Water Management in Sites of Abundance: Ecosystem Policy and Native Peoples in the Guianas

Studies of the social relations connected to water are most commonly associated with places in which water is a scarce and valued commodity, and in which the management of water use is an important practical question on a local level. However, in the context of widespread concern about global climate change, discourses have emerged about the problems of global management of water resources, and these are beginning to have an influence even in places where water is abundant. For the Guiana Caribs, the aquatic environment of the great rivers of the Amazon rainforest plays a fundamental economic role, most directly as a source of drinking water and fish, a place to wash, and a medium for transpor-tation. It is also, perhaps unsurprisingly, prominent in their cosmology and ancestral myths.