Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology - Infrastructure

Commodity and supply chains

Rebecca Tishler — Thu, 19 Dec 2024 20:31:24 +0000

Dried chillies are loaded on a truck to send them to further processing in Sindhanur, Raichur district, Karnataka, India. Picture by Rakesh Sahai, Asian Development Bank, 2015.

Dagna Rams

London School of Economics

Initially published 19 Dec 2024

http://doi.org/10.29164/24commoditychains

Abstract:

The global circulation of goods connects economic processes worldwide—from extraction and production to distribution, consumption, and waste disposal. The resultant web of economic activity means that cultures and places around the world have become interdependent. People’s desires in one place organise work and landscapes elsewhere; seamless flows of goods create new infrastructures; and places become united by an exchange of commodities and differentiated by the unequal distribution of profit and power. Anthropologists have traced these connections by following commodities along their international journeys, conducting fieldwork at crucial nodes like international ports. They have examined how global forces interact with local economies and vice versa. Through elaborating concepts like ‘commodity chains’, ‘supply chains’, ‘global networks’ or ‘the social life of things’, they have revealed legacies of global inequality, cultural exchange, trade infrastructures, and their impacts on environments and lives. Anthropologists have shown that global flows of goods and services are more than a simple correlation of supply and demand or a mere opportunity for economies to grow. Rather, they represent rich sites in which values of people, places, and things are negotiated, and where relationships of inequality are created, maintained, or undermined.

Introduction

The global circulation of goods weaves local work and raw materials together into the vast tapestry of the global economy. Food grown in one place may feed a stomach many kilometres away. Producers of consumer goods cater to the tastes of people they have never met. Any sudden local process—an ecological disruption, a change in state regulation, skyrocketing demand—can have effects far beyond its locality. Yet, people joined by this global exchange rarely share the same political institutions, landscapes, or the power to define how profits get distributed. As geographic distance and socio-cultural differences hide actors from one another, anthropological research uncovers the interdependencies between capital, labour, and consumers. It shows how the global economy creates room for unchecked accumulation, exploitation, misrepresentation, and delusion about planetary futures.

To represent these global webs, anthropologists and other social sciences have used different terms: ‘commodity chains’, ‘supply chains’, ‘commodity ecumene’, ‘the social life of things’. Each builds on a different intellectual tradition. ‘Commodity chains’ describe a sequential transformation of raw materials into consumer products through the stages of extraction, refinement, distribution, consumption, and waste disposal. Such chains, once mapped onto the world, represent a regional division of labour, often derived from colonial legacies in which (former) colonies supply raw materials to the metropoles (Hopkins and Wallerstein 1986). Meanwhile, economic fluctuations—expansions or contractions— are due to the interdependence between various locales, rather than isolated state-level reforms. ‘Supply chain’ in turn is a management term to describe networks of suppliers and distributors working together across distance to increase efficiency and reduce cost. Focusing on supply chains foregrounds developments in logistics such as tracking systems and legal arrangements such as contracts between business partners. They enable economies of scale. The terms ‘commodity ecumene’ and ‘the social life of things’ are anthropological concepts that emphasise the rich cultural life of economic exchanges, where value attached to things is not solely an expression of economic laws but of cultures of valuation (Appadurai 1986). Sometimes used interchangeably, all of these terms draw attention to various qualities brought by the exchange of things across distance and difference. In using any one of them, researchers might emphasise the sequential nature of commodity exchange from extraction to consumption and the unequal distribution of power and capital across the commodity chains, the infrastructures that facilitate global flows and create profits out of ‘location advantage’ within supply chains, or the emergence of value and meanings as objects and social practices lead their social lives.^{^[1]}

Anthropologists are not the only social scientists to take interest in the circulation of goods. Other disciplines have been interested in mapping global commodity and supply chains in order to compare different forms of their governance (Bair 2005). Likewise, they asked questions about the relative importance of national policy vis-a-vis the country’s position in the commodity chain (Gereffi 1996; Bair 2005; Gereffi, Humphrey and Sturgeon 2005). Compared to these approaches, anthropology’s distinct method of fieldwork has allowed us to observe global exchanges as rich sites of human encounters. Anthropologists have worked in locations consequential to the global circulation of goods such as borders or ports (Chalfin 2010), places marked by global economic connections such as American towns where pigs are slaughtered to meet mass demand (Blanchette 2020) or in the Congolese rainforest where labourers search for cobalt to power electronics (Smith 2022). Anthropologists have also followed commodities like coffee or mushrooms around the world to understand how far these exchanges connect or disconnect people and places (West 2012; Tsing 2015).

Power and inequality

Classical and neoclassical economic theories consider global trade to be a driver of prosperity and the efficient allocation of resources. They foreground how trade overcomes the whims of seasons, the limitations of regional soils, and differences in talent to meet needs and desires at an unprecedented scale. Seminal economic theorists like Adam Smith and David Ricardo in the late eighteenth century, and Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman in the early twentieth, formulated such laudatory views of global trade during various phases of imperial and colonial expansion and yet their works paid little attention to the resource exploitation and purposeful underdevelopment of the colonies.

Contrastingly, critical perspectives in history, political economy, and anthropology sought to centre the (post-)colonial experience, challenging the notion that the global marketplace is a realm of nations trading their advantages and surpluses according to free and equal exchange. These genealogies highlight the violent histories of extraction, compelled labour, and landscape devastation. With key references like The Black Jacobins (James 1938), Capitalism and slavery (Williams 1944) and The Negro in the French Revolution (DuBois 1962), this intellectual lineage locates the origins of global capitalism not in Western Europe but in its colonies, notably the Caribbean islands—conquered and settled for cash crops and worked by slave labour. These authors focus on how profits from plantations in the Caribbean fuelled wealth in the metropoles, establishing fortunes that developed Britain’s ports and factories, for example. They emphasise that development in one place and under-development in another, and the wealth of some and deprivation of others, are concurrent processes. And, moreover, the reason why they had not been viewed as such is due to racialising ideologies that see underdevelopment as a mostly inherent failure to advance rather than an exogenous effect of political intentions and structures.

One of the texts that inaugurated anthropological interest in commodity and supply chains is Sidney Mintz’s Sweetness and power: The place of sugar in modern history (1985), a historical study of the sugar trade from the Caribbean to the European metropoles—linking ‘the Enslaved Africans who produced [sugar]’ and ‘the British labouring people who were learning to eat it’ (175). Sugar gave rise to radically different political economies and social lives—plantations and toil versus a consumer good providing a moment of sweetness at the end of a long workday. Rather than being an abstract phenomenon, Mintz shows that the sugar trade shapes bodies and tastes on both sides of the Atlantic. His study was not only a proposition about how commodities connect places whilst disconnecting economic regimes and human experience; it also suggested a new disciplinary approach. The anthropological interlocutor was no longer someone leading a remote and culturally particular life, but rather an actor from whose labour anthropologists and audiences of their work had long been profiting. Through existing commodity and supply chains, the researchers and interlocutors are already in a relationship—a relationship often premised on a fundamental inequality in which one side gets the short end of the stick.

Further inquiries sprang out of this early work. Some of them asked whether imperial and colonial divisions of the world into zones of production in the ‘peripheries’, and zones of consumption in the ‘metropoles’, still mattered. A crucial reminder of this past is that not all economic actors today have the same power to benefit from the global marketplace, possess enough capital to direct the flows of goods, or indeed even perceive the market’s actual breath and width: not least because not all people have the same power to move around the world or access basic banking services, or make use of credit. Addressing this gap, anthropologists have positioned their fieldwork at different ends of the hierarchy of economic power and profit—fleshing out the processes that create a ‘divide’ between the Global South and North (Hickel 2017). They have followed both multinational companies with international presence and influence, as well as small-scale producers and labourers in plantations and industries who, while connected to global flows, have little power to negotiate prices or work conditions.

Some works have looked at the enduring nature of global divisions into producers and consumers, noting that people in the Global South rarely get to be considered consumers in the first place (Freidberg 2004). What’s more, it is often consumers and distributors in the Global North that define the terms of producers’ inclusion in global capitalism. Susanne Freidberg (2004), for example, compares Anglophone and Francophone postcolonial commodity and supply chains in green beans. She focuses on connections between Zambia and the United Kingdom on the one hand, and Burkina Faso and France, on the other. British supermarkets required their Zambian partners to follow auditing and certification standards that effectively advantage white entrepreneurs who are familiar with British norms and able to pay for audits. In comparison, French buyers were more appreciative of the skills of Burkinabe farmers, yet their appreciation was not reflected in price, as Burkinabe farmers, just like their Zambian counterparts, had lower profit margins than distributors in Europe.

Typically, states positioned in the first node of commodity and supply chains—that is, specialising in natural resource extraction and agriculture—struggle to ‘add value’ to their production, remaining dependent on slim profit margins and precarious terms of trade. Anthropologists bring attention to the various mechanisms that maintain such a state of affairs. Following metals across commodity and supply chains, for example, highlights the importance of places like Switzerland where favourable tax regimes, lax corporate regulations, and the power of banks and investment companies enable trading companies to buy and sell commodities around the world (Dobler and Kesselring 2019). Outwardly, they connect global demand and supply, yet in doing so they also render specific places substitutable and disposable. Thus, for example, when Zambia increased electricity rates for its foreign-owned copper mines, Swiss trading companies temporarily stopped operations, substituting their quotas with copper sourced elsewhere (Kesselring 2017).

This economic inequality pokes holes in capitalist notions of economic exchange as being voluntary or equal. Markets do not only deepen colonial inequality, but rather ‘they are made by that inequality’ (Appel 2020, 2). US oil companies, for example, are able to make substantial profits in Equatorial Guinea, a country run by an authoritarian government where the majority of the population lives in poverty. Arrangements that sell raw materials at marked-down prices are sealed by contracts between ‘states’ and ‘companies’— abstract concepts that ‘[mask] the “specific” parties who, in fact, sign the contract’ (Appel 2020, 145). Symbolising legality, such contracts are invoked to halt debates about whether or not profits are shared equitably. They obfuscate that the involved parties are fundamentally different: while states answer to citizens to meet their fundamental needs, many companies work for shareholders to increase their wealth. Power differentials between underfunded states and much wealthier companies can be staggering. In such situations, government workers, though supposedly representing their citizens, can see their job as ‘making things easy’ for the company in order to provide a ‘better business environment’ than other countries in the region (Appel 2020, 157).

Scholarship has questioned the extent to which the colonial and postcolonial structures limit entrepreneurial agency. Openings for breaking free from economic constraints have been described as ‘motion in the system’ (Trouillot 1982). Such motion may mean the relative ability to choose business partners and negotiate prices, acquire reliable market information, and accumulate enough capital to invest into projects that shape political and social institutions. ‘Motion in the system’ could be found in both colonial and postcolonial circumstances. For example, gens de colour, descendants of interracial couplings in the French Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti), were able to corner the market for coffee by growing it in mountainous and inaccessible areas that white settlers shied away from (Trouillot 1982). Whilst initially a niche product, coffee grew in importance amid the eighteenth century anti-British sentiment in North America which affected sales of British-controlled tea. These climatic and geopolitical circumstances created openings for new mixed-raced entrepreneurs. In a different historical moment and geographic place, the bifurcation of the shea market in postcolonial Ghana into export and domestic markets meant that female shea producers and market women in the West African country’s savannah were less beholden to exporters’ expectations as they could rely on domestic demand to sell their produce (Chalfin 2003; 2004). What’s more, they could off-load lower quality shea onto exporters, leaving better nuts for their local base and greater certainty in negotiating prices.

Important recent interventions in commodity and supply chains that anthropologists are following are fair trade schemes promising to improve labour conditions. Fair trade schemes principally imagine change as occurring on the level of contracts between individual producers and buyers, rather than on the level of international terms of trade, treaties, or international producer alliances (Besky 2014; West 2012). In consequence, they have been criticised for favouring established and richer producers, who have the financial and cultural capital to enter fair trade certification schemes (Besky 2014; Fischer 2022). Fair trade schemes also rely on a generalised context of unsustainable and exploitative modes of production from which fair trade participants are the honourable exception (West 2012). Sometimes, fair trade schemes even obfuscate larger socio-political structures that influence the lives of labourers. For example, Darjeeling tea plantations in India are certified as ‘fair trade’ based on small-scale interventions that aim to ‘empower’ workers through micro-loans (Besky 2014). Such interventions aim to soften the otherwise tough and unequal reality of plantation work as a largely immutable economic form, complete with impermeable social hierarchies. Plantations are here recast as a way of life, rather than a system of exploitation, and workers’ identities are fetishised with romantic images of working hands obfuscating injurious conditions of bonded labour. The grinding aspects of this labour are put on display in the photography collection Dark garden by Md Fazla Rabbi Fatiq, for example, where the artist documents the influence of pesticides on workers’ eyes and the disfigurement of hands from the work of plucking leaves.^{^[2]}

Infrastructures of connection

The focus on commodity and supply chains may strike some readers as limiting. It tends to privilege a sequential transformation of commodities, and presumes a linear accruement of value along postcolonial economic divides. Others also critique some of the scholarship for not paying attention to the actual processes of chain-making (Caliskan 2011). Therefore, researchers have also studied international economic exchange beyond colonial and postcolonial geographies and frameworks. They have followed, for example, trade between Asia and the rest of the world and exchanges in the context of South-South relations (Dirlik 2007). They also have looked at the multitude of actors such as distributors, brokers, and exchanges that weave the global web of production, consumption, and discarding. Such new approaches build on the basic insights of the previous literature, namely that the global economy is interdependent, but they equally show that global connections are non-linear, multi-directional, actively constructed, and reconstructed.

The recent anthropological theorising along these lines has emerged from closer scrutiny of the term ‘supply chain’, which describes networks of suppliers and distributors working together across distances with the aim of increasing the efficiency of production while reducing its costs. Two types of supply chains are common—buyer-driven or supplier-driven—in which firms with superior capital and power organise traffic in commodities through buying components from suppliers or supplying goods and services to a range of distributors. These byzantine arrangements mean that identifying ‘lead firms’ and understanding the nature of relations between actors in these chains can be akin to detective work. A vivid example of this is the production of seatbelts for American cars with ‘fibres manufactured in Mexico, woven and dyed in Canada to take advantage of the abundance of water, sent back to Mexico to be sewn up, and then installed somewhere at a plant in the United States’ (Klein and Pettis 2020, 28).

Commodity and supply chains embody the ‘bigness’ of global capitalism (Tsing 2008). Through ‘outsourcing’ (i.e. contracting suppliers for goods and services) and ‘vertical integration’ (i.e. taking ownership of key stages of a supply chain), they incorporate heterogeneity. These chains are instrumental in understanding the simultaneous increase in global standardisation and the growing inequalities of contemporary capitalism. Lead firms ensure that commodities meet uniform health and safety standards enforced through auditing checks. While outsourcing is justified by economies of scale and specialisation, it often relies on differences in regulation and labour conditions to make goods cheaper. This can maintain or exacerbate inequalities between people across the difference of class, race, culture, and the North-South divide. A key process here is ‘salvage accumulation’ (Tsing 2008); that is, profiting from skills, competences, and forces existing outside capitalist exchange, for example a company making profits from cheap labour motivated by an appeal to Christian work ethics (Tsing 2008). While primarily serving as a basis for exploitation, heterogeneity within supply chains can also function as a source of contestation. Encounters within supply chains may generate or maintain different values, ideas of utility, or philosophies of labour (Bear et al. 2015). For example, Asian refugees scavenging for mushrooms in US forests may choose such a livelihood because it provides them with a sense of freedom and a connection to nature (Tsing 2015).

