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Paper short abstract

How can social science engage diverse, multiscalar yet deeply entangled global crises and their combined consequences? This paper reflects upon water's ethnographic and analytical potential to study global polycrisis, its situated forms, and manifold explanations, knowledges and meaning-making.

Paper long abstract

Water has always featured in my research, whether it be climate-related flooding in the Indian Himalaya, pathogen-control practices in Bangladesh’s small-scale shrimp farms, or widespread pollution of an economically-significant lagoon in Benin (West Africa). I am an anthropologist whose ethnographic breadth crosses global development, climate change, and antimicrobial resistance (AMR). It is unsurprising therefore that ‘water’ in its myriad forms should prominently feature given its concern for each of these domains. For science and policy, aquatic systems form literal and figurative ‘hotspot’ imaginaries shaping scientific knowledge (Helliwell et al. 2021), whilst for lay publics they form 'wetlands' where the simultaneous outcomes of multiple crises drain into an enduring reality. For me as an ethnographer, water in the form of aquatic bodies and/or weather events offers the ethnographic grip by which sociomaterial effects of multiple intractable crises are rendered observable and analysable.

I therefore consider the analytical possibilities water offers the social sciences to engage the diverse, multiscalar yet deeply entangled and contingent global crises and their localised forms. During fieldwork, aquatic systems manifested not only as catastrophic weather and places of environmental pollution and pathogenicity, but as sites of social imagination and collective meaning making—at once scientific artefact, moral epistemology, and more-than-human world of microbes, water spirits, and millenarian catastrophe. I share how I’ve come analytically to imagine ‘water’ as a conceptual and sociomaterial reservoir accumulating the detritus of capitalist ruins, and reflect upon its utility for ethnographic, STS, and interdisciplinary studies of an emerging global ‘polycrisis’.