Workshop, 3-5 September, Copenhagen
Waterworlds
Towards an Anthropology of Fluid environments
Abstracts (in order of presentation)
Fluid Consistencies: meaning and materiality
in human engagements with water
Veronica Strang
(Durham University)
Abstract
Material things are not just passive recipients of imposed human categories, meanings and
values, nor mere subjects of human agency. Their particular characteristics and behaviours
contribute to the generation of meaning and are formative of human-environmental relations.
Persons and things co-constitute each other. The common material properties of things, and
the shared cognitive, sensory and physical processes through which people engage with them,
generate undercurrents of recurrent meanings in diverse cultural and historical contexts.
Water is particularly useful for thinking about the fluid relationships between things and
persons and the ways in which material properties and meanings co-mingle. As well as
carrying consistent themes of meaning in diverse ethnographic and historical contexts, water
also permeates all organic things and kinds, including humankind, flowing through and
connecting the various micro and macro scales at which they interact. This paper follows this
flow to consider how material and social processes provide both fluidity and consistency at
every level of engagement.
Imagining a Lens–The plurality of Water in Kiribati
Maria Louise Robertson
(University of Copenhagen, Waterworlds)
Abstract
Kiribati in the central Pacific relies on vulnerable aquifers for drinking water. A
shallow lens of groundwater sustains life here. Drought and saltwater intrusion always
affected the lens, but recently concerns emerge about climate change. However, the
freshwater lens does not render itself visible (Strang 2004), imagination is necessary
when understanding: What does it look like? What does it do? How should it be used?
I explore how locals, the government, and development workers imagine the
freshwater lens. How are different imaginations configured, and how do they
interact? Perception of the lens is situated through expertise knowledge: models or
ancient stories, or through technologies: pumps and pipes. Even if not visible, the lens
is not a remote object, but it is carried on a wave of imaginations (Callon 1991).
When engaging in imagining, the idea of one coherent lens fades away as different
actors rely on different systems in organizing the same material.
The anatomy of water in urban Peru: Grounds and figures of an
ethnographic water-path
Astrid O. Andersen
(University of Copenhagen, Waterworlds)
Abstract
This chapter follows an ethnographic water-path through the city of Arequipa in Southern
Peru.
Parting from a description of the methodology applied during one year of fieldwork - a
mapping of material, institutional and epistemological water systems in an urban context - I
will explore the multiple layers and anatomy of water in Arequipa.
I start out describing the method of ethnographic mapping of urban water systems. Secondly,
the analytical implications of the material exploration of water systems will be discussed.
What becomes visible as figure and ground as we follow the water ethnographically in an
urban context? What configures “the social” when we see it through water as well as social
and physical infrastructure around water?
The urban topography in Arequipa is characterized by verticality, with three volcanoes
embracing the city, pointing towards the high Andean ridge. The vertical topography gives
direction to natural water flows, and verticality shapes access to water as well as water
technology. Also, social life influences the flow and quality of water. It is these tensions and
relationalities between physical, practical and epistemological configurations in the cityscape
/ urban ecology that emerge when writing out the ethnographic mapping.
What further becomes visible along this ethnographic water-path is a complex web of
relations and positions; water becomes many as it circulates and is transformed through
infrastructures, practices, and knowledge regimes. As it flows through the city, waters get
linked with interests, politics and meanings, and become contested matter.
The analytical implications of ethnographic mapping are discussed, and the concepts of
“capture”, “connectivity”, “pressure” and “water-body” are proposed as analytical concepts
for digging into social life in urban ecologies. I argue that mapping water, with the analytical
concepts that grow out of method, gives us a particular optic for looking at urban
relationality; one which encompasses politics as well as ecological human and non-human
relations.