Outsourcing is a crucial mechanism for extending the global economy. International companies strategically locate their factories across Asia and Latin America, capitalising on cheap labour and lax regulations. The global supply chains have intensified due to trade developments, including the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994, China's accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001, and India's economic liberalisation in the 1990s. Anthropological studies conducted in factories across India, Mexico, and East Asia illuminate the human costs associated with these regions' transformations into global hubs of cheap and flexible labour. Indian consultancies, for example, now recruit and ‘bench’ labour on a short-term project basis, effectively relying on workers' rural kin to sustain them during periods of unemployment (Xiang 2007). Anthropologists have also traced the psychic imprint of trade liberalisation, which cast some regions as powerhouses of efficient and just-in-time production. Malay women who are employed in factories serving the global market, for example, are trapped between patriarchal management and demanding production quotas (Ong 1987). One ethnographic study showed that in the 1980s, these women frequently suffered from spirit possessions, which could be seen as a form of resistance, allowing women to channel rage and secure time off (Ong 1987). Such spirit possessions can be seen to reveal workers' contestations of oppressive outsourcing structures.

While the differentiation of labour can be grounded in outwardly racist or sexist ideologies (see Robinson 1983; Wynter 2003), contemporary managerial thought and practice tends to hold that a differentiated valuation of labour in global supply chains is the an outcome of economic policy, education, skills, and aptitude. As anthropologist Anna Tsing emphasises, ‘no firm has to personally invent patriarchy, colonialism, war, racism or imprisonment, yet each of these is privileged in supply chain labour mobilisation’ (2009, 151). In tune with this insight, anthropologists frequently reveal that differences between people are in fact the building blocks of profitability. Practices like ‘outsourcing in place’, whereby companies such as food delivery apps or hotels rely principally on migrants (Terray 1999) and ‘global care chains’, which stretch care work across national boundaries (Perreñas 2001), rely on precarious migrant workers to make up for the fact that in some sectors simply moving jobs abroad is not possible. The qualities of these workers—their gender, dependence on host families, having constraint options on the labour market, perceived docility, etc.—make them akin to the housewives and servants they have come to replace (see Ehrenreich and Hochchild 2004). Meanwhile, a common justification used by managers in Asian factories for underpaying female workforce is that the women are supplementary, and not primary, household earners. In this way, households are exploited for their kinship resources and their ability to provide psychological support to members (Dunaway 2001).

Anthropologists also examine the infrastructures that hold commodity and supply chains together. Commodity and supply chains can also be seen as infrastructures in their own right, often painstakingly created to ensure a smooth circulation of goods and services. Recently, anthropologists have scrutinised their global architecture by focusing on the actual material pathways taken and created by ships, containers, ports, and technologies that track the passage of goods (Chalfin 2010; Chu et al. 2020; Leivestad and Schober 2021). Such research also looks at how this global architecture creates inflection points around the world, such as at the Suez Canal, which has an outsized influence on global trade with any risks contained by militarised infrastructure (Cowen 2014). This shifts a conversation from commodity and supply chains as markets for the satisfaction of consumer needs and desires to considerations about supply chains as linked to survival, security, and military power.

People, exchange, and value

Global exchanges are rich sites of valuation. They can be teased apart not solely on the macro scale of global processes but also the micro scale of cross-cultural encounters between individuals and communities. To explore how exchange relates to value, anthropological researchers have drawn attention to the work of brokers, distributors, tastemakers, and experts; that is, all sorts of people who do not strictly produce commodities but rather make them accessible, meaningful, and valuable to consumers. Such intermediaries impart value on the exchange because of their social and cultural capital. For example, American mineral traders are able to negotiate higher prices compared to their Mexican counterparts as their expertise is more trusted and they are able to access markets in the US from which the others are excluded (Ferry 2013).

As global markets promote standardisation of commodities to make them commensurable, that very standardisation can also increase the power of middlemen. Coffee beans from Papua New Guinea, for example, were sold for $12.95 USD per pound in 2000s and yet the labour involved in producing them was remunerated at 0.33 USD per pound (West 2012, 16). Though there is no coffee without farmers, the standardisation of beans makes coffees from around the world substitutable for each other which in turn increases the value of creating distinction through branding, including storytelling. Coffee producers compete with each other on a market in which tastemakers, marketing agencies, and designers take the greater cut. What’s more, it is precisely the narrative of Papuans’ poverty and assumed ‘primitiveness’ that casts buying Papuan coffee as an aide to its growers, implying that ‘any money [the farmers] make is a vast improvement over their prior-to-capital lives’ (West 2012, 248). In a similar manner, the so-called Third Wave coffee—a coffee movement that emphasises quality, sourcing beans from individual farmers, and roasting to obtain distinct flavours—rewards those growers that are capable of ‘setting the terms for cultural narratives of [coffee’s] worth’ (Fischer 2022, 204).

Non-corporate middlemen and brokers act as agents of globalisation, connecting actors and places and exchanging across difference. Their work can be seen as enacting globalisation from ‘below’ as they extend distribution or source goods in a wide variety of places outside established networks that are already controlled by corporations and their licensed business partners (Matthews, Ribeiro and Alba Vega 2012). Because of the informal nature of such nascent networks, they become grounds for innovating cultures of trust, relations of credit and debt, and new technologies of pricing (Curtin 1984; Trivellato 2009). Such emerging commodity and supply chains include Chinese and Indigenous traders distributing cheap goods across Latin America (Pinheiro-Machado 2017). Here, brokers act as translators who appropriate foreign commodities for local markets, accessing places off-the-beaten infrastructure that companies may not have any proprietary market research about (Müller 2024).

These connections forge new models of creativity and partaking in the global economy. Asian manufacturing industries, for example, are contracted by African entrepreneurs to produce consumer goods responding to African tastes. In fact, much of the traditional West African wax cloth is now produced in China. Such trade connections are powered by, among others, the so-called Nanettes in Togo, a younger generation of women who hitherto lacked the capital to trade with companies located in Europe but are able to pioneer new exchanges with Asia (Sylvanus 2016). In a similar context, Igbo importers of foreign goods to Nigeria move between their home country, China, and the Middle East to source commodities and ship them to customers in West Africa. Every step of this inter-regional value chain has its own risks. Unlike multinational companies that rely on market research, established legal frameworks, or a regulated banking systems, Igbo entrepreneurs have to rely on mostly self-organised traders’ associations. To minimise risk, Nigerian traders curate containers sent from Asai, filling them with a great variety of goods. Once in Nigeria, they fight to seal their distribution networks from foreign competitors—especially as the latter have market advantages, such as access to foreign low-interest credit (Lu 2022).

Distributors not only reach consumers, but they are also powerful agents in the sourcing of commodities outside formal networks or the purview of corporations. People can forge connections to the global economy in the ruins of old commodity and supply chains or under the radar of the law as is the case for all sorts of pirates. Interrogating livelihoods forged in the ruins or in ‘grey zones’, as anthropologists have done, is a crucial counterpoint to the tropes of capitalist promise-making or state planning. In South Africa, for example, men searching for gold inside disused mines are known as zama zamas. They are often migrants and considered particularly ‘tough’ due to a lack of other economic options (Morris 2022). They descend into the mines to search for remaining sparse gold deposits. With death underground being a perceptible threat, days can go by until a sufficient amount of the ore is gathered. Shadowy middlemen then buy these finds, paying in cash, with zama zamas knowing as little about the buyers as their phone numbers. Here, migration, mining, and international commodity and supply chains work together, to create both a vague sense of opportunity and violent actual precarity.

Disembedding the environment

Similar to market economies becoming disembedded from social relations (Polyani 1944), the global circulation of goods and services arguably disembeds economic activities from local environments and labour. Commodity and supply chains hide consumers and producers from one another, heightening commodity fetishism, i.e. the mistaken belief that commodities exist independently of social relations. Relocating production to other regions means that consumers and investors may not experience or appreciate how their consumption affects natural environments. Urban economies in the Global North tend to specialise in research and development, finance, technology, and creative industries. Such ‘third sectors’ are heavily reliant on raw materials and invisibilised labour, but actors within them might see the global economy as a space of immaterial ideas, creativity, and innovation. This has psychic consequences: their ideas take shape in the material world, while they themselves do not have to attend to the material conditions and consequences of those ideas. Awareness about global commodity and supply chains corrects such anti-material bias. For example, the extraction of cobalt in the Congo is a crucial ingredient of cutting-edge electronics. Being blind to the inconvenient fact of cobalt mining’s pressure on the environment risks third sector actors sliding into a ‘self-congratulatory techno-utopianism’ of Silicon Valley, which often casts itself as singularly responsible for technological advances whilst remaining oblivious to its ecological consequences (Smith 2021).

Ecological considerations also matter when given that global commodity and supply chains have been crucial for realising economies of scale. As such, they raise questions about the ‘politics of scale’, i.e. the choices needed to achieve economies of scale (Blanchette 2020) and about ‘de-growth’, which is a broad proposition to create economies that are mindful of nature’s limits (Livingston 2019; Hickel 2021). While economies of scale have enabled cheapness, they rely on things, labour, and land that are not straightforwardly scalable. As such, economies of scale are experiments with profound environmental consequences. Producing cheap pork (as well as by-products such as pet food, methane gas, and gelatine) in a town in the US Midwest, for example, requires killing a pig every three seconds (Blanchette 2020). The companies that produce pork at scale replace individual pigs, capricious animals marked by idiosyncrasies, into ‘the pig’: a predictable commodity that enables calculating costs and profits. The latter requires interfering with pigs’ bodies, including adjusting sows’ reproductive drive and fertility through hormone therapy. Meanwhile, dealing with extraordinary events, such as a sudden death of thusly modified sows and their piglets, falls onto the shoulders of an undervalued workforce, who may find themselves needing to perform mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on dying piglets (Blanchette 2020, 153).

Economies of scale are not just corporate policy; they are also promoted by states as ways to attain economic growth. They represent a ‘self-devouring’ drive to produce evermore while in the long term undermining the very conditions of production, like access to clean water and fertile land (Livingston 2019). In Botswana, for example, cattle, which used to be appreciated in poetry, prayer, and ritual, are turned into a mere ‘techno-economic’ objects as part of mass beef production. Among the Tswana people of Botswana, cattle used to represent the family, was only killed towards the end of its life, and the resultant beef was ritually divided between its members. Industrial beef production, on the other hand, calls for higher levels of consumption to perpetuate higher levels of production and evacuates questions about nature into the future.

The study of commodity and supply chains has recently been complemented by anthropologists’ increased attention to more-than-human worlds. The production and consumption regimes that commodity and supply chains enable are not just violent to the environment, but also such violence can be displayed by the physical matter, such as oil palm trees, that they unleash onto the world. In villages of the Papua province of Indonesia, for example, Marind people witness how oil palms ravage biodiversity and landscapes (Chao 2022). They see their world become hostage to a quickly spreading plant that ‘kills the sago, murders their kin, chokes the rivers, and bleeds their land’ (Chao 2022, 11). Palm in these cosmologies has its own distinct, more-than-human agency and becomes a target of resistance. Here, the plantations are contact zones between the locals’ lifeworlds, based on the cultivation of sago, and agro-industrial capitalism which relies on palm as a plant suitable for economies of scale and useable across different foodstuffs.

Meanwhile, economies of scale create waste at a level that may be reaching its global ‘apotheosis’ (Hecht 2018). Landfills and dumpsites can be thought of as nodes in supply chains, even more so in the context of emerging circular economies that promise to recast waste as a raw material for production (O’Hare and Rams 2024). Acting as places in which waste is temporarily stored away and managed, they contribute to the status quo of overproduction (Liboiron and Lepawsky 2022). Beyond these localised waste sites, research also points to substantive movements of waste to the Global South as second-hand products. As such, consumers in these parts of the world both rely on and are inundated by waste-laden second-hand imports of electronics, clothes, cars, and other consumer products from Western countries. Such second-hand economies contribute to local environmental damage as they surpass the capacity of local waste infrastructures. While second-hand markets create economic opportunities for traders and provide choices to consumers, these benefits are complicated by the way second-hand buyers may feel lesser than consumers in the Global North who can afford new goods (Burrell 2012).^[3]

Economies of scale and their impact on the environment have met resistance. Anthropologists document the ways in which people practice opposition to what some have called ‘plantationocene’ or ‘capitalocene’, terms proposed as historically and contextually situated modifications of the term ‘Anthropocene’ to emphasise that the responsibility for planetary damage is unevenly distributed (Haraway 2016; Sapp Moore and Arosoaie 2022). They have explored histories of cooperative farming adhering to notions of wellness and self-reliance and thus away from capitalist models that promote reliance on food produced elsewhere (Reese 2019; White 2018). Anthropologists have also focused on examples of human and more-than-human resistance to mono-crops and their scalar logic (Beilin and Suryanarayanan 2017). Such works also document human resistance to projects of extraction in which ordinary people can be seen to disrupt extractive infrastructures such as pipes and expose their fragility (Mitchell 2013).

Conclusion

Anthropological scholarship explains some of the confusing and uneasy aspects of global commodity and supply chains: how they connect people as commodities pass from one hand to another and yet disconnect them when it comes to distributing the resultant power, profit, and hazard; how they mobilise people across difference—speaking different languages, living across economic divides, perhaps espousing different values—whilst exploiting that very difference for profit-making; and how all this worldly architecture sinks into the background, seamlessly rearranging what people come to expect as their economies get divorced from the local soils and workforce. This is a crucial effort because some of the most common ways of thinking about global trade—in economic theories or policies of international organisations—see the trade as happening between nations that are free to choose policy or specialise economies to their advantage. Anthropologists show how this economic calculus makes assumptions about the worth of other humans and cultural beliefs that reflect long and on-going legacies of global inequality. The study of global circulation allows us to interrogate the connection between growth and ecological and cultural devastation, accumulation and dispossession, and profit and exploitation.

As we look into the future, a multitude of new perspectives and potential areas for research emerge, especially when it comes to integrating global commerce within environmental limits. The integration of a circular economy could fundamentally reshape geographies of resource circulation, possibly creating new relationships between waste and production. Elsewhere, some view the advent of blockchain and other digital technologies as having promise for transforming transparency and trust within global networks whilst creating new forms of value, for example by tying the labour of farmers to carbon trading (Barbato and Strong 2023). Simultaneously, there's a growing interest in localising production and shortening commodity and supply chains, a trend that might have profound implications for global markets as it spurs new communities organised around principles of relative self-sufficiency. Such interventions could entail redesigning commodity and supply chains in dialogue with the environment. Rich existing anthropological research already draws insights from Indigenous knowledge systems about, for example, mining traditions aware of ‘sharing’ resources with nature (D’Avignon 2023) or approaches to food that promote diversified cultivation and food access (Reese 2019). These approaches suggest multiple pathways forward for reimagining resource flows and human-environment relationships.

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Note on contributor

Dagna Rams is a Visiting Research Fellow based at London School of Economics (Department of Anthropology). Her research is sponsored by the post-doctoral mobility scheme of the Swiss National Science Foundation. She has completed her doctoral fieldwork in scrapyards, e-waste sites, smelters, and metal buying companies in Ghana. Her post-doctoral fieldwork investigates how metal markets and technological companies conceive of metal supply and its sustainability, and factor those considerations into their operations. The research speaks to her interest in the resource limitations to economic, environmental, and technological future-making.

^{^[1]} For reasons of simplicity, this entry will use the term ‘commodity and supply chains’ throughout.

