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Waters in the Plural: Approaches and opportunities for more grounded research and management

Les eaux au pluriel : approches et opportunités pour une recherche et une gestion plus fondées
Jamie Linton

Résumés

Cet article répond aux appels à une recherche sur l'eau plus ancrée et territorialisée en mettant en évidence des approches d'étude des eaux au pluriel. Depuis quelques années, les chercheurs s'intéressent de plus en plus à la pluralité des cultures aquatiques et à l'hétérogénéité des eaux. Cet intérêt peut être opposé aux approches qui reflètent une notion singulière de l'eau qui a dominé la recherche moderne sur l'eau et la gestion de l'eau. Cette notion singulière de l'eau, et les pratiques de recherche et de gestion qui en découlent, rendent toutes les eaux essentiellement identiques, quelles que soient les circonstances historiques/sociales/géographiques dans lesquelles elles se produisent. L'article retrace brièvement le développement de cette idée moderne de l'eau ainsi que les circonstances qui ont suscité un intérêt croissant pour l'étude des eaux multiples. Nous discutons de deux manières distinctes de comprendre ce que l'on entend par référence aux eaux au pluriel en distinguant la relativité culturelle - qui repose sur des perceptions ou des interprétations différentes de la réalité sous-jacente de l'eau - et le pluralisme ontologique, dans lequel l'essence de l'eau elle-même diffère en relation avec aux circonstances dans lesquelles il se produit. L'article examine des exemples de recherche sur l'eau dans les sciences sociales et humaines au cours des 20 dernières années qui ont attiré l'attention sur ces deux façons de comprendre les eaux multiples et discute de certaines des opportunités pour une recherche plus approfondie associée à ces développements.

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Introduction

1In a recent (August, 2021) editorial in the journal Nature Sustainability, the editors stated that “water studies research has become…stagnant”, noting “the thematic repetitiveness of studies” and stressing their “concern that water studies as a field may have largely given up on historical context and institutional change, suggesting that as water studies has become more quantified and technically driven, it has also become less grounded (Nature Sustainability, 2021). The parallels between this statement and the call for contributions to this issue of Geocarrefour, suggest a widely-perceived need, within anglophone and francophone research communities, for alternative, more “grounded” (ibid.) approaches “to think about the territorialized management of water and aquatic environments” and to “spatially represent and analyze the links between societies and aquatic environments” (Rivière-Honegger and Ghiotti, 2021). In response to this declaration/call, the present article is intended to contribute to a growing discussion among researchers in the social sciences and humanities concerning the plurality and the heterogeneity of different waters occurring in different places, times and socioecological contexts. This turn towards multiple waters represents a shift in attention towards the historical, geographical and cultural circumstances in which different waters occur, effectively “grounding” or “reterritorializing” water and water studies in their specific historical, social and geographical contexts.

2Introducing a recent special issue of the journal Water Alternatives, published on the theme “Parsing the politics of singular and multiple waters”, Lindsay Vogt and Casey Wash reported that “numerous scholars have recently pointed out the thriving heterogeneity of waters and water cultures”, and argued that “the processes through which water is made homogenous or heterogeneous (or both) are distinctly political (Vogt and Walsh, 2021, p. 1). The political aspect of these debates needs to be stressed: the way water is defined in any particular instance – what water is understood to be – has important implications, as might be inferred from considering the various outcomes of considering and reproducing water primarily as a public good, a commodity, a resource, a vital component of the environment, or a living being. The present article builds on Vogt and Walsh’s work by contextualizing the growing interest of scholars in multiple waters within the broader field of water research over the past couple of decades, discussing what is meant by considering waters in the plural, and offering ideas on how attention to multiple waters might help ground water research and management.

