Painted manhole covers in Japan

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2016/03/01/national/sewage-firm-release-collectable-cards-featuring-manhole-cover-designs/#.VtUoYox96ig

This article reminded me of the book on Soviet bus stops. Not only are the manhole covers themselves beautiful, but they're commemorating them with trading cards! 

Water privatization and the sci-fi future

I just wanted to share with you all an indie sci-fi film, Sleep Dealer (http://www.sleepdealer.com/), because there are some themes here that relate to water privatization. This is a sci-fi film centered on the perspective from the other side of the technological divide. In this proposed future, the U.S. imports Mexican labor via robots in the U.S. that are operated within virtual control centers in Tijuana, thereby attaining the ideal of “labor without the laborers” in the "Cybracero program". The protagonist of the film comes from a rural town in Oaxaca where the local river has been dammed up and privatized by an American company. The dream of regaining common access to the river becomes a significant part of the storyline (and I’ll stop there to avoid giving any spoilers!)

Latest issue of Economic Anthropology

Looks like an interesting issue and certainly touches on our theme for next week! 

Economic Anthropology, Volume 3, Issue 1

The role of corporate oil and energy debt in creating the neoliberal era (pages 57–67)
Sandy Smith-Nonini

The infrastructure of markets: From electric power to electronic data (pages 68–80)
Canay Özden-Schilling

"The most eastern of the West, the most western of the East": Energy-transport infrastructures and regional politics of the periphery in Turkey (pages 81–93)
Bilge Firat

District heating as heterotopia: Tracing the social contract through domestic energy infrastructure in Pimlico, London (pages 94–105)
Charlotte Johnson

Circuits and currents: Dynamics of disruption in New York City blackouts (pages 106–118)
Stephanie Rupp

Women, nature, and development in sites of Ecuador's petroleum circuit (pages 119–132)
Cristina Cielo, Lisset Coba and Ivette Vallejo

Communities of energy (pages 133–144)
Ben Campbell, Jon Cloke and Ed Brown

Citizens of a hydropower nation: Territory and agency at the frontiers of hydropower development in Nepal (pages 145–160)
Austin Lord

Offshore wind power development in Maine: A rational choice perspective (pages 161–173)
James M. Acheson and Ann W. Acheson

Electric activism: Analysis, alliances, and interventions (pages 174–185)
Davida Wood

On airport mobilities and ghosts....

A few recent and upcoming publications on aviation from colleagues who work in Asia:

Jane Ferguson, 2014, 'Terminally Haunted: Aviation Ghosts, Hybrid Buddhist Practices, and Disaster Aversion Strategies Amongst Airport Workers in Myanmar and Thailand', Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology, vol. 15, no. 1, pp. 47-64.  

(Jane continues to redefine fieldwork. Next time your plane is delayed, turn it into an ethnographic experience... Those of you in SEAS will remember Jane for her cutting edge research on punk and metal bands in Shan State that entailed late evenings playing music with locals.)


Max Hirsch Airport Urbanism: Infrastructure and Mobility in Asia
http://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/airport-urbanism

(Max is a recent PhD from Harvard's Dept of Architecture who now works at Hong Kong University; he will be presenting this work in Pasadena at the SAH meetings at the start of April)

"Local Neoliberalism"

I was very happy this week to get more of a breakdown between the concepts of public and private sector infrastructural services. Karen Bakker is able to question these categorizations by centering her focus on the mechanics of how people get water to their homes—with a wide perspective inclusive of a variety of strategies (water cooperative, municipal water service, state water corporation, etc.) (Bakker 2009: 28). Bakker’s purpose is stated here: “I argue that the debate over privatization is not well served by concepts derived from what Charles Taylor terms ‘our modern social imaginary,” which assumes a clear division between public (governmental) and private sphere, adjudicated by mechanisms of popular sovereignty. In successive chapters, I will provide examples of why conventional concepts of public and private are inadequate for describing the complex interrelationships between communities and water use” (Bakker 2009: 6) For my outside media source, I found a scholarly article that takes a province in the Philippines as a case study for water privatization: “Urban Water Supply and Local Neoliberalism in Tagbilaran City, the Philippines” by Karen T. Fisher.

