waterways

reading list two: ethnographic site
Below is a list of readings that I am preparing for my comprehensive exams. As is, it is a work in progress.

Suggestions for further readings (and/or comments on inclusions) are welcome.

Anand, Nikhil. 2017. “Introduction: Water Works.” In Hydraulic City: Water and the Infrastructures of Citizenship in Mumbai, 1-24. Durham: Duke University Press.

Water infrastructure and access to it full of contest and controversy in Mumbai. In slum settlements water accessible certain times of day. Anand suggests water infrastructure as “social material assemblage that not only constitutes the form and performance of the liberal (and neoliberal) city but also frequently punctures its performances”(6) focusing on it’s materialities, histories, and socialities. System manipulated to gain access through: illegal pipelines/plumbing, protest/pressure applied to city councillors to redirect water and increase time for neighbourhoods (decreases time elsewhere). Examplifying how this waterway unites/divides/connects/opposes people throughout the city and within the slums. Legal access to water weighs/benefits households beyond their need for water, it provides documentation for them as ‘citizens’ by providing them with governmental paperwork which opens up access to further governmental services- water as symbol beyond its materiality. Uses informant who falls outside of popular imagination of “slum-dweller” to illustrate the socio-political manoeuvrings required to attain water at all, and relentless struggle to gain access. Water infrastructure is cyclical, patchy: work involved in navigating techno-political systems in gaining full access to water, and as in case of informant may seem to never come. Reflects how state sees people, how people view state. Water infrastructure / (movement of water) are forms of ‘becoming’ and open up imagination for new access, places, citizens, temporalities.

Anderson, Sarah. 2016. “Remembering Water: Immigrant water narratives in Waterloo Region.” Thesis, University of Waterloo.

Anderson looks to water narratives of immigrants in order to interrogate cross-cultural meanings (and their changes) of and relationships to water; consider how diverse immigrant experiences can contribute to Canadian water agenda; relationship between movement of people (translocality) and change in understandings of water. Personal emotional/cultural attachments to water brought from place to place – apply meanings and understandings of water to new home in Canada (mantras, prayers, experiences, uses) with also recognition of how water is also held sacred to Indigenous peoples– wanting to learn and respect those cultural understandings. Water narratives show future possibilities for the sacredness of local waters, responsibility for waters, and “community based watery placemaking”. Researcher and participants surprised by the similarity in themes of understandings of water. Perception of polluted waters colours/lessens people’s connections and relationships with water. Water and connection to it a way through which people understand one another and relate. A way through which people create connection and appreciation for differing unknown cultures and see avenues through which strategies for building more supportive cross-cultural understandings.

Brodie, Natalie Jane. 2013. “The San Diego River: an archaeological, historical, and applied anthropological perspective.” Thesis, San Diego State University. 
Using Wittfogel’s (1957) concept of hydraulic society and Strang’s (2004) examination of Stour River, Brodie examines history of San Diego River and its influence on water use in Southern California while also tying water use/policy to city’s future success. Uses archaeological and ethnographic record to examine cultural changes in water use due to environmental changes and Missionization, and later municipal politics. How anthropological theory can comprehensively address to water sustainability policy through marrying archaeology, anthropology and applied anthropological approach. Connectivity between people – shape experiences located at different spatial-temporal locations along waterway. Crops, livestock, invasive species erode/change/overuse waterway; privatization, technologies manipulate river with disregard for Kumeyaay stewardship of river. Looks to past changes in waterscape based on practices to determine future areas (and ways) through which river can be rehabilitated.

Carse, Ashley. 2012. “Nature as infrastructure: Making and managing the Panama Canal watershed.” Social Studies of Science 42 (4): 539-563. doi: 10.1177/0306312712440166 
Carse investigates how a landscape becomes re-organized/re-conceptualized in order to prioritize the mode of production of greatest value. In the case of forests adjacent to the Panama canal – the value of the forest as a watershed drainage basin for the canal (supporting international commercial transportation) outweighs the value of the forest as a piece of shifting landscape integral to swidden landscape (supporting agriculture) and therefore priority: showing how environmental politics are mediated by transportation infrastructure (and international commerce). Political problems on the local level develop out of this shift in integrating the forest into the economy, forestry management (trees older than 5+ years are old growth and not allowed to be cut altering farming practices), charged encounters between farmers and forest guards (former farmers persuaded into this role). Carse shows infrastructure as a process of relationship-building: “dams, locks, and forests are connected and become water management infrastructure through the ongoing work - technical, governmental, and administrative – of building and maintaining the sprawling socio-technical system”(556).