To the Lighthouse: Meeting the Sea Halfway
Frida Hastrup
(University of Copenhagen, Waterworlds)
Abstract
In recent years, in light of both routine hazards and extraordinary natural events, a series of
interventions meant to protect land and citizens against a threatening sea has appeared along
the southern Bay of Bengal coast of the Indian state of Tamil Nadu. State bodies and NGOs,
among others, have delivered and promoted lighthouses, lifejackets, building guidelines etc.
all with the aim of making life by the sea safer for coastal populations. This paper asks what
kind of work these technologies can be seen to perform, and what sea gets configured through
their establishment. The overall point is to suggest that the technologies do not only serve as
tokens of, say, state responsibility or humanitarian concerns vis-à-vis dramatic waters, but
rather that their making and presence in fact bring about a novelty in the world, namely a kind
of sea-of-people, which comes to life as it is analyzed and acted upon.
Excluding water: a case study from the East Anglia Fenlands
Richard D.G. Irvine
(University of Cambridge)
Abstract
This paper will explore a particular British landscape (the East Anglian Fenlands) from an
ethnographic and historical perspective. The Fens are a place where the Protestant Work Ethic
has been inscribed on the landscape; labour cuts drainage ditches to bleed the peat, and
creates productive land where once there was only feckless and lazy swamp. Or, to listen to
the story another way: labour attempts to impose man's will on God's dominion, with
disastrous consequences for humans and for other species. The Fens remain a contested
environment, represented variously as a natural flood barrier, a carbon sink, a key element in
Britain's food security, and a tourist attraction. I aim to explore how wetland is enclosed as a
resource, and in particular I want to explore the contested politics that surround the kind of
resource that it becomes. How has the Fenland been 'mastered', and given peat shrinkage,
climate change, and post-glacial rebound, how secure is this mastery?
My goal here is twofold: firstly, I want to place the anthropological study of wetland in a
broader ecological and geological perspective, one that thinks beyond a shallow time
perspective and towards a recognition of flux over time. To understand the relationship
between humans, land, and water in the Fenlands it is not only necessary to think about the
relatively short time span of a human life cycle, but to engage with much longer stretches of
history – and to understand how this deeper view of time is encountered and understood in the
daily lives of people who ‘dig into’ the Fenlands. To engage with the landscape of the fens is
to dig beneath surface certainties, uncovering preserved mementoes of wetland – extinct
riverways, evidence of waterlogging and of coastlines that stretched to places now thought of
as securely ‘inland’: cues that prompt speculation about past and future inundations. To think
through some of these issues, I will begin by reflecting on collaborations with archaeologists
that help us to place the current managed landscape in a deeper, water-bound context.
Secondly, I wish to reflect on the creation of property that comes out of the apparent
‘banishing’ of the wet. The history of the Fens provides us with ample opportunity to reflect
on Locke’s Labour Theory of Property: the world may be given to man in common, but man
adds his labour to a resource and makes that which was previously unused productive; in
doing so he attains property over that to which he has added his labour. This work of adding
labour to an apparently ‘useless’ resource to make it ‘useful’ characterises tales of struggle
with water in the Fenlands. And yet, here we are forced to recognise the self-defeating nature
of labour: peat shrinks as it is drained – the more drained, the more vulnerable the landscape
becomes. Labour must be renewed, again and again, or water will win.
I will therefore tell a series of stories about the creation of property in wetland. The first story
is from the 16th century, and of the struggles of the ‘adventurers’ (venture capitalists as we
might know them today) given rights to enclose the land. The second story is from World
War 2 and the military-style struggle to manage the land for the sake of food security. The
third story is from the present day, and speaks of how contestation over the ‘usefulness’ of
fenland continues through attempts to establish large wetland nature reserves, and the
resistance to those attempts.
Throughout, what I hope to provide is a study of a managed and drained landscape with a
deeper history. My goal is to show how water is excluded, only to retain its flow in human
relations.
