441690

12
SSS42410.1177/0306312712441690BijkerSocial Studies of Science

Comment

Social Studies of Science

Do we live in water
42(4) 624­–627
© The Author(s) 2012
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DOI: 10.1177/0306312712441690
A methodological sss.sagepub.com

commentary

Wiebe Bijker
Department of Technology & Society Studies, Maastricht University, the Netherlands

Keywords
constructivist research heuristics, governance of water, politics of technology,
technological culture

Reading the fascinating articles in this special issue (Barnes, 2012; Carroll, 2012; Carse,
2012; Pritchard, 2012; Sneddon, 2012) made me wonder: Do we live in water cultures?
I do not mean this to be an ontological question, asking about the reality in which we
live. I want instead to raise a heuristic and methodological question: Does it make sense
to study our world as a water culture?
I have argued that we live in technological cultures (Bijker, 1995a). And yes, I did
introduce this idea originally as an ontological claim: our modern societies are perme-
ated by science and technology. This was illustrated by a thought experiment of getting
into a time machine: imagine Archimedes travelling to Leonardo da Vinci’s time, and he
would, I suggested, find Leonardo’s world quite familiar. Travelling to Oppenheimer’s
time of the 1940s would however, I argued, confront Archimedes with a much deeper
divide. I then translated this from an ontological claim into heuristic advice: if you want
to understand our current societies, do study the role of technology and science in con-
stituting these societies. But once the value of those heuristics is recognized for current
societies, it is only a small step to then also see that these heuristics would also help for
understanding Archimedes’ world. Now I would indeed propose that for studying any
society – including pre-modern or non-western societies – the advice to approach such a
society as a technological culture also makes sense.

Corresponding author:
Wiebe Bijker, Department of Technology & Society Studies, Universiteit Maastricht, PO Box 616,
6200 MD Maastricht, the Netherlands.
Email: w.bijker@maastrichtuniversity.nl

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Bijker 625

The heuristic advice to consider our societies as technological cultures was meant
to summarize insights from Science, Technology and Society (STS) studies, and it
has a double message. First it says to researchers in the social sciences and humani-
ties that they will fail to understand our societies if they do not take into account the
role of technology and science. Second, it warns engineers and scientists that they
will fail to build well-functioning technological systems if they do not take into
account that these systems are embedded in society. These heuristics can then be
translated into methodologies, when using a social construction of technology
(SCOT) framework, for identifying relevant social groups, demonstrating interpreta-
tive flexibility, describing technological frames and understanding processes of
social construction (Bijker, 1995b); or, when using an actor-network theory (ANT)
framework, for identifying human and non-human actants, mapping them into net-
works, and understanding translation processes and trials of strength (Callon, 1986;
Latour, 2005; Law and Hassard, 1999).
The articles in this special issue do suggest a conceptual move similar to the one I
made with ‘technological culture’. Barnes (2012) describes how water shapes Egyptian
society, and how Egyptian society shapes the pumping technologies that, in turn, direct
the water flows. Carroll (2012) shows how water became a political problem and an
object of governance and, vice versa, how it shaped the state formation in California.
Carse (2012) extends the move that Barnes and Carroll had begun, and explicitly draws
nature into the analysis by describing how the natural watershed came to shape and sup-
port the infrastructure of the Panama Canal. Pritchard (2012) casts the net even more
widely and draws long-term economic history into the analysis by explicating the role of
water, first in imperialist and then in capitalist international relations of France and its
(former) colonies. Each of these articles can be read by making, at least implicitly, an
ontological argument: water is an important constituent of those societies; visiting those
countries, you cannot miss how important water is, though sometimes by virtue of its
absence, as in cases of the Egyptian irrigation struggles. But Sneddon (2012) describes
the key role that the Pa Mong dam played in shaping the US geopolitics in Asia during
the Cold War, even though it was never built. No ontology there, literally. The focus on
the Pa Mong dam thus is a valuable heuristic: it offers insights into the interplay of tech-
nology, politics and expertise that otherwise might escape us.
Collectively these articles thus suggest that we can consider the societies studied as
‘water cultures’. Moreover, this suggestion has the same dual status as my statement
that ‘we live in technological cultures’. First, it is an ontological claim that water is a
crucial constituent of any society, including cases of excess, as in flooding, or drought,
as in deserts; and cases of infrastructure, as in canals and cases of expertise, as in
hydroimperialism or US geopolitics. Second, it makes the heuristic claim that societies
will be better understood when the role of water is the focus of analysis. That heuristic
claim implies, again, a double message: first, it argues to social scientists that they will
never fully understand France’s international relations if they do not take into account
the role of water, irrigation projects and hydraulic engineers. And, second, it warns
engineers and policy-makers that they will not succeed in getting enough water through
their locks from the Panama Canal watershed if they do not pay attention to the social
embedding – in this case, the way politics and policing are embedded in local forest
hydraulics and farming.