Cattelino, Jessica R. 2015. “The cultural politics of water in the Everglades and beyond (The Lewis Henry Morgan Lecture).” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 5(3): 235-250. 
There are patterns to the way that nature and indigeneity are co-produced. Nature (water) as way to examine processes of settler colonialism: water and settlement; citizenship and sovereignty. Movement of water problematizes ability to govern it: watershed governance rather than water governance- therefore inability to control what happens to water upstream affecting other watersheds. Colonial settlement – changed water/landscape for settlement projects across entire Everglade-scape – and Seminoles forced out of Everglades. Same colonial pattern now pushing settlers out in order to ‘restore’ historic Everglades to their original ‘wilderness’. Catellino finds: “Both indigenous peoples and nature become historical only by becoming less themselves. That is, in this logic both the swamp and Seminole can be ‘improved’ (& thereby eliminated, whether drained or assimilated) they can vanish or hey can be pushed toward fantasy of return to a prior state, but it is seemingly impossible to become more natural or more indigenous than ever before” (248).  Further there is a clear disconnect in understanding of relationships between ecosystems and culture; for example there is understanding of cultural services ecosystem supplies, like drinking water, however failure to understand that the eco-system itself may be cultural to people. Landscapes anthropomorphized prior to contact are understood as wild, untouched, nature. Colonial mentality of untouched prior to contact and European influence is the only factor that has changed/altered.

Chen, Cecilia. 2013. “Mapping Waters: Thinking with Watery Places.” In Thinking with water, edited by C. Chen, J. MacLeod, and A. Neimanis, 289-298. Montreal:McGill-Queen's Press. 
Water often understood as non-place – where one gets lost. Current mapping practices are legacy of cartographic conventions/interests of colonial exploration, which inform what ‘matters’ and limits and constructs relations to/with water. “If we can learn to invoke more inclusively the way that places are shaped through generative relations with water and a community of others, then perhaps we can also enable wiser ways to map and inhabit the world with each other”. (292) Knowledge of water is formed through our uses of it: ie. drinking (tap, well, bottle). Water is more than resource; water is place as well as event, place as permeable and permeated with water. Chen asserts that for more whole mapping of watery places begins by mapping of complex transitional zones where land overlaps with water – a place where there is diversity of life and human relationships with water are “materially revealed”. Using Inuit object maps which communicate sensory experience of travelling along shoreline, Chen relays the importance of sensory and synaesthetic experiences (especially of shoreline) to the mapping of watery places and asserts watery places are intelligible through the cultural knowledge that they contain. Chen suggests a multi-vocal heuristic approach (responsive-improvisational) to mapping watery places, which also questions the conventions of mapping, would include: individual maps part of wider whole; maps of watery place needs multiple perspectives – different uses, temporalities over extended time, synaesthic/sensory aspects, comparison to other maps.

Dawson, Charles. 2016. “Learning with the River.” In Ecological Entanglements in the Anthropocene: Working with Nature, edited by N. Holm and S. Taffel, 35-53. Rowman & Littlefield. 
After 125 years of litigation, claims, and protest the Maori have achieved recognition of their worldviews and treaty rights in New Zealand, through their customary and spiritual values being applied to management and policy surrounding the Whanganui river. Through legislation the river is now acknowledged as a living being and life force that cannot be separated into pieces (riverbed, bank, watershed, etc.). Relationship with the river is therefore recognized and protected as one of guardianship rather than ownership, allowing elders to transmit knowledge of heritage through cultural processes. That is the world can be understood as relational: “Paddling into the past, being controlled by that River-as-ancestor can become a healing act. There are generations of hurt to paddle through” (40). Ensuring the health and continuing flow of the river protects ancestral presence and power, which ensures continuance of ritual and cultural well being of Maori community and culture. Through governmental and Maori monitoring of adherence to recognition of river’s agency people are encouraged to listen to the river. Through this holistic approach to river restoration offers a much-needed shift in implementing practices reconciliation, opening conversations to understand the role and interconnectedness of the river and need to recognize the ways in which rivers and water impact and control human lives.

Driessen, Henk. 2016. “Towards an ethnography of rivers.” In Migration, networks, skills: Anthropological perspectives on mobility and transformation, edited by A. Wonneberger, M. Gandelsman-Trier,and H. Dorsch, 195-208. New York: Columbia University Press.