^{^[2]} Fatiq, Md Fazla Rabbi. 2023. Dark garden. https://mdfazlarabbifatiq.com/dark-garden/

^{^[3]} See also Kolade, Bobby, and Nikissi Serumaga. 2021. Vintage or Violence Podcast. https://www.vintageorviolence.com/

Editor:

Hanna Nieber

Cash transfers

Rebecca Tishler — Thu, 08 Sep 2022 04:36:20 +0000

Demoh Contel (left) receives a cash transfer payment from Patrick Lamboi (far right) and David A. Kargbo (center left), who work for Splash in Freetown, Sierra Leone on June 21, 2015. Photo: Dominic Chavez/World Bank

Martin Fotta Mario Schmidt

Institute of Ethnology, Czech Academy of Sciences; Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology

Initially published 8 Sep 2022

http://doi.org/10.29164/22cashtransfer

Abstract:

Cash transfers—direct regular and non-contributory payments to eligible individuals—are one of the most discussed, celebrated, and contested social assistance innovations of the twenty-first century. They have helped alleviate poverty and provide quick relief during economic crises such as those triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic. They are heralded for improving the position of women, increasing community resilience, making development aid interventions more efficient, and achieving a more just distribution of wealth. This entry outlines the history of cash transfers and discusses some of their key features. It shows that cash transfers’ variability and ultimate indeterminacy allows scholars, practitioners, and recipients alike to approach them in a multitude of ways. Cash transfers can be used to mould recipients into neoliberal subjects; they can be seen as vehicles to revolutionise the global capitalist economy; and they may be considered as reparations for historical injustices. The entry focuses on three distinctly anthropological approaches applied to the study of cash transfers: Their infrastructures, the human relations that they presuppose and forge, and questions as to what kind of transaction they really are. It shows that cash transfer programmes rely on, transform, and build infrastructures such as digital payment technologies. They also impact gender relations, state-citizens relations and local power relations, and affect the lives of marginalised social groups. Lastly, cash transfers encounter already-existing transactional orders, types of exchange, and categorisations of money which shape their local interpretations. In these and other ways, cash transfers reveal contradictions of an increasingly financialised global capitalist economy that depends on particular infrastructures, bureaucratised state power, patriarchy, and specific understandings of what an economic transaction is. The entry concludes with a call for further, ethnographically nuanced studies of cash transfers.

Introduction

Over the past three decades, scholars, politicians, development aid practitioners, and increasingly also the general public have come to see the regular provision of relatively small sums to eligible recipients as one of the most promising social assistance and welfare state innovations. Cash transfers (CTs), also known as social (assistance) transfers or social (assistance) payments, are promoted for their potential to reduce poverty, revolutionise the relation between citizens and states, change gender hierarchies and household dynamics, streamline inefficient development aid interventions, and cushion the economic effects of ecological and other crises. Echoing these sentiments, a statement released by several UN agencies in 2018 described ‘cash-based assistance as one of the most significant reforms in humanitarian assistance in recent years’ (OCHA et al. 2018).

When advocating in favour of CT programmes, proponents point to experiences with and insights from existing governmental programmes and small-scale interventions. An article published in the New York Times, for instance, presents the activities of the NGO GiveDirectly that distributes unconditional cash transfers to, among other populations, Western Kenya’s rural poor as a potential blueprint for handling a global economy characterised by increasing unemployment, technological revolution, and an unequal distribution of economic assets. In this and similar accounts, CTs appear straightforward and ‘plastic enough to adapt to local needs and constraints of the several parties employing them, yet robust enough to maintain a common identity across sites’ (Star & Griesemer 1989, 393).

With 95,000 CT-related publications in different languages in 2021 alone (Gentilini 2022, 7), CT programmes are also possibly the most studied of all social programmes. Research protocols have been built into them and experts continuously evaluate their impact, especially when they are framed as experiments (Howard 2022). Governments, NGOs, and inter-governmental organisations frequently publish reports about individual programmes or analyses comparing several of them, usually confirming CTs’ success in reaching the stated goals or suggesting improvements. Indeed, through research, evaluation, and reporting funded by multilateral agencies or Silicon Valley’s tech sector, CTs gain persuasiveness as a global, rather than local, technocratic policy innovation (Peck & Theodore 2015).

Economists, political scientists, sociologists, and other academics have also been intrigued by CTs. They have assessed claims made as to their efficacy, identified their shortcomings and contradictions, or deconstructed their ideological underpinnings. Along with human geographers, social and cultural anthropologists have demonstrated the power of long-term ethnographic research to generate insights into the workings of state and development CT policies. They have shown how local contexts mould these seemingly objective and technocratic interventions, described their unintended effects, and nuanced some of the claims made in favour of CT policies. Equipped with methods such as multi-sited ethnography, anthropologists have revealed why CTs are exemplary ‘boundary objects’ (Star & Griesemer 1989), able to jump across scales and geographical borders.

This entry does not provide an exhaustive overview of CT programmes and policies or assess their reformist potential. Rather, it draws on three distinctly anthropological conceptual repertoires—infrastructures, relations, and transactions—to capture the diverse ways CTs operate on the ground and reshape social relationships. Each section provides ethnographic examples that highlight the major insights anthropologists have contributed to a refined understanding of CTs and illustrates diverse ways in which ethnography reveals how these programmes that firmly belong to the contemporary global development repertoire interact with local contexts and shape social relationships.

Cash transfers: A preliminary classification

The COVID-19 pandemic revived the appeal of CT policies. Over 2020 and 2021, in ‘the largest scale-up in history’, three-quarters of all countries across the world expanded or adapted existing CT programmes, or created new ones, as a way to protect livelihoods in the context of increasing economic meltdown (Gentilini 2022). CTs—of different scope, generosity, and duration—represented one-third of total COVID-related social protection programmes and reached 1.36 billion individuals. Put otherwise: one out of six people received at least one CT payment during this period. Two years later, giving cash to people remains widely presented as a tool of pandemic recovery in the face of slow economic growth. Debates, however, continue on what these policies should look like. To some, the pandemic has strengthened the case for a universal basic income (UBI)—regular unconditional payments to all citizens. Others see CTs as a replacement of lost income or maintain that they should only target certain vulnerable population groups. Still others propose to tie these transfers to specific conditions that recipients must fulfil or suggest connecting them with diverse financial services, such as insurance and credit. Despite these differences, the basics of CT programmes are often framed as similar across contexts which allows commentators to characterise CTs as a ‘traveling model’ (Olivier de Sardan 2018), or a form of ‘fast policy’ (Peck & Theodore 2015)—a set of globally-circulating ‘ideas that work’. The appeal of CTs lies in part in their ability to be standardised and implemented across various settings with the help of infrastructural inventions. Anthropological approaches to such debates tend to highlight that CTs are not only technical but also moral and political. The development and character of CT programmes are shaped by who, where, and when they are implemented.

The history of CTs’ adoption and their development is reflected in both their character and geographic distribution. Following the failure of 1980s structural adjustment policies across Latin America and their detrimental consequences on social protection and people’s livelihoods, many of the region’s governments adopted conditional cash transfer programmes (CCTs). Mexico’s Progresa (later reformed as Oportunidades, today Prospera) was among the first and became a prototype for other similar programmes. The goal of Latin American programmes was not only to alleviate poverty or improve food security, but also to break intergenerational poverty cycles and to ensure socioeconomic development. This was to be achieved through ‘investment in human capital’, by making cash transfers dependent on beneficiaries’ fulfilment of conditionalities, or ‘co-responsibilities’, such as attending compulsory workshops, participating in public works, or ensuring that children attend school.

The wealth of evaluations attesting that CCT programmes have positive social or economic impacts then led to their promotion by the World Bank, various national governments, and international development agencies. But CCTs’ implementation in countries with lower administrative capacities proved challenging. As a consequence, biometric and digital solutions became increasingly intertwined with these programmes. Moreover, a series of randomised control trials showed that conditionalities do not play a significant role in achieving their desired effects (e.g., Banerjee & Duflo 2011, 155). For these reasons, programmes adopted especially in countries of sub-Saharan Africa are often unconditional (UCTs), or impose only ‘soft’ conditions (e.g., awareness-raising seminars). Unlike in Latin America where CCTs are government-run, in sub-Saharan Africa small as well as large NGOs also implement highly localized UCT programmes which can be quickly evaluated in line with the current trend for evidence-based aid interventions (Scarlato; d’Agostino 2016; Simpson 2018).

Today, CT programmes exist in countries as varied as Lebanon, Indonesia, Ecuador, Finland, and Tanzania. They deliver physical banknotes, e-money, mobile money, debit cards, or value vouchers to eligible beneficiaries. Programmes can be further distinguished according to other dimensions: 1) their organising and financing entities (e.g. governments, NGOs, UN agencies); 2) their eligibility criteria (e.g. are they universal, means-tested or aimed at specific categories); 3) their modality (e.g. are they unconditional or conditional, and in what ways and to what degree); 4) the sums they transfer (e.g. do they provide people with a minimum income to cover basic needs or are they restricted to providing minor income supplements); 5) their regularity (e.g. lump sums versus regular payments); 6) their policy goals (e.g. do they aim to alleviate poverty, provide humanitarian crisis relief, or stimulate the economy); 7) their modes of legitimation (e.g., do they appeal to citizens’ rights, universal rights, or are they a form of reparations).

Given this diversity, there is a danger of asserting a ‘common identity’ across programmes and their correspondence to some overarching model. The immense variability and mutability of CTs further raises questions about the value of comparing, for instance, a state-led programme targeting millions of people that is conditional (Mexico) or unconditional (South Africa), with a project run by a Western NGO that facilitates direct digital money transfers from individual donors in rich countries to a few dozen recipients in Sierra Leone. At the same time, their complexity and the possibility of combining various elements make CTs easily adaptable to local circumstances and appealing from various political viewpoints. CTs can therefore be legitimised by different theories, narratives, and agendas. For instance, CCTs often try to exert Foucauldian bio-political control over people, aimed at moulding citizens’ daily lives or even affecting their reproductive strategies (e.g. Smith-Oka, 2013). Proponents of UCTs, on the other hand, frequently emphasise individuals’ ability to behave in economically rational ways, arguing that anyone can be trusted to use money wisely (Haushofer; Shapiro 2016). While citizenship-based interventions have the potential to raise xenophobic tendencies, means-tested CTs, which scrutinise people’s financial states to determine their eligibility, can reinforce middle-class sentiments about the ‘lazy poor’ (Jeske 2020). Taking a closer look at CTs from an anthropological angle reveals, however, that these interventions are far from simple and easily scalable or replicable. Their implementation depends on local infrastructures and is shaped by social relations and values.

Cash transfer infrastructures

The base mechanism of CT programmes is straightforward and already captured in the name: transferring cash. However, any regular and predictable movement of money depends on other exchanges. Information on the eligibility of beneficiaries must be delivered in specific intervals, targeting and registering recipients requires identity checks, and local agents have to ensure that beneficiaries meet programme conditions set by developers in the state capital or abroad. Moreover, cash needs to be deposited, stored, and withdrawn somewhere. The infrastructures enabling such varied movements of cash, information, ideas, and people across space and time are central. The dependence of CT programmes on functioning infrastructures became salient when, in a response to the COVID-19 pandemic, several countries attempted to ‘scale-up’ their social assistance programmes to deliver aid quickly (World Bank 2020). Given lockdowns and social distancing measures, this had to be done preferably without physical contact. Countries relied on already existing databases or pushed new and innovative digital solutions for registration. The government of Togo, for instance, utilised a biometric voter registration database updated in February 2020 to identify and contact payment beneficiaries. Guatemala’s government, on the other hand, determined eligible households according to electricity consumption levels, and provided emergency cash to those consuming less than 200 kilowatt hours per month or lacking electric connection completely (Grosh et al. 2022, 232). In expanding CT programmes to cover new categories of populations, governments thus relied on existing infrastructural systems, sometimes giving rise to new and heterogenous infrastructural assemblages.

In light of these experiences, there have been calls to strengthen, expand, or outright build money ‘delivery systems’ and to use alternative data sources and digital delivery technology (e.g. mobile phones) (World Bank 2020). The social sciences provide a critical view of this fascination with databases and other infrastructural techno-fixes. As part of this, the anthropological theorisation of infrastructures has become particularly useful (Larkin 2013), as it helps describe the nature of such infrastructural systems and the processes that go into their construction. It makes visible that CT infrastructures are not mere technical solutions. Rather, they are hybrid networks that consist of diverse elements that are: technological, such as bank cards, bank accounts, mobile money wallets; administrative, as they depend on laws and existing databases; social, since money transfers rely on the identities and relations of recipients, local politicians, bureaucrats, and social workers; and material, since they might require physical offices of governments or NGOs, or other places with computers to register recipients. Such CT infrastructures undergird the circulation of cash, information, and people, organise territories and populations, create an often-invisible environment for other interactions, and shape individual behaviour. Understanding diverse political and social effects of CT infrastructures therefore requires conducting ethnographic fieldwork across different levels, including in governmental centres or at meetings of transnational organisations, and considering the work of technicians and bureaucrats of various kinds (e.g. Dapuez 2016).

The role of infrastructure becomes particularly visible during the process of targeting and registering eligible individuals. Large state-run CT programmes, in particular, often face the problem of how to be implemented in rural areas and to deliver aid across large geographical distances (Donovan 2015a). One standard solution has been to create a sort of ‘human infrastructure’, a network of local intermediaries or consultants who report to others, such as district state officers or local NGO branches, and organise intermediaries from among recipients. Such a chain of intermediaries is central to mediating across scales by, for instance, translating and standardising information on persons’ poverty into a language that can be processed by a programme’s bureaucracy or database. Local managers often work in the context of under-invested social services and welfare state roll back. As a consequence, they might resort to imposing additional conditions on recipients. For example, in the context of the Peruvian CCT programme Juntos, Tara Cookson found that local managers and health and school staff require recipients to engage in ‘voluntary’ work, such as cooking for the school lunch programme or registering participants (Cookson 2018). Geographical distance and meagreness of the built infrastructure might be resolved by temporal exploitation: recipients may be expected to walk large distances, to be able to wait for long hours or even days, and to have time for other activities demanded by the intervention. Maria Elisa Balen (2018) provides an empathetic analysis of the centrality of queues in the context of the CCT programme Familias en Acción in Colombia. Beneficiaries queued up to have their identity verified by a clerk who also checked on the computer how much money they would receive. Receiving a slip of paper, recipients queued up again to receive their money from another bank functionary. Potential beneficiaries were also forced to queue up at schools (to receive attendance certificates of their children), in hospitals (to receive compulsory medical checks), and at programme registration offices. Many came from far away and were expected to queue in front of banks and registration offices for hours and even for days in the scorching heat, sometimes only to find out that due to computer failure they could not submit their documentation.

CT programmes’ infrastructures are expected to be value-neutral and standardised, to provide aid more effectively, reduce bureaucracy, bypass politics, avoid fraud and create a more direct link between donors and recipients (e.g Donovan 2015b). Technological innovations are promoted as a way to overcome problems related to infrastructural and administrative inadequacy. CT ‘techno-politics’ frequently imagines a lean state or lean aid organisation that heavily rely on technology to deliver services even when administrative and institutional capacities are limited (Ferguson 2015), thereby promising to depoliticise poverty and development. The possibilities of ‘digital payment ecosystems’ such as payment and loan apps, electronic money transfer, and mobile money wallets have further bolstered this core promise.

While biometric enrolment or electronic payments often improve the situation for recipients, however, the fetishization of biometric, digital, and electronic solutions often obscures their continued dependence on human labour, and hides the fact that technology is often unable to do justice to bodies that do not fit the required norm. As shown by Natasha Thandiwe Vally, for instance, fingerprints worn out by manual labour could not be recognized in a South African social grant programme (2016, 972). Despite the appeal that technological solutions possess in development circles, donors, recipients, technocrats, and local administrators alike might resist power entrenchment that comes through digital control and the accompanying rollback of service delivery. As shown by Ruth Castel-Branco, for instance, local leaders in Mozambique circumvented a complex digital selection method by introducing a rotating system that assured everyone would benefit from the state’s Productive Social Action Programme. In this case, however, the techno-politics of ‘non-politics’ had consequences beyond distribution. In contrast to the estimation of the World Bank, the introduction of a hybrid payment system relying on digital money transfers in urban centres and cash transfers in rural areas actually increased the costs of the CT programme (Castel-Branco 2021).

