Paper short abstract:

This paper considers the ongoing social effects of a large dam in the Eastern Pyrenees region of France. We employ the concept of the hydrosocial cycle – borrowing from Wittfogel’s dialectic, but demanding a more complex account of hydrosocial relations - to explain the dam's broader implications.

Paper long abstract:

This paper considers the ongoing social effects of a large dam in the Eastern Pyrenees region of France. In 1976, the French state constructed a dam near the town of Vinça on the Têt River, altering the hydrological conditions that had co-produced a complex system of hydro-social relations evolved since the Middle Ages.

Wittfogel's dialectical insights into the relations between the control of water and the control of people help explain the effects of the dam, which we argue was built partly as a means of gaining territorial presence in a region historically resistant to the control of the French state. However, a more complex set of dialectical relations is at play in this situation, requiring a subtler explanatory tool. We show that the dam has had the effect of transferring expertise and social power from local to central authority, but not in a direct way. Rather, the production of hydrological certainty in the form of assured and regular flows has weakened the local social structures and relations that had evolved to accommodate - and were sustained by - hydrological uncertainty and periodical scarcity. We employ the concept of the hydrosocial cycle - which borrows from Wittfogel's dialectic, but demands a more complex account of hydrosocial relations - to explain these developments.

We conclude by hypothesizing some of the longer-term consequences of the dam in terms of its unintended impacts on the agricultural sector of the region and, ultimately, on the influence of the state.