Abstract

CANTILLANA BARANADOS, Raphael. Water conflicts in its social and cultural dimensions: State policy and community management in Tarapacá, Chile. Estudios Socioterritoriales [online]. 2018, vol.23. ISSN 1853-4392.

This paper aims to describe and analyze the conflicts caused by the installation of the Rural Drinking Water System in the community of Caleta Chanavaya, Great North of Chile. This installation is part of the Rural Drinking Water Program (RDW), which was implemented by to the State to facilitate access and to solve water supply problems in the community. Based on theoretical contributions of anthropology of water, a problem regarding the crisis and conflict of this element was articulated. This paper presents part of the results of a qualitative research whose fieldwork was done through ethnographic method. Water was constituted as the focus axis of the investigation and it is from where the dynamics of the conflict between the community, the Drinking Water Committee and the Chilean State, represented by its institutions, emerged. This paper concludes that the Program RDW constitutes exogenous measures applied to the rural communities, impacting them in a negative way, producing conflicts, changing their sociopolitical organization and showing imbalances in the objectives of their formulation.

Keywords : Conflict; Drinking water; Water anthropology; Water policy; Chile.

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