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

The Struggle for Water: Politics, Rationality, and Identity in the American Southwest. By Wendy Nelson Espeland. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. 281p. $19.00 paper.

Daniel McCool, University of Utah

This book is a case study of how a small tribe of Indians and an alienated group of number-crunching bureaucrats managed to stop a proposed dam that was an article of faith for the powerful U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. Espeland gives a fascinating analysis of how different perceptions of value come into conflict in the political process; her research "confirms the salience of pluralistic modes of valuing and reasoning and discloses some of the distortions that emerge from efforts to commensurate the incommensurable" (p. 20).

The struggle over Orme Dam involved three disparate groups. The "Old Guard" in the Bureau of Reclamation was "invested" in the decision to build the dam; their organizational identity was characterized by an engineering ethos, unwavering loyalty, and a commitment to traditional political allies (pp. 96, 127). The "New Guard" consisted of more recent employees who viewed their professional expertise in terms of "rationality and planning, a commitment to commensuration and to making the bureaucracy more democratic" (p. 136). The third group consisted of Yavapai Apaches and their allies...