This special issue explores the materialities, (im)mobilities and meanings of dwelling on
and with water by asking how is water experienced, narrated, and understood. Water’s
physical qualities both afford mobility and create frictions, thus complicating the boundaries between moving and staying, while waterscapes are also full of political, socio-cultural, and metaphorical meanings. Dwelling on water presents a challenge to overwhelmingly sedentary states and their terra-centric logics, which compels us to further discuss
water both in a phenomenological and a political manner. This special issue suggests
avenues for studying dwelling on and with water by examining various practices of being on water with their related meanings (the liveaboard boating communities on inland
waterways and surfers on the sea) as well as with(out) water in terms of water scarcity,
thus underlining the need for an anthropology of water.
KEYWORDS: water, canals, boating, mobilities, drought, dwelling, materialities
Water is ‘simultaneously an element, a flow, a means of transport, a life-sustaining substance, a life-threatening force, the subject, the object, and often the very means of social
and cultural activity’ (Krause & Strang 2016: 633). It can cement state power (Wittfogel
1957) or act as a conduit for resisting it (Bowles 2016), as its smooth boundary-confounding qualities (in a Deleuzeo-Guattarian (1988) sense) and powers ‘fuse with social,
political, and economic processes in the pursuit of social dreams and fantasies nurtured
by a diverse set of social actors’ (Swyngedow 2015: 1). It is the laminar quality of water
that makes various mobilities possible – but it also creates frictions, immobilities and
moorings (Hannam et al. 2006) complicating the boundaries between moving and stay-
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Anthropological Notebooks, XXV/2, 2019
ing, scarcity and abundance, “nature” and “culture”. As such, ‘water offers us an axis of
comparison that is strikingly under-examined in the anthropological literature’ (Abram
& Lien 2011: 12) and indeed, watery materialities have until very recently, not been the
subject of intense anthropological scrutiny. Furthermore, Ingold (2011: 20, original italics) has pointed out that ‘the ever-growing literature in anthropology and archaeology that
deals explicitly with the subjects of materiality and material culture seems to have hardly
anything to say about materials’. We concur – and would also like to draw attention to the
matter, addressing this gap in anthropological knowledge by discussing dwelling on as
well as with this particular substance, water. Closer attention to the dwellers on and near
water allows us to open up (an)other place in space that takes possession of differently
structured temporalities. We will discuss the (im)mobilities, materialities, the power and
politics, as well as the meanings and metaphorical potency of water, all of which help us
to understand better ‘water worlds [that] often remain at the edge of everyday consciousness’ (Anderson & Peters 2014: 4).
This special issue is, therefore, a response to the recent turns in anthropology
and other social sciences that have opened up a more theoretical space for researching
populations who dwell on and with water. Such a moment, an opportunity to really bring
to the fore that which is special about lives lived in the flow of waters, has come about
due to anthropology’s growing attention to water, a significant milestone of which is
Ashley Carse’s (2010) curated virtual issue of Cultural Anthropology, bringing together
five articles from 1999-2009. This was, in turn, built on Strang’s research, particularly
The Meaning of Water (2004); a work that takes seriously the materiality of water, particularly how its ability to bring life, to run across boundaries, and to confound channels,
makes it a powerful material as well as a remarkably cross-cultural metaphor. Beyond a
literal dialectical complicating of mobility and immobility (further complicated by the
various moorings, ports, and other architectures that tie boats to the land), the waterscapes
have to be acknowledged as a rich creative source for metaphors, discourses, as well as
phenomenological realities. This special issue shall set out to deal with these vital and
emergent themes.
While researching water and water-dwelling practices, the contemporary imaginaries and historical cultural narrations also have to be invited into this discussion. We
are here referring to imaginaries as socially transmitted representational assemblages that
interact with people’s personal imaginings and are used as meaning-making and worldshaping devices (Salazar & Graburn 2014; Salazar 2012). Borrowing from lifestyle migration scholars, we could also talk about the ‘geographies of meaning’ (Benson & O’Reilly
2009: 6) of watery places in terms of cultural memory (Vallerani 2019) and sense of
place (Visentin 2019). We also need to pay attention to the meaning of different waters
and water bodies (potable water, the sea and its waves, the river, the canal, wetland, etc.).