3The recent attention given to multiple, heterogeneous waters alluded to by Vogt and Walsh is remarkable because, for the most part, we have tended to talk, read, and write about, use, and manage water in the singular, as an entity that is fundamentally timeless and placeless. This modern idea of water as essentially one and the same thing in all ecological, geographical, historical, and cultural contexts, has a history. In order to appreciate the significance of the growing attention being paid to multiple waters, a brief discussion of this history is provided in Section II of this article, as well as a discussion of factors that have contributed towards a critique of this essentialist conception of water. Section III follows with a discussion of some of the recent work that has drawn out the idea that waters differ from one place and occasion to another, focusing on research in anthropology, history, critical geography and political ecology. While water scientists, engineers and managers have always been attentive to how water differs from one instance to another, the application of qualitative methods used in the social sciences and humanities draws out the sense and social significance by which waters differ among themselves. Two ways of understanding hydrological heterogeneity are discussed in Section IV. For the most part, when speaking of different waters, we refer to various ways that people have perceived, known and represented water. This approach – which could be described in terms of cultural relativism – presumes that there is a single underlying water-reality, and that the differences we observe as researchers can be understood as alternative perspectives, interpretations or worldviews of this underlying reality. While this approach perhaps constitutes the bulk of the research on multiple waters that has taken place in the social sciences, a different approach describes various waters as ontologically-different. By this, the different waters reported by people in their various hydrosocial relations refer not to different representations of water but to different underlying realities of water itself. Following these discussions, the conclusion of the paper offers thoughts about how giving attention to waters in the plural might constitute something of an approach in itself to encourage more grounded, territorialized water research.

Modern Water and its critics

4Twenty years ago, the historian of science, technology and medicine, Christopher Hamlin, published an article that might be considered to have set off subsequent research and reflection on the notion of multiple waters. Titled “‘Waters: or ’Water’? Master narratives in water history and their implications for contemporary water policy” (2000) Hamlin’s article drew from his research in the history of water analysis in relation to the history of mineral waters in Europe to describe a transition, starting around the end of the 18th century. This transition was from an empirical emphasis on diverse “premodern waters”, to use Hamlin’s term, which were regarded as heterogeneous entities exhibiting different properties and qualities, to a modern “essentialist conception of water itself” (ibid., p. 315). An important moment in this transition occurred in the laboratory of the proto-chemist, Antoine Lavoisier, who had proven in the mid-18th century that all the various substances hitherto considered different waters, could be reduced to a single entity; a compound of oxygen and hydrogen:

A richer and deeper range of conceptions of water and its effects on the body existed before the achievements of Lavoisier et al. A paradigm shift in the concept of water occurred . . . in which water went from a class of infinitely varied substances to a monolithic substance containing a greater or lesser concentration of adventitious ingredients... That premodern paradigm... was more interested in how waters were different than in the ways they were the same . . . Waters were aspects of the histories of places. Although there were general types, there was also a sense of infinite variation ; waters had qualities or properties that went far beyond taste and salubrity and even beyond the poorly marked borders of the natural. (Hamlin 2000, p. 135).

5That premodern waters were “aspects of the histories of places” and that they had qualities that transcended “the poorly marked borders of the natural” is important when considering how they differed from the modern “essentialist conception of water itself” which followed the advancements of scientific chemistry. By our modern definition, the very nature of water is understood as that to which all waters can be reduced. Of course, all waters could and can be reduced to the essence identified as the compound of hydrogen and oxygen, H2O, but it is just this urge to make such a reduction that characterizes the modern view of water (Linton, 2010, p. 18).

6Thus the shift from the premodern paradigm to the modern water paradigm was partly the product of an epistemological revolution ; it occurred as a consequence of a particular way of knowing and representing water in modern scientific practice – a practice that presumed a fundamental separation between the natural and the social. However, while the achievements of Lavoisier and other proto-chemists helped effect the paradigm shift described by Hamlin, the growing dominance of “water” in the singular reflected the interplay of many factors. Principle among these was the rise of the modern state, and large cities, which involved the control and manipulation of water on an unprecedented scale (c.f. Worster, 1985; Goubert, 1989; Swingedouw, 1999; Bakker, 2003). The quest for such control and manipulation of water went hand in hand with the advancement of water science and engineering practices that had the effect of rendering all waters commensurable and reducible either to a ‘hazard’ (in the case of floods) or to a ‘resource’ susceptible to ‘development’ and ‘management (Aspe 1999).

