16. Becoming with Water: Ethnographic and Methodological Reconfigurations
There’s something in the water. Mosquitos swimming in still puddles, oil floating in the ocean, ice rock shoring in lunar poles. Carbon sinking into hydrogen and oxygen. A tea bag diffusing into a boiling kettle.
Water is not just water, a distinct category with fixed boundaries. In these examples/moments water is encountering something, becoming caught up in a process of perturbing, transforming, evoking. This panel asks you to attend to this becoming with. We encourage papers that step away from modes of analysis which stabilize water as well as the expectant definitions and categories of water. Rather, lean into water’s mutability. What emerges when we bring water’s capacity to affect and become affected into focus in our ethnographies? What methodologies stem from observing, recording, articulating the process of water co-evolving with the human, nonhuman, nonlife entities it encounters? How can the micro-moments in which water becomes an altering, entangling, disrupting entity shape analytical currents in our fields? We invite papers that take a speculative or experimental approach to water by focusing on moments when it is saturated with potential to commingle, or already participating in transmutations and reconfigurations.
Water is an entity, a force, and an environmental context that catalyzes and sustains multi-scalar relations across and beyond earth. As colonial, capitalist, and climatic processes bring human relations with water into focus, this panel probes water as a site for enriching analytical, metaphorical, and methodological approaches to the ethical, the ecological, the technoscientific, and the political in a shifting world.
Citations:
– Ballestero, Andrea. 2019. A Future History of Water. Durham: Duke University Press
– Biehl, João and Peter Locke. 2017. Unfinished: The Anthropology of Becoming. Durham: Duke University Press.
– de la Cadena, Marisol and Mario Blaser, eds. A World of Many Worlds. Durham: Duke University Press.
– Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix. 1983. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press
– Gan, Elaine, Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, and Nils Bubandt, ed. 2017. Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts of the Anthropocene. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press
– Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star. 1999. Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences. Cambridge: MIT Press.
– Haraway, Donna. 2008. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
– Helmreich, Stefan. 2009. Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas. Berkeley: University of California Press.
– Khan, Naveeda. 2016. “River and the Corruption of Memory.” Contributions to Indian Sociology 49(3):389–409.
– Lethabo King, Tiffany. The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies. Durham: Duke University Press.
– Povinelli, Elizabeth. 2016. Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism. Durham: Duke University Press.
– Raffles, Hugh. 2002. In Amazonia: A Natural History. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
– Tsing, Anna. 2005. Friction: An Anthropology of Global Connections. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
– Tsing, Anna. 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
– “Water” Cultural Anthropology Collection. 1999-2009. Accessed from Water | Cultural Anthropology (culanth.org)
– Weston, Kate. 2017. Animate Planet: Making Visceral Sense of Living in a High-Tech Ecologically Damaged World. Durham: Duke University Press.
