- Tallinn University, Department of social and cultural anthropology, Faculty MemberUniversity of Cologne, Global South Studies Center, Faculty Memberadd
- Hydropolitics, Hydropower, Common Property, Anthropology, Political Ecology, Water, and 23 moreSocial Sciences, Rivers, Environmental History, Water governance, Environmental Management, Environmental Anthropology, Big Dams, Ecological restoration, Northern Studies: Circumpolar North, Rhythms, Lapland, Salmon Fishing, Kemi River, Political Philosophy, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Social Theory, Cultural Memory, Cultural Landscapes, Landscape, Globalization, Cultural Anthropology, Environmental Sustainability, and Ecosemioticsedit
Gwich'in and Inuvialuit inhabitants of the Mackenzie Delta, in Canada's Northwest Territories, have witnessed an eventful history in relation to colonialism and environmental transformation. Their current lives are characterized by... more
Gwich'in and Inuvialuit inhabitants of the Mackenzie Delta, in Canada's Northwest Territories, have witnessed an eventful history in relation to colonialism and environmental transformation. Their current lives are characterized by mobility, mixing, and melting as they negotiate new and old livelihoods, continuity in traditions, and thawing landscapes. Approaching these lives in terms of volatility opens up an experience-near understanding of people's relations with perpetual, uncertain transformations. Differently situated delta inhabitants have different ways of dealing with these uncertain dynamics, but all are characterized by an improvisation that carries forth reputable activities and attitudes by new means. Dispositions like curiosity, playfulness, and risk-taking must not be seen as lacking resolve to confront transformations, but should be appreciated as skills for inhabiting a volatile world.
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Water is key to human life, both biophysically and socioculturally. Having long been regarded in anthropology as a circumstantial backdrop to human society and culture, water-alongside other nonhuman substances and beings-has received... more
Water is key to human life, both biophysically and socioculturally. Having long been regarded in anthropology as a circumstantial backdrop to human society and culture, water-alongside other nonhuman substances and beings-has received growing attention as a material with specific potentials and histories in the 21st century. This research explores the fundamental connectivity and relationality of water, through which social relations and hydrological flows are often two sides of the same coin, shaping and transforming each other. Watery materiality is frequently characterized by movement and instability, defying control but also intersecting with other social and material processes to create ever new arrangements. Water practices, infrastructures, and experiences participate in the formation and transformation of spaces and landscapes, and may inspire novel theoretical insights on meaning-making, kinship, learning, and space, among other topics. Water's valuation and the tensions that arise regarding how to govern it emerge in part from its material properties. Ongoing discussions explore the links between these properties, water infrastructures, unequal distribution, and political power. Watery materiality is not a single thing, but has multiple manifestations, including saltwater, ice, and humidity. Some scholars therefore propose studying water and materiality in terms of various forms of wetness or amphibious processes. Research into water and materiality suggests that the material world consists of open processes rather than of fixed objects, and that water's multiple manifestations and flows actively participate in shaping human lives.
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In our discussions around the theme of solid fluids, we often resort to everyday words, many of them of ancient derivation and rich in association. We have decided to make a list of some of the words that come up most often-barring those... more
In our discussions around the theme of solid fluids, we often resort to everyday words, many of them of ancient derivation and rich in association. We have decided to make a list of some of the words that come up most often-barring those that already figure as the principal characters of individual contributions-and to distribute among ourselves the task of writing a sort of mini-biography for each. The resulting lexicon with 19 entries, ranging from 'cloud' and 'concrete' to 'wave' and 'wood', serves as a conclusion to the collection as a whole.
Research Interests: Materialism, Cultural Materialism, Dialectical Materialism, Materiality (Anthropology), Historical Materialism, and 10 moreMateriality of Art, Memory and materiality, Marxist and Materialist Feminism, Materialities, New Materialism, Materiality, Material Culture & Materiality, Speculative Materialism, New Materialisms, and Feminist new materialism
The Anthropocene, we are told, will usher in unprecedented changes. The climate, in particular, is changing in complex and uncertain ways, which has (and will have more) tangible consequences for how we do the things we have been... more
The Anthropocene, we are told, will usher in unprecedented changes. The climate, in particular, is changing in complex and uncertain ways, which has (and will have more) tangible consequences for how we do the things we have been accustomed to doing. We need a way to think and speak about the relations between a changing climate and our activities. Perhaps a Finnish word, keli, can guide us here, a word that we might roughly translate into English as "conditions."