Fisher looks at the development of a plan to incorporate private sector services into the Tagbilaran water system in the Philippines. Tagbilaran is a province in the central Philippines (or Visayas) that, at the time, was listed as one of the 20 poorest provinces in the country. Fisher compares Tagbilaran government’s successful implementation of private water services to Manila’s failed privatization plans. She specifically is paying attention to the differences in use of neoliberalization in an urban metropolis versus a non-urbanized province. She cites and builds on Bakker’s argument that the private and public are not easily definable and also not universal: “Bakker’s (2007) typology of market environmentalist reforms in resource management is useful in helping to conceptualise the myriad ways in which neoliberalism is enacted at multiple scales" (Fisher 2009: 187). This statement helps me a lot. In class, we have already discussed the idea of many versions or interpretations of modernity. There is also a similar challenge in understanding “globalization” as a phenomenon that might look and act differently depending on local or global scale. Fisher’s statement above (specifically: “the myriad ways in which neoliberalism is enacted at multiple scales”) really reconfigures my mindset on how to talk about neoliberalism. There is a consideration over the ways neoliberalism is enacted, and also a consideration over the scale in which it is enacted as well. I found Fisher’s argument a bit hard to follow, but in the end I think she concludes that the concept of neoliberalism and experience of neoliberalism needs to be pieced together from many different actors (consumers, the government, “the community,” etc.). I also think that she argues neoliberalism cannot be seen as successful or unsuccessful across the board—there is a collection of small successes and small failures in the partnership.

Additionally, I’m sharing the link to the documentation of Tagbilaran’s water privatization plan that Fisher cites in her article: http://pdf.usaid.gov/pdf_docs/Pnacu530.pdf . I thought it was interesting to see the layout of the decision processes in privatizing the area’s water system. Pages 18-22 are especially interesting because they lay out the options the government deliberated over:

1. Outright Sale

2. Bond Issue

3. Cooperative

4. Water District/MCWD Model

5. Rehabilitate-Operate-Transfer Arrangement (a variant of BOT)

6. Stand-Alone Entity (Debt Financing)

7. Pure Joint Venture

8. Joint Venture on a Rehabilitate-Own-Operate- Arrangement

References

Bakker, K. (2007). The “Commons” Versus the “Commodity”: Alter-globalisation, Anti-privatization and the Human Right to Water in the Global South. Antipode, 39(3), 430–455.

Fisher, K. T. (2009). Urban Water Supply and Local Neoliberalism in Tagbilaran City, the Philippines. Asia Pacific Viewpoint, 50(2), 185–197.

Province of Bohol. (2000). The Bohol privatization initiative: A documentation of the experience to privatize the province of Bohol’s water and Power Utility Departments – final draft. Tagbilaran, Philippines: PPDO.

Religious Mediation of Water

I find it hard to imagine privatization of something as vital as water. Bakker describes water as locally important, simple to store, and costly to transfer; materiality offers water an indeterminate identity. Bakker provides Dutch, French and English examples to argue for a combination of public and private in maintaining water systems. Bakker includes the case of Jakarta where public water infrastructure echoes colonial exclusion of the poor for the benefit of the elite. Residents of Jakarta wade through overlapping networks to access urban aquatic archipelagos which Bakker conceptualizes as private forms of water access. Uneven functioning of water structure becomes points of affective and gendered cooperation (Schwenkel 2015).