Specific geographic locations hold meanings in terms of their potential for self-realisation
as people search for both ‘literal and figurative places of asylum or rebirth’ (Benson &
O’Reilly 2009: 6) created through personal and wider cultural narratives. Following this
line of thought, we could ask, what are the cultural narratives linked with water. How do
they differ in relation to different water bodies and states of water, and how do they reso-
Benjamin O. L. Bowles, Maarja Kaaristo, Nataša Rogelja Caf:
Dwelling on and with water – materialities, (im)mobilities and meanings: Introduction to the special issue
7
nate in the minds and practices of those who dwell on and with these waters?
Attention to these populations can (essential for a developing anthropology of
water) demonstrate the different ways of dwelling (Ingold 2000) both on and with water.
The dwelling perspective, paying attention to the interaction between people and environments rich with various human, non-human animal, and material actants (Latour 2005),
is a perfect vehicle for this investigation. In the 1980s, Ingold stressed the importance of
bringing the environment, the human actor, and the multitude of materialities together
to study the use of various objects and artefacts and their material properties in situative practices (Ingold 1988). In his later work, influenced by Gibson’s (1986) notion of
“affordances”, Ingold (2000) discussed the material world that surrounds us in terms of
medium, material, and surfaces, with the latter acting as a mediator between the rest of
the two. Itinerant boat-dwellers (Bowles 2016) or holiday boaters (Kaaristo & Rhoden
2017; Kaaristo 2018) on the rivers and canals; liveaboards on the seas (Rogelja 2017) and
international seafarers (Sampson 2014) all demonstrate particular new relationships with
water, as does the work of Nikhil Anand (2012) with his interest in the inherent leakiness
of water infrastructures. We are therefore interested in the ways in which all these different ways of dwelling on, near, and with water present a challenge to overwhelmingly sedentary states and their terra-centric logics. Considering different waterscapes as spaces of
dwelling compels us to discuss them in both a phenomenological and politico-theoretical
fashion; one perspective will not do. In addition to the political and the utilitarian, we also
need to discuss the shared experiences, embodied movements and practical skills related
to water.
We will start with the most obvious matter at hand: the material qualities of water. Scholars like Strang (2004), as well as the collaborators in Carse’s (2010) volume, can
all be seen as broadly connected to a “new materialisms” (Bennett 2010; Coole & Frost
2010) movement that seeks to put the matter of matter back into material culture studies.
This new anthropology of water (Carse 2010) or amphibious anthropology (Krause 2017)
takes water seriously as a materiality, and has provided a springboard for a new wave of
scholarship that de-centres the agency of the human components of networks involving water and looks, instead, from the water outwards (Helmreich 2011; Petrović-Šteger
2016). Although most of the studies in this line of theorising are focused on domestic
water provision rather than water as a conduit for dwelling, they are nevertheless foundational to the way that we, as editors of this issue, have come to take water seriously. What
is more, we argue that it is essential to discuss all these different aspects of water holistically, to arrive at a better understanding of what water uniquely is and what water can do
to and with those who interact with it. This means that we have to take seriously the point
that water has, to paraphrase the title of John Wagner’s (2013) edited volume, a developed
social life. Institutions, communities, and lives are frequently shaped around the material
qualities of water, which so often is an unremarked resource, taken for granted due to its
sheer ubiquity.
