Quem controla a água? Das controvérsias à cosmopolítica no circuito das águas em Minas Gerais, Brasil

Abstract

First Nature (Science), Second Nature (Economy) and Cosmopolitics (politics). These are the three parts that compound the thesis. But these domains are not purified, and the very specific connections among them (and others) attributed to mineral water dissimilar values. These connections have been explored in each part of the thesis. In the first part were descripted the relations that allowed to medicine adopt mineral water as an object of its practice. It was possible thanks to the chemical discoveries at the time: while the chemistry brought new entities to mineral water, medicine could incorporate them in its discursive practice. In the south of Minas Gerais (Brazil), medical, chemical and aristocratic interests are in the beginning of the production of bottled mineral water. Later, during the decline of therapeutic hidrology with the mineral water, the industrial potential of this resource where emphasized. That’s when second Nature enter in the history of mineral water. The notion of a Market functioning as an autonomous Nature has been provided by Economics, as one way to protect and maintain the laissez faire. To denaturalize the Economy, the institutional attachments of the mineral water market were investigated, succeded by an analyse on how these anchors provide to this market the conditions to grow (while helped to subtract the interventions in its operation). But the permanence of this way of thinking is not more guaranteed than the possibilities of conflicts (and enters the third part of the thesis). In São Lourenço municipality (south of Minas Gerais, Brazil), a group of citizens argued about the possibility of super-exploitation of mineral water by a multinational. To produce a specific brand of bottled water, the company had to take out the iron present in the water, because it would deposit in the bottom of the bottles and affect the commercialization. And it was trough an aliance between humans and the iron that the company was forced to stop its production of that brand of bottled water. Nowadays, another situation is occurring in the south of Minas Gerais. This time, a national company that posses the propriety of the springs in Cambuquira e Caxambu has opened the bottling activity in these municipalities to a private partner, but several groups of citizens do not agree with the way that the partership was communicated and conducted. Since the bottling is only one way to live with mineral water, the tone is of an alert and the message is that another present with mineral water is possible, but it has to be composed