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What does it mean to call something unnatural? And what does it do? This chapter illustrates how the unnatural is an immensely powerful, if inherently ambiguous, concept with critical implications for the formation of social categories,... more
What does it mean to call something unnatural? And what does it do? This chapter illustrates how the unnatural is an immensely powerful, if inherently ambiguous, concept with critical implications for the formation of social categories, the morality of classifications, the terms of urban governance and the directions of environmental conflicts. What people consider unnatural is a question of framing, strategising, and the significance of the respective categorical boundaries; its meaning emerges through ongoing and often conflicting ecologies of practice. Thinking about the unnatural can be seen as an opportunity to explicitly expand cultural theory beyond a focus on describing and explaining unnatural (human, constructed, imagined, symbolic) phenomena, and towards an exploration of the material-semiotic processes that produce the unnatural and the powerful efficacy of the concept. The chapter lays out various dimensions of the unnatural in six excursions that take the reader through (1) its implications in the academic division of labour; (2) the making and maintaining of categorical boundaries; (3) theories of hybrids and monsters; (4) articulations of the unnatural in urban ruins; (5) the unnatural in urban planning for former summer house cooperatives in Estonia; and (6) the role of the unnatural in assigning or foregoing responsibility for environmental change. The chapter concludes that the unnatural should be approached as a label that functions as a means for policing boundaries, articulating claims and positioning humans vis-à-vis each other and in relation to the wider world.
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This essay introduces the idea of hydro-perspectivism in order to better understand what happens if anthropologists, alongside their research participants, comment on terrestrial life from a watery angle. Based on a close reading of the... more
This essay introduces the idea of hydro-perspectivism in order to better understand what happens if anthropologists, alongside their research participants, comment on terrestrial life from a watery angle. Based on a close reading of the contributions to this special issue, it indicates how being afloat rather than grounded, shifts people's points of reference around, even though their general cultural framework might remain the same. A perspectivist, rather than representational, approach to the juxtaposition of water-and land-based subject positions pays heed to the specific materialities of watery heterotopias and to the ways water may engender certain social and political forms. This also means that different waters and waterways produce different perspectives-a British canal fashions different points of view than an Atlantic beach or a Taiwanese drinking water reservoir. As a way of making the familiar strange and the strange familiar, hydro-perspectivism can serve as a technique to afford a new look at our terrestrial assumptions and identify problems and blind spots in our received ways of thinking.
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This article argues for conceptualising the land-water nexus not primarily in spatial terms, but above all as a set of spatiotemporal rhythms of increasing and decreasing wetness and fluidity. By investigating human engagement with water... more
This article argues for conceptualising the land-water nexus not primarily in spatial terms, but above all as a set of spatiotemporal rhythms of increasing and decreasing wetness and fluidity. By investigating human engagement with water and land as rhythms, the corresponding and conflicting dynamics of particular places becoming-for longer or shorter periods-land, water or a mixture of both can be traced as an evolving web of relationships between human imaginations and practices, and the materialities of water, mud, sediment, dams, floodgates, etc. The article illustrates this approach with two brief ethnographic examples from northern Europe: In the depopulated Estonian Soomaa wetlands, some of the few remaining inhabitants are in the process of redefining unruly fluctuating water as a tourism destination. In doing so, however, these tourism operators are finding themselves and their "products" caught up in volatile and complicated spatiotemporal dynamics, including the difficulty to predict flooding and to coordinate high water with their potential customers' spare time, which is bound to working/school weeks and public holidays. On the Kemi River in Finnish Lapland, water flows are not only conditioned by precipitation and seasons, but also-through an intricate hydropower infrastructure-by the electricity market, triggering continued disputes about appropriate spatiotemporal rhythms in the land-water nexus. Seasonality and hydroelectricity generation point to the inherent rhythmicity of the land-water nexus, which is significant not only because it reflects the experience of people inhabiting and engaging with their in-between environments. A rhythms approach can also de-centre the (often illusive) quest for what the water-land nexus is, and instead focus on how this nexus continually comes into being and is negotiated by both its inhabitants and other people. This argument builds on anthropological thinking about temporality and materiality, and indicates how the two must be combined for better understanding how human life relates to the land-water nexus.
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This article outlines a set of dimensions for the study of human lives in major river deltas, which focus on the particular amphibious predicaments of these lives. These dimensions reflect that river deltas are environments characterised... more
This article outlines a set of dimensions for the study of human lives in major river deltas, which focus on the particular amphibious predicaments of these lives. These dimensions reflect that river deltas are environments characterised by ongoing transformations of wet-and-dry places, trajectories, practices and relations. Grounding an anthropology of delta life in the volatility of hydrological flows and social relationships can, on the one hand, help to identify the specific challenges and opportunities that delta inhabitants are facing around the world; on the other hand, this focus also allows for reassessing, in empirically-based ways, the recent critiques of social theory as overly static and rigid. The article proposes four dimensions of an amphibious anthropology of delta life: 1) An understanding of hydrosocial relations as those relationships between people that are as much about sociality in the classic sense, as about water flows in a material sense; 2) A focus on volatility and creativity; 3) An attention to the shifting affordances of wet, dry and in-between environments; 4) An investigation of the rhythms through which social and ecological life transforms and develops. Developing this study field can build on a range of anthropological, historical and geographical work that has focused on life in floodplains, wetlands and bogs, on rivers and along coasts. The article reviews some of these contributions and argues that taking their insights further means conceiving the anthropology of deltas as a field that takes hydrosocial relations to heart, and understands their volatile rhythms not as occasional deviations from a constant status quo, but as everyday processes. Access the full text at http://rdcu.be/qTlS If you have trouble getting access, please contact me directly.
