{"title":"QUESTIONING DAY ZERO: RIGHTS, PROVISION, AND WATER INEQUALITY IN SOUTH AFRICA","authors":"Amanda Mokoena","doi":"10.17730/1938-3525-82.3.223","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17730/1938-3525-82.3.223","url":null,"abstract":"The City of Cape Town experienced one of its worst droughts in 2015–2018, resulting in the Cape Water Crisis. This crisis revealed existing and new inequalities in how the city distributed water. I conducted fieldwork in the township of Khayelitsha in Cape Town, South Africa, against the backdrop of the crisis, to investigate how the city’s response to the drought worsened water inequality in informal settlements. Geography and poor water governance negatively affected water service delivery within the city, and townships as contested spaces faced the greatest inequality. I analyzed the city’s water management policy and strategies, conducted in-depth interviews with service providers who dealt directly with water distribution in Khayelitsha, and interviewed residents in different settlements of the township. As water inequality is relative, the study required a comparative basis to make the argument of unequal distribution using John Rawls’ theory of distributive justice. Literature at the time, in general, looked at inequality across different and distant settlements, with comparisons between the township as a monolith and the central business district and suburbs. I focused on inequality by studying two settlements within the same township. Although water inequality was caused by spatial inequality, it is upheld by a host of sociopolitical factors. The South African Constitution may enshrine water as a basic human right, but experiences from Khayelitsha reveal a cost-recovery model for water service delivery that prioritizes paying customers and disregards the poor.","PeriodicalId":47620,"journal":{"name":"Human Organization","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-08-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47936649","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“WATER AND ALL MY RELATIONS”: REIMAGINING INDIGENOUS WATER JUSTICE FOR SEVEN GENERATIONS","authors":"V. Gagnon","doi":"10.17730/1938-3525-82.3.274","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17730/1938-3525-82.3.274","url":null,"abstract":"The Ojibwe Gichigami (Lake Superior) bioregion is the ancestral and contemporary homeland of the Anishinaabe Ojibwa. Harvesting and consuming fish has sustained people for millennia, but today, toxic risks due to fish contamination contribute to many burdens for both human and more-than-human worlds. For the Ojibwa, nibi gaye nii’kinaaganaa (“water and all my relations”) are the lived experiences of fish-reliant communities and emphasize sustaining good relations with water and relatives. Toxicity disrupts traditional harvest lifeways, violates treaty rights, and problematizes Ojibwa water relations. In this article, I describe diverging values attributed to water and conflicting norms of water quality relations between Ojibwa people and scientific practices of toxicology. Drawn from a study of institutional water decision making, I examine practices associated with water, fish, and risk and how these practices clarify ethics in water policy. The study of toxic substances, albeit invisible in water policy and fish advisories, raises broader issues of Indigenous water justice, particularly for sensitive populations (e.g., developing children, women of childbearing age, and fish-reliant communities). In proposing a broader justice framework for reimagining water lives and livelihoods, I argue for foregrounding Indigenous water justice ethics based on long-term wellbeing, a time period inclusive of seven generations.","PeriodicalId":47620,"journal":{"name":"Human Organization","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-08-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44872038","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"AT THE FRONTIER OF WATER CONSERVATION: ATTENDING TO RELATIONSHIPS, VALUES, AND PRACTICES FOR INCLUSIVE INFRASTRUCTURE","authors":"Lucero Radonic","doi":"10.17730/1938-3525-82.3.235","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17730/1938-3525-82.3.235","url":null,"abstract":"Water utilities are incentivizing residential water conservation and incorporating alternative water sources, such as rainwater. How do past relationships with state institutions and their water infrastructures impact present engagements with state-sponsored rainwater collection? How does the formalization of rainwater harvesting as a conservation strategy account for or discount the practices and values of low-income Hispanic residents? Mixed methods data from southern Arizona show that collectively, low-income Hispanic participants had rainwater collection expertise often born from past experiences in the context of precarious water provisioning, but both residents and institutional experts tended to downplay this situated expertise. At the same time, by enrolling in state-sponsored rainwater collection, many low-income Hispanic households enacted their belonging to the city on their own terms, charting an unexpected path towards urban inclusion. I highlight how applied anthropology contributes to adaptive water management by showing how different relationships, values, and practices imbue people’s engagement with water infrastructures.","PeriodicalId":47620,"journal":{"name":"Human Organization","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-08-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42098071","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Colleen Linn, Jessica Robbins-Panko, Tam E Perry, K. Seibel