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626 Social Studies of Science 42(4)

If one buys this heuristic argument, what methodological approaches does it imply?
What methodological advice is implicit in the statement ‘we live in water cultures’, and
can be derived from these articles? Surely, each author builds on the standard STS plea
(summarized in the technological culture heuristics), that technology and science need to
be studied, both as being shaped by society and as constituents of society. But they go
further than this. Barnes argues that the natural-material context of water flows needs to
be included, in addition to the pump technologies. Carroll argues that, by historicizing
water, he can trace how water has become a problem and indeed an object of governance.
This neatly fits with reviving Dewey’s (1991 [1927]) pragmatism, as for example Gerard
de Vries (2007) does in his analysis of how political objects are shaped. Carse (2012)
similarly demonstrates how ‘the artifice of the Panama Canal watershed – its “making” –
is a result of the accretion of knowledge’, and then he further traces the detailed mic-
ropolitics of enrolling forest guards ‘to align the diverging interests of state institutions
and rural social worlds’ (p. 551). Pritchard (2012: 592) shows how employing a water
culture perspective (my words) offers an innovative and effective way to empirically
study ‘the ways that water, hydraulic knowledge, and water management practices both
revealed and reproduced unequal power relations predicated upon an expansionist men-
talité, whether political or economic in orientation’, which adds convincingly to the
existing frame of post-colonial studies. Sneddon (2012) shows how micro-level analysis
of biophysical data is connected to macro-level strategies of the US foreign department.
We live in technological cultures; the set of articles in this special issue suggests that
we live in water cultures too. Does this heuristic move stop here? Why not study societ-
ies as vulnerable cultures, as sound cultures, as food cultures? In all these cases the
argument would be that vulnerability, sound or food are pervasive elements of societies,
and that their shaping of societies and being shaped by social forces forms a fruitful
entry point for research. Only practice will tell: when research guided by such heuristics
does yield new methodological approaches, conceptual frameworks and substantive
insights, then it will indeed be worth the move. In the case of water cultures, these five
articles make a good promise, though time will tell whether it is indeed fruitful to study
societies as water cultures – hence the question mark in my title.

References
Barnes J (2012) Pumping possibility: Agricultural expansion through desert reclamation in Egypt.
Social Studies of Science 42(4): 517–538.
Bijker WE (1995a) Democratisering van de Technologische Cultuur (Inaugurele Rede).
Maastricht: Universiteit Maastricht.
Bijker WE (1995b) Of Bicycles, Bakelites, and Bulbs: Toward a Theory of Sociotechnical Change.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Callon M (1986) Some elements of a sociology of translation: Domestication of the scallops and
the fishermen of St Brieuc Bay. In: Law J (ed.) Power, Action and Belief: A New Sociology
of Knowledge? London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 196–233.
Carroll P (2012) Water and technoscientific state formation in California. Social Studies of
Science 42(4): 489–516.
Carse A (2012). Nature as infrastructure: Making and managing the Panama Canal watershed.
Social Studies of Science 42(4): 539–563.

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Bijker 627

De Vries GH (2007) What is political in sub-politics? How Aristotle might help STS. Social Studies
of Science 37(5): 781–809.
Dewey J (1927 [1991]) The Public and its Problems. Athens, OH: Swallow Press.
Latour B (2005) Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Law J and Hassard J (1999) Actor Network Theory and After. Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell/
Sociological Review.
Pritchard S (2012) From hydroimperialism to hydrocapitalism: ‘French’ hydraulics in France,
North Africa, and beyond. Social Studies of Science 42(4): 591–615.
Sneddon C (2012) The ‘sinew of development’: Cold War geopolitics, technical expertise, and
water resource development in Southeast Asia, 1954–1975. Social Studies of Science 42(4):
564–590.

Biographical note
Wiebe E. Bijker is Professor of Technology & Society at Maastricht University. His research and
advisory work focus on questions of democratization in technological cultures. His most recent
work relates to risk governance of nanotechnologies, in collaboration with colleagues in India and
Africa. His latest book (with Roland Bal and Ruud Hendriks) is The Paradox of Scientific
Authority: The Role of Scientific Advice in Democracies (MIT Press, 2009).

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