, I decided to write an essay for a class during my undergraduate studies. Among the literature I gathered, I came across the story titled “Agua”, written by the Peruvian anthropologist José María Arguedas. A passage of this story has, ever since, been engraved in my mind: “In the coast as well, the water is grabbed by only the main landowners. The ones that have two or three small plots of land are only allowed to irrigate at the end; the smallholders get the water as charity, but their land has been thirsty for over a year” (Arguedas, 1935, p. 7). The fact that “Agua”, published a little over 75 years ago, still reflected the situation described by my family infuriated me. Now, as I write this, that same feeling brings me back to relive plenty of moments in which I experienced the notion of water scarcity as part of my daily life, but due to the normalization of this limitation I was not able to notice it. Appealing to these diverse rememorative analytical processes, and to the feelings that they conveyed, I decided to investigate, as part of my thesis project, the relation between Subtanjalla’s smallholders and water scarcity.
1.2. About the concepts
Owning to my background in social anthropology and my interest in researching issues related to water and water scarcity, the conceptual scaffolding of this research was guided by the fields of political ecology and anthropology. The inter-discipline of political ecology, even if it embraces a wide range of definitions, is conceived in this research as a field that analyses socionatural relations of power among interconnected human and non-human actors.
Specifically, this research is supported by the political ecology of water, which can be defined as the “politics and power relationships that shape human knowledge of and intervention in the water world, leading to forms of governing nature and people, at once and at different scales, to produce particular hydro-social order” (Boelens, 2015a, p. 9). Instead of looking at naturalized and well-defined objects, this understanding of the inter-discipline of political ecology allows us to emphasize the complex networks of relations among actors established with and in their environment (Latour, 2004, p. 24).
Similarly, the discipline of anthropology brings to the research’s conceptual framework the blurring of the scientific-knowledge/empirical-knowledge dichotomy. Following Tim Ingold’s notion of anthropology, this research focuses on how to carry out scientific thinking engaged with/in the world we inhabit (Ingold, 2011). In other words, it tries to symmetrize the constructed differences that exist between the researcher and the researched. By combining these two research fields, and thus blurring the differences among nature/culture, human/non-human, academia/field-work, my research seeks to symmetrically articulate the myriad of perceptions that may be encountered throughout the paths travelled. Intending to give equal importance to the diversity of voices I discovered that, similarly to my fortuitous and planned encounters with Subtanjalla’s smallholders, I additionally experienced expected and unexpected encounters with authors such as Rutgerd Boelens, Jeroen Vos, Bruno Latour, Tim Ingold, Michael Foucault, Mario Blaser, Julian Yates, Maria Teresa Oré, Gerardo Damonte, etc. By reading some of these authors’ writings, a series of interconnected and epistemologically coherent concepts is deployed to further develop the analysis of the issue of water scarcity in the district of Subtanjalla.
Among them is the concept of water scarcity, which is defined as a physical, politico-economic, and inter-human relational construction (Mena-Vásconez, Boelens & Vos, 2016; Boelens, 2015, p. 10; Ioris, 2012; Urteaga, 2016; Aguilera-Klink, Perez-Moriana & Sanchez-García, 2000; Bakker, 2000). The first notion is based on the positivist idea of absolute physical
water scarcity (Baumgartner, Becker, Faber & Manstetten, 2006), which can be understood as a
materially well-defined lack of water that is quantifiable through standardized technical methods. The second notion is water scarcity as a politico-economic construction. This idea can be defined as a scarcity that exists when the water supply experiences shortage in certain areas due to its unequal distribution (Vos & Boelens, 2016, p. 33). The third connotation is guided by the idea of
relational water scarcity (Baumgartner et al., 2006). This takes place when an individual or
group, independently of their access to physical water supplies, feels that their access to water is more limited than the access of other communities or individuals.
Another relevant conception was hydrosocial territories that can be simply defined (only for now because in the future chapters this concept will be properly developed) as contested imaginary and materialization of an interconnected network in which humans and non-humans are interactively defined and mobilized through discourses and power relations (Boelens, Hoogesteger, Swyngedouw, Vos, & Wester, 2016, p. 2). An additional significant idea is the Foucauldian notion of subjugated knowledges that is expressed as “those knowledges that are either trapped behind the canonical scientific knowledge or marginalized because they are considered inadequate or insufficiently scientific” (Foucault, 2003, p. 7).
The fifth pertinent concept used in this project is biosocial becomings, which aims to decompose standardized cultural and biological behavioural models (Fuentes in Ingold &
Palsson, 2013, p. 58). This concept proposes to understand and perceive individuals (humans and non-humans) as organisms, which are produced through their relations with and in the world, engaged in constant processes of becoming (Ingold & Palsson, 2013, p. 7-8). Another notion that will contribute to the symmetrisation of humans and non-humans is meshwork of relations, which is a model that binds together people’s and things’ fluxes of life into an assemblage that allows its constituents to live and develop (Ingold, 2011, p. 69-70). Subsequently, the Latourian notion of matter of concern (Latour, 2004, p. 25), which could be defined as the process of de-essentialization of naturalized notions that contribute to universal discourses and unique systems of knowledges, such as inferring that water scarcity does only belong to the sphere of “the natural”, will enhance and broaden our understanding of the notion of water and the circumstance of water scarcity.
Finally, I will explore the notion of precarity (Butler, 2009b) and expulsions (Sassen, 2016). By precarity I mean the condition in which certain populations experience the rupture of
their socioeconomic networks of support and, therefore, become expose to a greater level of vulnerability (Butler, 2009b, p. 25-26). In this text, this term will help me to elucidate the difficulties faced by the smallholders as a consequence of the weakening of their network of relations due to the water scarcity circumstance. Similarly, the notion of expulsion is defined as the system’s deep political-economic transformations that contribute to forcefully and intangibly expel specific groups of the population from the system itself. Through this concept I will deepen the analysis of Subtanjalla’s smallholders’ lives under the water scarcity situation.