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This article illustrates how the main direction of water flow along the Kemi River has entered into the understanding of space in central Finnish Lapland, evident in expressions used for orientation, as well as in place and family names.... more
This article illustrates how the main direction of water flow along the Kemi River has entered into the understanding of space in central Finnish Lapland, evident in expressions used for orientation, as well as in place and family names. The article demonstrates how fluvial space-making resonates with the riverbank inhabitants’ engagement with and stories about the river’s flows, especially in fishing, travel and transport. It also shows how a north–south imaginary corresponds with fluvial space on the Kemi. I propose the term ‘fluvitory’ to shift attention from territory to water flows in understanding space-making and argue that moving water must be acknowledged as an active participant in the stories that make space.
Research Interests: Human Geography, Cultural Geography, Anthropology, Water, Mobility/Mobilities, and 11 moreSpace and Place, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Rivers, Place Names (Cultural Geography), Spatiality (Cultural geography), Cultural Anthropology, Phenomenology of Space and Place, Flow, Place Names, Kemi River, and Lapland
This chapter argues for an awareness of landscape movements for our understanding of boundaries, which is typically lacking in border studies. Drawing on literature on the Mississippi–Missouri and on fieldwork along the Kemi River in... more
This chapter argues for an awareness of landscape movements for our understanding of boundaries, which is typically lacking in border studies. Drawing on literature on the Mississippi–Missouri and on fieldwork along the Kemi River in Finnish Lapland, the chapter makes three claims: (1) the dynamics of rivers are at odds with modern, cartographic concepts of borders, (2) whether a river is used as separator or integrator is, to an extent, related to the spatial practices of humans in the landscape, and (3) water dynamics and uses complicate the fixation of boundaries of the river itself. These claims are contextualised by an overview of current writing about boundary-making, as well as an outline of the landscape phenomenology that serves as theoretical background to the argument.
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This editorial introduces the approach of 'thinking relationships through water' in studying current water issues from water provision to flood management and pollution, and provides an overview of the special issue 29(6) of Society and... more
This editorial introduces the approach of 'thinking relationships through water' in studying current water issues from water provision to flood management and pollution, and provides an overview of the special issue 29(6) of Society and Natural Resources.
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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... more
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.
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We propose an analysis of environmental management (EM) as work and as practical activity. This approach enables empirical studies of the diverse ways in which professionals, scientists, NGO staffers, and activists achieve the partial... more
We propose an analysis of environmental management (EM) as work and as practical activity. This approach enables empirical studies of the diverse ways in which professionals, scientists, NGO staffers, and activists achieve the partial manageability of specific “environments”. In this introduction, we sketch the debates in Human Geography, Management Studies, Science and Technology Studies to which this special issue contributes. We identify the limits of understanding EM though the framework of ecological modernization, and show how political ecology and work-place studies provide important departures towards a more critical approach. Developing these further, into a cosmopolitical direction, we propose studying EM as sets of socially and materially situated practices. This enables a shift away from established approaches which treat EM either as a toolbox whose efficiency has to be assessed, or as simply the implementation of dominant projects and the materialisation of hegemonic discourse. Such a shift renders EM as always messy practices of engagement, critique and improvisation. We conclude that studying the distributed and situated managing agencies, actors and their practices allows to imagine new forms of critical interventions.
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What is unnatural? Why do people refer to certain things as unnatural? And how does this reference configure their relationships to other humans and their environments? This article illustrates how the unnatural is an immensely powerful,... more
What is unnatural? Why do people refer to certain things as unnatural? And how does this reference configure their relationships to other humans and their environments? This article illustrates how the unnatural is an immensely powerful, if inherently ambiguous, concept with critical implications for the formation of social categories, the morality of classifications, the terms of urban governance and the directions of environmental conflicts. What is considered unnatural is a question of framing, strategising, and the significance of the respective categorical boundaries; its meaning emerges through ongoing and often conflicting ecologies of practice. Thinking about the unnatural can be seen as an opportunity to explicitly expand cultural theory beyond a focus on describing and explaining unnatural (human, constructed, imagined, symbolic) phenomena, and towards an exploration of the material-semiotic processes that produce the unnatural and the powerful efficacy of the concept. The article concludes that the unnatural should be approached as a label-turned-means for policing boundaries, articulating claims and positioning humans vis-à-vis each other and in relation to the wider world.
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Forum debate with Veronica Strang, Jeanne Feaux de la Croix and Hugh Raffles.