Like other infrastructural systems, CT infrastructures become most visible in their failure: when people cannot access their money, when money is deducted wrongly, or when benefits are cancelled. Increasingly these issues arise because of the uncontrollability of how registries are used or combined with other datasets. In Guatemala, for instance, the names and addresses of recipients of the state’s CCT programme Mi Familia Progresa were published online in 2010 after a two-year long legal battle. Fuelled by a discourse demanding more government transparency, this conflict shows how CT programmes are influenced by wider debates about the use of digital data. In this case, the publication of recipients’ personal information solidified a dichotomy differentiating between taxpaying citizens possessing the right to scrutinise and audit the government, and welfare beneficiaries who were turned into ‘legitimate objects of public scrutiny’ (Dotson 2014, 351), a bifurcation that simultaneously reinforced the exclusion of Indigenous communities from national citizenship.

Creating registries and digitalising information on individuals also enables states or other entities to transfer this data, for instance, to financial institutions which then attempt to capitalise on the regularity and surety of transfers. Thus, welfare programmes were central to India’s project of financial inclusion and push for a cashless society (Kar 2020). While politically transferring cash from the central government through banks was justified as a means to stop corruption and ‘leakages’ (as governmental funds would make their way to the poor) as well as to encourage saving, developing adequate infrastructure was only appealing for banks when they could produce debt and further income in the form of fees, overdrafts, and loans. In one of the most paradigmatic cases, the South African Social Security Agency hired the private company Cash Paymaster Services (CPS) to register over 15 million beneficiaries and open bank accounts for around 10 million recipients. Several other subsidiaries of CPS’s parent company, Net1 UEPS Technologies, then used the gathered data to approach recipients to sell them loans, insurances, and other services (Torkelson 2020; 2021). Bundling CTs with loans in this way might lead to deductions and cancellations of cash transfers of which people might not or only partially be aware. In all these ways, CTs’ involvement and dependency on ‘fintech’ experiments and infrastructures turn welfare into a collateral (i.e. a sum against which debt can be issued) which can enable new forms of capitalist accumulation by dispossession to emerge (Lavinas 2018).

Cash transfers and social relationships

Cash transfers are an aspect of contemporary regimes of distribution and redistribution, and as such they reconfigure sociality (Bähre 2011). Anthropological research on CT programmes has traced these ‘rearticulations’ of social life (Fotta & Balen 2019) through examining the ways in which CTs shape relationships of dependency and power, of race and class, within households, or in local politics. Of particular prominence has been a focus on how CT programmes affect gender relations and women’s lives. Issues of gender have been especially pronounced in the case of CCTs in Latin America, where women serve as prime conduits of social policies and of development interventions (e.g. Molyneux 2006; Tabbush 2010). Although evaluations show the overall improvement of women’s position and decision-making powers thanks to CTs, feminist critiques argue that sex-disaggregated data must be complemented by a more thorough analysis of gender impacts (Cookson 2018, 33). Since women are normally the recipients and are responsible for fulfilling the conditionalities and for enhancing the ‘human capital’ of their children, CT programmes might lead to an increase of women’s responsibilities, weaken their social position within communities, and reinforce patriarchal ideals (Dygart 2016; Schmook et al. 2019).

Even when a CT programme does not explicitly target women, local gender relations, moral economies, and divisions of care labour play a role in how they are perceived and legitimised. In sub-Saharan Africa, actors invariably interpret who is included in a programme through gendered ideologies regarding work, dependency, deservingness, or agency (Jeske 2020; Ferguson 2015, 17). In a study based upon interviews and participant fieldwork with young unemployed men in South Africa, Hannah Dawson and Liz Fouksman, for instance, observed that the inclusion of young able-bodied men into CT programmes was viewed with ambivalence. In the eyes of many respondents, giving money unconditionally to young able-bodied men threatened to corrupt them and to turn them into lazy beneficiaries. Instead, young unemployed men were expected to be able to provide for themselves and others and, consequently, preferred that the ‘government provide jobs, skills training or free tertiary education’ (Dawson & Fouksman 2020, 234).

At the core of anthropological analyses of gender impacts are tensions between the declared ideals behind CT programmes—of fostering people’s empowerment, social justice, rational financial planning, and inclusive citizenship—and the programmes’ contradictory and unintended consequences. These tensions are frequently analysed in the context of broader changes in economy and governance. In Uruguay, the ‘risk reduction’ and poverty alleviation governance by an ‘enabling’, rather than a welfare, state was framed as stimulating ‘self-help’, ‘empowerment’, and ‘civic participation’ (Corboz 2013). These qualities were built into the governmental CCT programme PANES, which was implemented in 2005 and lasted for 34 months. Women who could draw support from extended families, particularly from other female kin, often profited from the programme and managed to invest the money in productive activities such as reconstructing houses and starting small businesses. Many also used the money to get out of abusive relationships. Yet, in the case of single mothers living in urban squatter settlements, outcomes were different. Unable to leave their houses and children unattended due to increasing crime, but depending on cash from PANES, many felt forced to remain in abusive relationships. Instead of allowing these women to become more autonomous, the CT programme solidified problematic relationships as women depended on ‘bad men’ in order to be able to search for employment or participate in workfare activities required by the programme without leaving their children unattended. Ethnographies thus help reveal that effects of a CT programme on women’s autonomy and position within households vary and are mediated by household income levels, local gender ideologies, and patterns of labour control (Morton 2018; Radel et al. 2017).

Another strand of anthropological analysis focuses on how programmes reshape local politics (Castellanos & Erazo 2021; Eiró & Koster 2019). New power dynamics, inequalities, and hierarchies emerge from the very structure of CT programmes, particularly CCTs, as they give some people power to police the behaviour of others and to influence their enrolment. In some Mexican villages, for instance, Prospera created new affective and financial links between the state and (female) beneficiaries, but it also gave rise to new forms of power relations. Local programme mediators and monitors from among beneficiaries could demand other beneficiaries to provide them with unofficial additional labour, such as participating in community works. These new power relations undermined already existing forms of communal organising and cooperation, and ultimately led to a fragmentation of community belonging (Crucifix and Morvant-Roux 2019).

Even when a programme is NGO-run and unconditional, field officers and intermediaries take interest in monitoring the behaviour of the poor. Street-level bureaucrats organising a CT programme in an informal settlement in Kenya, for example, constantly attempted to make proper behaviour of recipients visible and to hide what they considered improper activities, even when such supervising work was not part of their official role. In this instance, bureaucratic activity did not just reflect changing power dynamics, but it also represented an ethical form of care (Neumark 2020) in a context of unequal and asymmetric relationships between foreign donors and local recipients. Conscious of the importance of programme evaluations, street-level bureaucrats tried to ensure that recipients used the money in exemplary fashion. A related theme that repeatedly emerges in ethnographies of CTs relates to the ways agents responsible for implementing and translating programmes into local practice, who are often middle-class professionals, see themselves as responsible for teaching the beneficiaries. They may feel the need to educate them about the value of hard work, entrepreneurship, and self-help, as well as distinct ideas about the state, modernity, and development. Such teaching can be done through mobilisation, mentoring and public works, and it frequently targets older persons and women (Ansell 2014; Green 2021).

When additional ‘shadow’ conditions are imposed upon female beneficiaries by intermediary actors, this can exacerbate power inequalities. One example for this is the CCT programme Juntos, which started operating in highland Peru in 2005 and is oriented exclusively at poor rural households (Cookson 2018). Gaps in its implementation and underfunded infrastructure were not, as discussed above, the only reasons that led local programme managers to impose additional conditions. Local managers were also guided by good intentions and their preconceptions about women beneficiaries and their skills. Just like official co-responsibilities designed in the capital by urban middle-class professionals, the ‘shadow’ conditions imposed here revealed existing doubts about women’s capacities to be ‘responsible’ mothers while simultaneously hiding the extent and character of their care work.

Such ‘making of good mothers’ (Piccoli and Gillespie 2018), whether through official or shadow CT conditions, is often racialised. Oportunidades enabled the Mexican state to intervene in reproductive and mothering practices of indigenous women (Smith-Oka 2013). In the name of empowerment, the aim of the programme was to turn women into ‘good mothers’ by making them participate in medical checks, educational consultations, activities, lectures, and so on. By merging concerns regarding population management (including ideas about family planning, reproductive behaviour, and mothering) and national development, the programme can be seen as a continuation of early twentieth-century attempts to convert Indigenous peoples into modern mestizo Mexicans who follow Western health, education, and family practices.

Despite the appeal of CTs as an ‘idea that works’, transferring and translating CT programmes thus invariably leads to friction with local cultural models, forms of sociability, and economic ideologies. It is also mediated by recipients’ previous experiences with development and welfare programmes (Murray & Cabaña 2019). Though this might sound like a truism for anthropologists, actors implementing CT programmes tend to underestimate or ignore local contexts, which often leads to what Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan and Emmanuelle Picolli (2018, 4) aptly call the ‘revenge of contexts’ giving rise to local mutations, forms of ‘corruption’, circumventions, and adaptations. CT programmes are thus not simply assimilated into people’s realities in ways imagined by planners, but are influenced by local politics, discourses, and narratives.

The very design of many programmes, in other words, reflects context-dependent ideas about human nature (e.g. in their use of behavioural nudges) and the ways in which these can be utilised to shape the future through, for instance, increasing education rates, stimulating investment, or otherwise aiding development. Such mechanisms generative of appropriate futures can, however, come into conflict with popular ideas. Andrés Dapuez (2019), who conducted research with economists from the Inter-American Development Bank and other policy makers as well as beneficiaries in Indigenous villages in Yucatán, describes tensions over what kind of futures these programmes are meant to generate. While for policy designers and for the Mexican middle classes it was important to transfer appropriate amounts of cash that would result in a decrease of the fertility rate and generate economic value through accumulation of ‘human capital’, to beneficiaries these goals appeared to undermine sociability and, more dramatically, were viewed as a drain of bodily vitality.

It is therefore important that any claims about or criticisms of the effects of CT programmes—both of which tend to argue through generalisations—are ethnographically nuanced and related to other social processes. In northeast Brazil, for example, the state’s CCT programme Bolsa Família did not only alleviate poverty, but, as UBI proponents have often suggested (e.g. Graeber 2018), also led to the decommodification of labour through increasing people’s autonomy from wage labour and making space for economic activities outside the labour market. It enabled beneficiaries to decline work in precarious and exploitative sectors and try to become self-employed as small-scale farmers and entrepreneurs (Morton 2019). Ethnographic research thus has the potential to reveal different autonomy-enhancing and autonomy-constraining effects of CTs, which emerge in the process of their assimilation into local ideologies and practices related to community belonging, the responsibilities of men and women, or wealth creation.

Cash transfers and the meanings of exchange

Anthropology has a rich history of recognising different modes of transferring wealth between people according to how the transfer takes place (i.e. its modality), which objects are being exchanged, and how the transactional partners relate. Going back to Marcel Mauss’ The gift (2016) and Karl Polanyi’s distinction between reciprocity, redistribution, and exchange (1957), anthropologists have, time and again, debated how people exchange goods, money, or favours, and how these exchanges are embedded in and reflect wider transactional logics, politics, and cultures (e.g., Bloch & Parry 1989). As recently argued by Anthony Pickles (2022), anthropology, however, has one-sidedly focused on reciprocal transactions at the expense of ‘one-way economic transfers’ (Hunt 2005) such as charity, gambling, inheritance, theft, and CTs. Drawing on and expanding this disciplinary tradition, anthropologists have interpreted the transactional logic of CTs in various ways and thereby revealed that often-contradictory views of CTs can be held in parallel in a single CT programme. CTs may be perceived as simple techno-fixes, or as reparations for past misdeeds, as baits into neoliberal or even satanic debt bondage (Schmidt 2022), as gifts from the state, as ‘women’s money’ (Diz 2019), as income replacement, as a way to move away from a wage labour system, or as tools to buy political favours.

The discussion surrounding means-tested unconditional ‘social transfers’ and ‘grants’ in the Southern Africa region—especially South Africa, but also Namibia and Botswana—are particularly revealing. Most famously, in Give a man a fish: Reflections on the new politics of distribution (2015), James Ferguson reflects on the region’s experiences with these programmes to outline a ‘new politics of distribution’. Ferguson follows Mauss by understanding the whole society, rather than just workers, to be involved in producing value (Mauss 2016). Based on this, he argues that a mere membership in a society should make people eligible for unconditional ‘basic income grants’. Ferguson frames UCTs as ‘rightful shares’ in a nation’s wealth and explicitly challenges the contributory understandings of social assistance and century-old assumptions about money being the fruit of an actor’s (wage) labour (Ferguson & Li 2018, Fouksman 2020).

Erin Torkelson (2021) has argued that Ferguson’s analysis does not consider the existence of ‘racial capitalism’. In South Africa, cash grants were turned into collateral for debts and financial companies predated on social grant recipients. This effectively undermined CTs’ efficacy and continued the dispossession and indebtedness of poor black South Africans who remained in particularly vulnerable and economically disadvantaged positions. For Jonathan DeVore (2019), even unconditional basic income grant schemes are merely ameliorative and do not give people control over their means of life. Elise Klein and Liz Fouksman (2022) argue for the need to recognise contextual differences with regard to who benefited from a society’s wealth in the past and to take into account that CT programmes often ignore underlying (post)colonial power relations. They therefore consider it fruitful to reframe UCTs as a form of reparations that pay for historical injustices such as settler colonialism, slavery, and other forms of capitalist racism, the effects of which continue to structure contemporary societies.

The meaning of CTs as transactions is profoundly shaped by how recipients perceive their characteristics, such as their pay-out rhythms, legal groundings, or the ways in which the monetary values of transfers are established. Uncertainty about the CTs’ modality or their origins causes their meanings to oscillate drastically. Gregory Duff Morton (2014) shows what is at stake at this interpretational interface. Because Brazil’s CT programme Bolsa Família (2003-21), like most CT programmes, was conceived as a social programme or intervention of limited durability and legitimacy, merely aimed at addressing pressing problems and not as a (universal) social right, recipients ended up viewing it as a gift from the government, president, or local politicians (also Eiró & Koster 2019; cf. Diz 2019). The ‘gift’ of Bolsa Familia, however, remained unstable, because there were no guarantees that it would continue or what its future value would be, even though it was reciprocated by the counter-gift of beneficiaries’ co-responsibilities. This dynamic fostered only an incomplete sense of citizenship against the background of an unpredictable state and made it impossible for recipients to imagine the programme’s future. Consequently, when the sums were increased it led to a panic as this was interpreted by beneficiaries as a sign of its imminent cancellation.

While CCTs are generally framed as an exchange, whereby money is dependent on people’s behaviour which therefore needs to be monitored, UCTs are, from the perspective of most emitting entities, understood simply as one-way, non-reciprocal transfers of money. As external and often locally unheard-of transactional interventions that are ‘rendered technical’ (Li 2007), they are prime examples for indeterminate transfers that lend themselves to be reintegrated into locally predominant understandings of money and transactional logics by recipients, politicians, or scholars. Even UCTs are thus far from innocent and simple ‘techno-fixes’, or mere ‘social interventions’, as the main development aid discourse suggests by highlighting their easy-to-implement nature. Instead, their local transactional interpretations can be surprising. In rural Niger, the smooth implementation of an NGO UCT programme was obstructed by complex political patronage relations and social networks characterised by antagonism and potential conflicts (Olivier de Sardan and Hamani 2018). When women received cash, for instance, they immediately handed it over to their husbands, i.e., their ‘providers’, and recipients sometimes decided to pool their UCTs, redistributing them according to local notions of deservingness and need. In these and other ways, UCTs were immediately integrated into local and frequently more encompassing notions and networks of exchange and redistribution.