  • 1 Jeremy Schmidt has developed the alternative concept of “normal water”, albeit with a different his (...)
  • 2 This is my translation of the original : “[L]es sociétés modernes ont généré un système de re (...)

7In his classic study, Seeing Like a State, James C. Scott drew from examples in the Americas, Europe and Africa to describe how the modern state gains command of vastly complex systems, simplifies and makes them “legible” by reducing them to terms that are actionable by government agencies (Scott, 1998). Thus, the physical environment, as well as people, have been brought under regimes of rational, centralized knowledge and control. It is significant that Scott’s thesis was partly inspired by his study of the control of water within the Tennessee Valley Authority, which Scott describes as “the United States’ high modernist experiment and the granddaddy of all regional development projects” (ibid., 6). A prerequisite to the control of water by the modern state was making all the various waters within a given territory commensurate, a process that involves first, the reduction of different waters to a common entity so that they might be more easily compared by measurement, quantified and accounted for (Espeland, 1998). The kind of water – homogeneous, uniform, commensurable -- that emerged from these scientific and administrative processes has been described as “modern water”, the dominant, or hegemonic, way of knowing and relating to water, originating in Europe and operating – often via processes of colonization and imperialism – on a global scale by the late 20th century (Linton, 2010). A feature of modern water has been to divorce the world’s various waters from their local, social, cultural, religious, and ecological contexts, and to reduce them to an identical, placeless substance, thus facilitating modern practices of water management and control. (Linton, 2010; 2014).1 As described by the sociologist/anthropologist Bernard Kalaora, “[M]odern societies have generated a system of representations and values where water is considered as an external, chemical object (H2O), a trivialized, mechanized, secularized product (no longer sacred…), which is available at will and whose resourcefulness seems inexhaustible and controllable by existing techniques” (Kalaora, 2001)2

8Bringing water under control in this way has produced important benefits, allowing billions access to water supplies in cities (Goubert, 1989) and providing enormous volumes of water for the agricultural and industrial activities that support modern economies, while limiting damage from floods. Despite these successes, anomalies in the modern water paradigm began appearing in the latter part of the twentieth century, with for example growing concerns for the social and ecological effects of large dams and water diversions (Goldsmith and Hildyard, 1984). These developments had the effect of shifting attention from the purely hydrological concerns of modern water towards water’s ecological, social, cultural and political aspects and implications. The now-familiar concept of Integrated Water Resources Management, which gained international currency in the 1990s, suggested that the dominant idea of water was becoming less homogeneous and more complicated inasmuch as it was based on the perception of water as an integral part of the ecosystem, a natural resource, and a social and economic good” (Gleick et al., 2002, p.38).

9Meanwhile, in more critical academic circles, modern water came under question as part of a general reassessment of the idea of nature in Western thought, especially in terms of its conceptual separation from humanity and human society. Writing in 1995, environmental historian William Cronon noted that the work of scholars in various fields over the past several decades had yielded « abundant evidence that “nature” is not nearly so natural as it seems. Instead, it is a profoundly human construction » (Cronon, 1995, p.24). This theme was taken up by geographers, applying a variety of theoretical and empirical approaches to elaborate on the sense in which nature is “indeed social through and through,” to quote Bruce Braun and Noel Castree (Braun and Castree, 1998, p.xiii.). Applied to water, growing emphasis on its social content helped give rise to the increasing application of methods employed in the social sciences and humanities, giving attention to aspects of the various histories and meanings of water in different times and places, and among different segments of society (e.g. Strang, 2004). In their introduction to a collection of papers published on the history of water, Terje Tvedt and Terje Oestigaard declared : « Water is both a natural and a social reality, which challenges traditional understandings in both the natural and social sciences. In nature and society water is not a single phenomenon but has many manifestations and meanings (Tvedt and Oestigaard,2006, p. xiv, my emphasis). Thus, with greater attention given to the social dimensions of nature, the particularities of different waters, which had always been recognized in a physical and practical sense, began to be more appreciated in a social and cultural sense. (Linton, 2010, p.4-5)

