WENDY
ESPELAND
The Struggle for Water: Politics, Rationality, and Identity in the American Southwest. University of Chicago Press (1998).
The Bureau of Reclamation's controversial decision to develop the Orme Dam in Arizona forms the backdrop of this book. Espeland uses the Bureau's long and bitter dispute with the Yavapai Indians, who fought being driven from their ancestral home, to examine both the underpinnings of rationality and its link to commensuration. She explains how rationality became the terrain for struggle over powerful material and ideal interests, and how, once the conflict was cast in these terms, the interests and identities of participants were renegotiated.