Paper short abstract:

Domestic water filters convey a sense of security toward public water, reducing and dissipating residents' fears about potential biopolitical threats. Additionally, filters are embedded in ethical and care of kin projects.

Paper long abstract:

Technologies of water distribution have been at the forefront of capital accumulation in the last decades. While there is a significant literature on bottled water in the US, the parallel rise of its twin - the decentralized, domestic water filter - has attracted less ethnographic attention. Drawing on fieldwork in New York City, where point-of-use water filters are widely used, I suggest that such filters participate in the city's "pipe politics" as parasites that handle the "noise" that pipes generate. Filters alleviate fears about pipe safety and increase the value of public water. In addition to trust repair, filters support ethical projects of the self and intercept relations of care between kin. The analytic of the parasite helps configure tap water as an ethnographic object that invites the anthropological gaze to document both the monumental displays and mundane operational processes that constitute infrastructure. The ethnographic material nuances our understanding of resident distrust of government water provision, helps differentiate between diverse new economic processes around water, and encourages anthropologists to approach tap water as a site of poetic qualities.