INTERCORPOREITY OF ANIMATED WATER

Abstract

In this essay, I examine the relationality between life and water in the context of its intercorporeal manifestations. Drawing on key aspects of Merleau-Pontian phenomenology, my concern is to reflect on water’s enfleshment of life and its complex ecologies of intercorporeity. These Merleau-Pontian key aspects, I note, are in close dialogue with a number of Indigenous cosmo-epistemologies that envisage the world as constituted by profound ecologies of intercorporeal relationality. The loci of my analysis are the Sonoran Desert and the lands of the Tohono O’odham people, all situated within the ongoing violent relations of power unleashed by the forces of settler colonialism, including the partitioning of Indigenous nations by the Mexico–US border, the ecological devastation left in the wake of the construction of the Trump border wall and the increasingly fraught situation of undocumented migrants attempting to cross the US border. The bodies of water that I discuss in this essay disclose the cycles of life and death that turn on the presence and absence of water. These cycles are increasingly ensnared in aquapolitical regimes of governmentality that, in settler colonial contexts, unleash lethal effects that kill both bodies of water and the entities that depend on them for life.

Keywords:

• aquapolitics
• settler colonialism
• Indigenous relationality
• phenomenology
• undocumented migrants

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 I want to underscore that I do not envision Indigenous cosmo-epistemologies of relationality as somehow homogeneous and essentialised in terms of their address of the more-than-human and related ecological concerns, thereby constructing, by default, yet another iteration of the trope of the “noble savage” in harmony with the environment. Indigenous nations are, it goes without saying, inscribed by internal differences and contradictory positions on these matters, including positions that advocate such things as the mining of country; see, for example, Birch 2–16 and Vincent and Neale.