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.