1.3 About which questions to ask
Since I became more aware of the issue of water scarcity that people were experiencing in Subtanjalla, I began to wonder about the best way to identify the root cause of the problem in order to contribute to its solution. Therefore, before embarking on fieldwork and based only in my readings of academic articles and assumptions about the situation, I sketched an initial question which asked: “How do Subtanjalla smallholders frame and use their notion of
hydrosocial territory to confront the ways in which they are affected by water scarcity?”. During the first weeks of my research, I was convinced that my question was going to help me answer everything that I was trying to find out. At times, I sensed that a feeling of uncertainty was intruding. Uncertainty for not knowing how to control the influence that the events were having on the questions I wanted to answer. It was in this moment, in which I remembered historian Arij Ouweneel’s criticism about my research question. He said that my question presupposed that the smallholders’ use the notion of hydrosocial territories and confront their water scarcity
adversities. Ouweneel’s criticism and my further readings about the topic of water scarcity in Ica reminded me of two advices that my last two supervisors, Carlos Steil and Rutgerd Boelens, had given me about fieldwork and finding answers to my questions.
The first advice, which was given by Steil, stated that I should let the fieldwork surprise me. Thus, I decided not to focus so much on controlling every little detail but to follow the itineraries and ideas of people in order to answer not merely the questions that interested me, from an outsider position, but also the questions that the smallholders themselves found relevant. The second advice, Boelens told me, was that I should not focus on one overarching question but on multiple small ones. I recalled that he told me that what we call the research’s main question should be the exact addition of sub-questions. Thus, when adding all the answers I would find for each of the smaller and more focused sub-questions, the main question was going to be
answered. By combining these two advices, I decided to be open to changing my question if necessary.
After spending some weeks in the field, and through new experiences and information gathered, I realized that questions began to slowly appear. The ones that I felt were more
prominent for the smallholders, and for me, are the ones I chose to guide each of the chapters of this thesis. These questions were: “(1) What is the smallholders notion of water and how it is constructed?; (2) What is the smallholders’ notion of water scarcity and how does it shape their hydrosocial meshwork?; (3) How does the current water scarcity circumstance influence the Subtanjalla smallholders’ ideas about their hydrosocial territories’ future?”. Furthermore, these sub-questions as well as the conversations with different smallholders helped me to reformulate my initial overarching question. Thus, the final main question that guides my research is: “How do Subtanjalla’s smallholders dwell under the conditions established by the situation of water scarcity within their hydrosocial territory?”. Here a clarification is needed, in my main question the word dwelling stands for the active engagement of biosocial relations through which individuals are brought up into existence within a world inhabited by a plethora of beings, humans and non-humans (Ingold, 2000, p. 5).3 In other words, dwelling can be seen as the reconciliation of the separation between individuals and their milieu, they are no longer separate entities because the individuals as well as their milieu contribute to each other processes of biosocial genesis. This is, our milieu is made within ourselves and we are also made within our milieus.
1.4. About the methodology
The ways in which this investigation has been executed was supported by two methods: secondary data analysis and ethnographic research. The secondary data analysis was an
important method because it provided me with the opportunity to generate the initial research questions as well as the initial hypothesis. This method also assisted me to identify the topic’s state-of-the-art as well as to place it in an epistemological framework. Furthermore, ethnographic research complemented the secondary source analysis. In this case, ethnography must be
comprehended as a holistic approach based on the self-immersion in the others’ ontological and
3
More information about the perspective can be found in the second part of the book The perception of the
epistemological systems, which is guided by participant observation. As Alpa Shah argues, participant observation “is praxis, the process by which theory is dialectically produced and realized in action… it is potentially revolutionary because it forces one to question one’s theoretical presuppositions about the world by an intimate long-term engagement with, and participation in, the lives of strangers” (2017, p. 48-49).
In my case, I spent three months conducting this type of investigation with people who, besides being ‘strangers’, were my family and neighbours of Subtanjalla. This provided me an opportunity to establish more symmetrical and closer relationships with the people who composed this research’s universe. These people were mainly fifteen smallholders (out of a group of approximately 100, mostly male, smallholders) of the district of Subtanjalla who are also part of the Users Association of the Ica River’s Basin (known as JUACRI, its Spanish acronym). Moreover, due to my time spent in the Subtanjalla district, I have interacted with Subtanjallinos that are part of the municipal government, and inhabitants of the district’s centre and the communities of Longar, Camino de Reyes, and Tres Esquinas. I visited these
communities as a consequence of carrying out the “snowball” sampling method. This is, I went on small trips to these other communities only after previously meeting people who subsequently introduced me to other smallholders living in those parts of the district.
As I was aware that this method could result in a biased selection of interviewees, I also decided to engage in informal conversation with people who, without previous encounters, were working on their fields or walking around town. This mix of predetermined and random
sampling techniques gave me the possibility to have a wide-ranging universe of people. In addition, these sampling techniques were complemented by semi-structured interviews and informal conversations. Living with my grandparents during three months, and having access to my grandfather’s circle of close friends and family, allowed me to interview 11 smallholders of Subtanjalla (9 males and 3 females), as well as the Ica river’s water inlet manager. It also gave me the chance to interview 2 mid-sized landowners (1 male and 1 female), two representatives of JUACRI (1 female and 1 male), and 2 councillors of the Suntanjalla’s municipality (two males). Besides these interviews, which took place after I had already interacted with them in other environments, I also held informal conversations that arose during participant observation, which in this text will appear as “personal communications”. The mixture of interviews, conversations,
cohabitation, and self-reflexions (which appear as field notes), resulted in the revelation of data collected in the form of field notes, interviews and audiovisual recordings.
