Water, Water, Water...

References:

http://www.npr.org/2016/02/24/467914419/water-in-new-dehli-partially-restored-after-protesters-sabotage-source

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

This year, World Water Week will be in Stockholm, 28 August – 2 September 2016. I thought: how appropriate! There is clear waterways everywhere in the Swedish capital. And Lake Malaren.

This week’s focus on water reminds me of a childhood rhyme:

Lạy trời mưa xuống,

Lấy nước tôi uống,

Lấy ruộng tôi cày,

Lấy đầy bát cơm,

Lấy rơm đun bếp.

Lấy tệp bánh chưng,

Lấy lưng hũ rượu.

(Đồng dao)

It is a prayer for rain, so people could farm for rice and get hay to cook and sticky rice cakes, and a brimming jar of wine - no less. Well, rain might come if you were to sing this song during the monsoon season in Vietnam, but elsewhere, people need something different.

Like in New Dehli, India. One of many “water wars” (Bakker 2013: 214) that get more attention than the well-run water supply networks would . NPR reports on February 24, 2016 that “When nearly 10 million residents were left without water, it was much more than a plumbing issue — it was a consequence of major social conflict dealing with the nation's ancient caste system.” Reading this story, I thought it would be great to get to Nikhil Anand’s Pressure in Cultural Anthropology on hydraulic citizenship for a better and nuanced understanding of the water situation (maybe during spring break!). Complicated reasons for the disruption of water distribution in New Dehli are complicated:

“This whole thing was tripped by unrest that occurred in the state next-door. Rioters damaged this water canal and cut off the flow, and on top of that, these protesters were torching railroads, they were blocking highways. They cut a broad swath of destruction in Haryana state. Nineteen people were killed. The army was called in. And what they were rampaging over, David, is affirmative action and who's entitled to it. One community, the Jat community, historically farmers, fought these pitched battles in the streets to secure government benefits. They view quotas for government jobs, for example, as the only tangible way to get any kind of influence to better themselves economically because they say, look, we're down on our knees.”

Water is connected to so many things. Like class. And peace - in the colloquium with Christopher Sneddon (Department of Geography, Dartmouth College) “Water for Peace? The geopolitics of development in the Mekong River Basin, 1957-2016” on March 14, 2016 at Bunche Hall, UCLA. The water crisis in California and unprecedented drought brings a different sense of understanding about ‘natural’ resources - that they do indeed run out. Water is connected to public consciousness and behaviors as much as it is to its physical sources.

Water can be thought of as a common of sort. It can be hoped that water waters can find peace looking beyond the ‘technical solutions’ - with the starting point that “Freedom is the recognition of the necessity” (Hardin 2001: 35).

Water is political, biopolitical (Bakker 2013:221). Water is emotional. Water is labor. The governance of labor, as Bakker shows, ought to engage with the terrain of ‘political society:’ the search for models that resolve, to the extent possible, the inevitable tensions between representation and participation, technocracy and democracy, centralized oversight and local preferences, and economic exigencies and environmental imperatives” (227).