Waterworlds

In one form or another, water participates in the making and unmaking of people’s lives, practices, and stories. Contributors’ detailed ethnographic work analyzes the union and mutual shaping of water and social lives. This volume discusses current ecological disturbances and engages in a world where unbounded relationalities and unsettled frames of orientation mark the lives of all, anthropologists included. Water emerges as a fluid object in more senses than one, challenging anthropologists to foreground the mutable character of their objects of study and to responsibly engage with the generative role of cultural analysis.

In one form or another, water participates in the making and unmaking of people’s lives, practices, and stories. Contributors’ detailed ethnographic work analyzes the union and mutual shaping of water and social lives. This volume discusses current ecological disturbances and engages in a world where unbounded relationalities and unsettled frames of orientation mark the lives of all, anthropologists included. Water emerges as a fluid object in more senses than one, challenging anthropologists to foreground the mutable character of their objects of study and to responsibly engage with the generative role of cultural analysis.

Preface

Introduction: Waterworlds at Large
Kirsten Hastrup and Frida Hastrup

Chapter 1. East Anglian Fenland: Water, the Work of Imagination, and the Creation of Value
Richard D. G. Irvine

Chapter 2. Fluid Entitlements: Constructing and Contesting Water Allocations in Burkina Faso, West Africa
Ben Orlove, Carla Roncoli, and Brian Dowd-Uribe

Chapter 3. Raining in the Andes: Disrupted Seasonal and Hydrological Cycles
Astrid B. Stensrud

Chapter 4. Respect and Passion in a Lagoon in the South Pacific
Cecilie Rubow

Chapter 5. West African Waterworlds: Narratives of Absence versus Narratives of Excess
Mette Fog Olwig and Laura Vang Rasmussen

Chapter 6. To the Lighthouse: Making a Liveable World by the Bay of Bengal
Frida Hastrup

Chapter 7. Enacting Groundwaters in Tarawa, Kiribati: Searching for Facts and Articulating Concerns
Maria Louise Bønnelykke Robertson

Chapter 8. Mapping Urban Waters: Grounds and Figures on an Ethnographic Water Path
Astrid Oberborbeck Andersen

Chapter 9. Water Literacy in the Sahel: Understanding Rain and Ground Water
Anette Reenberg

Chapter 10. Deep Time and Shallow Waters: Configurations of an Irrigation Channel in the Andes
Mattias Borg Rasmussen

Chapter 11. Moral Valves and Fluid Properties: Water Regulation Mechanisms in the Bâdia of Southeastern Mauritania
Christian Vium

Chapter 12. Reflecting Nature: Water Beings in History and Imagination
Veronica Strang

Chapter 13. The North Water: Life on the Ice Edge in the High Arctic
Kirsten Hastrup

Notes on Contributors