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This article tells the story of long-lasting and ongoing struggles surrounding the construction plans for a major reservoir on the headwaters of the Kemi River in the Finnish Province of Lapland. A point of contention since the beginning... more
This article tells the story of long-lasting and ongoing struggles surrounding the construction plans for a major reservoir on the headwaters of the Kemi River in the Finnish Province of Lapland. A point of contention since the beginning of hydropower development on the river in the mid twentieth century, the reservoir project has been promoted and abandoned multiple times in waves of land purchasing, legal procedures, opposition campaigns, and the delineation of nature reserves. Despite a Finnish Supreme Administrative Court ruling officially setting an end to the project, it never entirely left public discourse and is currently being re-negotiated in slightly adapted form. Articulating voices and documenting practices of riverbank inhabitants, activists and hydro electricity managers, this article presents the struggle as multiple modes of heterogeneous engineering, where both proponents and opponents work towards creating different realities. The article develops the metaphor of heterogeneous engineering by drawing attention to three temporal dimensions central to the reservoir struggle: moments, which refer to the situated emergence of practices and strategies; futures, which speak to the attempts to build and contest expectations regarding conflicting projects; and durations, which consider the cumulative aspects of a decades-long struggle on people and landscapes. Thereby, the article contributes to discussions on making, planning and environmental management, and illustrates ways of studying these processes as situated practices in relation to time.
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Fishing is a key livelihood for many people worldwide, and significantly contributes to global nutrition. However, there is an awareness of a widespread crisis in fisheries with profound ecological, social and cultural impacts (Urquhart... more
Fishing is a key livelihood for many people worldwide, and significantly contributes to global nutrition. However, there is an awareness of a widespread crisis in fisheries with profound ecological, social and cultural impacts (Urquhart and others 2013). The majority of people dependent on fishing are involved in small-scale fisheries, which stands in contrast to the narrow focus of most fishery science and policy on large-scale, capital intensive fishing (Berkes and others 2001). Small-scale fisheries require different approaches for research, policy and management, due to their specific technological, economic and sociocultural characteristics that differ from those of large-scale fisheries, as well as a large degree of internal diversity in terms of fish stocks, fishers’ backgrounds, vessel capacity, etc (see Afterword of this collection of papers).
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This paper develops an argument on the empathetic relationship between hunter and prey, as applied to the relations between small-scale fishers and fish. Drawing on ethnographic material from the Kemi River, and recent work on fishing, it... more
This paper develops an argument on the empathetic relationship between hunter and prey, as applied to the relations between small-scale fishers and fish. Drawing on ethnographic material from the Kemi River, and recent work on fishing, it suggests that although fishers often do not see the fish, they know their whereabouts and movements through an empathetic engagement with the fish. People on the Kemi do not see fish as merely the animal itself, but include in their empathetic relationship the behaviour and environment of the fish. An analysis of popular fishing techniques used subsequently illustrates that they represent what can be called an inversion of the fish's life story.
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Floods are a threat to livelihoods and landscapes in many places around the world and at many points in history. Yet, they also seem to be an intrinsic component of many landscapes and livelihoods. This article explores the... more
Floods are a threat to livelihoods and landscapes in many places around the world and at many points in history. Yet, they also seem to be an intrinsic component of many landscapes and livelihoods. This article explores the interconnection of multi-directional narratives of flooding through the representation of the memories of inhabitants of wet landscapes in past and present England. The article will illustrate three aspects of the relationship between floods and memory: first, the contextual mediation of flood memories in the contemporary moment. Here audio-visual and textual media (photographs, newspapers articles, television news broadcasts) of present and past flooding compete for our attention; second, the documentation of the early modern English treatment of a changing `wateryscape' and whether we can discern dis/continua with and in contemporary media; and third, the dis/connecting narratives of living with floods in the present day. We emphasize that remembering and forgetting floods is an active and creative process for both flooding communities and those who research them. Stories and experiences of past floods are strategically used within, between and across communities to construct a particular sense of self and a statement on vulnerability and resilience to floods. Thereby the article contributes to developing a creative engagement between past and present, which goes beyond encompassing hegemonic narratives of historical and environmental change by reinforcing the potential of researching everyday, experiential landscapes beyond arbitrary periodization.
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Human life is both literally and metaphorically unthinkable without water, which permeates and enlivens every form of human activity. Water is equally important for all living organisms, flowing through plants, animals and humans, through... more
Human life is both literally and metaphorically unthinkable without water, which permeates and enlivens every form of human activity. Water is equally important for all living organisms, flowing through plants, animals and humans, through places, river systems and ocean currents, and through the entire hydrological cycle, where it constitutes a fundamental aspect of the weather and climate. For many people water epitomizes the connections and integration of living processes: as the life-giving element enabling production and reproduction, and as a substance of community and belonging. However, the fluid qualities that enable water to connect mean that it can also be a major medium for pollution and a threat when overly abundant. And, being essential to all productive processes, it can readily become a means of control and domination. This special issue explores the ways the vitality of water is constituted, negotiated and used strategically in various socio-ecological contexts. How does water figure in experiences, narratives and symbols of living, creativity and healing, or in practices and discourses about pollution and destruction? In what ways can water be used to support or undermine particular power relations? How are ideas about “living water” articulated in property regimes, development projects and conservation strategies?