Multiple Waters

10Even at the height of modernity, when water was generally reduced to “an external, chemical object (H2O), a trivialized, mechanized, secularized product” to repeat Kalaora’s phrase, it is evident that particular waters never entirely disappeared. As Vogt and Walsh point out, “The rise of modern waters did not eradicate the varied, specific 'waters' that exist in one place or another and are used, experienced, and conceptualised in particular waysAlongside and within the uniform liquid that is concocted with uneven success by techniques of dispossession, large scale modern infrastructure, science and the modern ideals underpinning water resource management, there are [sic] a multitude of heterogeneous waters that continue to thrive” (2021, p. 3, 5). To cite a couple of well-known examples, one needs only consider the grotto at Lourdes (France), to which several million pilgrims flock every year, returning with their precious bottles of holy water, or the waters of the Ganges River in India, which Hindus regard as the embodiment of sacredness and treat with equal reverence.

11As noted above, a growing awareness, over the past few decades, of the ecological and social costs of modern water has undoubtedly contributed to the recent wave of interest among researchers in multiple waters. Another important factor has been the revendications of marginalized and subaltern peoples who always resisted modern water, expressed in postcolonial movements and in work by Indigenous scholars (see below). Taken altogether, it could be argued that the recent attention to the variety of waters, to the geographical, place-based and socionatural processes and circumstances of their becoming, and to their various political, social, and ecological effects, constitutes something of an emerging approach among water researchers in the social sciences and humanities.

12Much of the recent interest in multiple waters draws from work that emphasizes what can be described as the social nature of water, and in particular the political dimensions and implications of different representations and framings of water and water issues. One of the strongest critiques of homogenous modern water has been of its capacity to depoliticize water-related problems by allowing for them to be understood and framed as technical and managerial issues: Water is not about water. Water is about building people’s institutions and power to take control over decisions (WaterWorld, 2005). This statement, by Sunita Narain, head of the Centre for Science and Environment, on the occasion of her accepting the 2005 Stockholm Water Prize, reflects a dissatisfaction, growing since at least the beginning of the present century, with dominant water-management discourses. Critical water scholars working mainly in geography and political ecology, have responded by showing how, in every instance, water problems are fundamentally social and political in nature, thus pointing to the need to consider “the social nature of water itself” (Wesselink et al., 2017, p.7).

13Attention to water’s social nature enlivens ‘water’ so as to reveal its particularities in any given place and context. In a deliberate effort to dissolve the homogeneity of modern water, the concept of the “hydrosocial cycle” was introduced as “a socio-natural process by which water and society make and remake each other over space and time” (Linton and Budds, 2014, p.170; see also Budds 2009). Water flows in the hydrosocial cycle, but so do the political, cultural and social factors that make water what it is -- e.g. as a commodity, a public good, a sacred substance, a resource, an object of reverence, etc. -- in any particular set of circumstances. Within the hydrosocial cycle, water is no one thing; different waters are instantiated in different contextual circumstances that could be described as both social and natural:

“The hydrosocial cycle demands that we ask what water is [original emphasis]. This ontological question builds on theoretical work in dialectical and relational thought that draw attention to how the nature of water internalizes social relations. The hydrosocial cycle is a process that relates water and society internally, which implies the presence of different waters in different assemblages of social circumstances.” (Linton and Budds 2014, p.179)

