Taming the Flow: Migration, Negotiation, and the production of hydropolitical knowledge in the Late Pre-Hispanic Andes

Temperature and precipitation fluctuations, frequent flash floods, volcanic eruptions, and devastating El Niño events makes the Andean region one of the most unstable environments in the world. To mediate these conditions, Andean peoples have developed what I term “anticipatory infrastructures,” that include a range of mechanisms to stabilize the effects of climatic fluctuations. To contemporary Indigenous communities, such fluctuations manifest the terrakuna and apukuna, earth beings and sacred peaks. Quechua peoples in southern Peru thus refer to irrigation practices as “teaching water,” emphasizing the necessity of socializing a capricious earth-being before entering into relations with it. My research suggests that the majority of anticipatory infrastructures postdate 900 A.D., the terminal Middle Horizon (600-1000 A.D.). Rather than assume a timeless Andean orientation towards climactic uncertainty, I propose that such practices emerged through a specific political sequence. Many contemporary and historic Andean communities contain two moieties, discursively rendered as warlike, masculinized, pastoralist “invaders” and peaceful, feminized, agriculturalist “ancestors.” The ritual unification and meditation of these groups requires modes of socialization and domestication similar to those employed in the teaching of water and other earth-beings. Recent work indicates that such segmentary collectives – sometimes known as ayllu– coalesced in the 8th and 9th century, in a period of increased migration, exchange, and political turmoil. Here, I suggest that the political negotiations and experimentations that shaped ayllu structure generated new forms of social relation and ways of being-together that extended to the non-human world.