Society & Natural Resources

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Thinking Relationships Through Water

Franz Krause & Veronica Strang

To cite this article: Franz Krause & Veronica Strang (2016) Thinking Relationships Through
Water, Society & Natural Resources, 29:6, 633-638, DOI: 10.1080/08941920.2016.1151714

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/08941920.2016.1151714

Published online: 16 Mar 2016.

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SOCIETY & NATURAL RESOURCES
2016, VOL. 29, NO. 6, 633–638
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08941920.2016.1151714

GUEST EDITORIAL

Thinking Relationships Through Water

Franz Krausea and Veronica Strangb
a
School of Humanities, Tallinn University, Tallinn, Estonia; bInstitute of Advanced Study, Durham University,
Durham, United Kingdom

With this collection, we hope to contribute to a more explicitly relational study of water in
society. Water is not just the object of social relationships, or merely a natural resource on
which claims are made, to which meanings are attached, and over which political conflicts
erupt. We suggest that if we study how social and hydrological relationships are intercon-
nected and mutually constitutive, a much deeper understanding of the role of water in
human social lives can be gained, and significantly better management and policy can
be designed. This collection is thus an argument for considering the hydrological and
the social together: for thinking relationships through water.
Previous research on water has suggested a need to reconsider the relationships between
society and natural resources (Strang 2009; Linton 2010). Simultaneously an element, a
flow, a means of transport, a life-sustaining substance, and a life-threatening force, the
subject, object, and often the very means of social and cultural activity (Hahn, Cless,
and Soentgen 2012; Krause and Strang 2013), water inspires novel ways of thinking about
key aspects of social relations, including exchange, circulation, power, community, and
knowledge. At the same time, watery relationships challenge assumptions about nature
and resources, questioning their conceptual and material boundedness and stability and
furthering our understandings of the human and nonhuman aspects of their production.
Today, water has a prominent place in academic research, due in part to a widening
awareness of multiple global water crises, in which water is increasingly scarce, destructive
or polluted. As water is perceived as endangered or dangerous, researchers are rediscover-
ing the profound implications of water for human societies and cultures. Just as biophysical
life is unthinkable without water, so too is social and cultural life.

What Does “Thinking Relationships Through Water” Mean?

With the contributors to this volume, we want to highlight the benefits of thinking social
relationships through water. Rather than treating water as an object of social and cultural
production—something produced through social relationships and imbued with meaning
through cultural schemes—we consider water as a generative and agentive co-constituent of
relationships and meanings in society.
Much of current literature considers water “one of the most pressing environmental and
resource concerns” (Tempelhoff et al. 2009, 1), and a political challenge due to the
“plurality of worldviews, ideologies, interests and discourse related to water” (Molle,

CONTACT Franz Krause franz.krause@tlu.ee Humanitaarteaduste Instituut, Tallinna Ülikool, Uus-Sadama 5, Tallinn
10120, Estonia.
© 2016 Taylor & Francis
634 F. KRAUSE AND V. STRANG

Mollinga, and Meinzen-Dick 2008, 3). This framework positions water as the object of
evaluation and contestation. Similarly, Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Water describes
one of its key interests as “those interpretations that we, as a society, have brought to water
through art, religion, history and which in turn shapes how we come to understand it.”
Meaning, in this view, is something that people—or “societies”—project onto the world
(see Ingold 2000; Kohn 2013). Such an approach to meaning has long influenced the
humanities and social sciences, theorizing culture as a veil or filter that mediates between
human beings and the real world. This implies that the meaning of water is attached to a
material substance to which humans have no direct access.
Exploring the role of people’s relationships with and through water more directly, this
collection enables a shift in established approaches. We foreground water as an integral
part of social and political relationships, arguing that, rather than being imposed, water’s
meanings are emergent from these relationships (cf. Strang 2005). Rather than being
merely links between human actors, social relationships are seen as including engagements
with animals, places, things, and materials that contribute actively, through their properties
and behaviours, to the formation and transformation of these relations.
Our approach is based on recent work that emphasises water’s deep permeation of social
and cultural life (e.g., Fontein 2008; Linton 2010; Chen, McLeod, and Neimanis 2013; Strang
2014). This includes, for example, analyses of the simultaneously social and material
processes that compose the “infrastructure” of watershed management (Carse 2012), and
arguments that drinking water provision is conditioned by “pressures” that are simul-
taneously physical and political (Anand 2011). Observing that water is physically integral
to political processes, rather than just their object, Bijker (2012) recommends studying
human societies as “water cultures” (see also Bakker 2012), while others describe our envir-
onments as “water worlds” (Hastrup 2009; Orlove and Caton 2010; Barnes and Alatout
2012). With this in mind, our collection treats thinking relationships through water as a
way to consider the materiality of social relations as well as the sociality of material relations.