14As the qualitative and critical methods of the social sciences and humanities are brought to bear upon water and water issues, the existence of multiple waters becomes not only apparent, but impossible to ignore. As Andrea Ballestero concludes when summarizing recent anthropological research: “In the twenty-first century, anthropological thinking about water will take the concept of multiplicity as an analytic starting point rather than as a revelation” (Ballestero, 2019, p.406). This assessment builds on a wealth of anthropological research revealing, for example, how different meanings of water emerge in different social relationships (Strang, 2004; Krause and Strang 2016) and the variety of “waterworlds” wherein different waters and societies/cultures coproduce one other (Hastrup and Hastrup eds., 2015), to cite two of the better-known examples. Such approaches arise especially out of appreciation of the important social implications of different waters. The methods employed to draw out these implications flow from questions such as those posed by John Donahue and Barbara Rose Johnston:

What different cultural meanings does water have for the contending parties, and how do these meanings complicate mediation among the various interests ? How are some social actors able to impose their definition of water on other social actors with different but equally legitimate definitions ? In other words, how is power used in the service of one or another of the cultural definitions of water ? (Donahue and Johnston, 1998, p.339)

15Attention to the variety of hydrosocial relations, and how they give rise to different waters, is also reflected in the application of historical methods to water, as noted above. And at least since 2000, geographers and others applying interpretive methods to studies of water management have shown an increasing awareness of the importance of heterogeneous waters. To cite an example of this sort of work, drawing on her fieldwork in central Australia, Leah Gibbs, notes: “I quickly came to learn that water isn’t just water. River water, rain water, bore water, all have different values, and at a more subtle level, in-channel flow and overland flow; soaking rain, light steady rain and follow-up rain…This level of descriptionreveals connections between water, place, temporality, scale, change, difference and the intimate locally specific knowledge of water and its effects held by people in the Basin” (Gibbs, 2006, p. 77).

Culturally-relative vs. ontologically-different waters?

16In this section, we consider two ways of approaching the question of hydrological heterogeneity, or what is meant by referring to different “waters”. Both these approaches are valid for researchers, although they involve different methods, as discussed below and in the conclusion.

17Many of the examples cited in the previous section reflect researchers’ interests in how water holds different meanings, definitions, and values or how it is understood differently, for and by different people at different times. Such research implicitly or explicitly upholds what might be called the culturally-relative particularity of water/s. Until recently, this has been the approach taken by most researchers. By such an approach, the various meanings, interpretations, or worldviews attached to water by different people in different places or historical circumstances are studied in relation to social and cultural factors. This approach retains the notion of a basic underlying reality that may be perceived, understood, or interpreted in different ways by different people, with the difference explained in terms of cultural variability (cf. Ingold, 2013, pp. 19-25). Thus, as an example, water may be understood primarily as a ‘resource’ by most of the descendants of the European colonizers of Canada, while some traditional First Nations (Indigenous) peoples in Canada might understand it as a living entity (Wilson et al., 2019, p. 624), sometimes described as “lifeblood” (Yates, Harris and Wilson 2017) or “blood of life” (Blackstock, 2001, p. 4, 12). In culturally-relative terms, both water-as-resource and water-as-lifeblood are valid and interesting to us researchers in the sense that they can be considered variations or interpretations of the underlying reality of water, which we generally take to be a compound of hydrogen and oxygen, as represented in any standard dictionary definition of water. That all possible meanings and interpretations of water – or all waters -- can be reduced to this underlying reality of water is a presupposition of this approach, which is rooted in what we have described above as “modern water”. Such an approach has potential for critical research because, after all, meanings, interpretations, representations, discourses etc. offer much material for study and have powerful social effects, as suggested by the questions posed by Donahue and Johnston cited above. Awareness and scientific study of meanings and representations of water and water environments are also important for researchers advancing novel approaches to water management, which must account for these social realities as well as the physical reality of water itself (cf. Rivière-Honegger, Cottet and Morandi, 2015).