Furthermore, the ethnographic events that I experienced and the people I cohabited with during my time in Subtanjalla, taught me that I should not only be positioned as an
anthropologist or ethnographer. For the purpose of freeing myself from my shackles and getting immersed into the world of Subtanjalla’s smallholders, I was to become an apprentice of them and of the circumstances in which I was living. Through this positionality, I was able to complement the ethnographic work with the ontographic process (Holbraad, Pedersen and Viveiros de Castro, 2014). This can be defined as an ethnography that symmetrises the researcher’s and the natives’ cosmologies and, through that, opens the possibility to not only reflect on a radical otherness but to also reflect about our own positions and ways of thinking, as researchers and persons. The more I submersed myself into the analytical and fieldwork
processes, new elements, which from a distant and objective position were still invisible, started to reveal themselves. Phrases such as “water is multiple things” or “water scarcity is not a problem”, made aware that behind the naturalized ideas and preconceptions that I had created in my head prior to fieldwork, there was an entangled meshwork of elements that constituted the water world as understood and lived by the Subtanjallinos.
It was by living with Subtanjalla’s smallholders that I comprehended that my task was not to merely write a description of the elements and events I was encountering on my way, but to fully cohabit with them and also experience them. It was by building these closer relations that I recognized myself not as a mere spectator but as an active being that was also part of the
fieldwork. This is why now, sitting at a desk and reflecting back on these occurrences, I finally can conclude that I was making this fieldwork as much as it was making me. Therefore, in this thesis I am intending to write neither about the smallholders of Subtanjalla nor about water. Instead, I am trying to write with them, Subtanjalla’s smallholders in relation to water, through a symmetrical process of reflection that intertwines theories and empirical knowledges.
1.5. About the chapters
Based on the various events experienced during fieldwork as well as on the plethora of beings that I encountered in my reflexive path, this thesis has been divided in three ethnographic chapters that intertwines theory and fieldwork events. The first of them will help the reader grasp my process of understating of the smallholders’ notion of water. In this chapter I will explore
how, through a personal rememorative and ethnographic process, I became aware that in order to understand the meaning of water, I needed to, firstly, understand the meaning of the notion of person. This chapter also emphasizes my personal process of rediscovering the place that I once called home. Through the dialogue between past and present times I came to understand that for Subtanjalla’s smallholders, water, more than being defined as a one single and fixed entity, is multiplicity in itself. In the second chapter, the focus will move to the issue of water scarcity. Here, the academic notion of water scarcity will be explored through the eyes of Subtanjalla’s smallholders. This hypothetical conversation between academia and the smallholders, based on my experiences within the field, will result in the de-essentialization of water scarcity as a natural event. Political ecology concepts will be also analysed with the view to depict the meshwork of relations that constitutes the circumstances of water scarcity experienced by the smallholders. In the third chapter, intertwined discourses arising from the ethnographic events will help to analyse the way in which the circumstance of water scarcity intensifies the precarity and expulsions of Subtanjalla’s smallholders. Finally, through my grandmother’s question, “Is there more water to come?”, several ideas around the conceptualization of alternative futures for Subtanjalla’s situation of water scarcity will arise.
Lastly, as a note of caution, it is important to note that this text is not intended to be read as a mere recollection of anecdotes and events that have occurred during my fieldwork in Peru. It is not a text in which the voices of the ‘natives’ are exhibited on a stage while the voice of the ethnographer, my voice, is hiding behind the scenes. On the contrary, this work is based on ethnographic triggering events and the words expressed by the smallholders, but it ends with my interpretation of them. In other words, this work is developed under the idea that I, as a
researcher, can learn from the people I work with during fieldwork but, as Ingold tells, “I must be ready to speak with my own voice and not hide behind the voices of others” (2017a, p. 24). Equally, it is of the utmost importance to stress that none of the ethnographic analysis of the experiences described in this dissertation are intended to hold an absolutist character. On the contrary, the eagerness of these analyses and ethnographic descriptions is to contribute to thinking about the issues here studied from my own subjective positionality, which is a result of my personal relation with and in the world. This, therefore, gives room to others’ criticisms, corrections, and new studies that depart from different angles and would contribute to enriching the debate in the field of political ecology, anthropology and water studies.
Figure 2. Principal entrance to the district of Subtanjalla, Ica. Google maps. May 24th, 2017
2. About the relation between people and water
It is summer, well, Dutch summer, and I am back in Amsterdam. While sitting behind a desk at the temporarily empty CEDLA library, I opened my field notebook to search for
information that would help me start theorizing about the plethora of feelings, encounters and ethnographic events I had faced during my time in Peru. I noticed that my first note was titled ‘Ranting about mechanisms of control and accountability in academia’.
I need to confess that one of the parts of fieldwork that I dislike the most is taking notes. I particularly dislike it because playing with the twenty-six letters of the alphabet, a piece of paper, and a pen, curtail all the fluxes of feelings, ideas, and materials embedded in a given event. I think, that this technique merely allows us, pseudo-researchers, to fool ourselves and to think that we are doing something meaningful that brings us closer to the notion of objectivity that the hard science’s epistemology has long imposed on us. It is like implicitly saying, “oh wait, you think I am living it with you, but… let’s be real… I am not just living, like you do… I am actually working”. This unsymmetrical relation created by all these trivial ethnographical apparatuses makes me sick… especially if the people I am doing fieldwork with are my family.
(L. Reyes, field notes, April 28th, 2017).
My personal experience has shown me that conducting fieldwork, despite being a wholehearted event, is an arduous task. Now, doing it with the people who have brought you up and, as my grandma Reina always says, have even cleaned your ass, is even harder. From the very first day, it was clear to me that the conventional idea of what means to be a researcher needed to be debunked. During my firsts days at home, I was trying different things that would make me feel comfortable with the idea of conducting fieldwork at home. Probably, my
discomfort was so obvious that my grandmother was urged to ask:
“Hey flaco [skinny boy], what exactly are you? You are an anthropologist, aren’t you?” “Yes, mama Reina, I am. But… why do you ask?”
“…I am telling you, don’t come with your anthropologist questions, interviews, and stuff in here. Behave well… Here you are at home and you are just the son of your mother, my grandson, and not an anthropologist. I don’t want you to ask me weird questions about life, the past, and philosophical things at the wrong moments. Everything has its moment. And if you want to know things, just listen and learn like when you were younger”, my grandma said while chopping the chicken into smaller pieces. (R. Perez, personal communications, April 29th, 2017).
