Geoforum 77 (2016) 28–39
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Geoforum
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/geoforum
Practicing costumbres and the decommodification of nature: The Chilean
water markets and the Atacameño people
Manuel Prieto
Instituto de Investigaciones Arqueológicas y Museo R.P.G. Le Paige, Universidad Católica del Norte, Le Paige 380, 1410000 San Pedro de Atacama, Chile
a r t i c l e
i n f o
Article history:
Received 27 April 2016
Received in revised form 22 September
2016
Accepted 3 October 2016
Keywords:
Chile
Atacama Desert
Water markets
Decommodification
Atacameño people
Cultural politics
a b s t r a c t
Scholars who have critically analyzed the commodification of nature have explored how the specific biophysical features of the objects to be commodified can shape the outcome of the commodification process. Thus, the establishment and behavior of a market system is closer to a political struggle than it is
a simple technical and spontaneous process. Despite their contributions, these approaches have not
focused on the resistance that cultural exegesis, self-identification, and the affective connection between
the human and non-human pose to market systems. In this paper, I show how the Atacameño people
from the Atacama Desert (Chile) have subverted the radical pro-water market model imposed by the
Chilean military dictatorship in 1981 by relying on their water-related cultural values. In some
Atacameño communities, the water market has not operated to ensure that water rights are put to those
uses with the highest economic value (e.g., mining or urban water consumption). Indeed, in these communities, internal rules both forbid the sale of water rights to the mining sector and regulate the distribution of water within the community in terms that operate as barriers to other transactions. These rules
form part of a moral economy of water that is a concrete ethic based on shared values and affective connections between humans and non-humans, mandating how people should relate to one another in relation to water. Together, these relations have decommodified water and contradict the neoliberal
explanation of how a free water market should work.
Ó 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction
In 2012, a group of regantes (users of water for agricultural purposes) from the Atacameño community of Lasana invited me to
participate in their annual canal cleaning ceremony. As spring
arrives, the community members and guests gather to clean the
canals, venerating water, remembering their abuelos (ancestors)
who built the canals, and making pagos (payments) to the water
with alcohol and coca leaves.
During the ceremony, the participants exchanged coca with one
another, poured wine into the ground in veneration of the earth
and of their ancestors, and drank a toast honoring each member
of the community. At the end of the ceremony, the participants
mixed coca and wine inside a bucket, an action that is called pago,
which means a payment to the water. When the bucket was filled
with offerings, the leader of the ceremony drank a toast honoring
the day, all the participants, and water. During this ceremony,
the regantes and guests observed how their participation,
expressed in the form of offerings, became part of the same fluid.
Once the bucket was filled with offerings, somebody released the
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2016.10.004
0016-7185/Ó 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
water of the canal, and another man simultaneously threw the
contents of the bucket into the running water. The mixture of
offerings and water then flowed as one fluid through the canal.
The people became very excited; some people shouted loudly
and clapped their hands, while others ran along the canal following
the running assemblage of water and offerings.
Through this ritual technology (Condominas, 1977; Lansing,
1991), wine, coca leaves, dances, music, foods, regantes, guests,
water infrastructure, ancestors, land, canals, and water were all
assembled together, celebrating water as sacred. Participants told
me that the ritual ensures the material reproduction and continuous flow of water and the success of the crops and reinforces the
ties between community members and between them and water.
During the ritual, the irrigated landscape becomes a sacred site
(Rodríguez, 2006), the community value of water is reproduced
(Brown and Ingram, 1987), and the moral economy of water is
reinforced (Rodríguez, 2006; Trawick, 2001, 2002, 2003; Wutich,
2011). This collective event is part of the communal management
of water in the Atacameño communities, which is an anomaly in
Chile, whose water model is internationally renowned as a textbook example of an extreme neoliberal approach to water allocation (Bauer, 2004; Budds, 2004).
M. Prieto / Geoforum 77 (2016) 28–39
For neoliberal economists, the communitarian value of water
conflicts with the notion of water as a fully marketable commodity.
For them, water should be managed as a private and discrete
object, following the dictates of a market-based system
(Anderson, 1991; Briscoe, 1996; Kelso, 1967; Thobani, 1995).
Managing water through rituals and other vernacular practices is
viewed as inefficient (unless tourists are willing to pay the highest
economic value to participate in the water rituals). In neoliberal
economic theory, ownership should be allocated to those who
are willing to pay the highest monetary price, payment should be
in currency (not in strange concoctions), and the recipient of the
payment should be the owner of the commodity and not the commodity itself.
According to the 2002 national census, there are 21,015 Atacameños. Most of them (66%) live in the II Antofagasta Region, in
both urban settlements (mainly in Calama and Antofagasta) and
the rural villages located in the Loa River Basin and the Atacama
Salt Flat (Fig. 1). The Atacameño communities are recognized as
legal entities by the Indigenous Law (Law No 19.253), and as such
their members can collectively own and buy water and land. The
Atacameño territory extends through different ecological tiers:
The area between 2500 and 3600 meters above the sea level
(MASL) is designated the ‘‘Andean Desert,” classed as a Cold Desert
where the small amount of rainfall is sufficient for high-altitude
vegetation to grow and for agricultural and pastoral activities to
develop. Above 3600 MASL, the climate is of the High Altitude
Desert Tundra type, and the average rainfall can reach 250 mm/
year. Only pastoral activities can develop at this altitude (with a
few exceptions). During the months of January and February, there
are heavy rains and thunderstorms in the upper highlands, a phenomenon known locally as the ‘‘Altiplanic Winter” or the ‘‘Bolivian
Winter.” Communities are located near large or small rivers, and
their territories include land for agriculture and pasture lands. In
general terms, Atacameños practice an Andean-Christian syncretic
worldview. This worldview is manifested in their local ceremonies,
particularly in the saints’ celebrations and agro-pastoralist production rituals (e.g., canal cleaning ceremonies, floreamiento,1 carnivals), in which a deep interaction with non-humans and ancestors
is practiced.2
Despite the strict water privatization plan imposed in the early
1980s (Prieto, 2014, 2015) by the Chilean dictatorship in the Loa
River Basin, where several Atacameño communities are located,
the neoliberal logic behind the water markets has not taken root
in the area. Indeed, contrary to the expectations of Chilean experts
(see e.g., Donoso, 2004), the empirical data show that the water
market has not been active as expected, and the Atacameños are
not selling their water rights to the highest economic value water
users, i.e., the mining companies and urban water supply companies (Prieto, 2016).
Critical analyses of how the Chilean model has operated among
the Atacameño people have been conducted (Budds, 2009;
Carrasco, 2011; Molina, 2012; Yañez and Molina, 2011). However,
these investigations have ignored or minimized the agency of the
indigenous people in contesting, shaping, and reversing the water
privatization reforms and have focused less on alternative ways of
valuing nature and traditional practices vis-à-vis pro-market
rationality (Jackson and Palmer, 2014; Perreault, 2008). This article
fills these gaps by exploring the tension between the Chilean water
1
This is a production ritual that consists of decorating the ears, back, and chest of
animals (mainly llamas, alpacas, lambs, and goats; in rare cases, I also saw this done
to burros, dogs and bulls) with flowers made of different-colored wool. The
floreamineto ensures the reproduction and health of the animals.
