The Struggle for Water: Politics, Rationality, and Identity in the American Southwest

by Wendy Nelson Espeland

Overview

Nearly fifty years ago, the Bureau of Reclamation proposed building a dam at the confluence of two rivers in Central Arizona. While the dam would bring valuable water to this arid plain, it would also destroy a wildlife habitat, flood archaeological sites, and force the Yavapai Indians off their ancestral home. The Struggle for Water is not only the fascinating story of this controversial and ultimately thwarted public works project but also a study of rationality as a cultural, organizational, and political construct.

In the 1970s, the three groups most intimately involved in the Orme Dam—younger Bureau of Reclamation employees committed to "rational choice" decision making, older Bureau engineers committed to the dam, and the Yavapai community—all found themselves and their values transformed by their struggles. Wendy Nelson Espeland lays bare the relations between interests and identities that emerged during the conflict, creating a contemporary tale of power and colonization, bureaucracies and democratic practice, that asks the crucial question of what it means to be "rational."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226217949
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	09/15/1998
Series:	Chicago Series in Law and Society
Edition description:	1
Pages:	298
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.80(d)

Table of Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments
1. Contested Rationalities
2. Nature by Design: The Bureau of Reclamation's Western Conquest
3. The Old Guard: Stand by Your Dam
4. The New Guard: Agents of Rationality, Arbiters of Democracy
5. Views from the Reservation: The Politics and Perspective of Yavapai People
6. Rationality, Form, and Power
References
Abbreviations
Primary Documents and Printed Sources
Secondary Sources
Index

What People are Saying About This

John Comaroff

The Struggle for Water is among the very best ethnographies of bureaucratic cultures in the United States to date. It is a tour de force
—empirically, methodologically, analytically.

Editorial Reviews

The Orme dam was proposed for construction nearly 50 years ago at the confluence of two rivers in Central Arizona, but it was never built. Espeland's (sociology, Northwestern U.) study describes the interaction and evolution of three groups involved with the dam: younger Bureau of Reclamation employees committed to "rational choice" decision making, older Bureau engineers committed to the dam, and the Yavapai Indians, who would have been forced off their ancestral home if construction had proceeded. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

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