Bakker describes the environment as an actor beyond the categories of public, private and community which prompted me to think about religious mediation of water. Religious patriarchy and politics may combine to produce Buddhist monks that engage in protests that persecute minorities as in the case of the Rohingyas in Myanmar (Kipgen 2013). Some Thai monks aligned with conservative political movements in the 1970's but many also headed to the forests. In my research on Cambodian American temples, religion provides a space for Khmer women to ease survivor guilt, socialize, and build community through beliefs about merit. This is especially significant following the 1975-1979 genocide where an estimated 12-100 monks survived out of 65,000 (Harris 2013:135-136). At the local temple in Long Beach where I conduct fieldwork, the monk is ethnic Khmer who was born in Vietnam and speaks Vietnamese, Khmer, Cantonese and some English. The temple is a multilingual and multicultural site with regular visits from monks from Bangladesh, Laos and Thailand as well as diverse local adherents. Senior citizens take pubic transport from Los Angeles and the San Gabriel Valley in autumn to send goods to their ancestors. Light sprays of water bless groups of worshipers. Combined with incense and chanting, heavier pouring of water on a woman in her early 20's suffering from depression relieves her symptoms for weeks. Since Bakker focuses on the social actors in relation to water, I decided to select a reading that describes the religious work of ecology monks in Thailand as they draw boundaries around the commons (Walter 2007). Certain forms of Buddhism emphasize non-sentient beings such as trees and water. According to Walter, social movements necessitate continued local education through forms of cultural production such as films and teach-ins. In this context, ecology monks work as carpenters and instructors but also bless trees so to prevent deforestation. Thai ecology monks go as far as New Zealand but also neighboring Laos and Cambodia. While the Bodhi tree holds sacred significance Buddhism as where Buddha achieved Nirvana, the monks extend tree ordination ceremonies to different types of trees and bless rivers in order to create social boundaries around these commons.

References

Bakker, Karen. 2013. Privatizing Water: Governance Failure and the World’s Urban Water Crisis. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Harris, Ian. 2013. Buddhism in a Dark Age: Cambodian Monks under Pol Pot. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.

Kipgen, Nehginpao. 2013. “Conflict in Rakhine State in Myanmar: Rohingya Muslims’ Conundrum.” Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs 33(2): 298-310.

Schwenkel, Christina. 2015. “Spectacular infrastructure and its breakdown in socialist Vietnam.” American Ethnologist 42(3): 520-534.

Walter, Pierre. 2007. “Activist forest monks, adult learning and the Buddhist environmental movement in Thailand.” International Journal of Lifelong Education 26(3): 329-345.

Contextualizing formations of the commons and techno-optimism

Throughout the readings this week, I couldn’t help but consider Bakker’s (2010) observations regarding “ecological governance” of water as a “commons” in light of the critical conditions of drought in California. Notwithstanding the ecological importance of water conservation campaigns in curbing wasteful usage (like that which corresponds, for instance to what political ecologist Paul Robbins (2007) has termed an identity as “lawn people”), it is easy to over-estimate individual contributions to the water crisis, and to therefore gloss over industrial ones. By most estimates, total urban water consumption (which includes practices like personal use and lawn irrigation) accounts for less than 20% of all the water consumption in the state. Meanwhile, agriculture accounts for approximately 80% of water use (much of which is converted into food commodities, about half of which are discarded and never consumed).

However, to place blame entirely at the feet of a protean entity like “agriculture”, or even “industrial agriculture” would perpetuate an overly simplistic dichotomy between “public” and “private”, which Bakker notes is especially untenable with regard to water. A more productive approach would be to examine the historical configurations of water as a proprietary good within California, and which have collectively contributed to a failure of governance. For example, the state just recently passed legislation that requires, for the first time, that people and entities report the amount of water drawn from wells. Subsidence makes a particularly compelling case for political ecology, what Bakker (2010) describes as the recognition of the inevitable nesting of political and infrastructural interventions within the surrounding ecology. As a consequence of historically unregulated and unmonitored groundwater drilling without groundwater recharge, the ground beneath the feet of people in the Central Valley is literally sinking (see graphics below).  (http://waterinthewest.stanford.edu/groundwater/overdraft/index.html).

For my own research, I am especially interested in Bakker’s (2010) unpacking of ideas around “the commons”. I want to advance her argument for contextualizing and historicizing formations and political engagements within “commons” where the term is increasingly and explicitly invoked among “open science” publics which seek to engender participation in a vision of scientific databases as open-access commons. For example, the non-profit organization “Open Humans” allows people to “turn their data into a public resource” by uploading personal genotyping data, gut and environmental microbiome data, as well as other personal health data (openhumans.org). The potential implications of such massive, open-access stores of data for scientific research are fetishized as resources for reaching frontiers in technological and medical innovation. The configuration of the web-based organization appears to be such that governance – as described by Bakker (2010: 45) as participation in decision-making processes regarding resource distribution - is purposefully attenuated so as to facilitate easy and open access by researchers. However, infamous cases of biotech firms privatizing biomaterial and genetic data (see e.g. Skloot 2011), would underscore Bakker’s (2010: 175-176) observation that performances of “common resource allocation” do not preclude the possibility of unequally beneficial, and in some cases even violent, practices of re-distribution. By ethnographically engaging with such open-science publics, I wish to examine the ways in which such corporations anticipate (or disregard) the potential for such violence, and how their attempts to write-in safeguards to prevent against such violence via lines of code are nested within wider, "learned arrangements that constitute membership in particular communities of practice" oriented toward more open-ended infrastructures of data sharing (Star 1999:381, cited in Schwenkel 2015: 530).