{"title":"LIVING WITH LEAD: OLDER ADULTS’ EXPERIENCES OF NECROPOLITICAL WATER GOVERNANCE IN FLINT, MICHIGAN","authors":"Colleen Linn, Jessica Robbins-Panko, Tam E Perry, K. Seibel","doi":"10.17730/1938-3525-82.3.261","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17730/1938-3525-82.3.261","url":null,"abstract":"In Flint, Michigan (USA), an ongoing anthropogenic water crisis exposed residents to lead and other drinking water contaminants. The neoliberal policies that created this water crisis made Flint residents responsible for their own safe drinking water. In this article, we draw on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2016 and 2018 among older adults in Flint to argue that the water crisis has deepened forms of responsibilized citizenship by making residents responsible for ameliorating harms of the state. Older residents’ narratives of previous experiences of racialized structural violence shaped the emotional qualities of their present experiences with contaminated water. By exploring these responses and situating them within narratives of the past, we show that contemporary water governance can operate according to a necropolitical logic, in which citizens are responsibilized not towards an optimized future but rather in response to harms caused by the neoliberal state. Necropolitical logic reinforces the racial and economic inequalities that characterize majority-Black postindustrial American cities, thus limiting the potential for equitable resource distribution. By foregrounding older adults’ experientially grounded knowledge of the sociopolitical life of water, we underline the need for a holistic approach to justice that addresses the harms of both the present and the past and the relational nature of these harms. This approach could work towards remedying the racially disproportionate experiences of water insecurity in the United States.","PeriodicalId":47620,"journal":{"name":"Human Organization","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-08-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43798475","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Anais Roque, A. Wutich, A. Brewis, Melissa Beresford, Hilda Lloréns, Carlos G. García-Quijano, W. Jepson
{"title":"WATER SHARING AS DISASTER RESPONSE: COPING WITH WATER INSECURITY AFTER HURRICANE MARÍA","authors":"Anais Roque, A. Wutich, A. Brewis, Melissa Beresford, Hilda Lloréns, Carlos G. García-Quijano, W. Jepson","doi":"10.17730/1938-3525-82.3.248","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17730/1938-3525-82.3.248","url":null,"abstract":"In 2017, Hurricane María left more than a third of Puerto Rican households without water services. Cascading failures—including the simultaneous collapse of water, electricity, and transportation sectors—presented serious challenges to the timely restoration of governmental services. In response, families across Puerto Rico adopted self-organized coping strategies to obtain the basic resources they needed, including safe and sufficient water. Drawing on the fast-growing literature on household water sharing, we examine how Puerto Rican families shared water as a response to disaster. Using participant-observation data, interviews, and social network data, we studied water-sharing networks in three municipalities—urban, peri-urban, and rural—in western Puerto Rico in the aftermath of Hurricane María. We found that extensive water sharing (in 85% of households) spontaneously emerged in the wake of disaster, in previously water-secure rural, peri-urban, and urban communities. Households relied primarily on kin and neighbors, and women had more extensive sharing networks than men. Water-sharing arrangements were typically a form of generalized reciprocity, with little expectation of direct payback. We conclude that water-sharing networks are an important—but understudied and underutilized—component of disaster response. Our research indicates that water sharing should be more explicitly planned for and included in disaster preparedness plans. If water sharing is the dominant approach for coping with disaster-induced water insecurity, we argue, it must be at the core of disaster response.","PeriodicalId":47620,"journal":{"name":"Human Organization","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-08-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45826445","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
James A. S. Blair, Grant M. Gutierrez, M. Ramón Balcázar
{"title":"FROM WATERSHED MOMENT TO HYDROSOCIAL MOVEMENT: PATAGONIA WITHOUT DAMS AND THE FREE-FLOWING RIVERS NETWORK IN CHILE","authors":"James A. S. Blair, Grant M. Gutierrez, M. Ramón Balcázar","doi":"10.17730/1938-3525-82.3.288","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17730/1938-3525-82.3.288","url":null,"abstract":"In this article, we examine how social movement activists draw on the hydrosocial dynamics of the watershed unit to build a river protection network in resistance to extractivist development. We apply a critically engaged activist anthropological focus, and drawing on four years of collaborative fieldwork, we describe how activists formed a hydrosocial movement to reconfigure Chile as an interconnected territory of living watersheds. In 2014, the Patagonia Without Dams movement successfully stopped the development of a mega-dam complex in Chilean Patagonia, catalyzing a major upheaval in environmental politics. The Free-Flowing Rivers Network harnessed momentum from Patagonia Without Dams and jumped scales from place-based campaigns that defend singular rivers against dams to translocal actions that protect watersheds from an array of extractive industries. We show how this movement bridged rural and urban conflict zones, seeking to protect watersheds from forms of extractivism beyond dams, including mining and irrigation projects. By focusing on the Free-Flowing River Network’s efforts to translate its political-ecological platform into policy, we show how hydrosocial territories may be established, defended, expanded, and stabilized through strategies that explicitly connect water and society.","PeriodicalId":47620,"journal":{"name":"Human