___________________________________________________________________________
Fixing Water: Hydrological Phases and Social Boundaries
in the Peruvian Andes
Mattias B. Rasmussen and Karsten Paerregaard
(University of Copenhagen, Waterworlds)
Abstract
The hydrological cycle is a way of understanding how water moves through phases, from the
ice on the mountain tops to water flowing in rivers either filtrating or ending up in the ocean
and, finally, evaporating before restoring its airy shape and condensing as precipitation. In
this paper we will rethink the hydrological cycle as defined in biophysics and suggested an
alternative model based on Andean water practices. Drawing on lengthy ethnographic
fieldwork in Tapay and Recuay in two areas of Peru’s Andean Cordillera we discuss native
ideas of water cycling, proposing a socio-political understanding of the hydrological cycle.
Through four brief cases we identify three states of water: intangible, untamed and
domesticated. Intangible waters are waters of the sky; that is the clouds that periodically
results in rain or snow. Rain and snow follow a calendric cycle but vary from one year to
another sometimes producing flooding and sometimes droughts. To humans the intangible
waters, which also include ice and various types of underground water, are distant and
mystical and therefore objects of concern as well as contemplation. Untamed waters, by
contrast, are the free-flowing waters of the smaller and bigger rivers and the waters of fresh
water lakes, which can potentially be for any purpose. Oceans and seas are also untamed
waters. Although humans do not control the free-flowing waters, these are often the subject of
negotiation and strife and represent critical points of reference in the social and political
landscape. Finally, domesticated waters are waters that are controlled by humans and that run
through man-made sluices, pipes and other installations and that are stored in reservoirs. Such
constructions require political supervision in the form of management regimes and communal
work and constitute important institutions in many societies. Through ethnographic scrutiny
of actions such as religious offerings, burning of pastures, construction of irrigation canals
and potable water systems, extraction of pebble in the rivers, contamination and aquaculture
we show that the boundaries between intangible, untamed and domesticated water are the
product of politics and human organization rather than biophysical conditions. In the
discussion of how the hydrological cycle is perceived in Andean society we suggest that the
native tropes of reciprocity and verticality are useful to understand not only the human
organization of Andean waterscapes but also central themes of Andean sociality and the ways
in which the hydrological cycle is being altered and renewed in the Andes. Concluding the
paper, we will situate the phase-making of water within a national framework and argue that
Peru’s present political conditions, the country’s growing extractivism and global climate
change challenge existing notions of the hydrological cycle thus questioning the social
boundaries that intangible, untamed and domesticated water produce and making water an
issue of political conflict not only locally and regionally but also nationally.
The Nature of Flooding and Desertification in West Africa:
How and Why the Absence of Water Remains a More Powerful
Environmental Narrative than its Excess
Mette Fog Olwig and Laura Vang Rasmussen
(University of Copenhagen, Waterworlds)
Abstract
In the 2000s northern Ghana and northern Burkina Faso experienced extensive flooding as a
result of unusually heavy rains. When we conducted fieldwork in 2009 and 2010 in northern
Ghana and northern Burkina Faso, the evidence of destruction from flooding was dramatically
present, yet discourse on flooding remarkably absent. Throughout fieldwork among
development recipients, local practitioners as well as donors living and working in the area, a
strong emphasis on local resource mismanagement as the cause of droughts was found and
few narratives on the largely externally-driven flooding were encountered. Since the Great
Sahelian Droughts of the 1970s and 1980s, knowledge on, and narratives of, rainfall and
flooding in the Sahel have been largely subdued and neglected, instead the overarching metanarrative of the desertification discourse has remained dominate. With this presentation we
wish to point to the many ways in which we found the desertification narrative to persist in
our field sites, and the repercussions thereof. The victim-blaming desertification narrative
dominated the literature, national adaptation strategies, development project interventions and
local and global cultural imaginaries. This, for example, resulted in an overemphasis on the
problem of bush fires, charcoal burning, animal grazing and poor farming practices with little
interest in interventions related to floods as well as non-agriculturally based livelihoods.
