Historicizing more-than-human knowledge practices around water in the Lake Poopó basin, Bolivia

Abstract

This article develops a more-than-human and historicizing perspective on the co-creation of water knowledge in and around Lake Poopó, Bolivia, an Andean wetland area of international importance threatened by desertification. Through a combination of historical and ethnographic sources, it particularly focuses on the knowledge practices of the Uru or Qot Z'oñi communities who are recognized as "people of the waters and the lakes" and live as an ethnic minority in this dramatically transforming water basin. Starting from contemporary efforts to protect Uru water knowledges, it traces how shifting more-than-human entanglements and (neo)colonial encounters have produced, excluded, and transformed these knowledges.