Along similar lines, cash provided by the US-American NGO GiveDirectly was interpreted in contradictory ways by local actors in Homa Bay County, Western Kenya (Schmidt 2022). Most surprisingly, roughly 50% of the eligible population rejected the benefit of US$1,100 paid out in three instalments. Many of those who rejected the payments argued that they were part of a satanic barter trade whereby a sinister cult group would later demand the sacrifice of a child. Some of those who accepted the CTs framed the programme, which was actually a one-time intervention, as an on-going gift relation between themselves and individual anonymous donors in the US. According to these recipients, the continuity of the gift relation depended on the fulfilment of specific conditions such as a renovation of their houses, which they thought US donors expected of them due to the fact that they felt they were partly chosen because of the condition of their houses. Several politicians, on the other hand, attempted to channel the UCTs into their own political campaigns, thereby (re)politicising the transfer as part of local networks of political patronage—a move that for the NGO would have represented a clear case of corruption.

As anthropologists have long argued, money is far more complex than the orthodox understanding of it as the prime medium of exchange and store of value suggests (Maurer 2006; Zelizer 2017). CT programmes differ not only with regard to the question if money is distributed via new digital technologies (such as the Kenyan mobile money wallet M-Pesa), via banking accounts, or in the form of banknotes. Actors also ascribe a plurality of meanings to money that comes from CT programmes and contrast it with other forms of money. CT money is used in a myriad of different ways as a consequence of its entanglement with social practices, moral hierarchies, and political narratives (Wilkis 2018; Green 2021). ‘Money from above’ as Guaraní in the Argentine Chaco have called CTs (Diz 2019) thus acquires a different meaning compared to money earned in the form of salaries or as a result of one’s entrepreneurial activity. Neither being earned through wage labour nor business activity, Agustin Diz’s Argentinian interlocutors described ‘money from above’ also as ‘women’s money’ (Diz 2019). Along similar lines, money from CT programmes as well as the recipients themselves are often marked as morally suspicious and beneficiaries are asked to justify their deservingness and prove that they act in accordance with both local and international moral standards (DuBois 2021)

Towards a sceptical anthropology of cash transfers

Cash transfers have come a long way since their first implementation in the early 1990s. Fuelled by recent developments in digital payments and their scaling up during the COVID-19 pandemic, they will likely remain a go-to social policy in the near future. It is therefore appropriate to ask if CTs should become the cornerstone of a ‘new regime of distribution’ as argued by, among others, James Ferguson (2015), or if we should be more sceptical about CT programme’s multiple promises. On the surface, and in contrast to structural adjustment reforms or calls for increasing austerity, CT programmes—especially in the form of UCT or UBI programmes—satisfy a demand for a more just distribution of wealth and align with Mauss’ call that ‘the rich must return - freely and also necessarily - to considering themselves as kinds of treasurers for their fellow citizens’ (2016, 181).

A closer look at both the narrative about CTs and their implementation suggests, however, that they might fall short of such a promise. The ways in which they hide the role of intermediary actors downplays the collective nature of economic value creation (Mauss 1985) and threatens to produce new forms of control by the state or other institutions with access to proprietary data. CTs are also often accompanied by a deterioration of social services, thereby putting more pressure on individuals and their close kin. As is often the case with such projects, detailed ethnographic observation risks producing some disillusionment, despite the fact that CTs have undoubtedly helped millions. Yet, without engaging in anthropological fieldwork that connect CTs to their historical and social context, we are left with evaluating promises and assessments produced by the global network of NGOs, think tanks, fintech companies, as well as international institutions who tend to have vested interests in the matter, and who have neither the time, methodological qualifications, nor the will to study in-depth how CTs change peoples’ lives.

Being conscious of the fact that, within the assemblage of market-friendly approaches to development and social assistance, critical evaluations are continuously turned into consulting advice to design better products and interventions (Schuster and Kar 2021, 392), we consider it irresponsible not to conclude without explicitly mentioning a few applied insights into CTs gained through our reading of ethnographies on the subject. Firstly, payments should not be bundled up with other political measures or technological instruments if these are not necessary for the distribution of cash. Imposing conditionalities and introducing new tools of financialisation have frequently given rise to unforeseen and harmful power relations or have reproduced existing inequalities. Secondly, a fascination with ‘non-politics’ and ‘technological solutions’ hides the extent to which CT infrastructures risk being used by government or non-governmental actors in ways that threaten to undermine their positive impacts. New digital and financial infrastructures, for example, can be used for surveillance or to draw people into debt. Thirdly, when poverty thresholds and amounts transferred are set too low, programmes fail to have transformative effects. It is often slightly better-off recipients, and not the extremely poor, who manage to use the money creatively and productively, since these recipients are not forced to spend all of it on basic necessities. Fourthly, it is impossible to predict and control local meanings of CT programmes. Because their source and durability are often questioned and because even the most digitised programmes depend on some sort of intermediaries, both CCTs and UCTs can lead to the emergence of unforeseen ‘shadow’ conditions and be drawn into local power relations. Lastly, presenting the Global South as a ‘laboratory’ for a series of ‘experiments’ in order to provide arguments for testing fintech products or for justifying the libertarian dreams of Silicon Valley tech entrepreneurs about UBI is problematic and should be abandoned (Hoffmann 2020). CTs can have dramatic positive effects. Rather than treating them as simple top-down or experimental ‘interventions’, however, they should be implemented as a ‘social right’ and be backed up by democratic consensus.

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Note on contributors

Martin Fotta is a researcher at the Institute of Ethnology, Czech Academy of Sciences. He is a co-editor, with Maria Elisa Balen, of Money from the government in Latin America: Conditional cash transfer programs and rural lives (Routledge, 2018). His current work on resilience through cash transfers is part of the Systems of resilience project (‘Systemic Risk Institute’, Project NPO No. LX22NPO5101).

Dr Martin Fotta, Institute of Ethnology, Czech Academy of Sciences, Na Florenci 3,110 00 Prague, Czechia. Fotta@eu.cas.cz. orcid.org/0000-0002-3037-317X

Mario Schmidt is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology (Halle/Saale). He has published on a wide range of topics in distinguished academic journals such as Africa, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, and Journal of Cultural Economy. Currently, he is finalising a manuscript exploring the economic and social challenges of men who migrated to Nairobi from rural Western Kenya tentatively entitled, “Under pressure in high-rise Nairobi: Migrants, masculinity and expectations of success in an African capital”.

Dr Mario Schmidt, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology (Halle/Saale). Advokatenweg 36 06114 Halle (Saale), Germany. marioatschmidt@gmail.com.

Note on license

The license for this text has been changed from our usual Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY NC 4.0) to a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).

Emic and etic

Rebecca Tishler — Sun, 29 Nov 2020 17:51:42 +0000

Till Mostowlansky Andrea Rota

The Graduate Institute Geneva & University of Bern

Initially published 29 Nov 2020

http://doi.org/10.29164/20emicetic

Abstract:

The emic/etic distinction originated in linguistics in the 1950s to designate two complementary standpoints for the analysis of human language and behaviour. It has been subject to debates in the humanities and social sciences ever since. Imported into anthropology in the 1960s, etic came to stand for ambitions to establish an objective, scientific approach to the study of culture, whereas emic refers to the goal of grasping the world according to one’s interlocutors’ particular points of view. While the distinction lost traction as an analytical instrument in anthropology in the 1990s, emic and etic have become concepts used by various other disciplines and subfields in the humanities and social sciences. In these contexts, they continue to be used to address a range of different epistemological and methodological issues, such as the relationship between researcher and research subject or the question of how to legitimately interpret social practices. For this reason, the emic/etic distinction remains relevant. It draws attention to fundamental differences in the way scholars and students of various disciplines approach and discuss research, data, and comparison.

Introduction

To most students and scholars in the humanities and social sciences, the term emic is probably familiar from introductory courses and casual references to the concepts, statements, and interactions of a researcher’s interlocutors in ethnographic research. While emic has remained in use as part of anthropological jargon, its conceptual counterpart, etic, a term often loosely employed to identify a researcher’s own analytic framework, has fallen out of fashion. As a result, the historical development of these counterparts has likewise faded into obscurity. However, twentieth-century thinking on emic/etic encapsulates and sheds light on central debates in the humanities and social sciences that retain importance today. The terms are neologisms of the 1950s that were introduced to anthropology from linguistics. They have come to stand for major differences in epistemology, methodology, and theory, for example with regard to materialism, religion, theories of the mind, and relativistic versus comparative approaches to studying social life.

To understand the contemporary significance of emic/etic for the study of culture and society, it is paramount to discuss the distinction’s history in anthropology – especially in the period from the 1960s to the early 1990s – as well as its afterlives in various fields in the humanities and social sciences in which the terms are still widely used. This entry’s first section, therefore, analyses the emergence of emic/etic in the process of interactions between linguists and anthropologists in the 1950s and 1960s. It follows the trajectories of the main protagonists in this process, linguist Kenneth L. Pike and anthropologist Marvin Harris. The second section turns to the actual contents of the emic/etic debate of the late 1980s, which reflect major epistemological differences in the social sciences of the time. Finally, the third section addresses current scholarship in the humanities and social sciences that continues to debate the emic/etic distinction.

Beginnings

Categories and approaches addressing issues similar to the emic/etic distinction have notable precedents in linguistics and anthropology (e.g. Swadesh 1934; Sapir 1949 [1927]; Malinowski 1944, 1954). However, the introduction and formalization of the concepts emic/etic should be credited to the American linguist Kenneth L. Pike. Pike’s work was informed by both his academic research at the University of Michigan and his missionary involvement in the Summer Institute of Linguistics, a Christian-based organization specialising in translating the Bible into lesser-known languages (Pike 1962). As a specialist of non-Indo-European languages such as the Mixtec language family, Pike’s early career focused on the study of phonetics and phonemics both as objects of theoretical inquiry and as a pragmatic means to research and codify local languages (Pike 1943, 1947).

In linguistics, phonetics is the study of the sounds of human speech and their production. One of the aims of phonetics research is to develop a cross-linguistic representation of all sounds found in human languages. For instance, the French word cher (‘dear’ or ‘expensive’) and the English word sheep begin with the same phone, [ ʃ ]– a voiceless palato–alveolar fricative – according to the notation of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). Yet not all phonetic differences are relevant to speakers of any given language in their communication. Drawing on this observation, phonemics aims to reconstruct the implicit or unconscious system of sound contrasts that are employed to distinguish meaningful utterances in a given language. For instance, /r/ and /l/ are distinct phonemes in English; thus, rip and lip have different meanings. Conversely, the /r/ in the word great will sound quite different when pronounced by a Scotsman or a Londoner, but the meaning of the word will remain the same, which indicates that English speakers perceive the two phonetically distinct sounds as nonetheless the same phoneme.

In the 1950s, Pike became increasingly critical of approaches that considered language a form of human activity essentially distinct from non-linguistic behaviour, and he sought to develop a theoretical and methodological approach that treated ‘[v]erbal and nonverbal activity as a unified whole' (Pike 1954: 2). An initial step towards this goal was to extend the distinction between phonetics and phonemics to the analysis of all forms of human behaviour. Eliminating the reference to sound units implied by the prefix ‘phon-’ gave rise to the terms emic and etic. Pike defined emic and etic as ‘two basic standpoints from which a human observer can describe human behavior, each of them valuable for certain specific purposes' (Pike 1954: 8).

According to Pike, an etic approach would rely on a generalised classification system devised by the researcher in advance for the study of any particular culture in order to compare and classify behavioural data from across the world, analogous to the use of the International Phonetic Alphabet to compare the sounds of spoken language. For instance, a researcher might outline a series of formal criteria to distinguish among different types of speech acts, such as statements, orders, and promises. Such an etic taxonomy could then be employed to compare the use of these distinct functions of language in different settings (see Reiss 1985).

Conversely, following Pike, an emic approach would dispense with a priori means of classification. Focusing on one culture at a time, its goal would be to discover and describe the structured patterns of mental and bodily activities that the members of that culture, consciously or unconsciously, regard as distinct and significant for their system of behaviour. Thus, an emic approach would call attention to the fact that two etically idential behaviours can in fact differ profoundly, depending on the meaning and purpose of the actors. To illustrate this, Pike employed the example of two identical statements on the Parliament floor, one of which could serve to promote a piece of legislation, the other to filibuster it, depending on the intentions of the speaker (1954: 13). Another example is the killing of a fly, which may be a trivial gesture in one place, but may have deeper moral implications in others. Pike thus emphasised that emic and etic standpoints should be regarded as two elements of a stereoscopic image – one that combines two points of view on the same data to represent its object (Kassam & Bashuna 2004: 209-12; Pike 1954: 12). Yet, for Pike, the emic standpoint provided deeper insight into a particular culture because it helps scholars understand the attitudes, motives, and interests of social actors within the context of their cultural wholes.

Pike’s discussion of the emic/etic distinction was just the starting point for the development of tagmemics, a complex system of grammatical analysis devoted to the study of the basic units of language (Pike 1982; Hahn 2005). Within the social sciences, however, the transmission of Pike’s ideas was largely limited to the core terms emic/etic, which found their way into anthropology at least a decade after Pike had coined them (Headland 1990: 15) and became increasingly popular in anthropological publications from the 1960s to the 1980s (e.g. Berger et al. 1976; Durbin 1972; Levi-Strauss 1972; Feleppa 1986). During this period, the lines of transmission led in two directions: a transmission of the concepts emic/etic from linguistics (in the spirit of Kenneth Pike) directly into anthropological studies (e.g. Dundes 1962); and a different trajectory for the terms, which were popularised through the continuously-evolving work of Marvin Harris.

In 1964, Harris, then at Columbia University, published his first major work, The nature of cultural things, in which he refers to Pike and the emic/etic distinction. This book served as an early entry point for the concepts into anthropology. In 1968, Harris published The rise of anthropological theory, which remains one of the most cited histories of the development of anthropological thought. Harris’s history, covering a plethora of anthropological debates from nineteenth-century evolutionism to French structuralism to British social anthropology, ends in the 1960s with a theory – cultural materialism – which he himself coined and which he propagated as a means to return to anthropology’s ‘scientific’ aspirations. Cultural materialism is based on the assumption that ‘human social life is a response to the practical problems of earthly existence’ (Harris 1979: ix), and, drawing on Marxian, evolutionary, and ecological ideas, sought to uncover the material – that is, economic, biological, environmental – determinants of sociocultural phenomena. Harris thereby argued for a focus on the ‘objective’ causes of human behaviour and defended a view of anthropology as a universal science of society devoted to the formulation of general, explanatory, and testable theories (Harris 1979; 1994).

In the proclamation of cultural materialism, Harris tried to build a case against the New Ethnography and ethnoscience movements (Sturtevant 1964) of the same period, which propagated the emic study of cognition and language to examine how different cultures perceive and interact with their environments. Harris particularly criticised the unreflective borrowing of concepts from linguistics, including Pike’s emic and etic. In this process, he also introduced his own, critical reinterpretation of emic/etic as part of the epistemological framework of cultural materialism.

In The rise of anthropological theory, the emic/etic distinction served to differentiate between what Harris called ‘cultural idealism’ and ‘cultural materialism’ in ‘an age dedicated to eclectic middle-ground theories’ (1968: 569). With the term ‘cultural idealism’, Harris (1968: 568) was hinting at a broad spectrum of misguided anthropological approaches – ‘accumulated liabilities of the past two hundred years’ – that aim to explore informants’ mental states and motivations. According to Harris (1968: 576), this emic strand of theory, including the work of his contemporary, Claude Lévi-Strauss, failed to recognise the methodological dilemma that derives from the fact that ‘the ethnographer teaches the informant how to teach the ethnographer to think in appropriate emic terms’. In contrast, Harris fervently promoted an etic approach as the foundation of cultural materialism and a way out of anthropology’s increasing scientific irrelevance. By etic, Harris meant statements and categories that receive confirmation from other scientists, but not necessarily from informants. Etics thus allowed anthropologists to develop their arguments on the basis of scientific frameworks that are rooted in assumedly objective social processes and relations. This would eventually render anthropology ‘the science of culture’.

