Thinking Relationships Through Water

With this collection, we hope to contribute to a more explicitly relational study of water in society. Water is not just the object of social relationships, or merely a natural resource on which claims are made, to which meanings are attached, and over which political conflicts erupt. We suggest that if we study how social and hydrological relationships are interconnected and mutually constitutive, a much deeper understanding of the role of water in human social lives can be gained, and significantly better management and policy can be designed. This collection is thus an argument for considering the hydrological and the social together: for thinking relationships through water.

Previous research on water has suggested a need to reconsider the relationships between society and natural resources (Strang 2009; Linton 2010). Simultaneously an element, a flow, a means of transport, a life-sustaining substance, and a life-threatening force, the subject, object, and often the very means of social and cultural activity (Hahn, Cless, and Soentgen 2012; Krause and Strang 2013), water inspires novel ways of thinking about key aspects of social relations, including exchange, circulation, power, community, and knowledge. At the same time, watery relationships challenge assumptions about nature and resources, questioning their conceptual and material boundedness and stability and furthering our understandings of the human and nonhuman aspects of their production.

Today, water has a prominent place in academic research, due in part to a widening awareness of multiple global water crises, in which water is increasingly scarce, destructive or polluted. As water is perceived as endangered or dangerous, researchers are rediscovering the profound implications of water for human societies and cultures. Just as biophysical life is unthinkable without water, so too is social and cultural life.

What Does “Thinking Relationships Through Water” Mean?

With the contributors to this volume, we want to highlight the benefits of thinking social relationships through water. Rather than treating water as an object of social and cultural production—something produced through social relationships and imbued with meaning through cultural schemes—we consider water as a generative and agentive co-constituent of relationships and meanings in society.

Much of current literature considers water “one of the most pressing environmental and resource concerns” (Tempelhoff et al. 2009, 1), and a political challenge due to the “plurality of worldviews, ideologies, interests and discourse related to water” (Molle, Mollinga, and Meinzen-Dick 2008, 3). This framework positions water as the object of evaluation and contestation. Similarly, Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Water describes one of its key interests as “those interpretations that we, as a society, have brought to water through art, religion, history and which in turn shapes how we come to understand it.” Meaning, in this view, is something that people—or “societies”—project onto the world (see Ingold 2000; Kohn 2013). Such an approach to meaning has long influenced the humanities and social sciences, theorizing culture as a veil or filter that mediates between human beings and the real world. This implies that the meaning of water is attached to a material substance to which humans have no direct access.

Exploring the role of people’s relationships with and through water more directly, this collection enables a shift in established approaches. We foreground water as an integral part of social and political relationships, arguing that, rather than being imposed, water’s meanings are emergent from these relationships (cf. Strang 2005). Rather than being merely links between human actors, social relationships are seen as including engagements with animals, places, things, and materials that contribute actively, through their properties and behaviours, to the formation and transformation of these relations.

Our approach is based on recent work that emphasises water’s deep permeation of social and cultural life (e.g., Fontein 2008; Linton 2010; Chen, McLeod, and Neimanis 2013; Strang 2014). This includes, for example, analyses of the simultaneously social and material processes that compose the “infrastructure” of watershed management (Carse 2012), and arguments that drinking water provision is conditioned by “pressures” that are simultaneously physical and political (Anand 2011). Observing that water is physically integral to political processes, rather than just their object, Bijker (2012) recommends studying human societies as “water cultures” (see also Bakker 2012), while others describe our environments as “water worlds” (Hastrup 2009; Orlove and Caton 2010; Barnes and Alatout 2012). With this in mind, our collection treats thinking relationships through water as a way to consider the materiality of social relations as well as the sociality of material relations.

How Is “Thinking Relationships Through Water” Useful?

What is the point of challenging established approaches to water in society and culture? What additional insights can be gained from thinking relationships through water, and what are the implications for policy and practice? Here, we highlight three areas in which this approach can be useful:

Analysis: By refraining from artificially dividing human life into social and material spheres, an analysis based on their correspondence allows us to move beyond the conceptual limits of conventional approaches. For instance, Linton and Budds (2014) have argued that the dominant model of the hydrologic cycle simplifies the more complex realities of water circulation (and noncirculation) and is in itself an ideological construct. Assumptions about the hydrologic cycle not only make all human involvement with water appear like a deviation from an ideal state, but also describe some forms of water—especially the “blue” and flowing kind—as being more desirable than, for instance, the “green” or “brown” water stored in plants or soil. Linton and Budds propose the “hydrosocial cycle” as a conceptual alternative, foregrounding the ubiquitous involvement of conflicting human activities in water circulation.

Politics: Considering social and hydrological relations together, rather than as two fundamentally different ways of relating, opens up a more critical and politically more sensitive approach. This applies to conventional “human” politics as much as to a wider political sphere including nonhuman life (Chen, McLeod, and Neimanis 2013, 6). The fact that we share water with—or withhold it from—other humans, as well as animals, plants, soils, and watercourses, makes water an excellent element through which to explore the simultaneously ecological and political dimensions of its use and distribution. The social and the ecological are not distinct spheres, but part of a multifaceted yet basically continuous field of relationality. Thinking relationships through water helps us to navigate this area and articulate its political and ethical dimensions.

Policy and practice: Thinking relationships through water can enable the design and realization of more appropriate projects in water provision, flood management, aquifer governance, and coastal conservation. If the social nature of water and the intrinsic links between culture, political economy, and hydrology are taken seriously, managers will be able to better deal with material infrastructures following social logics or social processes sparked by hydrological events. Orlove and Caton (2010) have shown how thinking about water relationally can highlight the intricacies of governance and politics in a context where water studies habitually reduce water to an economic resource. Challenging this common reduction of water is urgent, given the disastrous effects of current managerial regimes on “biocultural health” (Johnston and Fiske 2014).

