Wateau Fabienne

Biography

Fabienne Wateau has been associate researcher at the CNRS since 2001. She was a member of the Casa de Velázquez in Madrid (1997-1999), deputy director of the Institute for Archaeology and Ethnology René-Ginouvès in Nanterre (Maison de l’archéologie et de l’ethnologie René-Ginouvès, 2008-2011) and coordinator of the PhD student exchange program with the University of Chicago and the University of Massachusetts Boston (2010-2012). She is a member of several scientific committees and review committees for French, Portuguese and Spanish journals (Ateliers d’anthropologie, Arquivos da Memória, Ankulegi, Mélanges de la Casa de Velázquez), and she teaches in the Department of Ethnology at the University of Paris West Nanterre La Défense and at the Musée du quai Branly (since 2006). Her PhD thesis, completed in 1996, aimed to address a paradox: why are there conflicts over water in regions were water abounds? By choosing northwest Portugal’s wet Rio Minho valley, where rural communities have been practicing irrigation for centuries, she went against the usual techno-economic approaches that posit the scarcity of the resource as the major cause of conflicts, and showed how seasonal, regular altercations contributed in this case to maintaining, perpetuating and modernising the society under study. When Portugal and Spain entered the European union in 1986, she also witnessed the initial effects of European Community agricultural policy in this cross-border valley, namely the rapid recomposition of minifundia and irrigated mixed food farming areas into a market economy based on unirrigated single-crop vine farming.

Research Interest

Conflicts and social order, spaces and politics, cognition and measurement, objects and societies, environment and sustainability