My grandmother’s words left me with one lesson that, it seems, I need to learn every time while doing fieldwork. By saying, ‘Here…you are just the son of your mother, my grandson, and not an anthropologist’, she taught me… or should I better say made me remember?... that I am multiple persons at the same time. I can choose whom to be, sometimes. But it also depends on
the people who I am cohabiting with. As my grandma subtly puts it, for me to actually be someone, there needs to be an implicit and smooth agreement that horizontalizes the relations that the others and I are establishing. Who I am now, at this specific moment, is not exactly the same I who was doing fieldwork in Peru, nor the same I who was living in Subtanjalla at his grandparents’ place. However, even when I am a multiplicity of different persons, throughout time and at the same time, I am definitely Luis.
During the first week in Peru, I was suddenly struck by the idea that my research was going to be more than merely about water and water scarcity. Anxiety was taking over myself. However, due to inexplicable reasons, on a Sunday, my mother, Gilda Escate, gave me a package of old notebooks, papers, and books. “Check what is still useful and what should be thrown in the garbage” (Personal communication, April 30th
, 2017), she told me in her bossy but caressing tone. It was a package full of materials used for my previous theses. Whilst carefully revising each and all of the documents that were in the packet, I stumbled upon my old field-notebook that I wrote while in the Afrobolivian community of Tocaña, La Paz, Bolivia. Moved by
hankering, I spent quite some time going through the dusty pages trying to decipher my atrocious handwriting. I came across with a brief note written two years ago. “As Carlos told you, don’t be afraid of letting fieldwork shape you and shape itself” (L. Reyes, field notes, 9th
January, 2015), it was written, I believe, in reference to the Brazilian anthropologist and my former supervisor Carlos Steil.
Being open to the last-minute modifications of my research was how I began to think of the following chapter as a narrative flux that needed to start by my encounters with the people I was going to work with, in this case my family and friends. This is why, the first subchapter (2.1.) focuses on my early conversations with my grandparents that shape, in a way, the genesis of this project. Although the final goal of this entire chapter is to answer the first question, (“What is the smallholders notion of water and how it is constructed?”), my cohabitation with my grandparents showed me that before asking about water I needed to know who I was really talking to. Thus, a reflexive and rememorative process of exploration will be build in order to analyse the Subtanjalla smallholders’ notion of person. Also, in the second subchapter (2.2.), I will portray the way in which my encounter with my pueblo, made me aware of the biosocial transformations that both, Subtanjalla and I, have undergone. As part of the process of deconstruction of my naturalized and idealized vision of Subtanjalla, I began to explore the
notion of water. This is why, in the third and fourth sub-chapter (2.3. and 2.4.), I will focus on the understanding of the notion of water and its relations with the smallholders.
2.1. A singular and multiple I
"Before we talk about what is water, I believe that it is necessary to know who really are the persons that you ask" (R. Perez, personal communication, April 30th, 2017) my grandmother tersely answered during lunch at my mother’s apartment. Her enigmatic response made me remember the phrase with which Steven Lukes (in Carrithers, Collins & Lukes, 1985, p. 282) opens the conclusion of his collection of essays regarding Marcel Mauss’ category of person, "a wonderful answer, but what was the question?". As Lukes puts it, for a while, I felt as if she urged me to decelerate for a second and listen. And this was enough to make me understand that behind the apparent simplicity of one of my initial tentative research questions, “what is water and water scarcity for smallholders in Subtanjalla?”, a totalizing and world-engulfing sense of ethnocentrism was present. I was coming up with questions without making the effort to know those who were going to listen to them, make sense of them, and answer them. My grandma’s words depicted previously, moreover, left me with a main question that wandered in my head during my time in Peru: what was the ‘really’ in her demand that ‘I should know who really are those that I ask’? To answer this question, I figured I needed to step down from my tower (Boelens, 2015a, p. 6).
At that time, I did not understand the ‘really’ pronounced by my grandmother as a mere description of the smallholders’ trajectories of life. I thought, on the other hand, that its meaning was directed to what in the field of anthropology has been referred to as the category of person (Levy-Bruhl, 1927; Mauss, 1929; Dumont, 1979; Goldman, 1999; etc.). I thought that analysing the smallholders’ notion of person was indeed very interesting because it would prevent me from smearing my thesis with a greasy ethnocentrism that invisibilizes the local's conception of person while reifying the projection of our own notion of person toward other societies. However, by writing these first reflections in my field notebook, like when I was child playing mischief, ‘the voice of consciousness’ assaulted me by constantly repeating one of the many inquisitive questions raised by the Brazilian anthropologist Marcio Goldman: “Would the insistence on the question [of the category of the person] not equally reflect a specifically western concern?” (1999, p. 21). This led me to ask my grandmother, once more, about what she exactly meant. The next night, before my grandparents’ usual game of cards commenced, I asked her:
“Mama Reina, what you meant to ask is who each person is or what it is to be people, in a more general sense?”
“The two are ok. But it is more important to know what the oldies say about what is to be people, right? It is well connected with the topic of water…”
“Why do you say that is well connected?”, I questioned her immediately.
“Oh… It is because the meaning of water depends on each person and their relationship they have with water. There you will see the difference”, she stated.
(R. Perez, personal communication, May 2nd, 2017).
This nocturnal conversation, made me realize that “to really understand who they are” I was forced to undergo temporal setbacks to establish dialogues with my past, with the child Luis, a child who was living with his grandparents at the first block of the 28 de Julio Avenue, a child who had barely left Ica and who was in the process of learning and apprehending the knowledge imparted by his relatives. As I was writing down these thoughts in my notebook, I heard that, behind the door of his room, my grandfather Lucho argued, "Reina, those questions you have asked are good but they are going to be answered by themselves".
