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Paper short abstract

This ethnography of Lianjia boat dwellers in Fujian proposes ‘doing anthropology with water’, taking water as an interlocutor. It examines how intimate engagement with water shapes homeworlds and how government-led resettlement to shore reconfigures bodily experience and social relations.

Paper long abstract

Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork among the Lianjia boat dwellers in northeast Fujian, southeast China, this research proposes a methodological and analytical approach that takes water as an interlocutor in understanding processes of dwelling and displacement. Rather than treating water merely as a backdrop to human activity or a resource to be managed, it argues for ‘doing anthropology with water’, attending to the material properties, sensories, rhythms and intimacies of aquatic life as generative of both social relations and anthropological insight.

Through detailed analysis of wooden boat materiality and sensory experience, this research develops the concept of ‘intimacy with water’. By tracing how boat dwellers maintain, navigate and dwell within the fluid materiality of boats and waterways, it demonstrates how water’s properties (its permeability, responsiveness to weather and tide, its capacity to hold and carry) become sedimented into bodily knowledge, spatial practices and networks of social relations.

For communities whose homeworlds have been shaped over generations through intimate engagement with water, the recent government-led transition to shore-based housing represents more than a change of address. It entailed a reconfiguration of sensory experience, relational practices and ontological orientations. This research further explores the entanglement of water with the flow of people coming ashore, examining how their watery bodies continue to be attuned within the renewed homeworld suspended between water and shore.