Short abstract:

While Dinaric karst challenges groundwater management due to scientific uncertainties, post-war legacies affect legal authorities, water utility companies and the water infrastructures they maintain. This ethnographic contribution studies karstic materiality, management and intimate geomorphologies.

Long abstract:

“As you know, here we are in karst, and in karst there are no rules,” declared a civil servant working for a water authority during my ethnographic fieldwork about groundwater management in the Dinarides. The Dinarides are a mountain range in South-Eastern Europe known for stunning mountainous and (ground-) water rich landscapes, characterized by highly karstified environments. The term karst denotes landscapes both subterranean and aboveground, characterized by highly permeable carbonate rock formations. Here, groundwater stands in special relation to karst as it contributes to corrosion of the underground rock formations, a process known as karstification. Simulatenously, the geological sub-disciplines studying karst, in turn, stand in special relation to the Dinaric karst, the first karst systematically studied and proclaimed ‘locus typicus’ in Western academia at the end of the 19th century. Ever since then, karstic groundwater has had a reputation of being difficult to live with due to low agricultural value, to model hydro(geo)logically, therefore to know and to manage. However, inhabiting karst also relates to spaces of death, detainment and refuge during the 1990s warfare in Yugoslavia, which also posed extraordinary challenges in maintaining groundwater infrastructures. Hence, this contribution explores how tracing karstic groundwater ethnographically in administrative bodies, water utility companies, and local and international karst scholarship amidst post-war infrastructural legacies can voice karstic dissonances between its materiality, management and their intimate geomorphologies.