The rough sound of pen on paper, the distant voice of my grandparents arguing about their card game and my fieldwork, and the dim white light stemming from the bulb of a wiry lamp, transported me to my old room. Adobe walls covered with blue wrapping paper over which I used to draw, a roof made of cane and mud through which it was possible to see a thin halo of light and dust coming in, and the voice of my grandparents coming from the hallway, made up the atmosphere in which I was brought up. And by being there and feeling again what it all meant, was how the things suggested by my grandmother unhurriedly began to make more sense. "One cannot be one in solitude", my grandparents used to teach me when I was little. “Take care of the animals and plants if you want them to take care of you”, “be kind and offer your help to people if you want to be recompensed”, “share what you have and don’t ask for anything in return”, were the phrases I grew up with and, as my grandparents say, “formed me as a person”.
Honestly, until this time I thought that these phrases were merely catholic lessons that my grandparents wanted me to put in practice because they desired to be good children of God. But, now that I think back, Subtanjalla was not a very Catholic town. The only time there was mass, was when someone from town had died or when someone was getting married. The other times the church was either closed or there was no one, but the priest and a couple of boys. But what was it, then? If these lessons did not necessarily imply a deep Catholicism, what did they stand for? What type of person did they want me to be? When I asked this to my mother, she affirmed,
“they have always looked after the community before looking after themselves” (G. Escate, personal communication, May 2nd, 2017).
By talking to them, to my mother, family, and friends, I could argue that for the old smallholders in Subtanjalla, like my grandparents, each person is made on the basis of the relationships we form with other beings, humans and non-humans, in the world. In addition, due to the fact that these relations are in constant transformation and variation, each person is always remaking him or herself, in a constant state of underlying incompleteness. This is why, since I was small I learned to see every person, and therefore to see me, as polyphonic and multivalent being (Guattari, 1995, p. 24). This was subsequently reflected in a phrase expressed by don Julio Espinoza, small farmer and former mayor of Subtanjalla, while being interviewed about water scarcity in the region, "You probably listen to us and say, oh they know something about water, but we actually don’t know a thing. What has happened is that we have lived a lot of things and we have learned from everything. It’s just about living and learning” (J. Espinoza, interview, June 14th, 2017).
My reflections based on these ethnographic triggering events led me to assert that the notion of person, rather than emphasizing the individual as essentially stable and perennial, sheds light on the processes in which an individual develops socially and biologically, based on its relationships established with other surrounding beings. This was explained with complex simplicity by my grandfather Lucho when he said, “There is no such a thing as a vine being excellent by nature or a pruner being awesome since his birth. For the pruner to do a good job, the vines have to let him work. But for the vines to be helpful, the pruner must have a good hand” (L. Escate, personal communication, June 13th, 2017). Through this example, I understood in greater depth that an individual’s development, therefore, denotes that "forms of life are neither genetic nor culturally pre-configured but emerge as properties of a self-organizing systems dynamics of development" (Ingold & Palsson, 2013, p. 8). That is to say that we are not stable and transcendent essences; differently, we constantly become in a continuum of relations of effects and assemblages that “results from/results in” the collision of our and the others’ fluxes of lives.
But, who they really are? I have understood that it is impossible to answer that question; that I should accept the failure of just grasping a minuscule bit of their volatile essence. Thus, instead of trying to find out their essences, I should shed light on the constant processes of
transformation undergone by the Subtanjalla’s smallholders. This was reaffirmed by my uncle Jaime who is currently a councillor of the municipality of Subtanjalla, when he told me that "even if you [I] were born in Subtanjalla, you're not Subtanjallino anymore. You were… but as you travel different paths, you've missed out on a lot of things that a Subtanjallino would nowadays know" (J. Escate, personal communication, June 21st, 2017). These ethnographic accounts, here collected, prompted me to think that I cannot be seen as a single static point unchanged through time and space, but as an space of confluence, where an entangled
multiplicity of fluxes of life constitute my current self. Through their opinions and my thoughts, I concluded that each person differs from others, and from their past and futures selves. If this is the case, I thought, I would be examining something that it is so fluid that is impossible to analyse. It would be, as my uncle Luchi once told me, as if I try to hug the water.
A sunny morning in Subtanjalla, I shared this conclusion with my grandpa Lucho while he was making a hook to collect mangos. Looking reluctant, he answered, “I agree, but also I disagree. I think we are, like you said, all different all the time, but also we are very much alike” (L. Escate, personal communication, June 13th, 2017). To further illustrate this idea, he later argued, "The people are like the canals and the water is like that soul that we all share... although each canal is different, and although the water that runs through each canal looks different from the outside, ohm…very deep… deep inside it is just H2O" (L. Escate, personal communication,
June 13th, 2017). On the basis of my grandfather´s words, I understood that although our
subjectivities are multiple, we share a commonality that binds us into a community of which we are a part. We, therefore, have a univocal interior, which is understood as the soul or the force that gives us life, and external differences, which are perceived as the materiality of the body undergoing physical transformations. There is, therefore, a clear distinction between an inner intangible essence and tangible outer forms. In addition, it is important to note that, although our outer physical form individuated us (it makes us different from others), our inner essence binds us together (because deep inside we are all made out of the same essence). This made me
conclude that although we are not constituted by transcendental essences, there are elements that bind us together as persons and groups.
For me, the Luis that right now is acting as a researcher behind his laptop and sitting at a desk at the CEDLA library, it is striking and problematic to explain these ideas in simple words. When I was there all these made sense, it was simple. But what has happened, then? I become
exasperated due to my inability to elucidate things that in my mind are flawless. How do I explain it? How do I prevent sounding as if I am exoticizing the ordinary? How do I stop using concepts that belong to the so-called grand theories? I start to wonder while my fingers continue typing on my laptop. And then, a phrase that used to be emitted by don Pacheco, a friend of my grandpa who has recently passed away, came to my mind. He used to say that we cannot expect a person to be always the same because we are dependants on the circumstances in which we live and on the people with whom we hang out. These words helped me to understand that to become a person or group, one needs to learn how to coexist with others without losing one’s
independent existence. This is, in order to be aware of our singularity, it is essential to understand that we are composed of multiplicities.