References

Robbins, Paul. 2007. Lawn People: How Grasses, Weeds, and Chemicals Make Us Who We Are. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Skloot, Rebecca. 2011. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. 1st pbk. ed. New York: Broadway Paperbacks.        

Dams in Iran, Government Failure!

One of the most famous quotes of Iran’s revolution leader in 1979 was “water and electricity will be free for everyone.” It never happened of course and from the day I remember we faced water crisis in Iran. Water resources in Iran are limited and the government has serious issues to manage them. I grew up in Tehran, the capital of Iran and I remember days in summer with a plan that each area’ water has stopped for hours to control water consumption of the city.

Iran like any other developing country scrimmages with using technologies. For a long time, building dams have considered as the best way to provide water for areas that do not have access to water.

The first huge protest against dam I remember was against dewatering of Sivand dam. Sivand dam is located in Fars Province, Iran. It has become the center of worldwide concern due to the flooding it will cause in historical and Archaeologically rich areas of Ancient Persia and possible harm it may cause to the nearby UNESCO World Heritage of Persepolis and Pasargadae.

Iranian Cultural Heritage Organization (ICHO) was not aware of a total area of flooding until 2003 since the planning was not made public for ten years. The lake will flood 130 historical "remains", however, the larger concern has been the effect of humidity on nearby World Heritage Sites, particularly Pasargadae, an ancient capital of the Persian Empire built by Cyrus the Great the site of his tomb. Archaeologists and scientists agree that the rise in humidity from the new lake will speed up the destruction of Pasargadae to some degree.

This is one of governance failure in Iran related to dams. Spending lots of money, energy, and time to build it and fight for dewatering it. Negotiating with Scientists and Archaeologists from all over the world just because contractors didn’t does research before starting construction. It is one example but there are more than 200 dams in Iran.

As Iran is an ancient country there is always archaeological rescuing excavation before dewatering each dam. In 2010, I was working with one of these groups. I have always thought it is very depressing that these beautiful archaeological sites are sinking, although lives of people matter more. After talking with workers that were native to the area, I realized they should leave their village because all of their farms are going to sink! I think there is more harm in building dams than their benefits. A couple of lakes dried, many heritages ruined and many people displaced because of these wrong policies. To me, it sounds that the only benefit in constructing dams is making money for contractors and the ones from the government who has the power to license them.

Sivand and Tang-e Bolaghi in the news:

http://www.cais-soas.com/News/2007/April2007/23-04-iranians.htm

Overview the protests according to time of occurrence:

http://iranwatchers.blogspot.com/2008/02/overview-protests-according-to-time-of.html

News of protest (2007):

http://www.cais-soas.com/News/Sivand/sivand_news.htm

Water and Toilets: Public Restrooms as Infrastructural Issues

As we've learned in class, infrastructure makes new subjects as part of its biopolitical logics. As toilets and restrooms are built, they are implicated within disciplining rubrics with particular discursively constructed subjects in mind. In particular, this blogpost seeks to examine the phenomena of all-gender restrooms as part of a study of infrastructure. As Harvey Molotch says in Toilet: Public Restrooms and the Politics of Sharing, "peeing is political".  The very construction of restrooms as gender-segregated is part of the ways in which gender is policed and surveilled in engineering intentions. On an architectural level, the role of gendered restrooms also already establishes public restrooms as homosocial environments that presumably reinscribe notions of heteronormative gender roles. Presumably, all people who enter and utilize the women's restroom are heterosexual women while the men's restroom is presumed to only be used by heterosexual men. Other forms of sociality and traffic that transcend  these gender restrooms are strictly disciplined (e.g. children who do this at schools are punished), although they do exist (see: Jose Esteban Muñoz's discussion of cruising utopias as one example).