2
For a general overview of Atacameño livelihoods, cultural practices and
geographical context, see Castro and Martínez (1996). For a general overview of the
archaeological, ethnohistorical and historical context, see Nuñez (2007).
29
model and the affective, communicative, and material relations
between the Atacameño people and water. Moreover, this study
advances the notion of water as an uncooperative commodity,
focusing particularly on how the biophysical conditions of water
impose a set of constraints upon its commodification (Bakker,
2004) by stressing the Atacameños’ cultural conceptions of water
and how these conceptions have been articulated in relation to
market-based approaches to water management. This approach
will lead to a more comprehensive understanding of the contradictions inherent in the neoliberal explanation of how a free water
market should work in practice.
In the following, I first advance the thesis of water as an uncooperative commodity (Bakker, 2004) by highlighting how alternative cultural approaches to valuing nature conflict with the
commodification process. Second, I describe the Chilean water
model and analyze how the water market has behaved in the area
under study. Third, I develop the concept of costumbres as performances rooted in cultural values and practices of water attached
to a certain moral economy. Finally, I explore how these costumbres
operate as barriers and produce contradictions for the neoliberal
Chilean water model.
For this paper, I gathered data during 3 field seasons (2012,
2013, and 2016) by conducting participatory observation and
open-ended and semistructured interviews and collecting oral histories from current and former indigenous leaders, everyday water
users, those who experienced the privatization or who have been
affected by it, and government and mining company officials. At
the documentation center of the National Water Agency (Dirección
General de Aguas, hereinafter DGA), I reviewed the technical documents that served as the basis for privatization; in the Water Property Register located in the city of Calama, I reviewed all the data
related to the water rights transactions that occurred between
1981 and 2009.
2. Beyond the thesis of the uncooperative commodity and the
moral economy of water
According to the neoliberal approach, nature must be fully commodified, and its value should spontaneously emerge from selfregulated markets (Anderson and Leal, 2001). Critical scholars
who have studied the commodification of nature have problematized this notion by stressing how the specific biophysical features
of the objects to be commodified shape the trajectory and outcome
of the commodification process (e.g., Bakker, 2004; Bridge, 2000;
Prudham, 2005; Robertson, 2000). This approach has been influenced by Polanyi’s (1957) position that nature is a fictitious commodity that demands an institutional arrangement for it to be
incorporated into a market. Following Smith’s (1984) argument
regarding the production of nature, this approach also rejects the
notion of nature as an external agent of social relations and instead
considers it a product of the capital accumulation process. Following this line of thought, Karen Bakker has studied water
extensively.
Bakker (2004) documents how water’s biophysical conditions
determine its inherently uncooperative nature regarding efforts
to commodify it. For example, water constantly flows and changes
its physical condition; thus, it is difficult to establish full private
property rights because the property boundaries are inherently
uncertain. Water is dense and heavy; thus, it is expensive to transport and demands costly infrastructure networks, which is an
obstacle to market entry and thus to transactions and competition.
Bakker (2004) emphasizes the agency of the biophysical conditions, focusing less on the role of cultural exegesis and alternative
ways of valuing nature. This emphasis is particularly important in
the Loa River Basin, where the copper industry, Chile’s main
30
M. Prieto / Geoforum 77 (2016) 28–39
Fig. 1. Map of El Loa Province. Map by Gino Sandoval for project Fondecyt No. 11150130.
M. Prieto / Geoforum 77 (2016) 28–39
income-producing industry (accounting for 42% of total Chilean
exports, on average), coexists with the Atacameño indigenous people. The former has sufficient capital to overcome barriers placed
by water’s biophysical nature and can eventually force water to
be treated as a commodity by investing in water infrastructure,
while the latter lack economic power. However, the Atacameños
have strong cultural values regarding water that have been able
to constrain, and even reverse, the commodification process. Thus,
water has become only partially commodified because of both its
ecological nature and its particular communitarian value that is
rooted in the affective, communicative, and material assemblage
between humans and water flows.
The communitarian value of water is grounded in practical
experiences that face concrete changes in the relations between
the human and non-human worlds (Brown and Ingram, 1987).
Shared cultural practices, use values, and interests emerge from
these experiences and are attached to a certain social identity that
is, in turn, related to water conceived of as a common good. This
communitarian value is reproduced through a ‘‘moral economy
of water” understood as a concrete ethic for coordinating its proper
usage (Rodríguez, 2006; Trawick, 2001, 2002, 2003; Wutich, 2011).
The establishment of a market system and property rights is
more akin to a political struggle than a simple economic issue
(Horwitz, 1977; Polanyi, 1957; Thompson, 1975). In this sense,
market-based models for managing resources are systems for
imposing instrumental values that deny cultural and communal
values. Within this context, the moral economy is a perspective
used to investigate how different moral positions meet and oppose
one another in the market, which is understood to be a political
arena.
The idea of a ‘‘moral economy” was developed by Wolf (1969),
Thompson (1971), Migdal (1975) and Scott (1976) to explain peasant revolts and responses to the effects of capitalist markets and
the capitalist economy on peasants’ everyday life. When market
penetration threatens shared values, moral expectations, and relations of reciprocity, resistance to capitalism can emerge (Edelman,
2005).
Trawick (2001) uses the moral economy framework to examine
traditional water management in the Peruvian Andes. For him, customary water management, cultural values regarding water, communal infrastructure, and a sense of belonging combine to produce
a moral economy of water that neutralizes privatization and promarket models.
Rejecting any essentialization that might present the moral
economy of water as an apolitical and ungrounded form of morality, he defines it as
a concrete ethic based on a well-defined set of practices, rules,
and norms, and corresponding material relations. These have
to do with the proper use of vital resources—land, water, and
labor—and the ways that individuals should relate to each
other, through the central reality of work, and to the community as a whole. Although the moral economy is primarily
inward-looking, focused on internal social interaction, it is also
a ‘‘political” economy, as any such ethical system must be by
definition, and of course it doesn’t exist in isolation.
[Trawick (2003)]
Trawick (2003) also rejects the idea that the moral economy of
water is reproduced upon a previously given nature. Following
Lansing’s (1991) studies on the cooperative water management
in the Subaks of Bali, he observes how the moral economy is rooted
in a historically and socially produced waterscape in which a mixture of labor, rituals, and nature blurs the boundaries between
human and non-human. Indeed, for Lansing (1991), irrigation practices are not purely technical tasks performed upon a separate natural world but rather a ritualized ecological management system
31
for distributing water in which human labor, time cycles, infrastructure, and water flows co-shape one another.