How Is “Thinking Relationships Through Water” Useful?

What is the point of challenging established approaches to water in society and culture?
What additional insights can be gained from thinking relationships through water, and
what are the implications for policy and practice? Here, we highlight three areas in which
this approach can be useful:
Analysis: By refraining from artificially dividing human life into social and material
spheres, an analysis based on their correspondence allows us to move beyond the conceptual
limits of conventional approaches. For instance, Linton and Budds (2014) have argued that the
dominant model of the hydrologic cycle simplifies the more complex realities of water circu-
lation (and noncirculation) and is in itself an ideological construct. Assumptions about the
hydrologic cycle not only make all human involvement with water appear like a deviation
from an ideal state, but also describe some forms of water—especially the “blue” and flowing
kind—as being more desirable than, for instance, the “green” or “brown” water stored in
plants or soil. Linton and Budds propose the “hydrosocial cycle” as a conceptual alternative,
foregrounding the ubiquitous involvement of conflicting human activities in water circulation.
Politics: Considering social and hydrological relations together, rather than as two fun-
damentally different ways of relating, opens up a more critical and politically more sensitive
 SOCIETY & NATURAL RESOURCES 635

approach. This applies to conventional “human” politics as much as to a wider political

sphere including nonhuman life (Chen, McLeod, and Neimanis 2013, 6). The fact that we
share water with—or withhold it from—other humans, as well as animals, plants, soils,
and watercourses, makes water an excellent element through which to explore the simul-
taneously ecological and political dimensions of its use and distribution. The social and
the ecological are not distinct spheres, but part of a multifaceted yet basically continuous
field of relationality. Thinking relationships through water helps us to navigate this area
and articulate its political and ethical dimensions.
Policy and practice: Thinking relationships through water can enable the design and
realization of more appropriate projects in water provision, flood management, aquifer
governance, and coastal conservation. If the social nature of water and the intrinsic links
between culture, political economy, and hydrology are taken seriously, managers will be able
to better deal with material infrastructures following social logics or social processes sparked
by hydrological events. Orlove and Caton (2010) have shown how thinking about water
relationally can highlight the intricacies of governance and politics in a context where water
studies habitually reduce water to an economic resource. Challenging this common
reduction of water is urgent, given the disastrous effects of current managerial regimes
on “biocultural health” (Johnston and Fiske 2014).

How Does This Special Issue Think Relationships Through Water?

By analyzing specific ethnographic contexts, the contributions in this volume show how
water flows are fashioned by a combination of topography, power relations, built infrastruc-
ture, institutional arrangements, property relations, money and market forces, ideologies,
social networks, and the properties of water itself.
O’Leary writes about the daily routines through which slum dwellers of Delhi, India, in
particular women, procure drinking water. These routines entail waiting for a municipal
water truck on the edge of the settlement, often for hours. Thinking through the metaphor-
ical and material relations of affluence and stagnancy, O’Leary contrasts the fluid rhetoric of
upward mobility with the stagnant reality of immobility imposed by the idiosyncrasies of
water supply. The article concludes that the present water delivery system reduces people
to being part of the infrastructure, obliging them to facilitate water movements that in
better-off quarters are carried by pipes, and preventing them from realizing other, more
human goals. For O’Leary, thinking relationships through water means understanding
drinking-water provision not predominantly as an allocation of a certain amount of water
to a particular number of slum dwellers, but as a temporal process that critically intersects
with people’s personal and economic aspirations, indicating how resource inequalities can
be reproduced even in ostensibly benevolent endeavors.
In Senegal, where Gomez-Temesio describes the local population’s efforts to obtain and
maintain sources of reliable drinking water, the infrastructure in question is a borehole.
Thinking relationships through water enables the author to trace how water supply is not
just a matter of constructing boreholes, but equally a matter of invoking social relations with
powerful staff in the state bureaucracy. Water flows are sustained through regular claims
on so-called “sons of the soil” who now work in central government departments. Gomez-
Temesio’s research participants maintain that these “sons” are indebted to their home
communities, without whose support they would not have reached their present positions.
636 F. KRAUSE AND V. STRANG

