Paper abstract:

In recent years, anthropological theories pertaining to materiality and environmental humanities perspectives have reconsidered thoughts, ideas, and presuppositions on things that had been previously labelled inert or passive. Work on everyday water politics drawn my attention to re-think the idea that materials can be used to describe material practice and second, it has led me to a re-consider of what does it mean for contemporary material culture studies and related fields to think with materials. Looking at the necessity of new modifications to existing water systems, this paper places less emphasis on the material decay of water infrastructure and more on how material modification are embedded in the local environment and what meaning is entangled in those constructions. In this vein, the paper explores a variety of themes that place more-than-human actors at the centre of their inquiries of informal material innovation, as well as the security of water pumps for daily needs, suggesting the material modification of the water supply as a crucial lens in making sense of understanding rural communities in people’s everyday lives, their material practices – and my research. Examining how materials in relation to practice don’t cease to matter can shed light on thinking about things as dynamic, and actively pumping beneath the material surface to generate multiple dimensions of practices, and how material practice remakes everyday life. Without harping on significant material modifications in water infrastructure we cannot fail to be impressed with the actions of local actors in rural At-Bashy that bring us back thinking material and social history together. Furthermore, the presented data from rural At-Bashy in Kyrgyzstan may underline material conditions to open up new ways of demonstrating adaptation and technologically innovative processes as an action that emerges in group co-operations of local actors in reshaping water access.