Rodríguez (2006) studies how Pueblo residents and Hispanics in
northern New Mexico have developed a common system of values,
water-sharing strategies, collective works, and rituals that have
created an alternative system for stabilizing irrigation practices
for the community through cooperation. She examines how collective practices, rituals, processions and religious observances associated with irrigation convert the irrigated landscapes into sacred
landscapes. From these sociospatial relations emerges a moral
economy of water in which actors resolve their conflicts outside
of the formal legal system and position themselves against the
threats imposed by increasing water demand driven by the modernization process and the market.
I use the moral economy of water to examine how the Atacameño people have subverted the radical pro–water market
model. They have mobilized their water-related cultural values
as attached to a certain moral economy of water in which a set
of practices, rules, and material relations emerge that establish
how people should behave toward one another in relation to
water. Notwithstanding the temptation to romanticize the moral
economy of water and present it as a set of cohesive practices isolated from broader contexts, I present it as an ethical system that is
reshaped by the neoliberal Chilean water reforms but that is concurrently able to conflict with and survive this pro-market logic.
3. The Chilean water model and market behavior
As part of an extensive neoliberal revolution, the Chilean military regime imposed a new Water Code in 1981, internationally
recognized as an extreme free market approach to water allocation
(Bauer, 2004; Budds, 2004). In brief, it first establishes a strong private property regime regarding water rights and then separates
water rights from land ownership. Consequently, water rights
became freely tradable among different water users and with limited state intervention. The rationale of the model is that the market will lead to an apolitical distribution of water to its highest
economic value, maximizing efficiency (Anderson, 1991; Briscoe,
1996; Thobani, 1995).
The full commodification of water demanded the formalization
of a system of private water rights that were separate from land
rights. Thus, to launch the water market in the Atacama Desert,
in 1983, the Chilean dictatorship started a privatization process
in the Atacameño villages of Chiu-Chiu and Lasana as an experiment before trying to expand the model to the other communities
located in the area.
In these settlements, the state turned the de facto and collective
rules of access (Ribot and Peluso, 2003) to water into de jure and
tradable property rights that assigned the water rights to fixed
water volumes per unit of time (m3/yr.) to individual land owners.
To assign these rights, the DGA prepared technical reports that
simplified local irrigation practices to facilitate the commodification of water (Prieto, 2014, 2015).
According to neoliberal theory, in a free market, water should
flow toward its highest economic value usage. Following this
axiom, my preliminary hypothesis was that the water market
would be active in the study area, that mining and urban water
supply companies would have bought a significant amount of
water rights, and that the market was thus dispossessing the Atacameños from their water. This hypothesis aligned with the general perception of the Atacameños, environmentalists and critical
scholars. Supporters of the model believe that the market is working as an efficient and active instrument for reallocating water
rights in the area from agriculture toward mining activities
(Donoso, 2004). However, these judgments had not been empirically tested.
32
M. Prieto / Geoforum 77 (2016) 28–39
I empirically studied how the water market has been operating
since the Code was imposed. The results surprised me and contradicted neoliberal expectations of how the water market should be
functioning. The market has been fairly inactive; mining companies and water supply companies have bought only insignificant
amounts of water rights. The Atacameños are not selling their
water rights, and, paradoxically, they are using the market as an
instrument for recollectivizing them or, in other words, decommodifying them.
3.1. Water transactions in Chiu-Chiu and Lasana
Lasana and Chiu-Chiu are adjacent villages/oases. They are
located at the riverbed of the Loa River, approximately 40 km
upstream from Calama city at 2535 and 2600 MASL, respectively.
The climate in these communities is Cold Desert; however, water
from the Loa River makes agriculture possible. Currently, the number of inhabitants of Lasana is close to 450 and that of Chiu-Chiu is
near 1000. Both villages are officially recognized as Atacameños
communities by the Indigenous Law (Law No. 19,253). However,
non-Atacameños also live here, particularly in Chiu-Chiu, where
Aymara people have been migrating since the late 1970s.3 Additionally, Chiu-Chiu has recently become a place where nonindigenous workers in mining and public works have moved.
Chiu-Chiu and Lasana were the only Atacameño villages where
the military dictatorship was able to privatize water rights under
the logic of the 1981 Water Code (Prieto, 2015). Overall,
5,967,512 m3/year was individually allocated for the regantes from
these communities. Here, I expected to find many transactions
between the regantes and the mining and urban water supply companies. This supposition developed because the main economic
activity in these communities is the production of beets and carrots, commodities whose price is not comparable with the price
of copper. Additionally, these communities are the closest to the
main copper mining cluster in the country (Fig. 1), and their inhabitants, in addition to practicing agriculture, also work for the mining companies. Finally, upstream from these communities is water
infrastructure: two water-intake structures through which the
urban water-supply company Aguas Antofagasta diverts water from
the Loa River for the urban consumption of Calama and Antofagasta. All these factors will eventually facilitate water transfers.
Nevertheless, urban supply water companies had not bought
any water rights, and mining companies essentially have not participated in the market (Fig. 2), with the exception of two cases.
In one case, a mining company bought water rights from a nonAtacameño. In another case, an Atacameño sold part of his water
rights because he was forced to sell them to repay a loan that
the state agency for agricultural development (Instituto de Desarrollo Agropecuario) had made to him to build greenhouses and to
introduce tomatoes as a new crop. Ultimately, this project failed
because the strong winds destroyed the greenhouses, and the
tomatoes were not large enough to meet market requirements
because of the high saline levels in the water. There were three
transactions in which non-Atacameños bought water; a local
church bought a minimal amount of water, and the other two
transactions involved the same person buying an insignificant
amount of water for resale to a mining company (see the case
above).
Most transactions have occurred among community members,
and water rights therefore continue to be used for agricultural purposes. When I analyzed who were the buyers and sellers of these
rights, I noticed that among the 106 transactions among village
residents, 59 were between relatives. Thus, rights remained not
only in the same village but also in the same household.
Finally, the communities as collective organizations are the
main buyers of water by volume transferred. Indeed, both communities together bought the equivalent of 58.3% of the total volume
of water that was individually privatized. Thus, the communities
have been using the water market as an instrument to recollectivize or decommodify those individual water rights that were privatized. In this last case, it is important to acknowledge that most
of the acquisitions of the water rights have been done through the
‘‘water fund”, a subsidy given by the National Corporation for
Indigenous Development (CONADI) to indigenous organizations
to buy water rights in the market. In practice, the Atacameño communities in the study area have been able to compete with more
powerful economic actors using this water fund in association with
a certain moral economy of water (Prieto, 2014).
In these communities, the water market has not behaved as
expected under neoliberal theory. Among other reasons that I have
explored elsewhere, such as identity formation, broader political
context, and social dynamics (Prieto, 2014), I defend the idea that
these circumstances emerged because of costumbres, a concept
that functions as a signifier for the cultural values and practices
relating to water that are attached to a certain moral economy of
water. This idea is especially relevant in a hyper-arid area, where
water is a key agent for sustaining the local economy and everyday
life.