They are therefore obliged to return favors, such as the construction and maintenance of
boreholes, to their places of origin. So while water is officially provided by the Senegalese
state to its citizens, in practice, both the status of citizens and the workings of the state
are mediated by these reciprocal relationships.
Drinking water in Kiribati has traditionally come from shallow wells on people’s proper-
ties, writes Bønnelykke Robertson. Digging and using a well was tantamount to asserting a
claim to the land around it, and people made homes where quality well water was available.
But the introduction of piped water supplies in the late 1970s upset this relationship: The
water now comes from land that is kept free of human occupation, and it is pumped—at
irregular intervals—into people’s homes in areas where well water is no longer deemed fit
to drink. Government officials, development personnel, and engineers argue that this
system is the most sustainable strategy for the atolls’ fragile water resources, and they
are increasingly frustrated by repeated acts of vandalism against the public water infra-
structure. This apparent contradiction can be explained when we think relationships
through water: Bønnelykke Robertson shows that wells, pumps, and pipes do not simply
allocate water, but embody fundamentally different moralities concerning relationships
between people, water, and land.
Investigating the concerns of floodplain residents in southwest England, Krause shows
how the materialities of flood water and floodplain landscapes form an intrinsic part of the
residents’ social and political relations. People who have witnessed recent and historical
flooding are especially critical of structural alterations of the landscape, including
new housing estates, road embankments, and other people’s flood defenses. The trope of
“building on the floodplain” condenses multiple anxieties about the effects of different
flood-defense regimes upon each other, ideas about the “right” kinds of flows, landscape
appreciation, and suburban sprawl. When floods do occur, floodplain residents are keen
to distinguish different kinds of flood waters, depending on with whom and what the water
has been in contact. Flood events and flood risk planning galvanize, reflect, and create rela-
tions that are simultaneously social and hydrological. Krause concludes that more effective
flood risk management would result from thinking relationships through water, acknowl-
edging the hydrosociality of flooding instead of treating humans and waters as separate
elements.
De Rijke, Munro, and Melo Zurita investigate conflicts over water and coal seam gas in
Australia’s Great Artesian Basin. The technology for extracting the gas requires pumping
water from the aquifer to the surface, which has tangible consequences for established land
and water uses in an otherwise arid region. Underlying the current debates between farm-
ers, ranchers, Aboriginal people and the government is a conflict between representing the
Great Artesian Basin as a huge, undifferentiated water body (in relation to which water
pumping and pollution are insignificant), or as a complex system of interconnected but
specific waters and places, with particular histories and songlines, and localized per-
meability and water tables. By thinking relationships through water, the authors elucidate
how the materialities of invisible water flows become central in the gas extraction conflict,
and reveal different ways of making the underground legible.
Reinert writes about a large mining project being planned in northern Norway in which
a major point of contention is the likely contamination of the local fjord by the mine’s
tailings. In the course of debates about water pollution, a number of watery metaphors
are being rehearsed and put to different uses around the project. Reinert traces how part
 SOCIETY & NATURAL RESOURCES 637

of the mining conflict itself is constituted by different ways of thinking and voicing rela-
tionships through water. He explores three metaphors—of ripples, cycles, and depths—
and discusses the specific characteristics of water that they highlight, and their potential
consequences for the configuration of the mining project. Mine champions promise a
“ripple effect” that will multiply and redistribute economic benefits from the mining
activities across the region. Opponents employ understandings of the hydrologic cycle to
emphasize that people and ecosystems are connected through water, for better or for worse.
Finally, the depth of the fjord into which the mine tailings are meant to be discarded is
evoked as a reservoir of opportunity.
Together, the contributions underline the importance of not severing the material from
the social in analyzing current water issues. Navigating a course between the mirror
fallacies of extreme constructivism and crude materialism, this volume demonstrates the
theoretical and practical utility of analyzing the material and social relations of and around
water as an integrated set of relationships. The contributions to this collection invite the
reader to begin thinking relationships through water.

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