Against this backdrop, we further aim to explore the nature of desertification in order to
understand its success as a discourse, while comparing it to the nature of flooding and its
rhetorical absence. The nature of desertification and flooding should here be understood in
the dual sense of the phenomena’s physical character as well as the cultural character and
values attributed to them. Why is it that the absence of water in these areas continually
receives so much more attention than its excess?
Existential Anchors in a Whirling Landscape :
Wells as nodes of political intensity in the nomadic landscape of Southeastern
Mauritania
Christian Vium
(University of Copenhagen, Waterworlds)
Abstract
In this chapter I investigate wells as constitutive components in the vortical nomadic
landscape of south eastern Mauritania. Based on ethnographic material collected between
2001 and 2012, I argue that wells are fluid technologies, which can be understood as
instantiations of potentiality which enact particular forms of political intensity. The wells
figure as both topological and topographic nodes in a nomadic landscape characterised by the
profound ephemerality of natural resources (topography) and the fluidity of pastoral political
economies (topology), configuring what I tentatively call emerging vortical topologies.
In the last decade, the landscape of south eastern Mauritania has been drying significantly and
rainfall has been degrading. As a result, the dispersion of pastures and surface water have
become reconfigured and rain fed wells, which constitute the vast majority of wells, have
become less affluent and more frequented at the same time. A paradoxical fluctuation of
intensity is taking place on multiple levels. Focusing specifically on material collected at, and
in the vicinity of, the Ain al-Argoub well outside Oualata during the build-up to the current
severe regional drought and subsequent food crisis affecting the entire Sahel (2012), this
chapter investigates the correlation between water scarcity and political intensity, thus
mapping out an emergent nomadic landscape of diverse potentialities, scaled through water in
the form of political intensity.
Ain al-Argoub is analysed as a specific and very concrete socio-technological assemblage, an
agent, which attracts nomadic pastoralists into complex configurations of negotiation and
conflict, thus configuring – and bounding - the vortical topology of the nomadic landscape.
The North Water:
Life on the edge between ice and sea in the High Arctic
Kirsten Hastrup
(University of Copenhagen, Waterworlds)
Abstract
The North Water is the name of a so-called polynya, which is a patch of Arctic sea that is
more or less open or only covered by a thin layer of ice for most of the year. The North Water
is extremely productive in terms of primary biomass and allows for a welter of marine
mammals higher up the food chain, also needing the breathing space. The polynya was named
by European whalers in the 19th century, who delighted in its riches whenever they could get
so far North.
More significantly, the North Water has fed the northernmost peoples on the globe, the people
of the Thule District (Avanersuaq) in Greenland, for the past thousand years, since settlement
became permanent in the region. Before that it served as a more or less temporary larder for
tiny groups of people migrating from the Northern coasts of Canada and into Greenland
where the distance was shortest. These groups constituted diverse prehistoric Eskimo cultures
(identified as such by archaeologists) that spread further south in East and West Greenland, to
disappear again, and later to be replaced by new waves of people from across the sea. The
North Water provided amble game for the better part of the year. Small wonder that a
dominant figure in the oral tradition was the Mother of the Sea, being in charge of the seaanimals and the one to discharge them to the humans.
In this presentation, I shall explore the social implications of living on the edge between ice
and sea, and concomitantly on the edge between nature and society, and between the animal
and the human world, seen to co-constitute each other. These years the water is opening up at
increasing speed, the edge is becoming increasingly fragile, and the biotope is changing. The
new race for the Polar Sea and its presumed riches in the form of oil runs right through the
North Water and disturbs both animals and hunters, as do the new submarine currents.
Focussing on the North Water as such enables me to see how it not only predicates people’s
lives and movements but also scale it. By being in itself a fluid form, the North Water
highlights the temporariness of social forms in the High Arctic – and shows how in general it
is impossible to think of an environment as external to the social.
