Paper short abstract:

This paper investigates management of sanitary infrastructures as one example of the co-existence of human activities and underwater worlds. More specifically, it suggests that the idea of water as circulating cannot be wrested apart from human attempts to control, and monitor this circulation.

Paper long abstract:

This paper draws on interviews with twenty-one water and waste water engineers and chemists in Sweden and Slovenia. Focus for these interviews is management of sanitary infrastructures, in terms of monitoring and repair, but also water leak detection and preventive work. Management of sanitary infrastructures offers an interesting example of the co-existence of human activities and underwater worlds. Pipes and pumps, carrying drinking, and waste water (and other water bodies such as storm, and ground water) make up for thousands of kilometers of infrastructures that largely remain hidden underground. Sanitary infrastructures are of interest to scholars, also within anthropology and sociology, as they are highly invested in social and political arrangements. Here, the idea of water as circulating cannot be wrested apart from human attempts to control, and monitor this circulation. My informants’ work thus seemed to comprise somewhat of a paradox. At the same time as an uninterrupted provision of drinking water and removal of waste water are largely taken for granted in many European countries today, human engagement (for instance, in terms of repair, maintenance and monitoring) is required to simulate water’s natural ability to circulate. This speaks to the concurrent hiddenness, and conspicuousness of sanitary infrastructures. More specifically, management of sanitary infrastructures serve, both to render natural, and reveal the social and political aspects of water’s circulation. The workings of sanitary infrastructures then, are simultaneously black-boxed and unearthed, in and through the daily engagements of my informants.