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This article explores the significance of rapids for the inhabitants of the banks of the Kemi River in Finnish Lapland. The river is frequently called “stream of life,” and people emphasize the critical role rapids play for this label.... more
This article explores the significance of rapids for the inhabitants of the banks of the Kemi River in Finnish Lapland. The river is frequently called “stream of life,” and people emphasize the critical role rapids play for this label. Starting from narratives, practices and material culture relating to the water movements along rapids, the article suggests two hypotheses: first, human associations of water with life arise not only from its characteristics as a substance in itself, but also from its particular movements through the environment. Second, the idea that “water means life” resonates with the similarity of shapes created by water movements and forms permeating all living processes. Building on the work of Strang (e.g. 2005a), Ingold (e.g. 2006) and Schwenk (1965) conclude that calling the Kemi a “stream of life” relates to people’s active engagement in its particular movements.
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The stark discharge variations on the Kemijoki, the longest river in Finnish Lapland, have long formed an integral part of the rhythmic dynamics of social and ecological life along its banks. With the spread of permanent infrastructure... more
The stark discharge variations on the Kemijoki, the longest river in Finnish Lapland, have long formed an integral part of the rhythmic dynamics of social and ecological life along its banks. With the spread of permanent infrastructure and activities, however, the annual spring-flood is increasingly conceived as a hazard. Fuelled, among others, by recent flooding events, climate-change scenarios, conflicts about hydropower developments and an EU directive, plans are being debated to dam the river in hitherto protected areas in order to decrease flood-risk downstream. This article outlines the divergent perceptions of floods, development and the nature of a river, on which the debate is based, and argues for a political ecology that understands non-human dynamics not as a backdrop, but as integral constituent of environmental politics.
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This article argues for an approach to the seasons as rhythms that emerge in the articulation of human and non-human processes. First, it contrasts two anthropological conceptions of the seasons, as temporal blocks and as rhythmic... more
This article argues for an approach to the seasons as rhythms that emerge in the articulation of human and non-human processes. First, it contrasts two anthropological conceptions of the seasons, as temporal blocks and as rhythmic dynamics, and subsequently indicates how life on the Kemi River conforms more to the latter approach. It goes on to show that the seasons exist in the context of many other rhythms, for instance those of discharge and water level in the river. Finally, it explains how river dwellers not only adapt to the rhythms of river and landscape, but in practising their activities they also shape these rhythms. Therefore, the seasons and the plethora of longer and shorter rhythms of which they form part are simultaneously ‘social’ and ‘natural’.
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This paper takes the management of the Kemi River in the Finnish province of Lapland as an example for asking what environmental management is or can do, in practice and in theory. It argues that environmental management – if understood... more
This paper takes the management of the Kemi River in the Finnish province of Lapland as an example for asking what environmental management is or can do, in practice and in theory. It argues that environmental management – if understood as controlling an environmental phenomenon following a ready-made plan – is not a suitable concept for understanding the interactions between the river and the people on its banks. Either, environmental management has to be defined widely as a dialogue between human and non-human actors, or it must be discarded as the illusion of a modernist, positivist ideology that projects static categories on the world. This paper juxtaposes the dams used for salmon fishing and those used in hydroelectricity production on the Kemi River. It illustrates the adaptability of the former to the river’s processes and then shows how very different the technology and rhetoric of the latter appears when it comes to relations with the river. In spite of the significantly larger impacts that hydroelectricity production has on the river as a whole, it will be argued that upon a closer look, the operation of the system of power stations has much in common with that of the salmon weirs.
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This theme issue re-engages the ghost of Wittfogel in ethnographically grounded conversations around the imbrication of water, power, and infrastructure. It examines social and political relations in ways that take their tensions and... more
This theme issue re-engages the ghost of Wittfogel in ethnographically grounded conversations around the imbrication of water, power, and infrastructure. It examines social and political relations in ways that take their tensions and correspondences with water seriously, as Wittfogel did half a century ago, but in a less monolithic and totalizing manner. Instead, the contributions pay attention to the situated, partial, multiple, and open-ended encounters that (un)make these links. Together, the papers collected in this theme issue build a critical conversation around the role of water in configuring and reproducing power. Its major threads are the construction of authority through water, the social complexity of water relations, and the interrelationships between water, infrastructure, and political rule.
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The research of all contributors to this collection revolves, in some way or another, around the relationships between human lives and water, especially along rivers, on coasts, and in river deltas. These are relations characterized by... more
The research of all contributors to this collection revolves, in some way or another, around the relationships between human lives and water, especially along rivers, on coasts, and in river deltas. These are relations characterized by rhythmic spatiotemporal patterns, political ecologies of wetness, and volatile transformations. In devising ways of studying these relationships, even in their 'open-ended multiplicity', our work follows Lury and Wakeford's (2012) search for 'devices' that lay open the 'happening of the social' and, in our case, the processes by which watery worlds come into being and are being transformed. Furthermore, Lury and Wakeford remind us that exploring specific issues requires specific tools, and that 'it is not possible to apply a method as if it were indifferent or external to the problem it seeks to address, but that method must rather be made specific and relevant to the problem' (Lury and Wakeford, 2012, pp. 2-3). So what is 'the problem' here? Our collection comprises a set of reflections on methods for, fieldwork practice in, and research approaches to what we call hydrosocial lifeworlds.