4. Practicing the costumbres
The term costumbres (customs) is used to refer to ritual observance in general. In relation to the water rituals, several rituals
are performed to honor water and the mallkus (sacred mountains
and hills). Mountains and hills are associated with water flow
because the high canyons and snowpack are the source of the
streams that are crucial to the agricultural and pastoral activities
(Castro and Aldunate, 2003).
The most common rituals are the canal cleaning ceremonies,
commonly known as limpias (cleanings) (see e.g., Barthel, 1986;
Castro and Varela, 1994; Lagos et al., 1988; Larraín, 1991; Matus,
1993; Serracino, 1985). Pagos are also a common ritual observance.
They consist of payments to the earth, to the water, and to the
abuelos among other beings/things. The payments are made with
an alcoholic beverage (wine, beer, distilled alcohol, or more traditional drinks such us chicha4 or aloja5), coca leaves, tobacco, and
flour. The pagos can be performed in collective and more-ritualized
formal contexts (i.e., during the limpias) or during everyday practices
(i.e., the initiation of irrigation, when checking the condition of the
canals, or when determining how much water is coming from a spring).
These practices constitute a ritual technology (Condominas,
1977; Lansing, 1991) in which people celebrate water as a sacred
subject and seek to ensure its material reproduction, its continuous
flow, the success of crops, and their community ties.
The data that I gathered during my research show how the costumbres are positioned in relation to the extractive industries and
conflict with the commodification of water.
In the village of Cupo, I talked to Don Julio.6 He is 76 years old
and has served as the purikamani7 for more than forty years during
the limpias. Doña Elvira, 73 years old, is a weaver and peasant. They
explained to me the importance of the costumbres.
4
3
Many Aymara have migrated to Chiu-Chiu since the late 1970s. They are not part
of the indigenous community; however, they actively practice agriculture and are
considered villagers. This discrepancy has created several tense situations and interethnic dynamics that are not explored in this paper.
Local fermented corn beverage.
Local fermented beverage derived from the pods of the Algarobo tree (Prosophis
Alba).
6
I have changed the real names of all the informants to ensure anonymity.
7
The captain of the canal cleaning ceremonies.
5
33
M. Prieto / Geoforum 77 (2016) 28–39
Buyers
Mining
Urban water supply
Non- community
Indigenous
Members of the
companies
members
community
community
Total
No.
2
0
3
102
106
213
%
0.8
0
1.3
44.9
46.6
100
Fig. 2. Number of superficial water-rights transactions in Chiu-Chiu and Lasana per type of buyer, 1986–2009. Figure by the author.
Me: Who do you make payments to?
Julio: To the ojos de agua [water springs] with wine, chicha,
flour, coca leaves. . . to Pachamama [Mother Earth], to the stones,
to the water, to the Mallkus, [and to] the abuelos who made the
canals. . .
Me: What happens if you do not make the payments?
Julio: Water and streams dry up. Years ago. . .[somebody] told a
story that it happened in Caspana [a nearby village]. One year,
they did not do the limpia according to the costumbres. . .and
the water dried up.
Me: However, there are people who still do not believe in those
costumbres.
Julio: Those are silly things. Water is alive and brings life. Without water, we do nothing and we are nothing. What would we
drink? Wine?. . .After all, the earth itself is going to eat us once
we die. . .That is the way she will collect our debt from us. . .If
land and water give us all, you have to give something to them,
too—wine, coca leaves. The earth and the water are alive, as the
sun is. . .everything is alive in constant movement. That is life.
Without the sun, water. . .fire, earth, what can we do? There is
no life, we die. . .we need to keep the movement alive. That is
why we keep the costumbres.
Me: But despite the fact that you keep making the costumbres,
the mining companies are still taking the water from the land
claimed by the Atacameños, and less water is flowing every
year.
Julio: Without payment, miners would take even more water.
They are not taking the water from Cupo; they took the water
from Ojos de San Pedro. Without the costumbres, [the mining
companies] will buy the water. If the costumbres disappear,
water disappears. That is why we keep the costumbres in Cupo.
Nobody is buying the water here and nobody can do it. They
have tried, but they cannot.
I had another dialogue with Doña Elvira, who is 81 years old and
a shepherdess, peasant, healer, and weaver, and with Don Ricardo,
72 years old, her husband, about their everyday agricultural and
pastoral practices.
Me: What happens if you do not make the pagos to the water?
Ricardo: Everything dries up, you get sick, nothing can be
watered. . . water is not supplied, everything is lost. . .
Me: What happens if you do not do the things according to the
costumbres?
Elvira: You stay stuck. If you make the pagos in the proper way,
with faith, you will lack nothing. [If I] am going there [the hills
where she goes with her llamas and sheep], I put my little jug of
wine, I throw my [coca] leaves. I do not know how to read, but I
know how to pray, how to make the pagos, and how to make the
costumbres, and the alcances [invocations] to the mountains, to
the Pacha, to the water. I tell them, ‘‘You are the doctors who
give me my security.” I talk to the mountains where I bring
my animals. I les voy convidando [go invoking, paying, and giving to them]. And I say to the water, to land, and to the abuelos,
‘‘this is your food, the food for you to eat.” With the left hand [I
pay] to the abuelos, with the right to the mountains, to the land,
and most importantly, to water to let her veins flow. Because
water fills the veins, the veins like the veins that I have. [That
is] para que se larguen [for the water to flow]. That is very beautiful! That is how we keep everything alive.
Me: Explain to me more how you keep things alive?
Elvira: Because of the pagos, water stays alive in the village and
everybody stays alive. That is why water doesn’t die and nobody
can take it out of here; miners cannot take it. Without the pagos,
water dies, and when water dies, everything dies. That is why
[mining companies] can take. . .or. . .buy the water in other
places because they have killed the water. Their water is dead
water. But not here. [Here, water] is alive. We keep it alive,
and water keeps us alive. That is why the costumbres are so
important.
In 2012, I participated in the limpia of one canal in Lasana.
Although water rights in Lasana have been fully privatized, water
continues to be managed as a common good. In fact, the volumes
of water individually allocated by the DGA are not followed, and
collective labor is still common. The former leader of this community told me, ‘‘Water is private in the papeles [property titles], but
we keep the costumbres.”
During the ceremony, under the orders of a capitán, all the male
regantes and their male relatives cleaned the canal of garbage,
stones, mud, and weeds that had accumulated during the winter
season. During the cleaning, people made pagos to the water, earth,
and the ancestors. They asked the earth for abundance of water, a
good harvest, and to maintain good relations among the community members. After the cleaning, all the participants came
together at a large table to participate in a boda (common lunch)
prepared by the women.
After the boda, we gathered at different sectors of the canal.
There, each regante brought a tinka (an offering that consists of
wine or other type of alcoholic beverage together with a serving
glass) for making pagos. Once all the tinkas were arranged
together near the canal, people began to distribute them to one
another. Each participant who received a tinka started by filling
the glass and serving it to another participant. The server then
asked the person receiving the glass to make a toast honoring
whomever had brought that bottle of tinka. After the toast was
made, all present shouted aproveche (enjoy), and the person
holding the glass with their left hand poured on the ground part
of the wine and coca leaves to honor the abuelos. Then, with the
right hand, the person poured out wine and coca leaves to honor
the Pachamama and the water and then drank the remainder.