Measurement and allocation: Water politics in West Africa
Ben Orlove et al
(Columbia University)
Abstract
Integrated Water Resource Management (IWRM) has emerged in recent decades as a new
form of water governance, replacing earlier state-centered management. It seeks to balance
three goals: efficiency, equity and sustainability. To explore IWRM ethnographically, we
examine three incidents of conflict over water allocation in a watershed in southwestern
Burkina Faso. The timing of these incidents, in 2007, 2009 and 2012, straddles the
introduction of IWRM into the country and the watershed in 2008-2010. Though many
features distinguish each of these incidents (the amount of rainfall in the previous season, the
prices of crops in regional and national markets, etc.), the timing permits a consideration of
the changes which IWRM has brought. We emphasize the process of confrontation and
negotiation between the different water users and institutions in the watershed, region and
country. We review the changing nature of participation in water allocation and in the levels
of conflict in the watershed—broadly, a political ecology of water under IWRM>
Of particular interest is the particular attributes of water which the interacting parties discuss.
They use different frameworks to measure the timing and quantity of water to be allocated
and to translate these water allocations into uses. As a consequence, some judgment must be
exercised to compare and assess these allocations. These issues, closely related to the
questions of indigenous knowledge in environmental anthropology at large, are crucial in this
case. We offer an initial account of the shifting patterns of mutual recognition between
different knowledge systems reflected in the three incidents.
Water for life – facing a fluctuating or finite, yet crucial productive
resource in the Sahel
Anette Reenberg
(University of Copenhagen, Waterworlds)
Abstract
The paper will, with point of departure in a couple (ca. 4-5) of compelling narratives from the
Sahel region (Burkina Faso, Senegal and Niger), explore the how local people cope with
uncertainty and change in availability of the water resources that are decisive for the local
livelihood and survival. We will explore how local coping strategies have evolved faced with
temporally and spatially fluctuating rainfall or faced with dwindling groundwater, and
especially adopt two perspectives, water sustainability and water literacy, to discuss the
possible future implications of contemporary livelihood strategies.
By way of introduction, a short characterization of the long term trends in the availability of
water in the Sahel will be given. Thereafter, two main groups of examples/case stories will be
presented. The first group will deal with ‘water from above’, and exemplify how various
strategies traditionally have been put in place in order to overcome the prominent spatial and
temporal fluctuations of the rain that sustain most of the food production for the local people
(agriculture, pastoral production). The second group will focus on ‘water from (or on) the
ground’, and exemplify how livelihoods and food production strategies have been geared in
order to make the best possible use of standing water in the landscape (e.g. temporary lakes
and dams) or groundwater wells.
The specific ambition of this paper is, based on the case stories, to discuss if coping and
adaptation to water constraints in a ‘business-as-usual’ fashion may in fact create a log-in
type of situation that effectively hampers a transition to a more sustainable and desirable
situation for local people.
Calling and collecting rain:
knowledge, technologies, and time-space in the mountains
Astrid Stensrud
(University of Copenhagen, Waterworlds)
Abstract
In this presentation/chapter, I will explore how rain is imagined, configured and practiced in
the mountains. It has been calculated that by 2025, all the tropical glaciers below 5500 m.a.s.l.
in the Peruvian Andes will disappear (Oré et al. 2009: 56). As these glaciers provide a large
part of the water used for irrigation and consumption both in rural and urban areas, the
consequences of rapid meltdown could be devastating. While the glaciers and snowfields are
decreasing, rain increases in importance for economic and social life in the mountains.
However, among the small-scale farmers and herders in Caylloma province, Southern Peru,
the effects of global climate change are also being perceived as the loss of stability: changes
in the known seasonal cycle of rain, frost, heat and drought, which have serious consequences
for the crops, since premature frost and new diseases destroy the plants. Timing is of crucial
importance for the rain cycle, and rain that comes too early or too late is said to bring disease,
both for humans, animals and plants.