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Research in the humanities and social sciences has increasingly become concerned with water. This not only mirrors wider societal discourses of water scarcity, floods, pollution and climate change, but is also part of a development... more
Research in the humanities and social sciences has increasingly become concerned with water. This not only mirrors wider societal discourses of water scarcity, floods, pollution and climate change, but is also part of a development towards integrating materiality more explicitly into social and cultural analysis. Water can have a particularly productive role in this development because it elides many of the often taken-for-granted properties of the material world (e.g. its assumed solidity, object-like qualities and substrate functions) and problematises some fashionable buzzwords in the social sciences and humanities (e.g. movement, flow, ephemerality). At the same time, this research has provided crucial insights into the social and cultural situatedness of allegedly scientific issues like water scarcity or climate change, illustrating how water matters in people’s lives not so much as local instantiations of global water problems, but as integral part of maintaining relations and negotiating meanings. If water is essential for biological life, it is as central for social and cultural life, too.
This edited volume is one of many innovative publications resulting from the Waterworlds project (2009-2014) at the University of Copenhagen, one of the first larger anthropological research initiatives to focus on water. The project explored social resilience in the face of three global water crises, which it called the rising seas, the drying lands, and the melting ice. While not strictly limited to these themes, many contributions to the book resonate with them.
This edited volume is one of many innovative publications resulting from the Waterworlds project (2009-2014) at the University of Copenhagen, one of the first larger anthropological research initiatives to focus on water. The project explored social resilience in the face of three global water crises, which it called the rising seas, the drying lands, and the melting ice. While not strictly limited to these themes, many contributions to the book resonate with them.
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Couched in vivid ethnographic descriptions of Peruvian highland landscapes, this book makes a refreshing contribution to analyses of phenomena that usually come under the label of climate change, especially by avoiding this particular... more
Couched in vivid ethnographic descriptions of Peruvian highland landscapes, this book makes a refreshing contribution to analyses of phenomena that usually come under the label of climate change, especially by avoiding this particular frame of reference and its often reductionist discourse. Climate change in the Peruvian Andes means seasonal water scarcity, which does not come as an isolated fact but is mediated through a host of social and cultural dynamics. The book illustrates that climate change does not exist as single reality, but its tangible effects are interwoven with many other – and often older and more pressing – tensions
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"Do people who live with a river also think like a river? Does everyday and professional engagement with a flowing stream resonate with ways of understanding social and ecological relationships in terms of flows? This thesis explores in... more
"Do people who live with a river also think like a river? Does everyday and professional engagement with a flowing stream resonate with ways of understanding social and ecological relationships in terms of flows? This thesis explores in what ways Kemi River dwellers, in the Finnish province of Lapland, use and have used the waters of their home river, and how their skills and experiences are reflected in their conceptualisation of the riverine world.
Based on a year of ethnographic fieldwork, I portray river dwellers’ relations with the Kemi, focusing on practices and narratives and how the flow of water and other matter figures in them. Having undergone radical transformation over the course of people’s lives, the river is tightly interwoven with personal biographies. An environmental history reveals how people and stream have mutually shaped each other for a long time and continue to do so today. Even orientation and topology in the area reflect the layout and flow of the river.
I focus on three activities, fishing, transport and hydroelectricity generation, that have been and are of central significance for the relations of river dwellers and the Kemi River. Fishing, formerly the major political-economic river use but economically marginal today, continues to provide a significant way of engaging with and coming to know the river. Boating has radically changed with damming, mechanisation and the displacement of travel and transport to the roads, and presently constitutes a way of performing one’s belonging to the Kemi, in terms of both “understanding” its waters and claiming them politically. Similarly, timber transport has recently shifted from the river to the roads, though the memories of large-scale floating operations are still prominent in river dwellers’ stories and the riverine landscape. The roads, in turn, provide transport arteries quite different from the river, but do share some characteristics with it, such as a dependence on weather conditions. Finally, hydroelectricity infrastructure widely transformed the river dwellers’ world and introduced a powerful technology negotiating water flows, electricity markets and inhabitants’ sensibilities.
Scrutinising these practices and narratives reveals profoundly rhythmic patterns in the river dwellers’ activities, the river’s dynamics and the world around. The annual course of the seasons and weekly and daily rhythms of discharge, temperature, work and other patterns, make the river dwellers’ world an ever-transforming phenomenon. Life on the river emerges as the ongoing articulation of these manifold rhythms, shaping and being shaped by their interaction. The flows of life and the frictions of everyday encounter continually make and remake the river and its inhabitants, negotiating national strategies, economic power, river dweller ingenuity, and the currents of the Kemi River."
Based on a year of ethnographic fieldwork, I portray river dwellers’ relations with the Kemi, focusing on practices and narratives and how the flow of water and other matter figures in them. Having undergone radical transformation over the course of people’s lives, the river is tightly interwoven with personal biographies. An environmental history reveals how people and stream have mutually shaped each other for a long time and continue to do so today. Even orientation and topology in the area reflect the layout and flow of the river.