Coca leaves carried in the chuspas (bags) were chewed and
exchanged among the participants as a symbolic—but material—
act of reciprocity.
During the celebrations, offerings of tinkas and coca flowed
between each participant, ancestors, land, sacred mountains,
water, water infrastructure, and the invisible world. This costumbre
34
M. Prieto / Geoforum 77 (2016) 28–39
reinforces the ties among community members and friends of the
community, between the people and water, and between the people and other more-than-human entities. Through performance of
this costumbre, the canals, water, and land community members
turn the land into a sacred waterscape in which community values
and the moral economy are reproduced.
This limpia was important to my research. My initial hypothesis was that water transactions had been operating as an
instrument of dispossession of the Atacameños’ water in Lasana
and Chiu-Chiu. In addition, many of my informants told me that
in Lasana and Chiu-Chiu, performance of the limpias was lost. I
believed that the lack of costumbres and the high prices of
copper were key drivers enabling the market to operate as an
instrument of dispossession. However, I was wrong. There were
almost no water transactions, and costumbres played a key role
in deterring the adoption of the neoliberal logic for managing
water.
During this limpia, I asked one abuela for her opinion regarding
private water rights and the possibility of selling them in the market. She responded as follows:
[to] sell the water is vulgar; it is like selling meat to buy chicharrones [pork rinds]. Do you see us eating chicharrones in the limpia? Water for us is not vulgar. That is why we do not sell it.
The week after the limpia, I had the following conversation with
the capitán of the ceremony.
Me: Why do you have to clean the canals?
Captain: You have to do that. Otherwise, the canal will be dirty
and you would not be able to irrigate and perform the tradiciones y costumbres that have existed since before we were here.
With the limpia, you are not only cleaning the canal, but the
community comes together and participates in all the costumbres. Can you imagine the community without the costumbres
and the limpia? There would be no water; without water, there
would be no canals; and without canals there would be no gathering and no community.
Me: Why would you not get together if there was not a limpia?
Captain: That happened in the [X] canal. [People there]. . .did
not want to perform [the costumbres] as they used to. They
became lazy, they did not want to bring the pots with food up
the canals, they did not want to walk. . .But then they realized
how bad that was, and they had to return to the costumbres.
[That was because] people stopped participating and [consequently] the community started to become divided. . . Because
we render thanks to the Pacha and the ancestors who made
the canals is why [we have water]. . .With no costumbres. . .this
would be nothing, only desert, dust. . .
Me: How does it feel to be the captain in the limpia?
Captain: I am young and I have the responsibility of keeping
[the limpias]. . .if the costumbres are not maintained, everything
will start dying. . .Where would we get water? From the tap?
Costumbres unite us. Giving pagos to the Pacha helps to keep
water running, allows rain, and maintains the river. In Lasana,
they [in reference to extractive industries] already have taken
a great deal of water, but we still have water. [Mining companies] want more water, but we say no. . .
Me: Why do you keep making collective works and the costumbres if water rights are private?
Captain: That is the tradition and we cannot break it. . .
Me: Why?
Captain: If everybody does whatever they want with the water,
the river will disappear. . .The limpias help us bring all the people together. Everybody was here to celebrate, to share. Those
are the beautiful things that are difficult to explain. I do not care
about what the [legal] papers say, for me, the water is our
water. I know that there is always the threat that miners can
buy it or take it; thus, we need to keep these [costumbres] alive.
Similarly, in the community of Caspana, in which there are very
few private water rights, I asked Don Santiago, a former leader,
why he continued to practice the costumbres. We had the following
dialogue.
Santiago: Here, we have the limpia. . .That is a costumbre, a tradición. [It] is beautiful and keeps us united. We make pagos to
the water, the canals, to the Pachamama. . . If you abandoned
[the costumbres], they can take the water.
Me: Who?
Santiago: The others.
Me: Who are the others?
Santiago: Those who have money.
Me: Who are they?
Santiago: The government, the mining companies and other
companies, Codelco [the state-owned copper company], the
contractors.
Me: Do you think that the costumbres have a role in keeping the
water in the community?
Santiago: Of course, yes, because. . .we celebrate the water
more strongly and keep it in the community. So, in this way,
we do not have problems with companies that want to buy
and take our water. In my costumbres and in the limpias, I
implore to. . .our Mother Earth that [companies do not take
our water] and that we keep strong for not selling or leasing
the water. Because [they have tried to buy and lease] the waters
downstream, they have offered buenas lucas [a good amount of
money] . . . [however, we] prefer that the water flows down
even though we lack monedas [money]. Looking from a business
perspective, we lose money, but on the other hand, it is good
that [outsiders] do not enter here and take our water.
There is an association among costumbres as ritual practices and
as local norms, the presence of a sense of belonging to the community of people who must share water, and the importance of water
for those communities to maintain agriculture and livestock
activities.
This association is clarified when the costumbres are presented
as part of an obligation that confronts the process of commodification. This connection is related to the extreme importance of water
in hyper-dry weather, and it is presented vis-à-vis the penetration
of markets by and interests of the extractive industries; as a consequence, it has played a key role in keeping water within the communities. This relation/tension is exemplified in the following
conversation that I had with Juana, the former president of one
of the canals of Chiu-Chiu:
Me: Why are people not selling their water rights to the mining
companies?
Juana: There are rules, and you cannot sell the water to outsiders . . . People know that they cannot sell [the water] to the
miners and miners know that they cannot buy it. If someone
sold the water, people are going to point him out. People feel
committed to the community. At the meetings, we have always
stressed that.
Me: And what would happen if the water were to be sold?
Juana: Nobody is selling the water. . .We manage the water as a
common good. We have our costumbres. People sell and buy
their water rights within the community—and the community
has bought a great deal of water—but the miners cannot take
the water.
This conversation shows how the costumbres do not exist only
as part of an abstract worldview. Costumbres actually operate as
a tangible ethic that establishes how the individuals who share
M. Prieto / Geoforum 77 (2016) 28–39
I remember that [the community] was called to an extraordinary meeting [because] several persons wanted to sell their
water. . . [People] said, ‘‘How is it possible that they are going
to sell [the water]?” We gave another meaning to water, a different value. We said, ‘‘You cannot sell to the water to the
miners.”
water should relate to one another within the community. I
explored how this tangible ethic operates through rules that create
community bonds that simultaneously act as a barrier to the water
market and create conflicts with the neoliberal expectations that
inform the Chilean model.
