Spring water is a critical element through which people relate to one another and their ancestors. This paper traces the import of water and associated spirit ecologies to the production of wet-rice examining complex social, political, economic and environmental fluidities and continuities across time and space. It analyses the foundational moral economy and variously embodied beings under whose auspices irrigated rice production is enabled and local water and knowledge politics plays out. It argues that such customary economies are generative of long standing modes of environmental governance and co-operation.

Chapter from book 'Water Politics and Spiritual Ecology: Custom, Environmental Governance and Development'