Driessen provides four elements of the social and cultural lives of rivers: (1) they are vital resources; (2) people have social relationships with rivers as individuals and communities – they play a role in social organization of space; (3) sites of a variety of socio-cultural events; (4) imaginative and symbolic informing worldviews. Various uses and meanings of rivers means that an interplay of economic, political, moral, religious, spiritual, aesthetic, material and legal features structure human-river relationships. “The most basic reason for being a vital force in the lives of communities and societies, apart from functional, material and geo-political ones, may be that rivers have a life of their own with a cycle that is similar to the human cycle” in their course and hydrological cycle (199). Human life greatly impacts river cycles and create meanings: rivers are gendered, personified, and named; they figure in legends, myths, identity formation; they are controlled, manipulated; they are used to think with, a source of imagination, and metaphoric for change and duration of time; water is ambivalent.  

Dudley, Marianna. 2017. “Muddying the waters: recreational conflict and rights of use of British rivers.” Water History 9 (3) : 259-277.

Dudley focuses on the conflict between different recreational users of British rivers. Canoeists campaign for public access use to pass through waterways freely. While anglers (on the river banks) defend a private traditional use that they have paid for the upkeep of the river through the high cost of fishing licenses and perceive the canoeists as damaging to natural river in which no one belongs. Through interrogating the history of river fishing in the UK alongside the more recently introduced canoeing, Dudley questions presence on the river, which reveals the wider implications for British water policy and the ways in which water is (and should) be used. This encounter of conflict marks different conceptualizations of property ownership and public use and highlights property ownership restrictions on the ability of rivers to “flow as dynamic entities in their own right” (265). Canoeists use ideas of hydrocommons and hydrosocial cycle in order to demand a common right to the use of water.

Dudley, Marianna. “River of Many Voices: Oral and Environmental Histories of the Severn.” In Telling Environmental Histories: Intersections of Memory: Narrative and Environment, edited by K. Holmes and H. Goodall, 81-106. Palgrave Macmillan.

Dudley collects oral histories of surfers who ride tidal river waves on the UKs longest river the Severn in order to understand the ways that the bore (tidal wave) has constructed the environment and peoples response to it. Dudley considers Portelli’s work on oral history as perspective rather than facts along with Feld’s theorization on aural elements of sensuous research to deepen knowledge of place. Argues that recreational knowledge informs environmental knowledge and vice versa. Failure to engage in adequate collection of oral history, research is based on 3-hour boat ride and a 2-hour group interview.

Edgeworth, Matt. 2011. Fluid pasts: archaeology of flow. Bristol Classical Press.

Edgeworth lays out reasons for necessity of considering archaeology in understanding physicality and agency of rivers. There are no pristine rivers, riverscapes and their forms represent diverse human-landscape relationships / interactions; water is the “dark matter” of landscapes with little to no attention paid to their influence on wider landscape formations and landscape use. Thus rivers can be understood as artefacts of the ways in which humans have made impacts on and by the flow of water; and are representative of the entanglement of natural and cultural forces. Examples of seemingly small changes / adjustments made to rivers, such as cutting of canals to facilitate efficiency for human usage show wider landscape changes and implications. Cutting of a small canal at Indal River to allow for transportation, drained an entire lake overnight and diverted water away from river course leaving dead falls. Massive human technological intervention is required to slow the inevitable Mississippi usurpation of an adjacent river (as outlined by McPhee in greater detail), which will cause a complete change in river course and demise of major human settlements. Dynamism between human action and river’s response; due to their flow and inability to capture it rivers and their flows set aside as setting rather than having any cultural dimension or significance. Edgeworth provides 6 reasons for bringing rivers (and concept of flow) into archaeological discussions that tend to focus on the solid: rivers are cultural artefacts; rivers are partially wild; human and river activities are intertwined; understanding rivers entails understanding past human activities (and vice versa); due to their danger rivers are good to think with; flow of water provides models for understanding other landscape flows.

Farminer, Andrea Susan. 2013. “People, Rivers and Recreation: Fluid Relationships of Place and Experience on the Clutha River, Otago, New Zealand.” PhD dissertation, University of Otago.