5. Costumbres and the moral economy of water
Costumbres operate as local rules that mandate how water
should be managed. They reflect a symbolic order regarding what
water is. However, this order, rather than being a purely local form
of imagining the real or symbolic link to cultivation (à la Geertz,
1983), is based on a concrete ethic and shared values that are
rooted in political economic contexts and material relations among
people, water flows, irrigation infrastructure, and so forth. This is
important in the hyper-arid Atacama Desert, where water is extremely important for everyday life in the communities. The Atacameño communities are located in oases situated near rivers
and streams; thus, any small change in the hydrology produces
severe effects in the local economy. For this reason, costumbres
are part of the broader moral economy in which both a cultural
system of meaning about what water is and an appropriate way
for individuals to relate to one another in relation to water are produced to maintain order in the management of this resource, resist
the imposition of the 1981 Water Code, and combat the threats
posed by extractive industries (Rodríguez, 2006; Trawick, 2001,
2002, 2003).
Costumbres and the moral economy of water are not prepolitical, frozen in time and space, or purely cultural. They are
always becoming something different in relation to political
economic processes, power relations, and the conflicts in which
they are situated. This constant change is why communities
constantly transform and mobilize their water rules, rights, obligations and their related worldviews as a form of confrontation with
formal state law that aims to standardize water management and
that perpetuates the market’s logic. This expression of the moral
economy has occurred regularly in Chiu-Chiu and Lasana. Here,
local rules and cultural values regarding water are continuously
mobilized in relation to the state water framework. Specifically,
in relation to the 1981 Water Code, this mobilization has occurred
within a certain neoliberal political economy reproduced by state
law that presents water as an object that can be divided into
discrete portions, privately appropriated and freely traded. Here,
the market inevitably becomes a place in which buyers and sellers
encounter and confront different worldviews and related moral
values.
My informants refer to the costumbres using normative language that recognizes no hierarchical difference between state
law and local norms and practices. Thus, I found that these local
regulatory systems are another barrier to the market system. The
first barrier consists of a ban that prevents the transaction of water
rights with the mining sector and other industries. The second barrier consists of the local irrigation practices that keep the few
water rights that were sold to the mining companies flowing in
the canals of the community. In turn, this practice prevents the
mining companies from buying more water rights in the
communities.
5.1. The moral economy of water versus the market
In Chiu-Chiu and Lasana, I repeatedly heard that there is an
internal law that does not permit water rights to be sold to the
mining companies.
I asked Juana what occurred when the outsiders tried to buy
water rights after the privatization. She responded as follows:
35
Several other responses confirmed the ban on selling water
rights to the mining companies: ‘‘selling water is not possible”;
‘‘if people sold their water, things will become doomed”; ‘‘that is
against the costumbres”; ‘‘that is against the people”; and ‘‘that is
like a sin.” When I asked what were to happen if somebody sold
his or her water rights, I received responses such as ‘‘that person
would be ashamed forever,” ‘‘that person will not be able to irrigate anymore,” ‘‘I do not want to be in his shoes,” ‘‘everybody will
point at him,” and ‘‘that means that he is betraying the
community.”
Having reached this conclusion, I asked the then-president of
the community of Chiu-Chiu whether there have been sales of
water rights to the mining sector. He told me that two people
had sold their water rights. I asked him what happened after they
did that? He replied,
The community. . .looked at them with indifference. They felt
like they had betrayed the people. They received something
similar to a moral punishment. . .That is how things were
regulated.
I talked to the persons referred to by the leader. In the first case,
we had the following conversation:
Me: Is it possible to sell the water in Chiu-Chiu to the mining
companies?
Interviewed: Nooooooo! How can you imagine that? The community has never allowed anyone to sell [the water] to the miners. . .There is a kind of internal law that forbids that.
Me: I was told that you sold your water.
Interviewed: No, that is what people think, but that is false. I
wanted to do a deal, but [the community] did not let me do it.
Me: What kind of deal did you try to do?
Interviewed: I wanted to lease my water [to El Abra mining
company8], not to sell it, but [the community] almost hung me
[using figurative language]. . . Then, all the huevones [dudes]
turned against me.
In the second case, an Atacameño sold his water rights to repay
a loan that the state had made to him for developing an agricultural project that failed (see above). He told me about his
experience.
I already made a condoro9 [mistake] when I sold my water. That
is like a crime. . . Selling the water is an offense. . .[In] the meetings, they pointed their fingers at me. People said, ‘‘You sold
the water, you cannot irrigate.”
The second regulatory system that operates as a barrier to the
water market consists of irrigation practices that keep the few
water rights that were sold to the mining companies from flowing
out of the community. In essence, they have constrained the mining companies from buying more water rights.
Costumbres is a concept also used for referring to the rules relating to how water should be managed in general (e.g., water distribution, irrigation schedules, the performance of collective works,
and conflict solving). These rules have played an important role
8
A copper mine co-owned by Freeport McMoRan (51%) and Codelco (49%).
Condoro is a popular expression for mistake. Its origin is in the Chilean comic
character named Condorito, an anthropomorphic condor, who is always making
mistakes.
9
36
M. Prieto / Geoforum 77 (2016) 28–39
in keeping the water flowing in the canals despite the water market and the few purchases by the mining sector.
I talked to Ernesto, the former president of one of the canals in
Chiu-Chiu. He told me how the costumbres have prevented the
market from operating as such.
Me: What happens if someone wants to sell their water rights to
a mining company?
Ernesto: [Somebody] sold his water to Codelco, and Codelco
thought that by buying his water and giving him a lot of money,
everybody would get tempted, but that stopped there. Codelco
could not loot the water.
Me: Why?
Ernesto: Because [Codelco] must respect our irrigation schedules, the intake of the canal, and all our costumbres. That is an
impediment for them. . . . We do not follow the [system of] individual liters per second as the law stipulates. We follow the
costumbres.
Similarly, I had the following conversation with Juana. She told
me what occurred with the water rights that were actually sold to
the mining companies by members of the community of ChiuChiu.
Juana: El Abra cannot withdraw the water that has been
purchased.
Me: Why?
Juana: Because of the costumbres and tradiciones that say you
can only get the water from the intake when it is your turn
according to the irrigation schedule that we establish. Thus, it
is not convenient for El Abra.
Me: What happens if someone sells his or her water rights to a
person from outside the community?
Juana: [The buyer] must adjust to the schedule that we establish. For example, if we say it is time to irrigate every seven
days, every seven days you have to get the water. That is
decided according to the costumbres, our agreements, and our
meetings.
Me: Do you think that the tradiciones and the costumbres have
something to do with the water purchases?
Juana: That is why [the mining companies] have not bought
more water, and the water that they have already bought runs
through the canals. In Calama, that is different. [Mining companies] began to buy and buy [water rights] until they accumulated a lot of rights; thus, they can then control the canal. Not
here, just one man sold his water, thus the mine cannot control
us. They tried to buy more water as I told you, but we stopped
them.
In a third interview, I asked the person who sold his water
rights to the El Abra mining company what happened to the water
he sold. He responded to me as follows:
El Abra cannot draw down [the water] because there is an internal statute that regulates the waters, the intakes, and the schedules according to the costumbres. The mine must take the water
on the day established in the schedule that is set by the community of the canal. That is why they prefer to keep the water flowing. Those waters are still flowing, the mine doesn’t have that
water, finally the community ends up using that water. Even
more, the miners have to catch the water in the specific intake
where I used to have my [water] right, not elsewhere. I sold my
water, but the miners cannot use it.