I focus on three activities, fishing, transport and hydroelectricity generation, that have been and are of central significance for the relations of river dwellers and the Kemi River. Fishing, formerly the major political-economic river use but economically marginal today, continues to provide a significant way of engaging with and coming to know the river. Boating has radically changed with damming, mechanisation and the displacement of travel and transport to the roads, and presently constitutes a way of performing one’s belonging to the Kemi, in terms of both “understanding” its waters and claiming them politically. Similarly, timber transport has recently shifted from the river to the roads, though the memories of large-scale floating operations are still prominent in river dwellers’ stories and the riverine landscape. The roads, in turn, provide transport arteries quite different from the river, but do share some characteristics with it, such as a dependence on weather conditions. Finally, hydroelectricity infrastructure widely transformed the river dwellers’ world and introduced a powerful technology negotiating water flows, electricity markets and inhabitants’ sensibilities.
Scrutinising these practices and narratives reveals profoundly rhythmic patterns in the river dwellers’ activities, the river’s dynamics and the world around. The annual course of the seasons and weekly and daily rhythms of discharge, temperature, work and other patterns, make the river dwellers’ world an ever-transforming phenomenon. Life on the river emerges as the ongoing articulation of these manifold rhythms, shaping and being shaped by their interaction. The flows of life and the frictions of everyday encounter continually make and remake the river and its inhabitants, negotiating national strategies, economic power, river dweller ingenuity, and the currents of the Kemi River."
Research Interests:
Die vorliegende Arbeit befasst sich mit dem Westlichen Verständnis von Ressourcenknappheit und verdeutlicht in zwei Schritten die soziokulturelle Konstruktion dieses Phänomens. Arbeiten der politischen Ökologie zeigen auf, wie... more
Die vorliegende Arbeit befasst sich mit dem Westlichen Verständnis von Ressourcenknappheit und verdeutlicht in zwei Schritten die soziokulturelle Konstruktion dieses Phänomens. Arbeiten der politischen Ökologie zeigen auf, wie Ressourcenknappheit immer sozial bedingt ist: Knappheitserfahrungen hängen von Verteilung und Bedürfnissen mindestens genauso ab wie von ‚objekti-ven‘ materiellen Gegebenheiten. Jedoch sind auch die Relativierungen der politi-schen Ökologie in bestimmten Westlichen Annahmen verwurzelt, die eine unvoreingenommene Betrachtung von Dynamiken zwischen Menschen und Ressourcen behindern. Deshalb werden in einem zweiten Schritt ethnologische Einsichten herangezogen, um die soziokulturelle Situiertheit von Ressourcenknapp-heit zu illustrieren. Die Diskussion von Mensch-Natur-Beziehungen bei Wildbeutern verweist auf die Problematik der Westlichen Subjekt-Objekt-Trennung und deren Auswirkungen auf die Wahrnehmung von ‚natürlichen Ressourcen‘ und deren Knappheit. Die Analyse der Bewertung von Dingen in Stammesgesellschaften verdeutlicht darüber hinaus den Fokus Westlichen Denkens auf materielle Gegenstände. Und der gesellschaftliche Umgang mit Knappheit in bäuerlichen Gesellschaften weist hin auf die Mannigfaltigkeit der soziokulturellen Anpassungsmöglichkeiten an eine Situation knapper Ressourcen. Nachdem so die Besonderheit des Westlichen Knappheitskonstruktes aufgezeigt worden ist, wird kurz die spezifische historische Entwicklung dieser Idee skizziert, die eng mit Individualisierung, Demokratisierung und der Etablierung von Wirtschaft als kulturell dominanter Sphäre zusammenhängt.
Research Interests:
It is widely held that communally governed resources are doomed to depletion. Zanjeras, a particular type of indigenous irrigation system in the Philippines, however, belong to a number of empirical cases suggesting that groups can be... more
It is widely held that communally governed resources are doomed to depletion. Zanjeras, a particular type of indigenous irrigation system in the Philippines, however, belong to a number of empirical cases suggesting that groups can be successful resource managers.
A framework has been developed to explain such success in terms of “design principles” that facilitate sustainability. Theories like this became popular in development theory and practice with a focus on community-based development. However, they have been criticised for using outdated understandings of ecology, culture, and community. This study presents a revisit of Zanjera irrigation systems, evaluating in how far their success is due to meeting “design principles”. Two Zanjeras are described, and it is argued that although these principles provide a valuable tool for analysing processes and
contingencies in a Zanjera, they ignore a number of important factors for system sustainability. Among these factors are shared ideals of cooperation, negotiability of rules, and sociality of the user-group.
The findings suggest that natural resource management is an interactive process, where culture is more than another form of capital, communities are differentiated and open, and institutions are an outcome rather of tinkering than of conscious crafting.