Take, for example, Strang’s (2009) study on Australian water basins that offers
a comprehensive analysis of water as a source for physical, social as well as spiritual “regeneration”. She focuses on diverse waterscapes, such as areas where rivers serve as set-
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Anthropological Notebooks, XXV/2, 2019
tings for adventure and self-realisation, for sports that reinforce masculine identities (jet
skiing, rafting, speed boating), as well as places where one may simply enjoy the birds
and wildlife and visually consume the waterscapes. All these diverse ranges of activities
bring about a particular relationship with the substance, where ‘experiences of meditating upon or being immersed in water engender affective responses and a particularly
powerful sense of connection’ (Strang 2009: 197). However, we should also pay closer
attention to the myriad of physical properties of water, that is, water’s fluid and flowing
materialities. Looking from the water, the land looks hard to separate from it as water laps
at boundaries, erodes territories, breaks its banks and literally muddies its certainties.
Krause has made a critical intervention in this direction with Strang, suggesting
that, ‘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’ (Krause & Strang 2016: 633). We, as editors of this special issue, are indebted
to this hydro-centric approach, as lives lived on water are led through engagement with
this fickle and active substance, that seafarers, boat-dwellers, divers and fishermen will tell
you has a mind of its own. It is therefore essential to consider the agency of water and its
capabilities within the actor-networks (Latour 2005) as well as human and non-human assemblages (Deleuze 1997). There is something special about the agency of a waterway: it is
palpable and physical, it demands response, action and reaction (Edgeworth 2014).
The land is full of rain and dew and water-vapour and the humidity of the air;
nothing outside of the desert is ever dry. Drying the land and managing water, keeping
it in its place, thus begins to look like a doomed struggle against a fluid entropy; a literal
and metaphorical holding back of the flood-waters, a finger in the dam, or King Canute
failing to hold back the tides. Both anthropologists, as well as other cultural and social
theorists, have developed several metaphors related to water in order to think critically
about the globalisation, mobilities, post-colonialism and post-socialism. For example, in
Zygmunt Bauman’s notion of “liquid modernity”, liquidity and fluidity, water’s properties that most catch our imagination, are central and extremely powerful metaphors:
Liquids, unlike solids, cannot easily hold their shape. Fluids, so to speak,
neither fix space nor bind time. While solids have clear spatial dimensions but
neutralize the impact, and thus downgrade significance, of time (effectively
resist its flow or render it irrelevant), fluids do not keep to any shape for long
and are constantly ready (and prone) to change it; and so for them it is the
flow of time that counts, more than the space they happen to occupy: that
space, after all, they fill but ‘for a moment’. In a sense, solids cancel time; for
liquids, on the contrary, it is mostly time that matters (Bauman 2000: 2).
Bauman celebrates the constant movement and change and discusses the rapidity of the mobility of people, images, information, goods, or capital as a means for the
liberation from physical spaces and places. Water is thus permeating different realms
and embodying different forms – liquid, solid, and vapour – it streams through people,
animals and plants, it forms physical water bodies, and informs various imaginative, sym-
Benjamin O. L. Bowles, Maarja Kaaristo, Nataša Rogelja Caf:
Dwelling on and with water – materialities, (im)mobilities and meanings: Introduction to the special issue
9
bolic, mythological and spiritual domains (Petrović-Šteger 2016). The watery metaphors
are also often used by the states that parallel the mobility of refugees with the flows and
flooding of water that needs to be controlled (Abid, Manan & Rahman 2017).
Indeed, in much of the water scholarship so far, water is the Other of land, reproducing a reductive land–water dichotomy. Social scientists often tend towards a landbased, frequently sedentary perspective and look to ascertain how water is a special case
or, more extremely, a state of exception. This reinforces the idea of land as stable, hierarchically organised, capitalist, state power, and often clock-time dominated. Furthermore, describing water as liminal also implies stable categories of “water” and “land”.
However, when viewed from the water, all phenomena are complex and ever-changing
vectors (Deleuze & Guattari 1988). It is clear that many people are positioned somewhere
between the solidity of land and the fluidity of water, and that their sociality comes to be
shaped by this constant negotiation and engagement. However, what of those who have
gone, to a greater or lesser extent, more or less permanently, onto the side of water? What
of those who have come to dwell on waterways, to reject the terra-centric logics of states,
to become permanently or temporarily resident on waterways?