Following Professor Schwenkel's assertion that "no material resource and public good is more critical to sustaining urban life than water", how do we also think about public restrooms as inherently part of the sustenance of urban life, as part of an infrastructural issue?

As access to clean water is desired as part of urban life to maintain clean bodies and spaces, the use of toilets, public and private, rely on the delivery and circulation of water to expel wastes like urine and stool out of the body and into the plumbing systems. This mechanization of our bodily functions can be argued to be part of an anatamo-politics where individuals subject themselves to particular disciplinary movements in order to acquire a heightened ability. In this regard, the discipline that one undergoes to use and rely on toilets to expel bodily functions makes them into a new subject as part of modernizing, civilizing, and disciplinary projects. In this way, we can see that using toilets requires discipline. And that discipline creates a distinct relationship not only to toilets, but the entire infrastructural reliance on energy and water for the creation of buildings broadly and restrooms specifically.

An additional thing to consider is also the role that gender-segregated restrooms have on people who experience life within a gendered spectrum--those folks who identify as gender variant, gender non-conforming, or trans*. Taking the figures of gender variant, gender non-conforming, and trans* peoples, it is important to understand that the strictly gendered policing of restrooms render visible how peeing is very much a political issue, as workers who identify in these ways have a much harder time finding restrooms that make them feel comfortable and safe in that often leads them to feeling uncomfortable and holding their bodily needs until they have the time to access a safe restroom. There has been research performed that details how gender nonconforming people experience significant amounts of discrimination for simply using the restroom. There have also been a number of stories where trans women of color have been attacked in public restrooms as well. If peeing is considered a necessity and constructing buildings that supply the basic supply of energy and water for bathrooms are part of this process, then the construction of gender-neutral or gender-segregated restrooms are inherently part of the politics of infrastructure.

Currently, actually, there is a policy within UCOP's facilities manual that requires all newly constructed UC-owned buildings to also provide gender-inclusive facilities, with specific attention to gender-inclusive restrooms. I actually saw this happening during my time at UC Davis where the newly built Student Community Center, prized and featured on many diversity outreach websites and brochures, included a number of gender-inclusive restrooms.

As part of UC Davis' initiative to centralize the different extent cultural centers into one main building (e.g. LGBT Resource Center, Student Recruitment and Retention Center, Cross Cultural Center, Women's Research and Resources Center, the Undocumented Student Resource Center and the Undergraduate Research Center), this building quickly became a spectacle that was meant to incite and inspire awe, a sense of enchantment. Not only was it the newest built building on the UC Davis campus in the center of campus, the building itself was heralded as a bastion of the university's commitment to multiculturalism and diversity. As part of this awe, the gender-inclusive facilities found in this building also aided as a materialization of UC Davis' commitment to gender-diversity as well. In so doing, the creation of gender-inclusive restrooms functioned not only to facilitate a different relationship to restrooms; it also facilitated the creation of UC Davis' institutional culture that was also mediated through relations of capital, (inter)national politics, and technical knowledge. The construction of the Student Community Center and the inclusive construction of gender-inclusive restrooms within the campus building is then premised on the effective delivery of water and energy, alongside the continued maintenance of these buildings with wage staff.

Just as we think through how restrooms can open up our analysis of different kinds of culture and production of space, I hope that we have also begin to conceptualize and situate restrooms within our conversations of water, governmentality, and creation of space/place/institution.

Works Cited

Ford, Zack. "STUDY: Transgender People Experience Discrimination Trying To Use Bathrooms." ThinkProgress RSS. Think Progress, 26 June 2013. Web. 23 Feb. 2016.

James, Robin. "Juridical, Disciplinary, and Biopolitical Power: Basic Background on Foucault." YouTube. YouTube, n.d. Web. 23 Feb. 2016.

Molotch, Harvey Luskin, and Laura Norén. Toilet: Public Restrooms and the Politics of Sharing. New York: New York UP, 2010. Print.

Schwenkel, Christina. "Spectacular Infrastructure and Its Breakdown in Socialist Vietnam." American Ethnologist 42.3 (2015): 520-34. Web.

UCOP. "Construction Services." RD4.1: Providing Gender Inclusive Facilities. UCOP, 30 June 2015. Web. 23 Feb. 2016.