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Hydraulic Societies explores the linked themes of water, power, state-building, and hydraulic control. Bringing together a range of ecological, geographical, chronological, and methodological perspectives, the essays in this book address the how humans have long harnessed water and sought to contain its destructive power for political, economic and social ends. Water defines every aspect of life and remains at the center of human activity: in irrigation and agriculture; waste and sanitation; drinking and disease; floods and droughts; religious beliefs and practices; fishing and aquaculture; travel and discovery; scientific study; water pollution and conservation; multi-purpose dam building; boundaries and borders; politics and economic life; and wars and diplomacy.  

From the earliest large irrigation works thousands of years ago, control over water has involved control over people, as the essays in this volume reflect. The intersections of water and political, economic, and social power historically span international as well as domestic politics and operate at scales ranging from the local to the global. The authors consider the role of water in national development schemes, water distribution as a tool of political power, international disputes over waterways and water supplies, and the place of water in armed conflicts. They explore the ways in which political power and social hierarchies have themselves been defined and redefined by water and its control, how state leaders legitimized their rule both culturally and economically through the control of water, and how water management schemes were a means to impose and refine colonial power.

Reimagining watersheds as living hydrocommons through which artists and communities create more just and sustainable futures

Hydrocommoning explores how artists, activists, and curators coalesce around water in embodied efforts to contest entrenched and enduring forms of harm and degradation. Against the reduction of rivers, streams, and wetlands to mere resources to be managed, Hydrocommoning centers water as a living web of relations through which artists and communities forge creative means of reconnection by moving, weaving, pumping, eating, and listening.

By charting these aesthetic practices, Hydrocommoning shows how artists and organizers across Latin America oppose extractivism, unequal urbanization, ecological degradation, and the erasure of Indigenous water cultures. To cultivate widespread social attunement to vulnerable waters and raise the call for their defense and care, collectives in Brazil, Colombia, Guatemala, and Peru engage in communal meals, sound art, infrastructural interventions, and other practices that Lisa Blackmore theorizes as “hydrocommoning.”

Grounded in five years of experiential fieldwork, archival research, and curatorial projects in Latin America, Blackmore proposes a methodology to work with water as an analytical framework for collective action. Bridging the gap between theory, curating, and community-based practices, Hydrocommoning offers a promising vision of grassroots organizing that actively confronts some of today’s most urgent ecological threats.

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