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- Convenor:
-
Heather OLeary
(Washington University in St Louis)
- Location:
- Hall 4
- Start time:
- 15 May, 2014 at
Time zone: Asia/Tokyo
- Session slots:
- 2
Short Abstract:
Water sourcing, allocation, use, and disposal are deeply contextual practices, and as such require multivocal engagement. This panel addresses the role that anthropological research plays in shaping the future flows of water and the way these interventions better inform the practice of anthropology.
Long Abstract:
To live in the 21st century is to be faced with questions of change, sustainability, and survival. At the macro-level, climate change, rapid urban development, globalization, and environmental devastation are threatening the vitality of previously stable systems and magnifying uncertainty in the tenuous holds of others. These problems manifest themselves in myriad ways at the micro-level, wherein cultural variance affects the ways societies engage with these problems, and the way they are engaged by the problems. This panel presents an opportunity for anthropologists to convene over one of the most pressing problems of this future: global water disparity. Water is the matrix for life; a future without water is a future that limits the potential for lives, lifestyles, and vitalities. Water—control over its flows, discourse surrounding its legitimate uses, measures of adequacy in quality and quantity—is a reflection of the societies that it courses through. In many ways, those who are on the margins of water systems are also those whose perspectives and testimonies are marginalized by sociopolitical systems. Anthropologists, as those committed to holistic, multivocal understandings of water disparities, provide the framework for understanding the commonalities of this global problem in a way that acknowledges and respects the elements that make water disparities inextricable from their local context. By discussing water disparities in this light, anthropology plays a significant role in shaping our global and local futures.
This panel is sponsored by the IUAES 'Commission of Anthropology and the Environment'
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper short abstract:
Should toilet blocks in informal settlements be regarded as communal or public facilities? The paper considers Cape Town’s informal settlement toilet provision and the consequences of misrecognising sets of residents as communities.
Paper long abstract:
South Africa's basic services policy requires that all residents of informal settlements - of which there are close to four hundred in Cape Town - should be provided by the municipal (local) authority with basic sanitation. The City of Cape Town has interpreted that to mean that there should be at least one toilet provided for every five informal settlement households. But how does such sharing work? Who is responsible for cleaning and maintaining such toilets? Can those responsibilities be imposed on residents as if they constitute communities? Why have there been repeated 'poo protests' in Cape Town where informal settlement residents have emptied buckets of faeces in public places such as the provincial government offices and the international airport? Why do many informal settlement residents demand that each household should be provided with a full flush toilet? What is the role of a local activist group in relation to such demands? The paper addresses those questions and considers especially the challenges that arise when local authorities, when designing and installing either scattered individual toilets or toilet blocks, describe them as 'communal' facilities to be 'owned' by local residents, rather than 'public' facilities that remain the property of the local authority.
Paper short abstract:
Cahora Bassa is the largest dam the world built to produce energy for export. This paper explores how the originally designed to promote rural development in Mozambique was transformed into a project producing cheap energy for the apartheid regime displacing hundreds of thousands of peasants.
Paper long abstract:
In 1965, when Portugal proposed constructing a dam at Cahora Bassa, colonial officials envisioned that numerous benefits would flow from the US$515 million hydroelectric project and the managed environment it would produce. These included the expansion of irrigated farming, increased mineral output, improved river transportation and reduced flooding in this zone of unpredictable and sometimes excess rainfall.
Despite these pronouncements, the realities on the ground forced Portugal to drastically modify its vision for the dam. During the period of construction, the growing success of the liberation struggle against Portuguese colonialism in Mozambique turned the dam into a focal point in a larger regional struggle, and Cahora Bassa became a security project, which the minority regime in South Africa and the Portuguese regim masked as a development initiative
In return for South Africa's strategic assistance in the fight against FRELIMO, Portugal agreed to export to South Africa the vast majority of the energy that Cahora Bassa would produce at an artificially low price. This 1969 agreement transformed Cahora Bassa from the multi-purpose hydroelectric project into a dam whose function was to provide energy to South African industry at a fraction of the world price. For more then a million peasants displaced by the dam or living down river the effects were devastating as they were for the different riparian ecological zones. Control over Cahora Bassa was part of the apartheid regime's ambitious plan to integrate it and other dams in Lesotho, Angola, Namibia, Zambia and Zimbabwe into one centralized power grid.
Paper short abstract:
Through a critical review of the notion of scarcity and its application in the the South West region of Burkina Faso, this paper attempts to explain how integrated water resource management has succeeded in raising hope among the local populations.
Paper long abstract:
For two decades now Burkina Faso has been trying to adopt the global concept of IWRM. The official texts were developed between 1996 and 2001, while the experiment was being put into action in the Nakambe river basin. Following a positive outcome, the Action plan on integrated water resource management was adopted in 2003, defining a strategy and action plan to be executed by the water resource management by the 2015 deadline. We try to understand the effects of the reform at the grass roots level, how it has been taken and understood by the local population in the South West region of Burkina Faso, which happens to be one of the most fertile and wet areas of the country, but paradoxically also a region facing problems in WRM and in having access to drinking water. Our research suggests that the reform is definitely in progress in the area of study and that it has created a sense of hope and expectations among the local population with regard to effective management solutions as to the availability and supply of drinking water. However, a gap still exists between the legal texts of the reform and their application in the field and lies at the level of the appropriation of the concept of IWRM, the availability of financial resources and the required technical skills.