Explores recreation of river in understanding place based experience and meanings, combining recreational experiences, co-constructions of fluid place, and institutional framings of rivers; Farminer acknowledges that accounts of experience are necessary to understanding the co-creation of knowledge and meaning. And determines that recreational focus cannot be separated out from wider lives of individual recreationalists and where they ‘live’. Furthermore, definitions of recreation change based on personal location as well as temporally based on wider socio-economic-political conditions. A focus on recreation exposes how Maori understandings of recreation differ from settler definitions of recreation. At the same time that Maori understandings of recreation support indigenous conceptualizations of place and landscape and highlight the importance of understanding the various interwoven definitions of recreation, Maori traditional lifeways are usurped and conflated with Western definitions of leisure and recreation. Recreation is context specific, wider relationships in life affect and create meaning in recreational-place-meaning making – recreation can not be thought of separately from wider lives. That is lens of recreation provides new angle to consider meanings of ordinary life. Pays particular attention to wider life experiences that colour individual’s perception and experience, and relationships with rivers which in turn shapes meanings. Spatiality, meanings and descriptions of river understood at once as whole (River) and by specific places and segments (Upper River, gap, falls); materiality of river act as spatial, temporal, and symbolic connector of meanings. Physical changes of river, dams, alter the abstract meanings and associations individuals have with place – reveals power of/in management and planning practices to shape meaning of place.

Gagné, Karine and Mattias Borg Rasmussen. 2016. “Introduction–An Amphibious Anthropology: The Production of Place at the Confluence of Land and Water.”Anthropologica 58(2): 135-149.

Following Anthropological inquiry into work considering the necessity of including water to understanding place (Hastrup, Helmreich, Strang), Gagne and Rasmussen note that both land and water exists in concrete and abstract forms; each being conceptualized through different frameworks yet are related through political, economic, environmental changes. Using a Lefebvrian dialectical approach to material and ideological aspects of space, this article considers “amphibious anthropology” that follows movement of water through time and space and how its movement informs ways of knowing land/water. Such considerations highlight: social processes change in materiality of water and places impact humans physically and mentally; relationships to/with water are relational and ever-shifting; merging water and land denaturalizes water and time “as its flow changes, water becomes an explicit dimension of the experience of a place; conversely focusing on the flow of water and concomitant changes in practices and perceptions makes explicit the historical processes that define places.” (141). Knowledge as embedded and situated yet not fixed, knowledge is susceptible to change as places transform: landscapes are altered by shifts in water flow and/or quality, in turn causing different knowledge systems to encounter and interact.

Harris, Mark. 2016. “Finding Connections Along the River in the Lower Amazon, Brazil.” In Knowledge in Motion: Constellations of Learning across Time and Place, edited by, A. Roddick and A. Stahl, 155-178. University of Arizona Press.

Looks to the strong constant presence of the Amazon river and uses Ingold’s concept of taskscape to understand the transmission, maintenance, and building of knowledge, skills, and materials inter-generationally that includes the physical environment as a subject. There are spatial and temporal orientations and patternings to be learned from the river in order to live: it is an archive of skills, memories, and knowledge. People’s common interactions with the river create mutual understandings and connections among the people who live with the river. Harris looks to different nodes along the river as bundles from which ways of learning proliferated and were shared across river as a way to understand Amazonians mechanisms of resistance against colonialism and assertion of lifeways. Cross-cultural bundles were drawn together through materials, beliefs, perceptions, etc. from combinations of Indigenous, European, and African traditions. He looks to river, and movement through it, as a subject in the formation of regional culture. River is understood as a teacher and source of knowledge that can not be controlled or fully understood. Individuals continually look to river to learn to live with its fluctuations and processes throughout life. Knowledge and engagement of river is what connects people; people don’t teach others about the river you learn about river from river itself.  Paddling river as of source of knowledge about how to live with the physicality of the river, but also different people along river. Paddling on through the water reveals kinship and economic ties. The river and paddling it is an embodied source of knowledge that connects past and present histories and shapes spatial-temporal realities. The river is at the centre of understanding cultural reality spatially and temporally, but also as a source of knowing how to be and live.

Hastrup, Kirsten. 2013. “Water and the configuration of social worlds: An anthropological perspective.” Journal of Water Resource and Protection 5(4): 59-70.

