Andean Waterways

"Andean Waterways lends itself as a good text for use in teaching. The book is illustrated with stunning black-and-white photographs, which evocatively capture the landscapes that Rasmussen writes about. . . . The book is a valuable addition to the literature on resource politics in the Andes, and likely to be of particular interest to scholars working and teaching on this region."

"A significant contribution to the anthropology of water in the Andes. . . . This is an indispensable book if one wishes to understand the contemporary politics of water in the Andes of Peru."

"The Cordillera Blanca, along the higher elevations of the Santa river watershed in Andean Peru, has become the focus of considerable research on climate change and associated policy anxiety for remediation of such change and its adverse impacts. The author situates what is essentially a study of water politics at a regional level within international pressures and their national mediation, in a landscape where water is abundantly present but poorly distributed. Rasmussen takes a landscape of interconnected channels and investigates this topography of flows through a careful ethnography of long-term settlers in their region. Along the way he builds his chapters around each channel and with it a particular issue—community formation, state intervention, water management bureaucracy, conflicts over mining—to show the way water and local livelihood are produced in intimate contests."

"This timely and engaging book fills an enormous void. We now have a water ethnography that does the subject justice."