A framework has been developed to explain such success in terms of “design principles” that facilitate sustainability. Theories like this became popular in development theory and practice with a focus on community-based development. However, they have been criticised for using outdated understandings of ecology, culture, and community. This study presents a revisit of Zanjera irrigation systems, evaluating in how far their success is due to meeting “design principles”. Two Zanjeras are described, and it is argued that although these principles provide a valuable tool for analysing processes and
contingencies in a Zanjera, they ignore a number of important factors for system sustainability. Among these factors are shared ideals of cooperation, negotiability of rules, and sociality of the user-group.
The findings suggest that natural resource management is an interactive process, where culture is more than another form of capital, communities are differentiated and open, and institutions are an outcome rather of tinkering than of conscious crafting.
Research Interests:
Twenty-five scholars from across Europe, Colombia and the United States convened in late May 2012 for the five-day workshop “How do you manage? Unravelling the situated practice of environmental management” at the Center for... more
Twenty-five scholars from across Europe, Colombia and the United States convened in late May 2012 for the five-day workshop “How do you manage? Unravelling the situated practice of environmental management” at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF) in Bielefeld, Germany. Bringing together deeply empirical, often ethnographic work from science and technology studies, environmental anthropology, sociology, human geography, history, social psychology and law as well as by conservation and renewable energy practitioners, the workshop aimed to open up the black boxes of “environment”, “management” and “sustainability” simultaneously, which are often still taken for granted. As the workshop introduction by convenors Ingmar Lippert and Anup Sam Ninan (both STS scholars based in Germany) put it: attending closely to the entities assembled in situations-assumedly-under-management promises to provide insights not only about the managers, but also the environments, the societal patter...
Web magazine "Voices from Around the World", 2017 (3). http://voices.uni-koeln.de/2017-3/socialwateranintroduction We encounter water every day. It is a vital substance biologically as much as socially. We may notice this in art... more
Web magazine "Voices from Around the World", 2017 (3).
http://voices.uni-koeln.de/2017-3/socialwateranintroduction
We encounter water every day. It is a vital substance biologically as much as socially. We may notice this in art exhibitions and university courses communicating submersed and subversive facts about water; the rhythms of floods and tides resonating with fishing techniques and conflict patterns; inundations carrying moral and political weight as much as water and pollution; and particular mixtures of water and land generating wealth, anxieties and memories. In short, wherever people deal with water, they are involved not only with a physical element, but also with social relations. In fact, whenever we pretend that water is foremost the molecule H2O, we ignore all the political, economic, infrastructural, emotional and legal aspects of this element without which water would not be what it is for us today. This issue explores some of the ways in which water is profoundly social, both in the sense of being co-produced by social life, and by being a core constituent of it. Some contributions to this issue do this through the examples listed above. Others illustrate the way water positions people and their perspectives. A few show how large water infrastructures reshuffle social lives. And some suggest that water may sometimes be better imagined as a word in the plural, rather than a singular, universal substance.
http://voices.uni-koeln.de/2017-3/socialwateranintroduction
We encounter water every day. It is a vital substance biologically as much as socially. We may notice this in art exhibitions and university courses communicating submersed and subversive facts about water; the rhythms of floods and tides resonating with fishing techniques and conflict patterns; inundations carrying moral and political weight as much as water and pollution; and particular mixtures of water and land generating wealth, anxieties and memories. In short, wherever people deal with water, they are involved not only with a physical element, but also with social relations. In fact, whenever we pretend that water is foremost the molecule H2O, we ignore all the political, economic, infrastructural, emotional and legal aspects of this element without which water would not be what it is for us today. This issue explores some of the ways in which water is profoundly social, both in the sense of being co-produced by social life, and by being a core constituent of it. Some contributions to this issue do this through the examples listed above. Others illustrate the way water positions people and their perspectives. A few show how large water infrastructures reshuffle social lives. And some suggest that water may sometimes be better imagined as a word in the plural, rather than a singular, universal substance.
This theme issue re-engages the ghost of Wittfogel in ethnographically grounded conversations around the imbrication of water, power, and infrastructure. It examines social and political relations in ways that take their tensions and... more
This theme issue re-engages the ghost of Wittfogel in ethnographically grounded conversations around the imbrication of water, power, and infrastructure. It examines social and political relations in ways that take their tensions and correspondences with water seriously, as Wittfogel did half a century ago, but in a less monolithic and totalizing manner. Instead, the contributions pay attention to the situated, partial, multiple, and open-ended encounters that (un)make these links. Together, the papers collected in this theme issue build a critical conversation around the role of water in configuring and reproducing power. Its major threads are the construction of authority through water, the social complexity of water relations, and the interrelationships between water, infrastructure , and political rule. Studies of the links between water management and social relations have long moved on from Karl Wittfogel's (1981 [1957]) theses of hydraulic despotism. His argument-that large-scale centralized water provision infrastructures would foster an autocratic political regime-has not only been disproven by archaeological and anthropological evidence , which suggest that autocratic regimes predate extensive water infrastructure, and that water provision may come with very different political arrangements (e.g. Davies, 2009; Obertreis et al., 2016), but it has also been rightly criticized for having an imperialist political agenda related to the historical backdrop of its inception-the Cold War-and