How Does This Special Issue Think Relationships Through Water?

By analyzing specific ethnographic contexts, the contributions in this volume show how water flows are fashioned by a combination of topography, power relations, built infrastructure, institutional arrangements, property relations, money and market forces, ideologies, social networks, and the properties of water itself.

O’Leary writes about the daily routines through which slum dwellers of Delhi, India, in particular women, procure drinking water. These routines entail waiting for a municipal water truck on the edge of the settlement, often for hours. Thinking through the metaphorical and material relations of affluence and stagnancy, O’Leary contrasts the fluid rhetoric of upward mobility with the stagnant reality of immobility imposed by the idiosyncrasies of water supply. The article concludes that the present water delivery system reduces people to being part of the infrastructure, obliging them to facilitate water movements that in better-off quarters are carried by pipes, and preventing them from realizing other, more human goals. For O’Leary, thinking relationships through water means understanding drinking-water provision not predominantly as an allocation of a certain amount of water to a particular number of slum dwellers, but as a temporal process that critically intersects with people’s personal and economic aspirations, indicating how resource inequalities can be reproduced even in ostensibly benevolent endeavors.

In Senegal, where Gomez-Temesio describes the local population’s efforts to obtain and maintain sources of reliable drinking water, the infrastructure in question is a borehole. Thinking relationships through water enables the author to trace how water supply is not just a matter of constructing boreholes, but equally a matter of invoking social relations with powerful staff in the state bureaucracy. Water flows are sustained through regular claims on so-called “sons of the soil” who now work in central government departments. Gomez-Temesio’s research participants maintain that these “sons” are indebted to their home communities, without whose support they would not have reached their present positions. They are therefore obliged to return favors, such as the construction and maintenance of boreholes, to their places of origin. So while water is officially provided by the Senegalese state to its citizens, in practice, both the status of citizens and the workings of the state are mediated by these reciprocal relationships.

Drinking water in Kiribati has traditionally come from shallow wells on people’s properties, writes Bønnelykke Robertson. Digging and using a well was tantamount to asserting a claim to the land around it, and people made homes where quality well water was available. But the introduction of piped water supplies in the late 1970s upset this relationship: The water now comes from land that is kept free of human occupation, and it is pumped—at irregular intervals—into people’s homes in areas where well water is no longer deemed fit to drink. Government officials, development personnel, and engineers argue that this system is the most sustainable strategy for the atolls’ fragile water resources, and they are increasingly frustrated by repeated acts of vandalism against the public water infrastructure. This apparent contradiction can be explained when we think relationships through water: Bønnelykke Robertson shows that wells, pumps, and pipes do not simply allocate water, but embody fundamentally different moralities concerning relationships between people, water, and land.

Investigating the concerns of floodplain residents in southwest England, Krause shows how the materialities of flood water and floodplain landscapes form an intrinsic part of the residents’ social and political relations. People who have witnessed recent and historical flooding are especially critical of structural alterations of the landscape, including new housing estates, road embankments, and other people’s flood defenses. The trope of “building on the floodplain” condenses multiple anxieties about the effects of different flood-defense regimes upon each other, ideas about the “right” kinds of flows, landscape appreciation, and suburban sprawl. When floods do occur, floodplain residents are keen to distinguish different kinds of flood waters, depending on with whom and what the water has been in contact. Flood events and flood risk planning galvanize, reflect, and create relations that are simultaneously social and hydrological. Krause concludes that more effective flood risk management would result from thinking relationships through water, acknowledging the hydrosociality of flooding instead of treating humans and waters as separate elements.

De Rijke, Munro, and Melo Zurita investigate conflicts over water and coal seam gas in Australia’s Great Artesian Basin. The technology for extracting the gas requires pumping water from the aquifer to the surface, which has tangible consequences for established land and water uses in an otherwise arid region. Underlying the current debates between farmers, ranchers, Aboriginal people and the government is a conflict between representing the Great Artesian Basin as a huge, undifferentiated water body (in relation to which water pumping and pollution are insignificant), or as a complex system of interconnected but specific waters and places, with particular histories and songlines, and localized permeability and water tables. By thinking relationships through water, the authors elucidate how the materialities of invisible water flows become central in the gas extraction conflict, and reveal different ways of making the underground legible.

Reinert writes about a large mining project being planned in northern Norway in which a major point of contention is the likely contamination of the local fjord by the mine’s tailings. In the course of debates about water pollution, a number of watery metaphors are being rehearsed and put to different uses around the project. Reinert traces how part of the mining conflict itself is constituted by different ways of thinking and voicing relationships through water. He explores three metaphors—of ripples, cycles, and depths—and discusses the specific characteristics of water that they highlight, and their potential consequences for the configuration of the mining project. Mine champions promise a “ripple effect” that will multiply and redistribute economic benefits from the mining activities across the region. Opponents employ understandings of the hydrologic cycle to emphasize that people and ecosystems are connected through water, for better or for worse. Finally, the depth of the fjord into which the mine tailings are meant to be discarded is evoked as a reservoir of opportunity.

Together, the contributions underline the importance of not severing the material from the social in analyzing current water issues. Navigating a course between the mirror fallacies of extreme constructivism and crude materialism, this volume demonstrates the theoretical and practical utility of analyzing the material and social relations of and around water as an integrated set of relationships. The contributions to this collection invite the reader to begin thinking relationships through water.