Harris’s research programme – further clarified in his widely referenced 1979 book Cultural materialism: the struggle for a science of culture – built on Marx and a range of other positivistic thinkers to emphasise societal infrastructure, structure, and superstructure as determinants of culture (Kuznar & Sanderson 2007: 4). In Cultural materialism, as well as in much later work leading up to Harris’s final monograph, Theories of culture in postmodern times (1999), the distinction between emic and etic served to shed light on the difference between social scientists who analyse their informants’ interpretations of events (emic) and those who weigh such interpretations against the forces of economy, ecology, and technology (etic). Harris discussed this distinction using, for instance, his research on ‘bovicide’ in southern India (1979: 32). This research juxtaposed farmers’ statements that all calves – male and female – were treated and fed equally with statistical data that showed that male calves were significantly more likely to die. In a context in which the Hindu prohibition against bovine slaughter was dominant but in which there was no use for male traction animals, Harris argued that the starving and neglect of male calves was emically rationalised as ‘males being weaker’. However, from an etic perspective, local economic and ecological conditions led farmers to actively cull male calves by pulling them from their mothers’ teats.

**The emic/etic debate**

From the 1960s to the 1980s, many anthropologists took up emic/etic, either as a way to position themselves epistemologically or simply to indicate alignment with a major strand of anthropological theory. However, no scholar employed the terms as pointedly and deliberately as Marvin Harris did to promote his own theory – cultural materialism – over such a long period of time. We can thus look at Harris as a node in anthropological discussions on the emic/etic distinction. Such discussions first took place in academic journals (e.g. Harris 1976) and then in person in 1988 when Pike and Harris were part of an invited panel at the Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Phoenix, Arizona. In front of an audience of an estimated six hundred anthropologists, the two protagonists of the decades-long intellectual debate encountered each other.

In his introduction to the collected papers presented at the symposium, Thomas Headland (1990), who was responsible for organising the event, called attention to the rising popularity of emic/etic beyond the field of anthropology. During the 1970s, the terms had not only spread to other social sciences, but had also found their way into English dictionaries. Yet, unsurprisingly, the dissemination of the concepts in various fields had led to growing confusion regarding their scholarly definitions. Depending on the academic context, the emic/etic distinction was used synonymously with verbal/nonverbal, specific/universal, description/theory, and in many other ways. Although Headland considered most of these imaginative interpretations to be inaccurate, he acknowledged that they had been heuristically useful in various disciplines and that the extension of the original meaning was therefore legitimate. He also argued that such latitude could prove detrimental to the field of anthropology. A conceptual clarification therefore seemed in order. This, however, proved to be a complex task. As various examples illustrate, what emerged from the debate was less a coherent view of the emic/etic distinction than an interconnected inventory of contested epistemological issues.

Pike and Harris accepted that their uses and understandings of emic/etic diverged from one another. More importantly, however, they used emic/etic in the service of distinct scientific paradigms. Defending a Kantian perspective, Pike portrayed thinking, imagining, and speaking as ways of relating the individual to the world that are inevitably mediated by the ‘emic structures’ of a culture (Pike 1990a: 34). As he suggested in one example, it is only by availing themselves of those cultural categories that the members of a family can say that they are not merely eating together in the morning, but are having breakfast (Pike 1990a: 39-40).

In his opinion, the main task of the researcher was to reconstruct the unexpressed ‘emic knowledge’ that guides human behaviour. Etic concepts were to provide a helpful steppingstone towards this goal – just as a phonetic analysis provided an entry point to decoding an unknown language (Pike 1990b: 64-5; Pike 1954: 11). Harris, on the other hand, championed a neo-behaviourist perspective and vehemently opposed the anthropological ‘dogma’ that identified the ‘distinctively human capacity for expectations, intentions, and ideas’ as the key to explaining human behaviour (Harris 1990a: 55). According to his approach, an analysis employing etic categories was not only a goal in itself, but was in fact essential if one is to account for emergent social phenomena that were not consciously or individually intended.

Pushing this argument further, Harris objected to Pike’s view that thinking, imagining, and speaking are kinds of ‘emic behavior’ (Harris 1990b: 78), insisting that the terms emic and etic were not meant to demarcate particular types of behaviour (for instance, mental events versus bodily movements). Rather, they referred to separate modes of description the researched used – Pike had actually emphasised himself in his early works. In Harris’s opinion, the advantage of emic/etic over similar binary modes of description such as subjective/objective or insider/outsider derives precisely from its inherent epistemological focus. For instance, participants and observers can both be subjective and objective in their descriptions and analyses. However, ‘the discrimination between emic and etic modes depends strictly on the operations employed by the observers’ (Harris 1990a: 50). In this epistemological understanding of the terms, Harris underscored that the validity of scientific results ultimately depends on the consensus of the community of observers, independent of the distinctions that the actors themselves consider appropriate (Harris 1990b: 78). Etic categories are regarded as scientifically sound when they allow for the discovery of objective social patterns and the production of general and verifiable knowledge, and not because they apprehend some subjective account of the world. As Harris put it, etic analyses ‘stand or fall on their contribution to predictive or retrodictive nomothetic theories about the evolution of sociocultural differences and similarities’ (Harris 1990: 53-4).

This argument revealed an even more profound fault line. For Pike, scholars themselves were ‘creatures of their scientifically and naturally categorized linguistic environment’ who may not recognize the ‘local’ or culture-specific nature of their own point of view (1990b: 68). This implied that the etic categories devised by the scholars had no special status, but amounted to nothing more than the emic perspective of a scientific community (Pike 1954: 9). This idea questioned the very possibility of a cross-cultural ‘scientific’ anthropology as postulated by Harris. Harris thus warned that if all scientific concepts were regarded as plain emic constructs, ‘the very notion of etics would have to be abandoned along with all hope of achieving a science of human social life’ (Harris 1990b: 79). Harris insisted that the emics of the scientific community were of a special kind because of their unique responsiveness ‘to the task of building a diachronic, synchronic, comparative, and global science of society and culture’ (1990a: 49). It is this fundamental distinction that, in Harris’s opinion, granted scientific statements the separate category of etics.

Despite the fact that the Pike‒Harris debate happened in the context of a large-scale gathering of anthropologists, it appeared to be the end rather than the beginning of a focused engagement with emic/etic in anthropology. The reasons for this are complex and vary according to local contexts (and this entry can only cover anthropological research published in English as the main site of the emic/etic debate). For instance, Harris, who continued to be the main promoter of emic/etic in anthropology in the context of cultural materialism, remained outside the period’s dominant debates, and his contemporary work was – if acknowledged at all – referenced to distinguish critical approaches from old-fashioned ones, with his being considered old-fashioned and not sufficiently reflexive (e.g. Marcus & Fischer 1999 [1986]: 111).

Furthermore, the significant influence of postcolonial studies and poststructuralism on anthropology in the 1980s and 1990s contributed to a turn away from aspirations to conduct cross-cultural analysis and achieve scientific objectivity – or etics – that had been an integral part of cultural materialism. At the same time, the temporary decline in interest in Marxian historical materialism that came with the end of the Cold War assured that cultural materialism ‒ and thereby Harris’s take on emic/etic ‒ were laid to rest. In his late work, and most explicitly in the essay ‘Cultural materialism is alive and well and won’t go away until something better comes along’, Harris sought to defend his positivistic stance against the constructivist position of feminist theory and the deconstructive approaches of Derrida and Foucault (1994: 74). In Harris’s opinion, the relativism inherent in these paradigms led down a dangerous path towards the rejection of scientific truth and, ultimately, to fascism.

It is against this backdrop that we can understand the receding interest in emic/etic as a heuristic instrument in anthropology. While discussions around emic/etic occasionally resurface (e.g. Ginzburg 2017; Sahlins 2017), they often do so in the form of footnotes and do not seem to affect larger theoretical debates. Although anthropologists continue to employ the term emic to broadly refer to an interlocutor’s standpoint as well as collective ‘local’ practices and perspectives (e.g. Beyer 2016: xix; Her 2018; Knauft 2019), it has lost its analytical significance. Similarly, the epistemological and theoretical arguments related to the term etic have lost traction or appear using other terms, for instance in relation to universal cognitive constraints as foundations for cross-cultural comparison (e.g. Whitehouse 2004) or in debates concerning cultural and ontological difference (Heywood 2017). Meanwhile, emic/etic have emerged in other fields of the humanities and social sciences. The following section discusses selected examples, some of which have fed back into on-going anthropological debates.

Afterlives: language, infrastructure, and religion

In linguistics, Pike’s legacy lives on through the numerous scholars he trained to analyse unwritten languages, in particular in his capacity as director of the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) (Wise, Headland & Brend 2001). His original approach to the study of language and behaviour, however, succumbed to the paradigm shift within linguistics towards Noam Chomsky’s theory of transformational grammar (Headland 2001). Yet, one of Pike’s students, the anthropologist and former SIL missionary Daniel Everett, has recently revived the conceptual reflection on the emics of culture at the intersection of linguistics and anthropology.

Everett’s discussion of the implications of an emic perspective is set against the backdrop of a widely publicised scientific dispute between him and Chomsky (Everett 2005; Colapinto 2007; Wolfe 2016). Drawing on his analysis of the language spoken by the Pirahã people of Amazonia, Everett questions Chomsky’s thesis of a universal grammar shared by all of humankind and insists on the role of culture in shaping underlying linguistic structures. Developing this argument further, Everett (2007, 2016) criticises the nativist tradition in Western philosophy that, from Plato to Chomsky, postulates a psychic unity of mankind on the grounds of shared innate concepts. In contrast, Everett situates his work in a lineage that extends from Aristotle to Michael Polanyi and emphasises personal experiences and appreciations as the sources of tacit forms of knowledge. Within this framework, Everett deploys the concept of emicization (citing Pike 1967) to characterise the individual internalization of a number of ineffable or unspoken background premises and know-how that constitute a culturally specific ‘insider point of view’ and ground our understanding of the ‘self’ (Everett 2016: 18).

Everett does not conceive of culture as a concrete, static entity that individuals appropriate, but rather as an ‘abstract network shaping and connecting social roles, hierarchically structured knowledge domains, and ranked values’ (2016: 79). For Everett, culture resides exclusively in the minds of individuals. Thus, the unity of a culture and the power of culture to influence thoughts and behaviours are not determined at a social level, but rather emerge from the overlapping backgrounds of individuals who share similar – although never identical – experiences in a local context. For Everett, emicization is the process that leads, consciously or unconsciously, from objective experience to the formation of a common subjective appreciation of the world (2016: 116). Therefore, in his opinion, emicization constitutes the answer to one of the fundamental anthropological questions: ‘How is culture even possible?’ (Everett 2016: 116).

As noted earlier, the rise of new trends in anthropology at the end of the twentieth century largely prevented the transmission of Harris’s theoretical reflections on the emic/etic distinction to a broader audience of scholars. More recent anthropological studies on infrastructure (e.g. Appel, Anand & Gupta 2018; Dalakoglou 2017) have once again critically engaged with the legacy of cultural materialism and the claims it developed with respect to the determining force of infrastructure vis-à-vis sociocultural and political processes. For instance, in his study of a highway from Albania to Greece, Dimitris Dalakoglou (2017) observes that early anthropological approaches to infrastructure, such as Harris’s (1968), hindered broader ethnographic exploration through their static, deterministic frameworks. Dalakoglou argues that Harris’s cultural materialism lacked ‘the necessary departure from the Marxist grand narrative toward ethnographic particularity and then back to theory […] in concrete and organized ways’ (2017:11). From a Marxian, positivistic perspective, which Harris largely followed, ‘ontological diversity among the various dimensions of an infrastructure (e.g. the sociocultural, material, historical)’ is replaced by a broad, overarching category of infrastructure that determines everything else. An etic analysis of the sort championed by Harris was, therefore, expected to focus on universal infrastructural processes underlying specific cultures.

It is precisely this much-criticised aspect of cultural materialism that has led anthropologists of infrastructure, and contemporary scholars of materiality more generally (Coole & Frost 2010; Ellenzweig & Zammito 2017), to turn to Science and Technology Studies (STS) and their take on infrastructure as a product of human/non-human interaction. In the kind of materialism proposed early on by scholars of STS such as Bruno Latour (1987, 2005) and Langdon Winner (1989), infrastructures are not a universal or otherwise objective category. Rather, they are part and parcel of sociocultural practices and therefore shaped by class, race, and relations of power at different scales – as demonstrated, for instance, in Stephanie Tam’s (2013) study of caste relations and regimes of purity in Ahmedabad’s sewage system since the time of its construction in colonial India. In this framework, the idea of infrastructure is fundamentally opposed to pre-conceived dichotomies, including epistemological distinctions between mobile/static, subject/object, and emic/etic.

As these examples indicate, in its more recent uses the emic/etic distinction tends to accompany disciplinary debates in various (sub-)disciplines. The study of religion offers a last telling example. The importation of emic/etic and similar distinctions into the study of religion has been largely mediated through the work of Clifford Geertz (e.g. 1966, 1974; see A. Geertz 1997). Since the 1960s, Geertz’s work on religion has provided essential resources to move this discipline away from its original phenomenological concerns with the nature and manifestations of a distinct sacred reality to framing religion as a social and cultural domain of human thought and activity (Wiebe 1984; Gladigow 2005). During this long – and to some extent still on-going – process, the emic/etic distinction became intertwined with contentious methodological and epistemological issues concerning the alleged special status of religious ‘insiders’, as opposed to academic ‘outsiders’. At the heart of the controversy lay the question of whether or not religious ‘insiders’ have privileged access to and understanding of religious matters.

From a methodological point of view, the debate has raised the question of how scholars determine who counts as a religious insider and whether it is possible or necessary for outsiders to acquire such a status if they are to credibly analyse religious phenomena. Recent scholarship questions the validity of the insider/outsider dichotomy as a way to assess the status of an individual with respect to a religious tradition or community. In this regard, George Chryssides and Stephen Gregg (2019: vii) point out that ‘[t]here are not merely insiders and outsiders, but a whole range of positions that those who belong or do not belong to religious communities find themselves in’. Accordingly, they underscore the importance of ‘acknowledging different modes of accepting and rejecting various forms of religious life’.

From an epistemological point of view, the insider/outsider debate in the study of religion highlights significant differences between scholars. On the one hand, there are those who frame religion as a sui generis phenomenon; that is, as a separate reality the appreciation of which would necessitate a form of ‘religious insight’ that only ‘insiders’ could possibly bring to bear. On the other hand, there are scholars who defend the possibility of studying religion by means of sociological, anthropological, and psychological approaches (Mostowlansky & Rota 2016). In this context, various authors have criticised the idea that religion necessitates a special mode of knowing as a normative stance and as a political move in a struggle for (academic) influence (Wiebe 1999; McCutcheon 1997; Jensen 2011).

Russell McCutcheon’s (1999) volume The insider/outsider problem in the study of religion constitutes an important node in this debate, but also contributed to the conflation of emic with ‘insider’ and etic with ‘outsider’. One way to disentangle these dimensions at the epistemic level is to employ Niklas Luhmann’s (2000) distinction between first- and second-order observers (Mostowlansky & Rota 2016). According to this distinction, first-order observers appreciate the world according to a specific perspective. However, they are not reflexively aware of the fact that their point of view is contextually situated. Religious insiders can be equated to first-order observers who relate to the world on the basis of their religious convictions – for instance, the way they conceive of God or the sacred. Second-order observers, on the other hand, examine how first-order observers observe; that is, they appreciate the perspectival character of first-order observations and explore how and why first-order observers uphold a certain perspective. Academics can also be first-order observers, just as religious practitioners can reflexively assume the position of second-order observers. But emic and etic are not synonymous with first- and second-order observations. Rather, emic and etic analyses are both the product of second-order observers, although they imply different standpoints. In sum, as Steven Sutcliffe points out, emic and etic address ‘the question of how, rather than by whom, the object of knowledge is constructed’ (2019: 30, emphasis in original). In the study of religion, emic approaches are favoured by, for instance, scholars in the tradition of critical theory who focus on empirical uses of the term ‘religion’ as an instrument to categorise and control certain aspects of the world (Bergunder 2014). Conversely, examples of etic perspectives can be found in the burgeoning field of the cognitive science of religion, which draws on cognitive, ecological, and evolutionary theories to explain the universality of human beliefs and practices associated with religion (Pyysiäinen 2013).