Paper short abstract:
Neoliberal policies embraced by the governments allow corporate powers to disconnect people from their immediate natural environments. Among many other disciplines, what discipline suits better than anthropology in questioning this disconnection and providing answers to policymakers for improvement.
Paper long abstract:
Imagine a country where on three sides it is surrounded by seas, supplied by many large and small rivers and brooks, and the government is preoccupied with privatization of all rivers and brooks across its borders for benefits from hydroelectric power. As a continuously developing country, Turkey pushes hard to be one of the emerging countries across the world as well as striving to be a prominent figure in the region. Adapting a corporate-friendly approach, the government has over-eagerly surrendered the natural resources, mainly the water, into the hands of global corporate powers, and exposed them to a wild exploitation. With increasing number of hydroelectric power plants gathering water from these rivers and brooks to collect them in pipes, each and every one of these rivers and brooks has started to break their contact with their environs and the communities living nearby. The disconnection between the nature and the society imposed by neoliberal policies can be well articulated by transformation of a water monster, Boldoroz, into a bulldozer as described by a local in the Aksu Valley of Erzurum after what they have experienced during construction of two hydroelectric power plants in their valley. This paper discusses anthropology's role in defining and leading the way to change the conditions which produce a significant break between nature and human groups, inevitably resulting in a drastic change in their cultures, with a focus on the hydroelectric power plants in the Aksu Valley which has replaced Boldoroz, the water monster, with bulldozers.
Paper short abstract:
In this project a Mundellian “development trilemma” is proposed by the author as a globalization conundrum and an impossible trinity, in order to describe three elements of “development” running afoul with each other and deteriorated into a vicious circle, occasioned in a Southwest China development case.
Paper long abstract:
In this project a Mundellian "development trilemma" is proposed by the author as a globalization conundrum and an impossible trinity, in order to describe three elements of "development" running afoul with each other and deteriorated into a vicious circle, occasioned in a Southwest China development case. A: development paradigm based on infinite growth and material abundance -- a free flow of "modernity", fluid modernity and a "civilized juggernaut". B: prosperity accessible to all and one "fluid" development/modernity paradigm fits all - "development by the people, for the people and of the people"; an ever-lasting exchange process between nature resources and artificial knowledge concoction. C: nature conservancy and continuity of cultural heritage -- a "stateless" global village where miscellaneous cultures converge and intermingle versus a myriad of "sovereign tribes" where culture "fossilized" and encrusted by incremental development sugar coat (a sovereign ethno-cultural continuity). Out of these liquid 'trilemma', the ignoledge should be treated as darkening light and concealed alētheia when memory persists and time melts, turning lithe, supple and fluid-like: as powerfully captured by Salvador Dali in his La persistencia de la memoria.
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines how human futures with rivers are constituted in northern Thailand in the aftermath of natural disasters like floods and amidst the imminent threat of state dam development plans.
Paper long abstract:
This paper examines how human futures with rivers are constituted in northern Thailand in the aftermath of natural disasters like floods and amidst the imminent threat of state dam development plans. In 2011, Thailand's rivers demonstrated their irrepressibility in unprecedented floods that crippled major economic sectors, inundated broad swaths of the nation, and displaced over 8 million people at least temporarily. The floods compelled the government to design a 350 billion baht (US $11.5 billion) water management plan including 21 new dams that would irrevocably alter the Thai waterscape and the human lives and livelihoods tied to it. In the face of imminent displacement, raw mai opayop or "we will not move" has become a galvanizing mantra for a collection of communities on the Yom River as they boldly resist the construction of a large-scale dam that would displace them and drown their rice paddies, orchards, and a protected golden teak forest. In this paper, I examine how community laws, animist spiritual practices, and global climate change discourses converge to form local strategies for resistance. I argue that through these resistance strategies, people on the Yom River not only make political and physical claims on the future of Thai rivers, but also constitute themselves as global citizens whose potentialities and vitalities emerge through their entanglements with local waters.
Paper short abstract:
Women perform the majority of domestic water duties. The decisions they make about their water consumption patterns are closely related to their gendered identity as mothers. In Delhi’s water-poor neighborhoods, the use of water becomes imbued with narratives of justice for future generations.
Paper long abstract:
As issues of climate change, rapid urban development, globalization, and environmental devastation threaten the viability and vitality of increasingly larger populations, the social structures that presently marginalize people will only further threaten the lifestyles and lives of vulnerable populations. This paper explores the disparity of water access in Delhi, India through the perspective of the marginalized urban water poor who struggle to meet their daily water needs, and those of their children. Many urban residents have been exposed to and trained in the aesthetics of the world-class city and experience tension over meeting high standards of cleanliness, purity, and order with limited resources. Women are major stakeholders in domestic water debates since they perform the majority of collection, allocation, and disposal duties. The decisions these stakeholders make about their water consumption patterns are closely related to their gendered identity as mothers. In Delhi's water poor neighborhoods, the use of water becomes imbued with narratives of justice for future generations. For mothers living on the margins of hydrosocial justice, how do they envision their own future and that of their children? What role does water use play in this depiction? How do they imagine the future vitality of their basti settlements or that of Delhi, or India at large, while exposed to water allocation disparities every day? For the millions that live in Delhi's underserved water communities, tracing the flows of water means tracing the disparities of justice and imagined urban contributions that ultimately either permit or condemn lives in Delhi.