Hastrup highlights the how Anthropological perspectives destabilize reifications of water (and its processes) as natural; and argues that water is central to understanding dynamism of social world. Water is more than a natural resource it configures society processes and generates cultural values. Generalized scientific understands the hydrological cycle as a stable model that operates outside of the human realm. However, water isn’t an abstraction, people interact / influence / interfere with hydrological cycle with water in its many different forms; the meanings and experiences people have with water has a shifting omnipresence. Water is something that is used and also has agency; “on an immediate level of perception, it makes life possible, which in some way blurs the boundary between nature and infrastructure” (60). Water is creative and destruction, it has multitude of imaginative implications. Following a river reveals the transformation of water: from wild, to being controlled and stored (or commoditized as water supply), to irrigation for farmlands, to industrial production, distribution, recreation, and its shifting values create different pressures on the materiality of water as well as social tensions. Hastrup uses Carse’s example of canals to further how water (and use of it) informs value systems. Social lives (and inequalities) centre around wells / groundwater are nodal points in global flows of virtual water – used for production that will be consumed elsewhere – obfuscates water consumption.

Helmreich, Stefan. 2011. “Nature/culture/seawater.” American Anthropologist 113(1): 132-144. 
Seawater is at the same time substance and symbol (and oscillates between) in anthropological social theory. Meaning is derived from its form, thus different forms of water (river, lakes, etc.) should be accounted for separately. Early anthropology describes aesthetics of water; maritime anthropology understands materiality. Currently techno-scientific descriptions, influenced by understandings of water as constant, inform socio-poli-economics dealings of/with water. That is water is used as a theory machine, an object foundational to theories of cultural organization; it is framed by and frames notions of nature / culture. Helmreich argues that, like theory, seawater both exists in the world and is an abstraction. He demands that water be examined through athwart theory: a “tacking back and forth between seeing theories as explanatory tools and taking them as phenomena to be examined” where meaning and materiality are intertwined. Differentiations of culture and nature need to be refused, requiring Anthropologists to examine how water is used as a theory machine.

Krause, Franz, and Veronica Strang. 2016. “Thinking relationships through water.” Society & Natural Resources 29(6): 633-638. 
Krause and Strange consider water beyond its role as natural / economic resource but understands the meanings and flows of water being co-constituted through multiple interactive social and material forces. Water is both the “materiality of social relations as well as sociality of material relations” (634). Three strengths of thinking relationships through water: analysis - integrating the social and material worlds of nexus of human-water encounter, for instance hydro-social rather than hydrologic cycle; politics - focus on relations rather than divisions allows critique and understanding of political sensitivities and ethical dimensions including ecological and non-human; policy and practice – enables better management of material infrastructures that take into account the social effects of hydrological events. Drinking water as temporal process intersecting with personal / economic aspirations; water supply received not just through nodes of access but also through governmental relations; moralities as well as infrastructure allocate water supply.

Mason, Amanda. 2005. “Applied anthropology and heritage tourism planning: working for the western Erie canal heritage corridor planning commission.” Annals of Anthropological Practice 23(1): 151-169. 
In planning of tourism for a canal as a heritage corridor needs of local community first need to be addressed and developed to improve quality of life locally. Regional collaboration to revitalize an early 19^th century infrastructure to generate economic and social movement again through tourism instead of previous life used for commercial purposes. Before creating tourism management plan of the canal, applied Anthropologists set out to understand locals’ conceptualizations of heritage and construction of place-making of the canal. Heritage corridor or heritage canal a site of economic downturn through what is known and understood as the rust-belt – heritage sanctioned by government in a place to stimulate local economy, how then is memory of as well as representation constructed and which stories of the canal get obscured in the heritage narrative.

McLean, Jessica. 2017. “Water cultures as assemblages: Indigenous, neoliberal, colonial water cultures in northern Australia.” Journal of Rural Studies 52: 81-89. 
The physical and cultural dimensions of water, along with its materiality and immateriality, are entangled in ways that produce connections between humans and water; what McLean calls water cultures. Water cultures are assemblages that are perpetually being made: colonial water cultures, Indigenous water culture; conservation water culture, etc. and vary through time. A focus on water culture rather than hydro-social cycles highlights engagements with water across water cultures while unsettling nature/culture binary. Examining water cultures as assemblages allows identification of the practices and forces that produce divergent water relations and shows how power flows with water. Water cultures are derivative of power relations.

