Production and Water Culture

This chapter examines the cultural values of water division systems in the Iranian local communities. Water division system has been evolved by the local communities over hundreds of years ago in order to better adapt to their harsh environment. This chapter shows how social dynamics and cultural potentials play a significant role in the water division system to ensure an efficient irrigation for every stakeholder. A village in western Iran has been selected as a case study to show how the qanat's water division system has remained almost intact, despite the profound changes that its management elements have undergone over the past few decades. In the traditional feudal system, the qanat water was divided among 11 agricultural units on an 11-day irrigation cycle that is still in use, though the feudal system itself is long gone. This chapter investigates water in relation to other production factors, which formed a specific feudalism in the village. In Iranian villages, feudalism was not identical in character, but it varied from region to region based on the relationship between the lords and their peasants. This relationship that underlay the entire agricultural system was contingent on five production factors: workforce, plough, seed, land and eventually water. This chapter tries to discover the role of water in the village's power relation. This chapter also shows how an irrigation technique like qanat could have served as a vehicle to transfer cultural elements from an ethnic group to others in the village. The village has been a historical stage on which different ethnicities have played their roles and then disappeared, but some vestiges of their cultures have remained in the shape of irrigation jargon. The qanat of the village is part of a bigger cultural landscape that goes back to the dawn of history.