What can we learn by thinking through rain? Rain connects time and space in cyclical
currents, in conjunction with the sun, the wind, the ocean, the mountains, the clouds, and the
humans, and is essential for the maintenance of watersheds. When the rain cycle is disturbed
and unbalanced, it creates new uncertainties and a stronger sense of risk in agricultural
production. One on hand, rain is mostly perceived as uncontrollable. However, different
knowledges and technologies are being employed to create a sense of predictability. I will in
this chapter, discuss two different and complementary technologies: calling for rain through a
mimetic ritual, and harvesting rain by constructing micro-dams.
I will argue that rain is not just a natural phenomenon; rain is made in assemblages of nature
and culture, and it engages different technologies, knowledges and practices. The question is
if these different practices and assemblages enact different versions of rain? I will discuss rain
as knowledge and as practice, and suggest that rain is not just rain; different rain-technologies
and rain-practices enact different rain ontologies, which are overlapping and always in the
making.
Flow Talk and Stasis in a Fluid Environment
Jonas Østergaard Nielsen
(University of Copenhagen, Waterworlds)
Abstract
The social sciences have since the early 1990s been influenced by a metaphor (paradigm) of
fluidity. The ‘sedentarist metaphysics’ of blood, soil and identity has been replaced by studies
of movements, circulations, connections, networks and flows. This ‘flow talk’ is heavily
influenced by globalization theories and their leitmotif of mobility of goods, money, ideas and
peoples across frontiers: movement and fluidity appear the stuff of contemporary human life
and identity. In this paper this ‘flow talk’ is critiqued. The critique show how the celebration
of ‘deterritorialization’ marginalizes issues of local belonging. Creating a false dichotomy
between people on the move and a stagnant rest, the emphasis on flows results in a
disembodied globalism that undervalues the cultural thickness of everyday territoriality. This
latter point is exemplified by turning to new ethnographies of human-environment
interactions. Here studies of identity acknowledge that rootedness and fluidity are not as such
opposing metaphors but exist in a complementary relationship to each other. Landscapes and
material substances like water provide a backdrop of relative constancy to more dynamic
processes of social change. Thinking with material substances like water hence allow for a
kind of ‘embodied flow talk’. Yet, I will argue, thinking with water cannot truly avoid a focus
on social fluidity. Faced with an ethnographic present in which staying put, or stasis, is of
crucial cultural importance I hence turn to another material substance: Sand. Sand moves
around in northern Burkina Faso yet it does not inspire the same reflexive analytic use
(locally as well as among the researcher) as the qualities of water does. While it behaves
much like water sand is unlike water only an obstacle. There is nothing life giving about it.
As such, sand and its ‘fluidity’ represent a major challenge to life in the study village and, in
turn, their very strong desire to stay put.
"Boom. Fresh and Bright." The enactment of water through soap
Cecilie Rubow
(University of Copenhagen)
Abstract
In Rarotonga, a small island in the South Pacific, a group of women engaged in Muri
Environmental Care Group run a semi-formal project, sometimes named The Soap Saga.
Having become aware that a number of laundry detergents - not least Boom - available in
local shops and supermarkets contain high levels of phosphate, this group is aiming for an
import ban in order to improve the health of Muri Lagoon. This paper shows how the
practical theory of soap enacted by the group is not only grounded in the anticipated negative
effect of phosphates (causing algal bloom) in a fragile eco-system, but also in a much wider
field of enactments of fresh water, waste water and salt water. Using the soap and The Soap
Saga as a prism, the idea with the presentation is, first, to present the wider heterogeneous
field of this practical theory (including concerns with the relation to Mother Nature,
generational gaps, legal frameworks and the colonial preference for the colour white); and
secondly, to raise some questions concerning the anthropological representation of
heterogeneous practical theories, specifically targeting the montage as a genre.