McPhee, John. 1989. “Atchafalaya” In, The Control of Nature, 3-94. Macmillan. 
McPhee interrogates human persistence to utilize and control the Mississippi river despite the river’s agency and inevitability to shift. A canal was dug in order to shorten river course for steamboat operators, which quickly lead to a shift in its course and the alteration of two adjacent rivers. US Marine Corps engineers have steadily fought the Mississippi to slow down the inescapable future wherein it usurps the Atchafalaya river, and changes the course of the Mississippi and shifts the delta. Billions of dollars have been spent to delay the future wherein millions of Americans are displaced from farmlands surrounding the river and in delta cities such as New Orleans. The biggest oversight is and has been understandings that the Mississippi is one solid river with one natural course; the fact that humans have tried (and continue to try) to restrict the Mississippi to this one course is where the issues lay.  McPhee’s chapter highlights the agency of nature and human arrogance in asserting control over nature for their own needs, rather than understanding the characteristics of the river (and nature) as living being with own agency for change.

Mishler, Craig, and William E. Simeone. 2004. Han, people of the river: Hän hwëch'in: an ethnography and ethnohistory. University of Alaska Press. 
Written in a classic ethnographic style, this text details the lives and history of Han hwëch’in (literal translation people of the Han river) who reside in what is known as in present day Yukon Territory and Alaska. Traditional life centres on the river and its use; the text focuses on modes of subsistence, trade, kinship, economy, seasonal rounds, et cetera. However, the river is merely the setting for practices related to sustenance and transport, but never recognized as anything more. There is a lack of description of river itself, or what Han hwëch’in perspectives and relationships on/with the river are. The text neglects to interrogate the interrelationship between the people of the river and the river itself.

Perry, Simona Lee. 2009.  More than one river: Local, place-based knowledge and the political ecology of restoration and remediation along the Lower Neponset River, Massachusetts. PhD Dissertation, University of Massachusetts Amherst. 
Perry interrogates social constructions of sense of place as the root of conflicts in the planning implementation and monitoring of restoration of nature. She views the Lower Neponset River restoration project through a political-ecology framework to complicate interpretations of restoration. Planners, scientists, engineers (experts and policy makers) fail to acknowledge the multiplicity of interpretations of / relationships to place: Native American, colonial & industrial histories; economic development; ecological resources and services; recreation; danger; refuge; aesthetics; remembrance. Different people have different meanings; individuals hold multiple interpretations dependent on site and social situation.  Personal meanings affect interpretations of meaning of restoration: of what; to when; through what means? Perry used printed maps, walks along and canoe paddles on the river to elicit interpretations of river to create local storylines, a taxonomy of narratives and their divergences, which revealed associated interpretive environmental communities that form around the values and beliefs that shift with economy, politics, and ecology. These were mapped spatially using GIS technology in order to identify 6 hot-spots of policy debate (and conflict of meaning); one layer physical features referred to in storylines, the other places of socio-political environmental conflict. Spatial representations reveal patterns of convergence and divergence between interpretive communities; concepts of nature and how it should be controlled or respected is what bounds interpretations. Perry shows river is more than biophysical place but also shapes and shaped by (personal and collective) socio-cultural meanings, which influences past present and future of what river is / should be.

Rademacher, Anne. 2011. “Introduction: A riverscape undone” In Reigning the river: urban ecologies and political transformation in Kathmandu, 1-41. Durham: Duke University Press. Rademacher considers the political and environmental transformations of Kathmandu by looking to the polluted Bagmati river which has been widely understood as locals as the failure of democracy to fulfil its promises, following its instatement after the country’s rule by monarchy. The state of the river is understood as a symptom of cultural, religious, and national disorder. Various understandings of the form and function of river exist which make it a site for contestation over ideas of housing rights, ritual access, and ecosystem integrity. Radmacher understands that “modern ecology formed discursive and practical terrain for both a state seeking to retain its legitimacy and for those who sought to challenge or reshape that very state” (15). She looks to how social processes effect considerations for / of particular ‘biophysical contours’ of the river, which in turn inform how ecological problem is defined and engaged with. That is the riverscape, which can be considered a “facet of urban nature” is constructed by the entanglement of cultural and biophysical processes influenced by multiple social dimensions. Rademacher recognizes the contestation of the term urban ecology itself and its range of implications and thus works with  three main groups attempting to control over the restoration of the river: state and development experts; cultural heritage experts focused on religious aspects of river’s heritage; housing advocates for ‘illegal’ squatters along riverbanks. Interplay of cultural meaning, history, and territorial belonging inform how urban nature, the riverscape, is understood and experienced. Interrogates constellation of viewpoints spatially and temporally to understand the issue and how it mirrors issues concerning the larger state of Nepal.

