Snake with Golden Braids

Stephen G. Bunker is professor of sociology at University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Although the engineered landscape has received considerable attention in anthropological and historical circles, few researchers have provided the observational detail that informs this book. By assessing the elaborate irrigation efforts of prehispanic societies in this region of the Peruvian Andes and contrasting them with subsequent hacienda systems as well as recent agrarian reforms, we are introduced to the fundamental organizational underpinnings acting on the landscape. Bunker shows how local places are linked by the movement of water and how cosmology and environment become codependent, though biophysical principles remain the ultimate arbiter in this topographically severe setting. Socially imbued place codifies myth, ritual, and belief. The author reveals how we all write own histories on a landscape, and how these culturally inscribed histories reconfigure aspects of the natural world. How we organize ourselves within our built environments and what technologies we chose to implement provide lessons for the future and will affect our longevity on this planet.

• Chapter 1 The Huanoquite Water Works: Environmental Sensitivity and Technological InnovationChapter 2 Mountains, Rivers, and ValleysChapter 3 Fitting Tame Ditches into a Wild LandscapeChapter 4 Power, Property, and TechnologyChapter 5 Cosmology, Society, and Nature