2.2. Preceding encounters
During my fieldwork in the community of Tocaña, I was taught about the insufficiency of, as it is argued by symmetrical anthropologists, taking the natives’ words seriously (Viveiros de Castro, 2002). Through staggering events, the Tocañeros showed me that a vital aspect of fieldwork was not to believe in the native’s words but to analyse whether they are actually taking us, researchers, seriously. The first step to do so, I remembered to be told by the Tocañeros, was to stop believing that we are ethnographers or researchers. We, outsiders, are learners. This previous experience, as well as my grandparents’ advices shown in the last sub-chapter, helped me to deconstruct the tower in which I tried to stand at first. Being and feeling mundane, as if I had nothing to offer but my willingness to learn, was how I started to delve into this
ethnographic journey. My grandpa Lucho and I were the only ones travelling because my grandma Reina decided to stay in Lima taking care of my younger brother. Sitting in a busy bus station, located in Lima’s downtown, right at the intersection of 28 de Julio Avenue and the Vía Expresa, I ask my grandfather if he could explain me, how the understanding of what people really is would help me develop the topic of water scarcity.
Slowly eating a bag of salty peanuts, he listened to my question. I thought he was going to come up with an answer, but in a very ceremonial manner he asked me to repeat again since he didn’t listen properly because of the chatters, claxons, whistles, screams, and all the other sounds that were part of this chaotic and raucous symphony. Raising my voice, I posed the question once again to which he responded, “Your grandma is right. First, we need to see what people think of themselves and then ask about water. Everybody has a different relationship with water” (L. Escate, personal communication, May 4th
, 2017). I felt somewhat lost because I was still unable to understand the logic of my grandma’s recommendation. And whilst thinking about it, my grandfather redirected my attention by saying, "I wanted to let you know that there are some things that we need to do in the chacra [small agricultural field]. The thorn fence needs to be repaired well so that people cannot get in to steal the fruits and other things. I'm going to teach you because none of your uncles wants to help me" (L. Escate, personal communication, May 5th, 2017). And so, without unerringly knowing what path my research was going to take but being sure that I was going to become my grandpa’s apprentice, we boarded the half-empty bus. Minutes after boarding the bus, I asked my grandpa:
“Oh… well… Water, for me, is many things. It is difficult to explain, but although it sounds a bit simple, I could say that water is life” he replied, relaxing in his seat. “Water is life… That sounds like a commercial of bottled water”, I said laughing. “It sounds like it, right? But, water is life because it produces life. I need time to say it more beautifully. Later, I will write down what water means. Also, you should ask the same thing to your uncles, your mom, and the other people”, my grandfather nodded while trying to adjust the volume of his hearing aid.
(L. Escate, personal communication, May 5th, 2017).
During the trip, we hardly talked. I was slightly absorbed … immersed in my memories. A lot of things still were familiar. I could smell the cheap and intense perfume that is spread in the bus to give the impression that it is clean, hear the street vendors jumping on the bus to sell food, watch the religious films the TV of the bus, feel the dense and hot air circulating inside the bus, and get lost in the desert landscape and the Pacific sea that accompanied us all the way. However, on this occasion, I noticed something different. I remember that when I was still a kid, most of the travellers were natives of Ica. Even, I remember, many were old acquaintances of my grandparents. In contrast, during this trip at least six people asked us about the name of the cities where we were, "San Luis de Cañete," "Chincha Alta", "San Clemente", "Pisco", we replied along the way. By answering the questions, my grandfather was encouraged to tell me, as a soft confession:
“Before only Iqueños travelled. Now there are people of a lot of places living there, that is why they don´t really know the way.
“But they could be Iqueños, who says they are not?”, I said to tease him.
“I say it because to be Iqueño is not enough to be born there or to live there. You need to be one with it”, he told me.
(L. Reyes, field notes, May 5th, 2017).
Between answers, little naps, short conversations, and contemplations of the landscape, the bus passed by Pampa de Pisco, a desert located between Ica and Pisco. It was almost five years that I had not transited through there, and now I think I did not at all because Pampa de Pisco, the one that I remember so vividly, has ceased to be. Its immense and generous looking veils, sparsely covered by a few mounds of long-lasting huarangos (Prosopis pallida), their endless dunes and hoyadas (small depressions), yellowish, before my eyes, threatening to scorch me out of thirst, and its blue sky which merges with the yellow sand on the horizon, forming a single bicolour canvas, just will live in my childhood memories. My grandfather, in a regretting tone, told me to look at how little pampas (desert) are left because of the expansion of the houses and the agribusinesses. I wrote, “between the rapid growth of new neighbourhoods and the
intensification of the agribusinesses sectors, the desert is being quickly devoured” (L. Reyes, field notes, May 5th, 2017). I shared this idea with my grandfather who responded by saying, "and these people do not know that the desert is as important as the water. Ica is fucked” (L. Escate, personal communication, May 5th, 2017).
Mixed feelings, it would be the perfect phrase to define what I felt at that moment. The pleasant emotions to return to see my family, to go back to live in my first house, and spending time in Subtanjalla were mixed with the selfish sadness of knowing that everything else, as well as me, had grown up in divergent directions. It was in that moment when I experienced, once more and paraphrasing the poet César Vallejo, which can be explained as trilce, a happy and melancholic sadness. Delving in the sweet sadness caused by my memories, we got down in the middle of the Pan-American Highway, right in front of the municipal stadium of Subtanjalla. We crossed the highway, which now has a traffic light, and everything seemed to be as before. The
ticos (small yellow taxis) were still standing on the side of the street, there is still the little store
where soft drinks in plastic bags and pieces of watermelon are sold, the acequia (canal) continued to be full of sand and debris, the same white cart with blue plastic roof continues selling candy in front of the SENATI (a national institute of applied higher education). My grandfather continued stopping every minute, like when I was a child, to greet someone he knows… I recognized some faces, others not, but I equally greet them. The fulbito (futsal) courtyards remain in the same place, but their goals are now almost destroyed. On the bridge of the acequia, el chato (the short guy) continued selling newspapers, and in the corner of the street, an old shirtless man still ran a bicycle repair stand. We passed the small roundabout, which receives some shade from the same acacia tree that has seen me grow. And all of a sudden, we found ourselves in the block were I grew up.
