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...
moreThis 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
