“One Man’s Flood Defense Is Another Man’s Flood”: Relating Through Water Flows in Gloucestershire, England

ABSTRACT

Presenting voices and observations from flood-affected people in Gloucestershire, United Kingdom, this article analyzes the relationships that flooding engenders through the material dynamics of water, and argues that flooding illustrates how particular social relations are simultaneously hydrological, and vice versa. It presents the variability of water flows in people’s environments, and the local differentiation of normal and exception floods. By outlining the residents’ concern about drainage, their hydrosociality, that is, an understanding of relatedness through and with water, is sketched. It is explored how these hydrosocial relations become intensely political, where insiders and outsiders, and beneficiaries and losers, are configured in relation to water and flood risk. Finally, the article shows how pollution in flooding emerges out of perceived disorderly flows, when water moves into a place along the wrong trajectory and embodying the wrong characteristics. Where one person’s or group’s defenses can easily turn into another’s increased risk, water flows and social relations are intimately entwined.

KEYWORDS:

• Anthropology
• drainage
• flood risk management
• flood risk
• Gloucestershire
• hydrosocial
• water

Acknowledgments

This article is based on research conducted during the ESRC UK-funded “Sustainable Flood Memories” project, in which I worked together with Lindsey McEwen, Owain Jones, and Joanne Garde-Hansen, and written up during the Estonian Research Council-funded “Water, Rhythms, Landscape” project. I am indebted to the people of Gloucestershire who have shared their knowledge of floods with me. I am very grateful to Veronica Strang, Laur Kiik, the Technologies in Practice Group at IT University Copenhagen, and three anonymous reviewers for insightful comments on earlier drafts.