I heard the people on the street making noise, the colectivos (shared taxis) honking every other minute hoping to get passengers, the children running down the street as they exit school. I saw that they're all well dressed, not as in my childhood in which some children wore slippers or remanded shoes and clothes. It was hot and it was almost noon. I also noted that many houses have put signs on the sidewalk that say “Menu”. My grandfather noticed the same and told me "now with this scholarship program ‘Beca 18’ there are quite a lot of people coming from other
cities to study. That helps locals to open their restaurants and rooms for rent".4 As I walked, I pulled out my small notebook and wrote in it “It seems that while I have been gone, the 'development' has come to my land” (L. Reyes, field notes, 5th May, 2017). After reading my note, my grandpa told me that I was right, but that it was a chaotic development.
And there we were, in front of the door. We opened it. We walked into a small patio with cement floor. I remember that before it used to be a small garden where I used to play with my cousins. I said to my grandpa, “nowadays people like sowing cement, right?”. My grandpa Lucho smiled and opened, with a bit of effort, the old brown wooden door. We went in. We were in the kitchen, which for many years was the living room. The big house is now only one-third of the size it used to be. The other two-thirds have been distributed among two of my uncles, who have already built their own houses. I immediately noticed that what was left of the old house was only half of the alley, my auntie’s room, and part of my grandpas’ old room. My hands go along the walls accompanying my heart and eyes. I arrived at the alley and remember that it was there where my cousin Marcos and I scored a few beautiful goals, and also where we broke my grandma’s beloved red clock. Suddenly, I came up to a wall that was not there before. It was new, and it abruptly made me realize that what once was my room had disappeared. It has been deleted from the materiality of the today’s world, which filled me with a slight evocative sadness. My process of remembering the old house was interrupted by my grandfather who called me to unpack my things. He then began calling my uncles, to let them know that we had arrived. The first one to arrive was my uncle Jose, known as Pepe, who told me,
“Lalín [that was my nickname as a kid], your mom Gilda has told me that you are doing a research on the lack of water”.
“Yes, uncle. I'm going to spend time here with papa Lucho doing fieldwork on the theme of water and its problems”, I responded.
“Oh, yes. It is fucked up. For example, here we only have water for half-an-hour a day. If we did not have a tank or a pump, we can do nothing at home”, my uncle Pepe stated. “That is fucked up, uncle. But it has always been like that, right?”
“Yes, but now is worse than before. When you were here the situation was not so critical. But another problem is that if you go to interview papa Lucho’s generation, they are not going to talk about the real problem. They're thinking more about the water of their chacras. But they don´t realize that […] what is of primary importance is the problem of drinking water in the urban area”, my uncle Pepe concluded.
(J.A. Escate, personal communication, 5th May, 2017).
4
Beca 18 is a scholarship program managed by the Peruvian government that offers full scholarships to young people in poverty situation to follow an academic degree at universities or institutes within Peru.
"Apparently there is a single problem in the tangible sense of the world, a problem related to water scarcity, and two or more different views on that problem. For instance, my grandpa’s and my uncle’s" (L. Reyes, field notes, 6th
May, 2017), I wrote in my notebook in the warm solitude of an early sunny morning of June.
2.3. A single and multiple water
Before going to the field, on a febrile spring afternoon, in a corner of the CEDLA library I found myself in a meeting with my thesis advisor, Rutgerd Boelens. He brought a copy of my thesis’ project proposal thoroughly and accurately revised. I was satisfied with his feedback, but all in all a question was hovering over my head. Why do you focus so much on the notion of ontology? I think that if you go to an Amazonian or indigenous community the ontological differences will be obvious… but by living with the smallholders of your community it will be harder to find ontological differences. I did not answer, and only limited myself to agree. However, I knew that there was something about Boelens’ opinion with which I disagreed but was unable to put it in words. It was during fieldwork, and as my grandfather had predicted, that questions and doubts began to be clarified by themselves. Gradually, I began to comprehend that although the notions of water do not vary much in the superficiality of the signifiers, in the depth of their meanings there are sometimes irreconcilable gaps. There are different ontologies in play, I concluded at first. This is why, using the photo elicitation method which had the figure 5 as base, I decided to deepen on the diverse understanding of water.
“The image that you show me is all about water. It is about how the new generations do not know that the water does not come out of the pipe. It’s about how it is believed that the water is something that is used to carry on without daily chores. But in my personal concept, water is life […] It is something that is out there in the world, but it also runs through my blood. Water, together with the earth, is outside in the world, but it also forms my body. For me, the water is not a living being, is only a resource [...] But the water is still important to keep us alive. But it does not only contribute to keeping us alive but also to unite and disunite us. There are many types of water, but biggest sections can be defined as water for people and water for animals and plants. And it is important to remember that there has to be a care of all waters alike […] Now people do not listen to the water, they do not respect the liquid elements[...] It doesn’t speak like a human, but we have to listen to their phases so that we can maintain the same levels of the past. Now the groundwater, for example, is falling because we are not aware of what she is telling us. If it withdraws, it does not come back”.
“This picture is clear, talks about the water and its daily use. Water is a natural resource that essential to preserve life. Without water, for example, it is complicated to execute everyday chores. We have seen it this summer in Lima. In some areas, water was missing for two weeks and the people were becoming really mad. In Ica, for instance, water has always been a problem. But we, the older generations, have experienced what it's like to live with little water, and I think that makes us appreciate it as a resource that should be used efficiently. For example, I believe that with the booming of the agro-exporting industry the authorities are misusing the water. We are allowing the big companies to exploit in excess the underground water, while the water of the rivers is wasted… being thrown into the sea. I believe that we should have a better water management. If our authorities were more intelligent we would not waste our hydric resources and instead, the pampas would be converted into arable land”.