Rasmussen, Mattias Borg 2015. “Deep Time and Shallow Waters: configurations of an irrigation channel in the Andes.” In Waterworlds: Anthropology in fluid environments, edited by K. Hastrup and F. Hastrup, 203-218. Berghahn Books. 
Rasmussen interrogates how flows of water are both embedded in and configure time, and asserts that water and time are linked through personal actions, technology, expansion, construction, maintenance, and local governance. He looks to the irrigation channels in the Andes for the ways that they trace different historical eras through examining: (1) the interplay of individual strategies with the range of collective temporal strategies to manage water use. Using Ingold’s concept of taskscape he suggests that the temporality of water (levels, availability) offers foundation for understanding the ways social, political and economic activities of Andeans relate to one another. That is temporalities emerge at the interplay between human and non-human movement. (2) How temporality of water management practices call upon different pasts and futures to reconstitute the present. The manipulation of water flows affects more water management practices, but also influences spatial and temporal imaginations. 

Rodriguez, Sylvia. 2008. Acequia: Water Sharing, Sanctity, and Place. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research. 
Rodriguez looks at water irrigation infrastructure in New Mexico as both physical and cultural system in context of wider issues of water crisis. Acequia divides and distributes water through series of ditches and canals, this is shared and allocated based on complex interconnection of moral, religious, and cultural principles of the acequia community; that is it is not simply an irrigation infrastructural system but a site through which cultural values are practiced and lived. Multiple players involved in controlling and managing the water and infrastructure of the acequia, Native Americans, Hispanic Acequia association, township of Taos, and water management district. The foundational principle asserts that everyone gets water however how this translates into practice is flexible and varied depending on geographic, social, and hydrological factors – through understanding the infrastructure itself Anthropologists can then begin to understand organization of people around it and only then general water use. She focuses on religious activities of Hispano, including prayers and processions, in order to show how morality is embedded and embodied in place, which serves as enforcement of moral economy of water distribution and sharing. Rodriguez asserts that struggles over land and water rights construct Indian and Hispano identities. However, she fails to interrogate the struggles between these two peoples throughout her work, likely due to the fact that Hispano Acequia Association commissioned her work.

Slater, Lisa. 2013. “‘Wild rivers, wild ideas’: emerging political ecologies of Cape York Wild Rivers.” Environment and Planning: Society and Space 31(5): 763-778. 
Slater examines on-going settler colonialism in the processes of land management, environmentalism, and conservation through using the example of Australia’s Wild Rivers Act. She uses Latour’s concept of assemblage to consider debates surrounding the Act that protects near natural rivers from development, what it conceals, and the political ecologies that emerge. In order to take an anti-colonial stance, she centres rivers as socio-political actors in interrogating the contentious debate between the traditional ‘owners’ for and against the act, which is misrepresented, by government, as being between regional focus on the future versus a local focus on traditions. Denying existence of entanglements of human and non-human world as well as recognition to traditionalists’ creation of new political practices, which have shifted understandings of river as more than social but political actor. Together environmentalism and conservation dispossess Aboriginal people from place, while prevention of development keeps Aboriginal people in state of poverty and suffering. Slater sees rivers as sites of sustaining and reproducing diverse worlds and life ways, with the adage that rivers are entangled in both human and non-human social relationships that colonial states do not perceive or recognize. Like Perry, need to recognize the multiplicity of realities that inhabit and are embedded in place.

Strang, Veronica. 2005. “Water works: agency and creativity in the Mitchell River catchment.” The Australian Journal of Anthropology 16(3): 366-381.

Strang asserts that ethnographers need to question the meanings implicit in humanizations of landscapes and resources. A deep focus on social value of water and rivers is necessary to understand how and why water is used in different ways, as well as issues related to its management and ownership. Inherent meanings of water, as both “the material basis for and expression of human and environmental regeneration… [and] as generative basis of wealth and health” (367), carry cross-culturally however, specific interpretations are socially constructed within particular contexts. Differential assignment of value to various aspects of the water cycle and waterscapes, create different notions of productivity, thus causing conflict between different stakeholders concerning relationships with the water and watershed. Strang asserts that this conflict over water reflects wider political debate over definitions of private versus public ownership of goods, and whether individuals or communities should hold rights to land and water resources; ultimately revealing tensions between individual and societal needs. Strang asserts that interrogation of water use and management reveals expressions of identity, agency and power.

