Abstract

While most studies focus on the boom in oil, minerals, and logging, Stensrud’s chapter explores another form of extractivism, which is growing in importance: the extraction of economic value from the water that flows to infrastructural megaprojects, which are damming the water for agribusiness. Focusing on the implications of the Majes Irrigation Project for Quechua-speaking farmers in Peru, and how they make claims to the water springing from the mountains, Stensrud analyses the conditions that make land claims in Majes possible. Their claims are connected to notions of belonging and ownership that emerge from particular ontological compositions of water, mountains, personhood, and earth-beings that are not deliberately invented as part of an indigenous strategy to stop extractivism. Rather, these compositions form part of relationships that are continuously nurtured as part of ongoing life projects that conflict with the extractivist and modernising project of colonising water by turning it into an economic resource.