(G. Escate, interview, June 28th, 2017).
“I took the picture thinking about the problem of water scarcity. Lima is the second largest city located in a desert, and while I was in Amsterdam I read in the news and talked with my family about how water scarcity was altering the social relations during these two weeks that many districts of the capital suffered a widespread shortage of drinking water. With this image, I wanted to start a dialogue on the meaning of the water and water scarcity. For me, and before going to fieldwork, I consider water as an
important resource for the maintenance of the balance that allows the existence of Gaia, a term used in the contemporary world by philosophers and social scientists, which refers to that life force that is produced by the interconnected relationships that form the earth”. (L. Reyes, field notes, April 24th , 2017).
“That photo is about water. It’s about how the water flushes through the sink, in the house. The water is important because it is used to prepare the food, to swim, to wash our clothes”, said my young cousin Sarita.
“Yes, the water is important because if we do not take water we can die of thirst”, continued José Luis.
“We need to take care of the water because there will be no more water in our homes, and we won't be able to do things in the house”, responded José Luis.
“Then we are just going to have to drink soda, and if we run out of money we will no longer be able to buy soda at the store”, added Sarita.
“We can also buy water in the store”, José Luis said.
“Yes but the water in the store is not free, and the tap water it is. That is why it is best not to waste much so we can all have a little bit because here there is little water”.
Figure 6. Sarita Escate playing with her dog at her home in Subtanjalla, Ica. June 13th, 2017.
Four generations of the same family, four opinions outwardly similar but inwardly different. They revolve around water and water scarcity and, at the same time, each of them expresses different concerns and emphasis. For instance, my grandfather perceives of water as an element that produces live. My mother Gilda assigned it a meaning related to an economic resource that could be used efficiently. I see it in a more broad sense, as a signifier that
encapsulates multiple signified. And my little cousins interpreted it as good that is essential to perform our daily activities. Would this show the ontological diversity? Would these even qualify as markers of different ontologies? Or are they markers of diverse epistemologies? How do we define what they are, if for each of the five people it may be different things? Who am I to impose my opinion and vision of the things over the others?
With total frankness, during the writing of my thesis project proposal, I foresaw that the term used to explain this diversity would be ontological heterogeneity of water. At first, I
thought it was an appropriate term, as it was coined as a reference to the overlapping multiplicity of ways of metaphysically existing within the water-worlds that a given groupality lives in. For instance, under this logic it can be said that the agribusinesses have their own water ontology and therefore inhabit an specific water-world, the smallholders have another, the indigenous another, and so on. I now understand that in principle this definition may sound a bit complex or
confusing. However, at a first glance Alberto Castillo, known as Rache, the guardian of the
bocatoma (canal inlet structure) of the Ica river, said something that could work as an applied
definition of the notion of ontological heterogeneity of water. Rache said, "there is a lot of people involved in water management, and all have their own way of understanding…
knowledge about water is something that everybody has, especially the people who work here in the field… the difference is that people valued more the knowledge that comes with a diploma" (A. Castillo, interview, 14th June, 2017). This is also supported by Yates et al. (2017) argument,
Recent attention has been paid to the promise and politics of ‘a multiplicity of worlds animated in different ways’ (Blaser, 2014, p. 49). This work has challenged the assumption of a singular world (of one material reality that is ‘out-there’, fixed, knowable, and potentially manageable by humans according to related knowledge hierarchies), proposing that we pay serious attention to the possibility that there are diverse ways of being within and interacting with multiple worlds. (Yates, Harris & Wilson, 2017, p. 797-798)
Multiplicity of ontologies (Stengers, 2010; Latour, 2005, 2009), multiplicity of worlds (Viveiros de Castro, 1996, 2007; De la Cadena, 2010), multiplicity of ways in which we relate to
multiplicities of water (Blaser, 2009; Yates, Harris &Wilson, 2017), is what we need to decolonize, or to find alternatives, our naturalized and fixed world, the proponents of this
epistemological approach warn us. However when talking to my grandpa’s brother in law, Hugo Muñante, what used to be so clear began to show certain problems. My uncle Hugo said, “If there would different waters and different worlds, and all that nonsense, as you explain me now, there wouldn’t be the need to fight over who has access to it. Deep inside, water is one and the world is one. It is people who see it differently because of how they interact" (H. Muñante, interview, June 16th, 2017). Moreover, in a second time I met with Rache, I asked him whether he believed that different actors lived in different worlds or realities. To this, he responded that, “I don’t think so. I think everybody lives in one reality. What happens is that different people have different ideas and relation with waters, and sometimes they don’t talk to find solutions” (A. Castillo, personal communication, July 4th, 2017). I became more aware that even if at first I considered that it would be plausible to portray multiple worlds and water-worlds in which people inhabit (Yates, Harris & Wilson, 2017, p. 797-798), at the end I understood that despite our differences we all inhabit a single material world.
Departing from this view, I also was able to understand that for Subtanjalla’s smallholders water, in its broader sense, is a materiality in which different meanings are embedded. For them, there is neither ontological multiplicity of waters nor multiplicity of worlds. Instead, there is a single world where all of us inhabit and are able to establish different relations among one another. And it is in this single world in which each of us develops different ways of interacting with water. After grasping this idea, I began to question whether the
smallholders conceived water as a singular being or as multiple entities. This was clarified when in a conversation between Julio Espinoza, Pacheco, and my grandfather, they explained to me that there were, at least, three noticeable types of water: for humans, for non-aquatic animals and plants, and for fish and aquatic plants. After discussing the differences, I asked them “despite the differences, does water have something in common? According to them, the point in common is that in the profoundness of its constitution, water is H2O.
Their chemical oriented response shattered some of my preconceptions that I had formed before going to the field. This led me to question the smallholders about their understanding of H2O. To my surprise, they responded in similar ways to what was stated by the Cabrera brothers,
