Paper long abstract:

Based on twelve months of ethnographic doctoral fieldwork, this paper describes and analyses how engineers working with water in Arequipa engage with particular technologies and infrastructures, doing and redoing water as part of a particular urban ecology.

Setting out from Bruno Latour's ideas about purification as related to the self-conception of modernity, it discusses water engineering as a practice. It draws upon Penny Harvey's and others' work on engineering as a project of transforming the natural world through human agency and discusses the power that has been acquired by engineers in Peru to define water policies on the basis of technical knowledge. Engineers are addressed as doers of particular ways of knowing an urban ecology, and data from visits to tanks and water plants provide the ethnography for an analysis of relations between (technical) knowledge and practices, and (political) power. Through an abstract analysis of the role of categories that emerge through 'purifying' engineer practices, it is argued that the technical domain, as represented by engineers, emerges as separate from and superior to political and social domains. This represents a practice of boundary drawing between the political and the non-political. Technical knowledge obliterates other knowledge forms on water, and technical knowledge is a highly politicised form of knowledge. The paper engages with engineer ways of knowing, doing and undoing as situated practices, and reflectively asks how research can take part in reconfiguring the way environmental assemblages work.