This thesis explores two examples of water management in the highland Peruvian villages, San Pedro de Llancha and San Antonio de Chinchina. One example is of cooperation and union between the two communities. The other is of conflict between the same two villages just 40 years prior. I examine ethnographic and ethnohistorical data from both the collaborative period and the conflictive period of these two communities’ relations over water. The data suggest that, while the outcomes of these two periods were drastically different, the processes through which these communities came into relation with one another were quite similar. Their communal union or fragmentation depended on subtle differences in their positional relations to a common resource, water, others who needed the resource, and external entities who had authority over that resource. The result is two neighboring sister communities who flow in to and out of each other’s communal orbit according to circumstance and practice, rather than permanent, abstract village identity.