Virtuous Waters

Mineral Springs, Bathing, and Infrastructure in Mexico

Casey Walsh

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780520291737
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780520965393
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Mexican History
• Index: Social Sciences

At free ebook version of this title is available throughLuminos, 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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Preface
• 1 Waters/Cultures
• 2 Bathing and Domination in the Early Modern Atlantic World
• 3 Policing Waters and Baths in Eighteenth-Century Mexico City
• 4 Enlightenment Science of Mineral Springs
• 5 Groundwater and Hydraulic Opulence in the Late Nineteenth Century
• 6 Chemistry, Biology, and the Heterogeneity of Modern Waters
• 7 Dispossession and Bottling after the Revolution
• 8 Spa Tourism in Twentieth-Century Mexico
• 9 Virtuous Waters in the Twenty-First Century
• Notes
• Bibliography