People in Chiu-Chiu and Lasana acknowledge that transactions
of water rights between community members and the mining
companies are forbidden and that costumbres play an important
regulatory role in keeping the water flowing within the commu-
nity’s canals. However, during my research, nobody could provide
me with specific details of the ban or details concerning how the
community forced the mining companies to follow their local irrigation rules. In my notes, I recorded different normative concepts
used by my informants when referring to that ban, such as ‘‘internal rules,” ‘‘internal laws,” ‘‘internal ban,” ‘‘community laws,”
‘‘community rules,” ‘‘local rules,” ‘‘here we have a law that forbids,”
‘‘our law forbids,” and ‘‘we forbid.” I tried but failed to learn about
details such as when exactly the ban was approved by the community, who was the president of the community at that time, who
had the idea of creating the ban, what exactly the terms of the
ban are, whether the ban was written in the minutes of the community, or how the ban is enforced. Nobody knew—or wanted to
tell me—the details of the ban. Perhaps there are no details, and
there is only an unwritten collective law that people from Lasana
and Chiu-Chiu have articulated as a confrontational response to
the formal state law, the market-based frameworks, the imposition
of the water code, the intentions of external agents seeking to buy
the water, and those who have bought water.
Despite a few exceptions and the normal asymmetries of power
that can exist among community members, these rules seek to
reinforce the communities’ control of their own water, proportionality among users, regularity of the water flow and transparency.
These are the main principles that, according to Trawick (2001),
allow the reproduction of the moral economy of water.
The Chiu-Chiguanos and Lasaneños have also been able to
mobilize their costumbres publicly and have thus gained notoriety
in the eyes of both the state and the mining sector.
When I spoke with the director of the regional office of the
CONADI, she recognized the existence of the internal rules as part
of the costumbres that forbid the transfers.
Me: Have mining companies tried to buy water rights?
Director: There have been attempts, but they have not materialized. That was because the community put barriers. . .There
are rules for [managing] water and agriculture that are different
from the Water Code. . .
Me: Why do you think that in Calama there are transactions
with the mining sector, and in Chiu-Chiu and Lasana there are
not?
Director: Water in Lasana and Chiu-Chiu is managed differently. . ..[You should see] what costumbres means for the people,
the meaning of the shared laws. People do those things with
respeto [respect]. There is an issue of consciousness regarding
the law that is applied to water. If you made an assessment in
Chiu-Chiu and Lasana of the Water Code, it isn’t functioning.
What works there are the tradiciones y costumbres. Legally
speaking, people can sell the water rights under [state] law,
but people are not selling because of the local costumbres and
rules.
Mining companies also recognized the existence of the internal
ban. When I asked the Chiu-Chiuguano who unsuccessfully tried to
rent his rights to El Abra mining company what occurred after the
community disapproved of his attempt, he responded as follows: ‘‘
[A]fter that, no one else wanted to sell their water. I guess that is
why the miners did not come back.”
I also asked the president of the community of Chiu-Chiu what
occurred after the two members of the community sold or tried to
sell their water rights. He related the following:
When these attempts for selling happened, the mining companies for the first time saw a community that was tightly bonded
on a highly sensitive issue. After that, [the mining companies]
did not try to buy more water. They knew that we were here,
that we were united, and that they could not buy us.
M. Prieto / Geoforum 77 (2016) 28–39
I asked of an anonymous Codelco official whether Codelco has
tried to buy water rights in Chiu-Chiu and Lasana. He responded,
‘‘I do not think so.” I asked him why. He responded,
[In] Chiu-Chiu, there are no transactions because of the community thing. They do not allow their people to sell their water
rights and they have their own mañas [tricks] for managing
water.
5.2. The moral economy of water and the water fund in rural
communities
The only rural Atacameño communities where the water fund
has operated in the Loa river basin are Chiu-Chiu and Lasana. In
almost all of these transactions, the water fund has been used for
buying water rights that were privatized within the community.
Buying water rights from outside of the community is difficult
due mainly to the fact that the mining companies and urban water
supply companies are not selling any of their water rights; for
them, water is a scarce and extremely valuable resource (see other
secondary reasons in Prieto, 2014).
As a result of this factor, Chiu-Chiu and Lasana are using the
water fund almost exclusively to buy the individual water rights
that were privatized in these communities. Due to the internal
rules that forbid members from selling their water rights to external parties, those who want to sell their water rights are selling
them either to other village members through private transactions
or to the community through the water fund.
I asked an official from the Calama CONADI office why people
from the communities of Lasana and Chiu-Chiu prefer to sell their
water rights to the community rather than to the extractive industries. The official responded as follows:
. . .they have internal guidelines. They are fighting to get back
from the mining companies the water that they had taken away
[during the privatization process]. So if they sold [the water
rights] to the companies, they would be breaking their
guideline.
The official told me that community members are willing to sell
their water rights to the community for prices lower than what the
mining companies or urban water supply companies are willing to
pay. I asked the official why they are willing to do that. The official
responded as follows:
The whole point here is that water keeps flowing in the community. They are reluctant to sell to the mining companies, and
there is a moral sanction. In all of the meetings they have said
that you cannot sell the water to the miners. Their fight is for
bringing water back to their communities. Their discourse is
that. . .the wetlands are drying, the animals are dying and that
they cannot graze anymore. So selling [the water to the mining
companies] does not align with what they believe. Thus if
somebody wants to sell their water, [he or she] needs to sell
to [through] the [water] fund.
The subsidy given by the water fund to the communities has
allowed them to purchase the water rights that are available in
the market and cannot be sold to outsiders due to the internal disapproval. The fusion between the internal ban mobilized through
the costumbres and the water fund has produced an incentive to
sell water rights for those who are not irrigating for several reasons
(e.g., migration, proletarization, inheritance of the water rights
from relatives), who sell them either through the water fund to
the community or to individual members of the community.
Despite the importance of the costumbres as a barrier to transactions with non-community members and as an incentive for sell-
37
ing the water to the community as a collective organization, it is
notable that regardless of whether the sellers have experienced
deterioration in their community bonds, stopped practicing agriculture, or migrated to the city, they have sold their water rights
to the community instead of to the mines or urban water supply
companies.
According to the interviews conducted among both community
members and the CONADI representatives, the explanation for why
these people have sold their rights to the fund is basically that the
mining companies are no longer buying water from indigenous
communities due to ethical concerns and introduction of better
practices; doing so is too complicated and the community is not
allowing the mining companies to withdraw the water from the
irrigation canals.
The water rights that the communities of Chiu-Chiu and Lasana
have been purchasing through the water fund are individual rights
owned by the community members. Consequently, the fund has
been operating as an instrument for recollectivizing those water
rights rather than operating solely as an instrument for recovering
the water that the mining companies and urban water supply companies appropriated after the dispossession suffered by these communities in the 1983 privatization process. This finding leads me to
conclude that these communities have not used the water fund to
increase the volume of water beyond what existed in their canals
before the imposition of the 1981 Water Code. However, the fund
has operated as an instrument for reversing some of the effects of
the code and formalizing the decommodification of water that has
been operating through the internal rules and the related
costumbres.