Strang, Veronica. 2014. “Fluid consistencies. Material relationality in human engagements with water.” Archaeological dialogues 21(2): 133-150. 
Strang uses water as a site to think though understandings of the relationship between and entanglement of material things and social processes. Water connects multiple scales and levels of things and processes: microbes to humans to ecosystems across time, through different forms; “all things – and living kinds – are dynamically composed of flows of condensed matter”(135). Affective relations: Water and its use is encoded with specific meaning in its practical use of its materiality. Dissolves theoretical divides between analyses of material culture and abstract views of human beings are bound in webs of life with other organisms. Water and agency: “a repudiation of human-centred views, and an acknowledgement that material things have a role in forming human-non-human relationships and engendering meanings, offer a compelling logic that their capacities to do so must necessarily cross cultural boundaries and persist over time.” (140). – life generating life connecting source. Materializing justice: multiplicity of effects of water on people and environment. Harnessing of potentiality serves human interests and makes it a resource. Resourcing water: water as resource assumes human agency and control. Dynamic and mutually constitutive relationships between humans and water. Flowing through: follow flow to articulate material relationality. Water drawn into socio-technical systems drinking water water supplies. Connects but implicit in regimes of inclusion / exclusion. Transpiration: evaporation – movement/ use for plants. Growing crop. Allocaton of water via rights. Dehydration: privitization of water impact democracy – disenfranchisement of all but powerful international elite of water owners and political decision makers. International relations: “I would suggest that it is precisely this imaginative capacity for varying degrees of distance and reflexivity that enables people to shift conceptual scales, and thus to connect immediate human-environmental interactions with wider, global flows”(149). What I hope this paper has shown is that a focus on the materiality of water and its particular properties enables us to bring human and non-human systems on various scales together coherently, recognizing an interconnected flow of events in which persons, ideas and things work upon and compose each other in ways that are both fluid and consistent.

Whetung, Madeline. 2016. “Nishnaabeg Encounters: Living Indigenous Landscapes.” Thesis, University of Toronto. 
Whetung applies Sarah Hunt’s concept of colonialscape to approaching research in her Nishnaabeg ancestral homeland surrounding what is now known as the Trent-Severn Waterway (TSW), which is understood as colonial project “highway” to encourage settlement on Indigenous lands. Indigenous peoples feel boundaries vertically as opposed to how settlers see boundaries horizontally, that is all territory is Nishnaabeg but Canada covers / squashes out Nishnaabeg presence and relegates Indigenous territory to an outside/other space. Whetung’s embodied approach to research: allows building of relationship to / understanding of landscape, paddling on the TSW reveals how Indigenous presence make Indigenous landscape visible, popping through the layers of  “Canada” stamped across landscape; enables her to recognize place and ancestor’s presence on it by connecting with same waters and water routes. In the same vein as Leanne Simpson’s work she tells stories of being in place in order to consider the living Nishnaabeg land/water scape. Though, she finds even the use of her canoe labelled as “Canadian” rather than traditionally Nishnaabeg. Finds how her use of waterway is allowed and acceptable so long as she is moving through it, and carefully planned her canoe trip for personal safety in regards to mooring/camping. That is to stop to engage in cultural practices, such as wild rice cultivation seen as countervailing property ownership. Research brings to fore understandings of land/water ownership; Nishnaabeg conceptualization of land does not include water, whereas Canadian legal tradition assumes that land referenced in treaties include water.

Wilson, Nicole. 2012. “Human Ecological Dimensions Of Change In The Yukon River Basin: A Case Study Of The Koyukon Athabascan Village Of Ruby, Ak.” Thesis, University of Alaska.

Wilson highlights the connections between Indigenous knowledge, subsistence livelihoods, socio-cultural and ecological relations to water and the assertion of Indigenous sovereignty, she uses participatory research approach in order to care for the relationships that inform knowledge and meaning making as well as the act of research. Her project was designed in order to serve the needs of members of the community with whom she was working, thus Wilson documented peoples’ observations of changes in the local ecology along with the implications these present for human-ecological relationships. The hydrological changes of the Yukon River were recorded with attention to the wider context of climate change in terms of both community adaptation and historical perspectives. Documentation reveals the failure of techno-science to adequately recognize the extent of climate change, and also demonstrates the necessity to examine historical perspectives on adaptations to understand the current political context of adaptations to climate change. Finally, Wilson’s research affirms that water sovereignty is entrenched in human ecology. That is factors beyond legal rights including cultural opportunities; ecological knowledge and possibility are required in the assertion of water sovereignty.