Conclusion

The historic significance of the emic/etic distinction in anthropology is twofold. The terms emic and etic have provided scholars with a vocabulary that directs the attention of their audience towards important issues of analytical perspective, standpoint, and positionality without having to articulate them in detail. In the case of emic, many anthropologists have employed the term intuitively to point to their interlocutors’ standpoints. While the term etic has largely disappeared with the decline of Marvin Harris’s cultural materialism, similar issues are raised in debates on comparative approaches. What is more, debates surrounding the emic/etic distinction themselves constitute a fruitful object of study in that they provide important insights into the development of anthropological theory over more than six decades.

The explicit theoretical relevance of the emic/etic distinction has progressively faded in anthropology since the 1990s. Yet in other disciplines, the terms have been used in a multiplicity of dimensions and sub-debates. As a result, they do not have a clear definition today. Rather, emic/etic are continuously appropriated and reinterpreted in various fields of the humanities and social sciences, often to express a range of ontological, epistemological, and methodological standpoints. These fields include – in addition to the ones discussed above – cross-cultural psychology (e.g. Eckensberger 2015), history (e.g. Ginzburg 2013), and management studies (e.g. Buckley 2014). One way to think about the emic/etic distinction, then, is that it consists of two adaptable concepts that scholars employ to address issues salient in their disciplines. As such, they are part of on-going struggles between the quest for objectivity and the acknowledgment of its potential elusiveness.

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Note on contributors

Till Mostowlansky is a social anthropologist whose research interests include mobility, materiality, and religion as well as diverse practices of ‘doing good’ (e.g. development, charity, humanitarianism and philanthropy). He is author of Azan on the moon: entangling modernity along Tajikistan’s Pamir Highway (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017). His current project focusses on Muslim humanitarianism in the borderlands of Central and South Asia.

Department of Anthropology and Sociology, The Graduate Institute Geneva, Chemin Eugène-Rigot 2A, P.O. Box 1672, 1211 Geneva 1, Switzerland. till.mostowlansky@graduateinstitute.ch

Andrea Rota is Assistant Professor at the Institute for the Science of Religion and director of the doctoral program “Global Studies” at the University of Bern. Previously, he held research and teaching positions at the Universities of Bayreuth, Fribourg, and Zurich. His work focuses on philosophical and sociological theories of religion, the entanglement of religion and science in the Long Sixties, and religious education.

Institute for the Science of Religion, University of Bern, Lerchenweg 36, 3012 Bern, Switzerland. andrea.rota@relwi.unibe.ch

Water

Felix Stein — Mon, 09 Dec 2019 14:42:27 +0000

Veronica Strang

Durham University

Initially published 9 Dec 2019

http://doi.org/10.29164/19water

Abstract:

Because water permeates every aspect of human existence, ethnographic accounts describe many forms of engagement with it: for example, its centrality to modes of production; its influence on how societies organise themselves socially and spatially; its role in leisure activities and the enjoyment of its aesthetic qualities. Human relationships with water, though culturally and historically specific, share common themes of meaning, recognising water’s essentiality to life, health and well-being at every scale. This often translates into the use of ‘living water‘ in religious rituals, such as baptism or mortuary ceremonies, in which water expresses important ideas about social identity and spiritual movement between material and non-material domains.

The material control of water has long been recognised as vital to gaining and maintaining political power. In recent decades anthropology has focused increasingly on debates about water ownership and rights of access to water, and considered how the control of water reflects social, economic and political relations. There is growing interest in water infrastructures, and how they have often enabled unsustainable practices in water use and management. Today, as the world faces an anthropogenically-created ecological crisis, water issues are central to concerns about climate change, global warming, and increasing volatility and uncertainty in water flows. This has encouraged a new area of anthropological focus on non-human as well as human rights in relation to water. Thus the anthropology of water extends from its multiple uses in everyday life to the major issues that all societies urgently need to address.

Introduction

As the element essential to life and to all processes of production and reproduction, water permeates every domain of human existence. It has always had a background presence in anthropology’s ethnographic literature, where it appears in religious rituals; shapes human spatial organization around water sources; and structures people’s lifeways and modes of production, as well as their ecological knowledge and environmental engagement. However, water itself has not been the focus of anthropological studies until relatively recently. It came to the fore with growing interest in the relationship between the control of water and political power and, more strongly, when environmental anthropology emerged as a lively subfield in response to increasing concerns about sustainability. As societies have begun to realise that the world is facing a human-made ecological crisis, water has become the focus of intense research in multiple disciplinary areas. Anthropology brings to this a vitally important capacity to illuminate its diverse social and cultural dimensions (Hastrup 2011, Hastrup & Hastrup 2015, de Wolff et al. 2019, Wagner 2013).

Human engagements with water take place on every scale, beginning with the most basic physical needs for clean water to maintain health and to ensure bodily and domestic hygiene. Recognition that water is literally essential to all biological organisms means that it has cross-cultural meaning as the ‘substance of life’. This understanding supports important concepts of water as a common good, to which everyone must have rights of access and use, and this fundamental principle permeates many discussions about water ownership and governance. Yet many people lack access to clean water and sanitation for a variety of reasons, including the overuse of limited local resources; disruption of rural lifeways; economic imperatives to migrate to marginal and poorly served urban areas; and insufficient fiscal or technical capacities to create infrastructures for water supply. Such a lack of access to clean water is a key indicator of governmental capacities to provide for people’s most basic needs, and of the deep inequalities existing both within and between societies.

Religion, health and wealth

Anxieties about meeting basic human rights of access to sufficient clean water tend to obscure other aspects of people’s immediate engagement with it, but these are also powerful influences on how people respond to a range of water issues. Water’s essentiality to life means that it has a central place in multiple religious belief systems. In many place-based societies, where what are often described as ‘nature religions’ pertain, its elemental powers are frequently manifested in deities responsible for rain, fertility, and the creation of life. For example, in Africa, Mami Wata, a water goddess valorised in many parts of the continent’s west coast, provides all of these things (Drewal 2008). In Aboriginal Australia, water is the source of cosmogenesis in the creative era known as Dreamtime, in which the world was formed, while the Rainbow Serpent, which is a manifestation of the powers of water, continues to generate life from within the land (Merlan 1998, Strang 2009). In the monotheisms of larger societies, water features as a vital manifestation of a humanised deity’s divine beneficence or, in the form of floods or drought, as an expression of god’s wrath. Thus for many people, access to sufficient and timely water carries an important moral and religious dimension.

Whatever the form of the providing deities, many religious schema also conflate ideas about water and the human spirit, generating visions of ‘living water’, vital to physical and spiritual well-being (Krause & Strang 2013). Such beliefs are central to a host of rituals in which water cleanses, heals, and blesses, and metaphorically carries the spirit between material and non-material domains. The notion of living water is also a response to people’s phenomenological engagement with it as an animated and animating element that is always in motion: shimmering, flowing, appearing, and disappearing. Physical and immediate interactions with water – bathing, drinking, swimming, and observing – provide a range of compelling sensory experiences, which lend emotive weight to people’s thinking about water and what it means (Krause 2016, Strang 2005). Thus, an understanding that water flows through, enlivens, and connects people and places supports important ideas about common substance and identity. These are neatly expressed, for example, in the use of water for rituals of baptism that welcome individuals into particular groups or congregations, or which conjoin them in marriage (Mallery 2011). The inevitable dark side of this understanding is that a vision of identity as literally ‘substantial’ also allows for many anxieties about social and/or physical pollution, and invasions of ‘otherness’ that might compromise individual or collective health and well-being (Strang 2004).

Concepts of holiness, health, and wealth are both etymologically and conceptually related. They express capacities for maintaining (spiritual, bodily, or fiscal) wholeness and flourishing. As well as being seen as fundamental to physical health, the relationship between health and water has seen a transition from assumptions about water’s intrinsic healing qualities (as assumed, for example, in the thousands of holy and healing wells in many parts of the world) to more material notions about the healing properties of water’s mineral content, which led to a major fashion in Europe for spas and baths (Anderson & Tabb 2002). Water’s centrality to processes of production leads to cross-cultural acknowledgement of its essential role in enabling human agency and generating wealth. What constitutes wealth is culturally diverse, but in many societies the relationship between water and wealth is often demonstrated in the ways that the ownership of water, displayed in landscaped gardens, fountains, and pools, provides a key signifier of wealth and social status.

Power and control

As the above implies, the control of water is intrinsically related to economic and political power, and historical and ethnographic research has demonstrated that how water is controlled and distributed provides a precise mirror of social, political, and environmental relations. A classic study of Balinese water temples, for instance, describes the carefully balanced social and hydrological relations mediated by local priests acting as both religious leaders and water managers (Lansing 1991). On a larger scale, it has famously been argued that major infrastructures such as irrigation schemes, requiring the centralisation and coordination of labour, were foundational to the creation of nation states (Hocart 1970). The importance of water in political organization is particularly clear in the historical emergence of ‘hydraulic societies’ dependent upon major irrigation schemes, such as those in Mesopotamia, and in the Indus Valley (Butzer 1976, Giosan et al. 2012, Tvedt & Jakobsson 2006). Karl Wittfogel’s historical analysis of water in China suggested that state capacities to control a vast network of canals was vital for the establishment of powerful imperial dynasties (1957). However, subsequent writers have rejected the argument that the control of water necessarily leads to ‘despotic regimes’, observing that relationships between water and power can take many different forms (Krause & Ley forthcoming).

However, Wittfogel’s more fundamental point, that power and the control of water are inextricably related, remains influential, and contemporary ethnographers have continued to explore how the control of water mediates relations between states and citizens, with access to water often demonstrating persistent social inequalities. For example, the manipulation of weirs, sluices, and water flows in a South Indian irrigation scheme has been shown to reinforce the advantages of village elites (Mosse 2003). In multiple development contexts, gender inequality influences women’s access to and control over water (Coles & Wallace 2005, see also Lahiri-Dutt 2006). The provision of water in Mumbai turns out to be linked to social identity and recognition of ‘hydraulic citizenship’, and leads to the exclusion of marginal groups lacking such recognition (Anand 2017). Shifts in ideology are similarly reflected in water. A strong focus on instrumentalism – a determination to act directively on the material environment – in industrialised societies has been exported, via literal and economic colonialism, to many parts of the world under the guise of development (Lewis & Mosse 2006).

Focusing on the history of the American West, the commodification of water into an asset may mean that ‘capitalism has created over the last 100 years a new distinctive type of hydraulic society, one that demonstrates once more how the domination of nature can lead to the domination of some people over others’ (Worster 2006: 50, see also Escobar 2005, Josephson 2002, Reisner 2001).

Water has its own material powers, of course, in the force provided by water flows. Many societies have harnessed these powers, via channels, water wheels, and mills, to do ‘work’ to support their processes of production, and to direct irrigation to their crops. But water is not always amenable: it also has its own agentive effects in making and unmaking environments and impacting upon human lives. In a world dominated by dualistic ideas of nature as the ‘other’ to culture, water is commonly seen to represent the capacities of the non-human world to reject the authority of human instrumentality. Water’s material forces highlight that such efforts often involve an intrinsic tension – a wrestling for control (Edgeworth 2011). This brings to the fore the reality that every cultural landscape is also a cultural waterscape. Control over water flows is achieved via the imposition of dams, canals, drainage, reservoirs, pipes, and other directive infrastructure that materialises societal ideas, values, and practices in relation to water. As with other forms of infrastructure, such concretization inscribes long-term patterns of human-environmental engagement upon the land and waterscape (Bichsel 2016, Harvey & Knox 2012, Larkin 2013).

Over time, human communities have engaged with water with varying degrees of determination to control its movements and direct its flows into serving their interests. Early societies, and those that have retained pre-industrial economic modes of hunting and gathering, horticulture, and small-scale agriculture, have tended to be conservative in their practices, working with the inherent processes of local ecosystems, and imposing relatively low-key forms of manipulation of the landscape for their purposes. In many larger societies, however, trajectories of human-environmental engagement have been very different, as population growth and technological developments have encouraged more assertive efforts to control water flows. Social and religious changes, in particular movements from nature religions to monotheistic beliefs, have led to notions of ‘dominion’ and the desire to impose patriarchal authority on ‘nature’, often feminised as alternate to male ‘culture’ (Plumwood 1993, 2002). The objectification of nature has also been encouraged by a more scientific lens upon the world, through which ideas about what water is have become ‘disenchanted’, leading to its reconceptualization as H₂O (Illich 1996, Linton 2010).

Greater dominion over water has been realised through new forms of science and technology enabling extensive engineering of the landscape and increasing capacities to direct water flows into supporting the needs and desires of rapidly enlarging human populations. Water usage has risen, in part because of more profligate domestic habits, but also in its use to support societies’ growing dependence on irrigated agriculture, as well as industry itself, which – due to the embodied water in goods and production processes – often results in the movement of water globally from arid environments to densely populated and wealthier temperate regions (Hoekstra & Chapagain 2007, Meissner 2012).

The commoditization of water, and its reductive reframing as a resource or economic asset, has further encouraged utilitarian ideas about the material world as the basis for the provision of ‘environmental services’ or ‘ecosystem services’ to humankind. Patterns of water use in many societies have reflected the dominance of these ideas. In the last century there has been a race to build large dams, canals, and other infrastructures designed to direct water into enlarging urban areas; into hydro-electric generation; and into irrigated agriculture (Khagram 2004). Today over 70% of the Earth’s freshwater is directed into irrigation, and the World Bank has stated that a further 15% will be needed in the next decade to provide sufficient food and energy for the expanding human population.^[1]They are predicting major shortfalls, which raises the prospect of a range of problems, including rising numbers of environmental refugees.

Infrastructure and conflict

Shortfalls in water supply also exacerbate the issues surrounding the management of transboundary water flows which provide opportunities for both collaboration and conflict. The United Nations reports that 145 states share transboundary lakes or rivers (2019). In the last fifty years, 295 international water agreements have been signed, but there have also been thirty-seven ‘acute transboundary water disputes’ and two-thirds of the 263 transboundary river basins lack any framework for cooperative management. With rising demand, and with water flows becoming less reliable (in particular where global warming has diminished the water storage provided by glaciers), there is obvious potential for greater conflict.

Such tensions are readily evident in the controversies relating to the construction of big and ‘mega’ dams, such as the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River (built in 1936); the Kariba Dam on the Zambezi River (funded by the World Bank in the 1950s); and, more recently, the Sardar Sarovar Damon the Narmada River, and the Three Gorges Dams on the Yangtze River. 57,0000 large dams have been constructed over the last century: these generate nearly 20% of the world’s energy, and assist much of its irrigation. They have supported worldwide population movement into urban areas, and the development of industries. Thus – like the earlier hydraulic infrastructures noted by Arthur Hocart – they have often been seen as integral to the building and flourishing of the nation state (Biggs 2012, Mohamud & Verhoeven 2016, Verhoeven 2015).