6. Conclusions
The literature on the commodification of nature has enriched
the heterodox critiques of the establishment and the behavior of
the market system by stressing how specific biophysical features
of the objects to be commodified are able to erect barriers to the
commodification process. However, this approach has minimized
the role that cultural exegesis, identity formation, alternative ways
of valuing nature, and the affective connection between the human
and the non-human collectively pose to market systems. In this
article, I have tried to advance this approach by showing how
neoliberal expectations in the study area about how a free water
market should behave have been subverted by the Atacameños’
costumbres and the related moral economy of water.
In Chiu-Chiu and Lasana, where water was successfully privatized, the market has not followed the neoliberal formula that
water rights should flow toward their highest economically valued
usages. On the contrary, there are almost no transactions involving
water rights toward these usages, water rights have remained in
the communities, and even the community as a collective entity
has determined to buy individual rights. In this case, individuals
sold their private water to their own community as a collective
entity consisting of all the members of the community. Thus, water
rights changed status. From being individually owned, they are
now collectively owned. This transformation constitutes decommodification. The explanation of this phenomenon goes beyond
water’s simple biophysical conditions that determine its inherently
uncooperative nature with respect to efforts to commodify it.
These conditions are particularly clear in an area in which mining
companies are able to force water to collaborate as a commodity by
investing in water infrastructure. In these communities, there are
internal rules that both forbid the sale of water rights to external
members and regulate the distribution of water in terms that constitute barriers to transactions and keep water flowing in communities where, due to their hyper-dry conditions, water has a high
38
M. Prieto / Geoforum 77 (2016) 28–39
value. Rather than constituting a formal and explicit system of law
forming part of a moral economy of water that acts as a concrete
ethic based on shared values and affective connections between
humans and non-humans, these rules mandate how people should
relate to one another in relation to water (Rodríguez, 2006;
Trawick, 2001, 2002, 2003; Wutich, 2011). For this particular case,
the Atacameños have articulated a particular set of norms and obligations and a shared culture that confronts the process of water
marketization.
Through the performance of costumbres, the Atacameños have
developed a ritual technology (Condominas, 1977; Lansing, 1991)
that creates material and affective bonds among labor, ancestors,
community members, friends, visitors, ancient and contemporary
water infrastructures, the natural world and the divine world. In
the costumbres, water appears as a subject with agency that
demands payments, cariño (affection) and respeto (respect) for
ensuring its reproduction and the survival of the community and
life. When costumbres are practiced, the flow of water is humanized
as a subject that demands payments and demands to be nurtured
in exchange for the water’s productive force, which allows for the
reproduction of life. Humans and the community also appear naturalized as part of that flow, in which if something is altered, somebody can become sick or everything can simply disappear. These
narratives defeat the anthropocentric views of nature, insofar as
water is not reduced to a discrete resource but is presented as a
subject—with agency—that can create societal trajectories on its
own and is able to reconfigure ethical sensibilities and affective
connections between the human and the non-human.
Costumbres are used as a broader signifier that is pitted against
the interests of external actors and the market. This narrative was
present not just at the discursive level. Atacameños mobilized it to
prevent sales or transactions when some community members
tried to lease and/or sell their water rights to a mining company.
The argument is that dealing in water violates the costumbres
and the Atacameños’ worldview in which water is presented as a
living entity and in which land and water are inseparable. In fact,
my interviewees said that without the costumbres, the mining
companies would buy the water and, consequently, if the costumbres disappear, both water and the community would disappear.
In summary, practicing the costumbres allows for the reproduction of a shared meaning and value of water and a communal sense
of belonging. Through the costumbres, people recognize the existence of a shared genealogical connection, reinforce communal
bonds, practice reciprocity, and identify themselves as territorially
placed. Moreover, the waterscape becomes sacred. All these elements are necessary to produce a moral economy of water in
which people learn how to use water properly and how to position
their interests against threats to those interests. These values and
their reproduction through rituals emerge in a specific manner
related to the material world, the landscape, and the waterscape
(Castro and Aldunate, 2003; Rodríguez, 2006). This bond and
reflection turns people into moral subjects with both a sense of
belonging to their communities and a sense of the correct way to
manage water (Rodríguez, 2006). I argue that this moral economy
is mobilized in historical and geographical conditions specific to
the Chilean neoliberal water market regime, defeating these same
neoliberal expectations of how a water market should work. My
argument presents an alternative to the human rights discourse
as the sole instrument against the commodification of water. The
practice of the moral economy of water and the related costumbres
construct a different alternative community economy of water.
That alternative, as noted by Bakker (2007), creates the possibility
of an alternative globalization model of common governance that
considers non-human actors and is less state-centric.
Because the Atacameños have been able to subvert the promarket logic in Chiu-Chiu and Lasana does not necessarily mean
that water inequalities have been solved in the Atacameño area.
Indeed, mining companies and urban water supply companies continue to obtain water rights to develop their projects, and Atacameños are continuing to claim that they are suffering the
dispossession of their waters. This situation invites a close examination of the extra-market institutional arrangements developed
by the state that have allowed these extractive industries to continue obtaining water rights. Many of these arrangements are
responses to the barriers that the Atacameños have been able to
mobilize against the 1981 Water Code. Additionally, it is important
to acknowledge that it is common for Chiu-Chiguanos and Lasaneños (or their relatives) to work for the mining companies, and
mining companies invest significant amounts of money as part of
their corporate social responsibility programs. Nonetheless, they
continue positioning the mining companies as against their indigenous values toward water, and they do not sell their water rights to
the companies. This withholding poses intriguing unsolved questions related to how they perform their hybrid identities as miners/workers/indigenous residents and how, in spite of their
hybrid identity and their direct or indirect labor relations with
the mining sector, they continue creating contradiction in the
water market. In addition, the fact that the Atacameños have
become less dependent on agriculture and pastoralist activities
poses the intriguing question of why conflicts over water resources
have remained an important issue in the Atacameño area.
Finally, the fact that the Atacameños are using the market as an
instrument for collectivizing water rights runs the risk of reproducing a model of neoliberal multiculturalism, where subjects articulate their identities without threatening the racialized model of
distributive justice (Hale, 2004; Postero, 2007). This phenomenon
is under study in a current project.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the Atacameños who shared with me their personal histories and to the people from Lasana, who invited me to
the Limpia. I thank Carl Bauer, Paul Robbins, Sally Marston and Stephen Lansing for their comments on early drafts of this article.
Helpful comments on this paper were also received from three
anonimous reviewers. This research was supported by CONICYT –
Chile (the Interdisciplinary Center for Indigenous and Intercultural
Studies, FONDAP No. 15110006; Concurso Nacional de Inserción en
la Academia, Convocatoria 2014, PAI No. 79140014; and Fondecyt
Iniciación No. 11150130).
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