Organization","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-08-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42622034","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"INTRODUCTION: APPLYING ANTHROPOLOGY TO WATER","authors":"Matthew T Wilfong, M. Paolisso, J. Trombley","doi":"10.17730/1938-3525-82.3.197","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17730/1938-3525-82.3.197","url":null,"abstract":"Anthropology brings a uniquely holistic sensibility to the study of water. It examines water from multiple dimensions and in its myriad forms to understand the many ways that people make meaning and a living from water. Anthropology’s study of water provides a foundation for contemporary application and practice by anthropologists and others toward solving a wide range of water-related problems. In this introduction, we introduce the seven articles that form this special issue on applied anthropology and water. Collectively, the articles provide valuable and diverse insights on the application of anthropology to a wide range of water issues. The articles also demonstrate the capacity of research and practice centered around applied anthropology to highlight local impacts and responses at multiple scales and across institutions. Here, we discuss four thematic areas shared across the articles that suggest wider commonalities for applied anthropological research and practice. These areas are configurations of clean water access; multiplicity and heterogeneity of the lived experiences of water; injustice, inequities, and inequalities related to water; and ethnography in applied research on water. We conclude by suggesting characteristics and qualities of applied anthropological research on water, which might guide future research and practice.","PeriodicalId":47620,"journal":{"name":"Human Organization","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-08-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45677941","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"COPING WITH COMPLEXITY IN WATER MANAGEMENT: LESSONS FROM PALESTINE","authors":"E. McKee","doi":"10.17730/1938-3525-82.3.209","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17730/1938-3525-82.3.209","url":null,"abstract":"In this article, I examine the role of applied anthropology in coping with common water management dilemmas and in facilitating more equitable water management. Field research and interviews with Palestinian residents and water managers between 2012–2020 illuminate deep disagreements about two commonly used management tools: full-cost recovery pricing reforms and supply expansion through emerging water technologies. This case demonstrates that not only are there limits to the transportability of solutions across societies, but even within a society and among seemingly similar stakeholders, fundamental disagreement exists about a place’s water priorities and proper interventions. How do we explain the multiplicity of ways in which people seemingly of the same social group approach a single water issue? The article demonstrates an anthropological approach to understanding water use that draws political ecology’s focus on power together with attention to the intersectionality of peoples’ relationships to water. This approach can help water managers acknowledge the political impacts of purportedly apolitical management approaches, and it provides the basis for a more robust incorporation of diverse residents’ priorities into water management decision making.","PeriodicalId":47620,"journal":{"name":"Human Organization","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-08-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47273427","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
G. Fix, A. Seaman, Linda Nichols, Sarah Ono, Nicholas A. Rattray, S. Solimeo, H. Reisinger, Traci Abraham
{"title":"Building a Community of Anthropological Practice: The Case of Anthropologists Working within the United States’ Largest Health Care System","authors":"G. Fix, A. Seaman, Linda Nichols, Sarah Ono, Nicholas A. Rattray, S. Solimeo, H. Reisinger, Traci Abraham","doi":"10.17730/1938-3525-82.2.169","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17730/1938-3525-82.2.169","url":null,"abstract":"The disciplinary contribution of anthropologists employed outside traditional anthropology departments has been a topic of discussion and debate in the field for nearly a century. Alongside industry, nongovernmental, and nonprofit career paths, an increasing number of anthropologists have developed productive research careers outside of academic anthropology departments. The United States Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), which provides health care services to more than 9 million United States military veterans annually, is one federal employer that has become a professional home to many anthropologists. Anthropologists working in VA represent all four fields, have established roots in health services research, and have grown a national network of ethnographically-informed colleagues. These anthropologists constitute a Community of Practice that collaborates and contributes to scholarly discourse, health care operations, and policy. In this article, eight anthropologists with over 120 years of collective experience share insights into how our community of anthropological practice came into being, the organizational culture that sustains it, and the potential opportunities in health research for emerging scholars. Working at the intersection of multiple disciplines, this geographically dispersed community offers a viable model for anthropologists embedded within health care systems, in clinical academic settings, and learners seeking to broaden their understanding of anthropological praxis beyond anthropology departments.","PeriodicalId":47620,"journal":{"name":"Human Organization","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-04-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48576106","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}