At free ebook version of this title is available
through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open
Access publishing program. Visit
www.luminosoa.org to learn more.
Virtuous Waters is a pathbreaking and innovative study of
bathing, drinking and other everyday engagements with a wide range
of waters across five centuries in Mexico. Casey Walsh uses
political ecology to bring together an analysis of shifting
scientific, religious and political understandings of waters and a
material history of social formations, environments, and
infrastructures. The book shows that while modern concepts and
infrastructures have come to dominate both the hydrosphere and the
scholarly literature on water, longstanding popular understandings
and engagements with these heterogeneous liquids have been
reproduced as part of the same process. Attention to these dynamics
can help us comprehend and confront the water crisis that is coming
to a head in the twenty-first century.