18But what of the people themselves who understand and describe water as something altogether different from H20? Clearly, their approach is not one of cultural relativity: When First Nations peoples living in Canada refer to water-as-lifeblood, they are not giving an alternative interpretation or representation of the underlying reality or nature of water, but describing the underlying reality or nature of water as it exists for them. This way of understanding the heterogeneity of waters can be described in terms of ontological difference or ontological pluralism. Ontology is the branch of philosophy that considers fundamental questions of being and becoming. The increasing attention given to ontological pluralism by critical water researchers is often inspired by an intellectual movement known as the “ontological turn”, which has been underway for twenty years or more in the social sciences and humanities. Derived mainly from work in anthropology and science and technology studies (STS) as well as philosophy, proponents of the ontological turn eschew explanations of difference that rely on various interpretations of an underlying reality, and speak instead of different realities – they use the term “multiple ontologies” -- emerging out of different kinds of practices and processes. As STS scholar Annemarie Mol has argued: “Now the word needs to go in the plural. For… if reality is done, if it is historically, culturally and materially located, then it is also multiple. Realities have become multiple” (Mol, 1999, p.75). If there is a single theme that is common to proponents of the ontological turn, it is that reality does not pre-exist its becoming, but is always in-the-making as an effect or product of the assemblages, enactments, worldings, or performances which bring things, at least momentarily, into being. Thus, the anthropologist Mario Blaser writes “ontology is a way of worlding, a form of enacting a reality” (Blaser, 2013, p. 551). For Annemarie Mol, “reality is done” and thus “reality is historically, culturally and materially located” (Mol, 1999, pp, 87, 75). And STS scholar John Law writes, “Different realities are enacted in different practices, and this is a chronic condition” (Law, 2011, p. 5).

19Over the last decade, critical water scholars working mainly in geography and political ecology, have shown growing interest in the idea of multiple waters in light of the ontological turn and/or their work as, or with, Indigenous peoples. For example in 2012 Jessica Barnes and Samer Alatout coordinated a special issue of Social Studies of Science in which “multiple ontologies of water” was a key theme, stressing how “water is multiple, not only in its meanings, but more importantly, in its very materiality” (Barnes and Alatout, 2012, p. 484-485). A 2017 paper by Julan Yates, Leila Harris and Nicole J. Wilson explores the political implications of different ontologies of water, highlighting “water ontologies as a site of political contest” and what they describe as “ontological disjunctures – conflicts over the very essence and being of water” (Yates et al., 2017, p. 2, 3). Cameron Harrington (2017) has considered questions of water governance in light of the ontological turn, describing the co-determination of ontologies of water and “how water governance is imagined, understood and performed. The multiple ontologies of rivers, has been explored by Joanna Gotz and Carl Middleton (2020, p. 2) who delve into the political implications of the question, “When different groups talk about a river, are they talking about the same ‘thing’?” Ontologies of the Ganges in India (Perry, 2009; de Micheaux 2019) and the Whanganui and other rivers in New Zealand (Salmond, 2014; Salmond et al., 2019) have been studied as a function of the various kinds of social relations that different people have maintained with these waterways. And Silvia Flaminio (2021) has described different ontologies of water that contend in controversies around the building of modern dams, and shown the resilience of modern water ontologies in these contests.

20One way of understanding ontological pluralism is to return to the precept that things do not preexist the circumstances of their becoming, and to recognize that what we call reality is constantly emerging (Whitehead, 1960). What emerges on Earth is the product of ongoing processes, including social practices and processes, that favor certain outcomes over others. Thus we can understand how First Nations peoples of Canada are not merely playing word games when they call water “lifeblood”, nor are they kidding or posturing politically when they say that water is a living being. We know this because such people engage in relations with water as a living being through reciprocal modes of practice. For example, from their work with First Nations peoples of Yukon Territory in Canada, Nicole Wilson and Jody Inkster report that “Indigenous peoples often view water as a living entity or a relative, to which they have a sacred responsibility (Wilson and Inkster, 2018, p. 1). But this “view” is not merely a question of perception or interpretation; rather water as a living entity emerges out of a set of relations and practices: “Rarely, have we witnessed a conversation about water or water governance in Yukon, Canada, where First Nations there have not emphasized the importance of respect for water”. Most importantly, in this case “respect” is not simply a question of “deferential regard or esteem felt or shown” but a matter of practice “characterized by reciprocal relations of responsibility between people and water as a ‘more-than-human person’” (ibid., p. 2).

