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| Water irrigation system in Pampamarca: a colonized indigenous community |
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Reference |
| Trawick, Paul. 2002. "Comedy and Tragedy in the Andean Commons."Journal of Political Ecology. Link: http://dlc.dlib.indiana.edu/archive/00001642/01/Trawick2002.pdf |
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Introduction to the Institution |
| Pampamarca, is a predominantly indigenous village, remote and lying at high altitude. It has long been dominated by a small group of resident Spanish landlords. These elite families long ago expropriated large amounts of the community’s land and water in order to found private agricultural estates. However, the impact of state institutions has not been directly felt in irrigation. The springs that supply this village are almost impervious to drought, and water has remained abundant here despite major population growth during recent decades. Because of this, the privatization of water by a few elite families, though introducing a major inequity among peoples’ rights, and between their rights and duties, did not seriously affect the hydrological balance, nor have other related changes that occurred before or have happened since. the contiguous order of distribution, if it ever existed here, was modified long ago and replaced by another pattern, a hierarchical one that remains the tradition today.This village is composed of four ayllus, or corporate kinship groups, each of which has its own territory, its own irrigation system with its own water sources (alpine springs), and its own campo, or water distributor. |
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Rules for Management
of the Institution |
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(a) Boundary Rules |
| Spacial Boundaries: Pampamarca, a colonized indigenous community in the Cotahuasi valley of Peru’s Department of Arequipa, one of the more remote provinces on the arid western Andean slope.Social Boundaries: This village (population 852; elev. 3,600 m.) is composed of four ayllus, or corporate kinship groups, each of which has its own territory, its own irrigation system with its own water sources (alpine springs), and its own campo (water distributor). The principles of water distribution and use are, with a few minor exceptions, exactly the same in each ayllu, forming a distinct local tradition. Although the watering frequency was probably the same for everyone, as it is here, the exact sequence may have been determined by the social and symbolic order, rather than the lay of the agricultural land. This procedure, also widespread in the Andes today, was apparently used only when water was abundant. |
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(b) Governance
rules |
| Not mentioned |
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(c) Resource Allocation |
| As the watering cycle is taken up consecutively for each sector of land, the landlords are first in the sector order, and are allowed to irrigate for as long as they care to, without supervision, for the first few days. After that a routine procedure is carried out by the water officials for the community members (comuneros): water is given to households, rather than to fields, in an order that is hierarchical. Within each sector, the community members are allotted water consecutively according to the positions that they hold in a prestige ranking based on civil and religious service to the community, the well-known cargo system. They are then free to distribute that water to their fields in any order that they like |
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Conflict Resolution Mechanism |
| Not mentioned |
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Problems Faced by Institution |
| 1) Irrigation is less predictable, less transparent and less public. Vigilance among neighbors is much less systematic and effective. Water theft and favoritism on the part of the distributors can occur quite easily because the restraints on them are not as strong. Of course, people are generally aware that such abuses do occur, but they have to go to a lot of trouble to detect particular cases and to do anything about them. That is the impact that hierarchy has ultimately had. 2) Some comuneros have recently built sloped pasture fields, which they now irrigate using the top-down method. This practice, which emerged during the last few decades and is slowly expanding. Due to this inequality in the distribution of water has emerged |
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Changes in the Institution over time |
| During the 19th and early 20th centuries, the community was colonized by a handful of elite merchant families, who established small agricultural estates and expropriated communal water in each ayllu for their own private use. These people were part of the provincial Spanish elite, members of the dominant extended families who came here to settle from Cotahuasi or from adjacent provinces. In order to maximize pasture production, the landlords not only irrigated their land more often than ayllu members (very two weeks) but also destroyed the prehispanic terraces on their estates, replacing them with large corral-fields that typically have a pronounced slope, called potreros or canchones. The contiguous order of distribution, if it ever existed here, was modified and replaced by another pattern, a hierarchical one that remains the tradition today. |
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Purpose |
| Management of hydraulic irrigation system |
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Country |
| Peru |
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Date Of Publication |
| RS-2002 |
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