Doing irrigation in a non-modern world Techno- and water diversity in the mango orchards of Northern Peru

This thesis takes as its departure point the question of how we can write about water and irrigation concerns without erasing the differences between the diverse ways in which humans and water relate. Its various chapters draw on ethnographic materials gathered in the coastal valley of Motupe, in northern Peru, where export mangos are cultivated and irrigated in diverse ways, more or less in line with modern and technoscientific ideals. It pays particular attention to the practices of smallholder farmers, large plantation owners, water scientists, local engineers and others who try to control and/or to care for water and for parts and aspects of a complex irrigation system. The complexities found on the ground, make it difficult to discuss water problems in singular terms or in long-standing modern and non-modern dichotomies. Hence, research into water and irrigation would benefit from discarding the idea that things need to be pure or purified in order to work. Water scholarship could be enriched if it were to renounce these dreams of purity and instead welcome mixtures, mélanges, composites, and messiness. If we were to eschew overviews, big words, and totalities, this would create more space for stories and realities that are now, along with the people generating and fostering them, unduly marginalized.