21Water can therefore become a living being for people -- indeed for anyone -- who engages in the reciprocal practices with water that engender mutual respect and healthy relations. By the same token, water can become an entirely different substance, a compound of hydrogen and oxygen, when it is subjected to chemical reduction, such as occurred in the 17th century experiments of Antoine Lavoisier. Both practices of respectful actions and chemical analysis may be considered methods that not only reveal different waters, but have the effect of producing ontologically different waters (Linton, 2019). In this way, water-as-living-being is not understood as an interpretation or representation of water; it is rather considered an ontology as real as H2O, and like H2O, it requires certain relations, practices and circumstances to be brought into being and sustained.

Conclusion

22This article has described the growing interest shown by researchers in multiple and heterogeneous waters, and has put this interest in the context of water research over the past couple of decades. It has been suggested that attending to different waters might be regarded as something of an approach in itself, offering an entry point for studying waters and hydrosocial relations grounded in particular places and historical circumstances. Two ways of understanding the differences between waters have been presented: In a culturally-relative sense, meanings, interpretations, representations and discourses of water offer a rich field of study, particularly when considering their powerful political and social effects. For this, interpretive and discourse-analysis methods familiar to social scientists are fruitfully employed to reveal hydrosocial relations that might otherwise go unremarked. A second approach, considering ontologically-different waters, involves methods that highlight the specific processes and practices underlying particular waters instead of searching for essentialist notions of the nature of water itself. The sustainability of such practices, and the welfare of the people who engage in them then become an important corollary of the recognition of waters as ontologically distinct.

23Attending to different waters, either in culturally-relative or in ontological terms, implies research that is focused on the particular conditions and circumstances out of which various meanings, or practices, emerge, giving rise to different waters. As a kind of approach, attending to specific waters thus requires “grounded” research practices of the sort that were demanded in the Nature Sustainability editorial cited in the introduction of this article, wherein it was claimed that “water studies research has become…stagnant”, and with the journal expressing “concern that water studies as a field may have largely given up on historical context and institutional change, suggesting that as water studies has become more quantified and technically driven, it has also become less grounded. (Nature Sustainability, 2021)

24Perhaps the root of such apparent stagnancy is that what often counts as water, and water research, is limited to the paradigm established by the singular view of modern water. Possibly, the real problem is that we have largely exhausted the possibilities of modern water as a paradigm for water research and water management. The reason that it appears – at least to some – that so little new and interesting research is being done in this field is because it is defined in such a limited way, as applying only to researchers applying positivist methods, and thus repeating and reproducing the same basic models and relations that have produced water problems in the first place (Venot et al., 2021). Such research has and will continue to have relevance in a world where water issues and problems grow in importance. However, at the same time, the paradigm needs to expand, or change, so as to include a wider epistemological field, specifically so as to entertain the more critical methods associated with recognizing waters in the plural, and the practices and engagements that sustain them. Such an expansion offers potential for understanding and responding to current and emerging water issues and problems in novel ways.

25Attending to different waters necessarily grounds research and management in the social and cultural as well as the physical particularities of waters in different places, and in the historical circumstances and practices that make one water different from another. In a practical sense, it must be acknowledged that water scientists, engineers and managers are highly attentive to differences in water quality, availability, and biophysical attribute and that these differences figure importantly in modern water management. There are, however, advantages to considering different waters rather than merely differences in water in an epistemological as well as a practical sense.

