By David Bond, Associate Director, Center for the Advancement of Public Action, Bennington College Anthropologist David Bond at a Press Conference with Community Leaders in St. Croix, US Virgin Islands to demand accountability after the Limetree Refinery rained crude oil and petrochemicals down on the neighborhoods that surround the facility (June 17, 2021). Photo by author. What place does ethnography have in a world coming undone? Each season, a new deluge of disasters conspires with historical landscapes of inequality in the remaking of dispossession. How can ethnography stand against this ..read more

By Alejandro Camargo, History and Social Sciences Department, Universidad del Norte, Colombia. “In the depths of the river, our hands are our eyes.” Catching bagre pintao (Pseudoplatystoma magdaleniatum) in the La Mojana inland delta of Northern Colombia, sometimes requires diving down into the river’s darkest waters. The goal is to determine where bagres are, and what direction they are facing to accurately decide where to place a fishing net. Yet the concentration of sediment blocks light and, consequently, hinders visibility. This is why fishers resort to other sensorial skills underwater ..read more

By Laura Betancur Alarcón (Integrative Research Institute on Transformations of Human-Environment Systems-IRI THESys at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin) and Ana María Arbeláez-Trujillo1 (Water Resources Management Group at Wageningen University and Research). a On her way to the La Miel River banks, Isaura walks across the mountain. Lying down as tree steam, she sees the 6-kilometer pipe that transports the river waters to the powerhouse of the hydroelectric plant. She can’t swim in the river anymore: a large tube carries a large part of its water, diminishing its flow. Also on foot but in the ..read more

By Maira Hayat, Keough School of Global Affairs, University of Notre Dame. The three essays by Habib, Alarcón and Arbeláez-Trujillo, and Mamidipudi take the reader to worlds of water—to a variety of forms from springs and rivers, to land that turns into water and water that turns into land. To understand how these are also worlds against water, worlds from water, the essays provide insights into water’s forms and infrastructures in relation to political-economic environments, and the politics of knowledge and its exclusions.  The essays provide insights into water’s forms and infrastruc ..read more

By Colleen Linn, Wayne State University. Groundwater is difficult to observe (Ballestero 2019, Walsh 2018), and is an elusive substance despite being the most relied upon drinking water source globally. Groundwater has a growing focus within the field of anthropology (Ballestero 2019, Bessire 2021, Walsh 2018). In these texts, groundwater depletion or quantity issues are often highlighted, and for good reason, given worldwide dependency and climate change impacts. However, groundwater contamination poses overlapping yet distinctive threats to water security, especially when considering the gr ..read more

By Peter Habib, Department of Anthropology, Emory University. I came across it on a blazing Monday, tucked away next to a small dikkān (corner store) and a complex of five-story apartment buildings in Zahle. I had asked my companion—a water truck driver—about the water flows in this city, the capital of Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley. Having arrived in Zahle just a few months prior, I was still getting my lay of the land. My time was spent on a seemingly futile quest to find what residents mentioned as a ubiquitous and mundane feature of this mountainside landscape: water springs. We parked near the ..read more

By Sita Mamidipudi, Department of Anthropology, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Too Salty Najma and her family are Muslim fishworkers who live half a mile away from the Maachu river in Gujarat, India, and two miles from where the river flows into the Arabian sea through the Little Rann of Kutch. The Little Rann of Kutch region ( “the Rann”) is located along the Western coast of India. It is a low-lying saline desert that is inundated by the sea during the four months of the monsoon each year (July – October). This seasonal and cyclical shift between marine and terrestrial, inunda ..read more

By Sayd Randle, College of Integrative Studies, Singapore Management University. Walking along a covered aqueduct’s path through the desert, water can seem remarkably contained, cleanly separated from the surrounding terrain. You never see it, but the occasional sound of liquid sloshing within the infrastructure announces the substance moving through a landscape that it never touches. I had ample opportunity to ponder this sense of tidy segregation during a week spent following the path of the Los Angeles Aqueduct across the Mojave Desert, hiking with a documentary filmmaker named Sam. For he ..read more

By Melisa Escosteguy (Non-Conventional Energy Research Institute-INENCO-CONICET, Universidad de Salta) and Maria Labourt (Department of Sociology, University of Southern California). Transformations of an unconventional water body: From brine to lithium Water worlds are necessarily changing water worlds (Ballestero, 2019b). In the Puna region of the high Andes of Argentina, millenary water bodies and traditional livelihoods organized around them are experiencing varying degrees of disruption due to numerous lithium mining projects. As the world shifts toward forms of green energy, decarbonizat ..read more

Amit Kaushik, Department of Anthropology, University of Georgia In 2008, a somber event unfolded in the heart of India as the local tiger population faced extinction in the Panna Tiger Reserve (PTR) in Madhya Pradesh (MP), Central India—a historic second such event in India’s history (Chundawat, 2018). This news sent shockwaves through the conservation community, prompting swift action by the MP Forest Department. In 2009, dedicated forest officials reintroduced tigers in Panna from neighboring protected areas, launching a successful reintroduction effort. Today, the once-dwindling tiger popul ..read more