However, the human and environmental costs of such large-scale directive engagements with water have also been massive (Rodgers & O’Neill 2012). As well as increasing the potential for transboundary conflicts, their focus on water storage for resource extraction, urban supply, and cheap hydro-electricity has resulted in many human rights violations and, with concomitant social impacts, the displacement of thousands of people living in riparian rural communities (Hwang et al. 2007, Mathur 2006, McDonald-Wilmsen & Webber 2010, Oliver-Smith 2009). Such projects have also resulted in extreme violence at times – such as the massacre of 400 Indigenous people to make way for the Chixoy Dam in Guatamala in 1982. Thousands more have been killed by dam failures; for example the collapse of China’s Banqiao Dam in 1975 killed an estimated 171,000 people.^[2]Huge dams, because of the enormous weight of water that they contain, have also been implicated in causing earthquakes: thus the Zipingpu Dam in Sichuan is thought to have triggered a major earthquake in 2008.

Many of the costs of dams and related water infrastructures are less dramatic but no less damaging. Financially, large dams tend to be uneconomic: they typically overrun predicted levels of investment by up to 96% (Ansar et al. 2014). They also incur major social, economic, and environmental costs. In disrupting hydrological flows, dams are hugely destructive to aquatic ecosystems, and there are human costs as well in the loss of access to water for downstream farmers, fisheries, and tourism. More broadly, irrigated agriculture in many regions has led not only to diminishing harvests, but also to widespread land salination, rendering vast areas infertile even for native vegetation. This is particularly the case in ecologically vulnerable areas such as Australia, the Middle East, Central Asia, and the southern United States, where irrigation has been aimed at producing profitable – but for arid regions, unsuitable – crops, such as cotton, rice, and wheat.

But, as Peter Bosshard, the policy director for International Rivers (an international NGO seeking to protect rivers) notes, ‘[m]any actors have vested interests in building dams’ (2014). It is an area rife with corruption, in which major engineering contractors, irrigation consortia, and others stand to gain considerably, either through huge profits on construction, or through the gaining of water allocations for massive irrigation or hydroelectric schemes.

A notorious example is provided by Cubbie Station: an irrigation venture in south Queensland, so large as to be visible from space (Strang 2013). Cubbie Station’s directors persuaded the Queensland Government to allow it to buy up over 50 water licences, and to build a series of dams along twenty-eight kilometres of the Culgoa River. The station is situated just above the New South Wales border, and diverts about a quarter of the water that would otherwise flow into the Darling River, and thus into the Murray Darling Basin, one of the most intensively farmed and ecologically compromised river basins the world. Unsurprisingly, this upstream abstraction has fuelled considerable inter-state conflict. As well as depriving downstream farmers and other local communities of water, irrigation has destroyed over 90% of the wetlands in the Basin, which formed critical breeding areas for migrating birds. The major beneficiaries are the station’s owners (an international consortia) its directors, and shareholders, and to a lesser extent the rural community for which it provides some employment and other local economic benefits.

Owning water

Major irrigation schemes such as Cubbie Station, and the thousands of other companies and consortia around the world taking control of water through dam building and the acquisition of water allocations, bring to the fore key questions about the ownership of water. For much of human history, water’s status as a common good remained the norm, albeit with some managerial control exercised by powerful groups: for example, the dynastic rulers of hydraulic societies or, in the medieval period, the Church, whose monasteries often provided communities with hydrological expertise and management (Tvedt & Oestigaard 2010). Although many of the traditional common property regimes described by Elinor Ostrom (1990) have undergone major alterations, water continued to be seen, until recently, as a common good.

Patterns of water ownership changed, however, as societies began to build major urban areas which demanded greater investment in technologies for water supply and waste removal. The Industrial Revolution introduced a new level of complexity, both in enlarging conurbations, and generating increasing levels of domestic and industrial pollution. The impacts of these developments were so challenging as to require major reform. In early twentieth century Britain, for example, water supply and waste removal services were initially provided by a mix of municipal authorities and Victorian philanthropists. The results were patchy, leading to considerable inequality within cities, in terms of access to piped supplies, and between cities and rural areas, the latter often remaining reliant upon local wells and pumps well into the twentieth century. Following the Second World War, democratic ideals demanded comprehensive provision of piped supplies and the public ownership of water. A national network of local water authorities was established, with water users paying for services via property rates. This worked well until the costs of maintaining aging water infrastructures became more pressing, and politicians were faced with the vote-losing prospect of raising charges for water. The Thatcher government, in accord with its conservative ideologies, decided (despite angry public protests) to privatise water, leading to a situation in which British water companies today are largely owned by international corporations (Bakker 2003). This proved profitable for water company directors and shareholders, but as water charges jumped by 60% in the following five years, rather less so for domestic water users (Strang 2004). The UK-based water companies made further profits by exporting to many parts of the world their expertise on how to privatise water.

This process proved even more controversial in countries where increases in water charges have more extreme impacts. In 2000, when the government of Bolivia responded to pressure from the World Bank to pay off its international debts through water privatization, and invited an American company, Bechtel, to enact this, citizens revolted and a violent water war erupted that succeeded in retaining public ownership (Albro 2005). However, although governments internationally have subsequently become wary of such wholescale national water privatizations, the process has continued in various forms: for example, through types of public-private partnership, and through mechanisms such as Government Owned Corporations which, as the name suggests, reform local or regional water authorities along the lines of privatised companies, sometimes separating the profitable operational (supply) side from the more costly infrastructural maintainance, with only the latter remaining a wholly public responsibility.

There have also been more covert forms of enclosure, as illustrated by the example of Cubbie Station in Queensland, Australia. Following the colonial appropriation of land and water from Indigenous groups, European settlers’ rights to water generally came with riparian land ownership. As pressure on limited resources increased, farmers were given volumetric water allocations. In the 2000s, these were effectively privatised and transformed into tradeable commodities, which could be bought up en masse (as with Cubbie Station) or, in other cases, traded away from the related land, leaving ‘dry blocks’. The conversion of allocations into profitable assets meant that those using water for the most profitable purposes (mining, cotton, rice, and wheat production) could readily outbid small farmers, or conservation organisations hoping to preserve wetland areas. This has resulted in higher levels of water use and environmental degradation.

In Australia and elsewhere, the creation of virtual water markets, whether in the form of allocation trading or as shareholding in water companies, has effectively detached water from the landscape. This process of ‘disembedding’ material things from their local environments and creating virtual global markets (Polanyi 1957) raises some key questions about social and environmental accountability. There is an important recent trend towards more ownership and trading of water (and other resources) by transnational corporations who are not physically present in the social communities or in the material environments where the water is located. Cubbie Station, for example, was bought up by a Chinese consortium; most large oil and mining companies are owned transnationally, as are other extractive industries. Regulating water users, even when these are locally based, is complex and challenging, and becomes more so when regulators have to deal with major transnational corporations. There are more fundamental questions, too: if a government hands control of the country’s most essential resources to external agencies, how does this affect its decision-making capacities about these resources? And does it uphold democratic processes? (Strang 2016).

Similar patterns can be seen in the use of marine resources, where overfishing has led to a process of formalising quotas and creating virtual trading schemes (Minnegal & Dwyer 2010). Competitive economies have done little to address the inequalities that pertain in both areas: customary rights to fishing have often been overridden by commercial interests, just as local rights to freshwater have been overtaken by the commodification of the water industry.

The loss of customary rights of access and the devastation of local waterways by extractive industries have been particularly distressing for place-based Indigenous communities, who retain close and affective attachment to their homelands, and for whom local land and waterscapes are often both sentient and sacred. As their land and other material resources have been appropriated, enclosed, and privatised, many groups have protested, and continue to do so (Berriane 2017, Strang & Busse 2010). Given the meanings of water within their cultural landscapes, the misuse and despoilation of waterways has evoked particularly anguished protests; exemplifed, for example, in response to the downstream pollution caused by mining on the Ok Tedi, in Papua New Guinea (Kirsch 2003), or in relation to rivers in northern Australia (Rumsey & Weiner 2004).

Over the last several decades, Indigenous communities have created international networks, working with each other, and with conservation organisations, to tackle these issues. In 2016, for example, the Dakota Sioux brought together a range of like-minded groups to stage a major protest at Standing Rock about the impacts of an oil pipeline on their land and water. Indigenous communities are challenging not only the appropriation of their traditional ownership of water (Morphy & Morphy 2009), but also the imposition of ideologies that in their view fail to value it properly. In New Zealand, in the 2000s, the Māori Council, on behalf of all iwi [tribes], fought a legal battle to try to reclaim Indigenous people’s ownership of freshwater, taking a case through the Waitangi Tribunal, the High Court, and the Supreme Court (Strang 2014). Although the claim did not succeed, the debates resulted in a robust co-management agreement, ensuring that Māori iwi would have a substantial voice in decisions about their related waterways (Muru-Lanning 2016, Ruru 2013).

Water in the Anthropocene

There is a readily discernible link between the enclosure and privatization of water and constant growth and intensification in the use of freshwater and other resources. Such intensification, and humankind’s impacts upon the planet, have become so extreme that we have now entered an age described as the Anthropocene (see Crutzen & Stoermer 2000, Stensrud & Hylland-Eriksen forthcoming). It is equally plain that water is a central factor – and a key area of vulnerablity – in climate change. As well as melting the ice caps and raising sea levels, higher planetary temperatures are melting the glaciers that store freshwater for many of the world’s major rivers, and destablising global weather patterns. Meanwhile, the clearance of forests and wetlands for further agricultural expansion continues. The result is much greater volatility in water flows, and higher risks of unmanageable floods and droughts.

The impacts on ecosystems are not only felt by human communities, but also by their non-human inhabitants. The Anthropocene marks the first human-caused mass extinction event on par with earlier planetary devastations. In the last century, species extinctions have spiked dramatically: a report by the World Wildlife Fund (Grooten & Almond 2018) documents the loss of 60% of species since the 1970s, and rates of extinction are continuing to rise.^[3]As Donald Worster observed, this pattern of environmental destruction goes hand in hand with an extremely exploitative mode of environmental engagement, and the widespread control of resources by commercial corporations, rather than by local communities with long-term attachments to places:

Whatever they [major corporations] may accomplish in the manufacture of wealth, they are innately anti-ecological. Immense, centralised institutions, with complicated hierarchies, they tend to impose their outlook and their demands on nature, as they do on the individual and the small human community, and they do so with great destructiveness. They are too insulated from the results of their actions to learn, to adjust, to harmonize. That is another way of saying that a social condition of diffused power is more likely to be ecologically sensitive and preserving (2006: 332).

It is not a given that relocating environmental control locally will necessarily produce less exploitative kinds of engagements with land and water. However, it is useful to consider the alternative values promoted by place-based communities in relation to non-human interests. Many retain traditionally egalitarian and reciprocal positionality towards non-human beings, locating humankind within living systems, rather than as rulers over them. This way of thinking has been inspirational for environmentalists, and interactions between Indigenous peoples, conservation groups, and scholars has produced a serious critique of notions of human dominion, and of the anthropocentricity and the entitlement implicit in exploitative practices (Brightman & Lewis 2016, Kirksey & Helmreich 2010, Orlove & Caton 2010). This critique argues that there is an urgent need for a repositioning that – for both ethical and pragmatic reasons – gives greater parity to non-human interests, with a view to halting (and hopefully reversing) the wholescale destruction of ecosystems and their dependent species, including, of course, human communities (Kopnina & Shoreman-Ouimet 2015, Kopnina & Washington 2019). The proponents of this critique recognise the centrality of water in this regard, and thus protecting waterways has become a key part of their endeavours.

Indigenous communities have approached this challenge in various ways. Some, such as the Kogi in Columbia, have spoken up to warn about the consequences of rampant exploitation of the environment (Ereira 2009, see also de la Cadena 2010, Fienup-Riordan 2005: 233). There have been protests (as in the case of Standing Rock), and some have pushed their governments to make constitutional changes. Thus, in 2008 Ecuador passed legislation affirming the rights of nature, and a few years later Bolivia established the Rights of Mother Earth (Pachamama). Some groups have campaigned for rivers (such as the Atrato River in Colombia, and the Ganges in India) to be acknowledged as living persons with concomitant legal rights. In New Zealand, Māori iwi succeeded in gaining legal rights for the Whanganui River. In 2017, the New Zealand government announced that the river had been granted the status of a living entity, ‘comprising the River from the mountains to the sea, its tributaries, and all its physical and metaphysical elements, as an indivisible and living whole’ (Finlayson 2017: 129(1); see also Strang 2019).

At an international level, there is growing pressure from environmental activists to persuade the UN to make a formal declaration about the rights of nature (Cullinan 2003, Gray & Curry 2016).^[4]Some are trying to establish ‘ecocide’ as an international crime.^[5]There is a widening conversation about ecological justice (Baxter 2005, Schläppy & Gray 2017) and the ethics of human-environmental relations, and for some groups this is connected with ideas about spiritual engagement with the world and, most particularly, with water (Sponsel 2012, Taylor 2010). There has thus been a refocusing on the spiritual meanings of water, which as well as permeating traditional religions, has an important role in New Age movements long aligned to environmental activism. New rituals are appearing to celebrate the spiritual or social meanings of water: in the UK, this has taken the form of well dressing, a revival of an ancient Roman ritual, fontanalia; in Australia, there are events such as the Splash! Festival in Queensland, in which people bring containers of water from their home places, and pour them into a central vessel to celebrate the social and spiritual connections between communities (Strang & Toussaint 2008).

The input from Indigenous, environmental, and related groups into global debates, along with widespread concern about societies’ unsustainable direction of travel, has led international NGOs, state governments, religious leaders, and the United Nations to focus on the issue of values. In 2016, the UN established a High Level Panel on Water to focus on water and values, which, in their terms, meant ‘economic’, ‘environmental’ and ‘cultural and spiritual’ values. Their aim was to produce a set of principles for water to underpin the Sustainable Development Goals declared in 2015, with the aim of encouraging heads of state to rethink their policies and practices in relation to water (UN 2018a). This was followed by a wider World Water Development Report, which advocated an infrastructural turn towards ‘nature-based solutions’ (UN 2018b). These aim to work with the processes inherent in ecosystems and to therefore move towards more sustainable practices (Thomé et al. 2016). There are thus concerted efforts to address the urgent issues that societies face in relation to water. Whether these endeavours will change human engagements with water ecosystems sufficiently, and quickly enough, to avert social and ecological collapse, remains to be seen. It is therefore vital that the anthropological study of water continues to elucidate the relationships between human societies, non-human beings, and the material world, and assists efforts to reform these relationships to ensure that the rights, needs, and interests of all are sustained.

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[1] Water (1 Jul 2019). Topics: understanding poverty. World Bank Group Water Global Practice (available on-line: https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/water/overview).

[2] Fish, E. The forgotten legacy of the Banqiao Dam collapse (8 Feb 2013). The Economic Observer (available on-line: http://www.eeo.com.cn/ens/2013/0208/240078.shtml).

[3] Summary statistics. The IUCN red list of threatened species. Version 2019-2. International Union for the Conservation of Nature (available on-line: http://www.iucnredlist.org/about/summary-statistics).

[4] See also Universal declaration of river rights (17 Sept 2017). Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature (available on-line: https://therightsofnature.org/rights-of-nature-laws/universal-declaration-of-river-rights/).

[5] See, for example, the work of lawyer Polly Higgins (available on-line: ecocidelaw.com).

Note on contributor

Veronica Strang is the Executive Director of Durham University’s Institute of Advanced Study, and a Professor of Anthropology. She is the author of The Meaning of Water (Berg, 2004), Gardening the World: agency, identity, and the ownership of water (Berghahn 2009), and Water, Nature and Culture (Reaktion 2015). She is currently working on a major volume about long-term trajectories in human engagements with water. See https://www.dur.ac.uk/ias/staff/?id=10491.

Professor Veronica Strang, Institute of Advanced Study, Durham University, Cosin’s Hall, Palace Green, Durham DH1 3RL, UK. veronica.strang@durham.ac.uk