26One such advantage might be inferred from classical creeds and practices of premodern waters: While the engineers of ancient Rome are often celebrated for providing large quantities of water to the city via its famous aqueducts, what is less well-known is their insistence on identifying the distinct water carried in each aqueduct, and on maintaining the integrity of each separate water throughout its voyage from source to end-use. The classicist, R.G. Tanner describes a general “hostility to blended waters”, for economic and industrial, as well as medicinal purposes in ancient Rome (Tanner, p. 30-31). Such insistence flowed from practical as well as epistemological reasoning: different waters were put to different uses, some being appropriate for drinking, others for bathing, still others for fixing dyes, or irrigating…To mix the different waters would thus introduce inefficiencies, and even health risks, that were avoided by matching waters with their appropriate end-uses. Such reasoning finds a modern-day analogue in the concept of “water-soft” paths (Wolff and Gleick, 2002; Brooks, 2005). The main insight of this approach is that in most cases it is not water that people need but the various services that water may provide. Among other things, this approach attends to the potential efficiencies that can be realized by matching the type and quality of water supplies with the specific requirements of water demands. Considering the classical practices cited above, that such an approach is today promoted as new and cutting edge, is largely due to supplanting the myriad waters formerly recognized by the essentialist concept of modern water. By the same token, the success of such an approach is favored by an understanding that, in a practical as well as epistemological sense, “water” needs to be disaggregated into the myriad waters that it includes.

27Another practical benefit of recognizing and giving attention to multiple waters would be to facilitate communication and collaboration between people with radically different views about water’s nature. Here, the modern concept of water does disservice by denying even the possibility of ontologically different waters. For example, this would mean giving legitimacy to those whose understanding of water has been marginalized, if not entirely ignored, in modern discourses of modern water science and water management. Notable cases would be with respect to indigenous peoples in places like Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, for whom, as noted above, waters differ ontologically from the “uniform liquid that is concocted with uneven success by techniques of dispossession, large scale modern infrastructure, science and the modern ideals underpinning water resource management”, to repeat the description of modern water given by Vogt and Walsh (2021, p. 5). To address the challenge of allowing for constructive dialogue between people with fundamentally different notions of the reality of water, Yates, Harris and Wilson have suggested strategies “to overcome persistent ontological dissonance in water governance by working at the points of interconnection and overlap among these ontological starting points.” (2017, p. 10) They put forward the notion of ontological conjunctures, effectively spaces of potential mutual listening and dialogue wherein people with different water ontologies can begin to collaborate (ibid, p. 1).

The search for “ontological conjunctures” in water research and management builds on a broader “political ontology” project proposed by anthropologist Mario Blaser, the first aim of which is to give credence to the ontological claims of indigenous peoples so as “to take others and their real difference seriously” (Blaser, 2013, p. 550). If indeed water research today suffers from being inadequately grounded, one solution is to adopt approaches that draw attention to, explain, and work with the specific circumstances -- both natural and social -- that make waters different.

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Notes

1 Jeremy Schmidt has developed the alternative concept of “normal water”, albeit with a different historicity. (Schmidt 2017)

2 This is my translation of the original : “[L]es sociétés modernes ont généré un système de représentations, de valeurs où l’eau est considérée comme un objet externe, chimique (H2O), un produit banalisé, mécanisé, laïcisé (plus de sacré…), dont on dispose à volonté et dont la ressource paraît inépuisable et maîtrisable par les techniques existantes. »

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Jamie Linton, « Waters in the Plural: Approaches and opportunities for more grounded research and management »Géocarrefour [En ligne], 96/2 | 2022, mis en ligne le 20 juin 2022, consulté le 29 mars 2024. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/geocarrefour/19295 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/geocarrefour.19295

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Jamie Linton

Géolab UMR 6042 CNRS, Université de Limoges james.linton@unilim.fr

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