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Article Excerpt
The recent spate of anthropological attention to water is a timely reminder not only of its salience in cultural representations of place and identity among many indigenous and local communities (Donahue and Rose 1998), but also of its likely prominence in future 'water wars' (Raines-Ward 2002; Shiva 2002). While international boundary conflicts over water are well-documented (Blatter and Ingram 2001; Turton 2007; Wolf 1995) contestations at the subnational level, between competing local communities, on the one hand, or between the state, its local constituencies and the globalised water economy, on the other, are only now beginning to receive substantial scholarly attention. Some worthwhile studies in this field include Whiteford and Whiteford's (2005) anthology which brings together case studies from the Americas, China and South Africa to indicate the ways in which water shortages--manufactured by globalised corporate interests, provincial politics or otherwise--impact upon human health. In addition, Elhance's (1999) survey of hydro-politics in third world fiver basins highlights the notion of local struggles and the strategies involved in contests that engage large corporate and state interests. Hu's (2007) analysis of water conflict in the Huanghe River basin of China from the recent text edited by Grover, Water: A Source of Conflict or Cooperation, provides another illustration of this, while Hussainy and Kumar, in the same volume, show how conflict over water in the Australian Murray-Darling basin takes the form of disputes over the degree of state regulation and the variability of water flow.
Of particular interest here is another article from the same suite: Eberhard Weber's (2007) analysis of water vulnerability in two Pacific island states--Fiji and Kiribati. Weber argues that both nations are highly susceptible to the hydrological impacts of global warming, including a decline in both water quality and quantity, and concludes that the future for both states, from the point of view of water security at least, is bleak (Weber 2007:310).
These analyses enhance and complement a growing body of anthropological literature emphasizing the centrality of water in many societies. What emerges from such studies is that water is not simply a technological or economic resource but also a potent symbol of group solidarity and identity. Strang (1997, see also this issue) for instance, emphasizes the importance of water in local assertions of social identity. These may then become a critical means of establishing difference vis-a-vis powerful elites or vested interests (Gose 1994; Oslender 2002). The bridge between these two aspects of water--its socio-cultural and its economic significance--is the use of arguments based around cultural affinities with water in economic disputes over tenure and custodial rights. A number of anthropological studies of water take this approach, focusing on the cultural meaning of water as a critical component of contestations over aquatic resources, both in terms of customary tenure and ongoing management (Donahue and Rose 1998; McWilliam 2002; Strang 1997; Toussaint et al. 2005). These studies, while acknowledging 'the cultural importance of water' (Scudder 1999), underscore the fact that cultural constructions of water may also express relations of power (Lucero 2006). Articulations of myth and ritual enactments which are perceived to express and specify social identity in terms of a relationship to water, can be seen as cultural scripts that articulate and encode not only social proximity but also hierarchies of social privilege and subordination (Lucero 2006).
Such ways of understanding water overlap with anthropological understandings of space and place (Hirsch and O'Hanlon 1995). However, conventional understandings of space as constituting discrete and discontinuous areas which non-problematically correspond to those who 'inhabit' them has been subject to considerable interrogation (Gupta and Ferguson 2002; Hodgson and Schroeder 2002; Hirsch 1995; Walker and Peters 2001). In a globalised world populated by disparate groups nurturing and often reinventing variable local identities, it is no longer possible to speak of Indians as living within the bounded nation-state suggested by the name; nor of South Africans as synonymous with South Africa, the state; nor Americans as synonymous with the United States; Britons with Great Britain, nor any other 'national' community as coterminous with its presumed nation of origin. Nation-states are internally heterogeneous and this is amply borne out whenever the state is relatively secure (Lewellen 2002). When the nation is under threat, the site of primary identification may well shift to the nation-state. However, as soon as it is no longer threatened, the fiction of national homogeneity disintegrates into myriad ethnic and other components. Lewellen (2002:91) cites the example of Native Americans, who constitute themselves as a people in relation to the American nation--perceived as dominant, if not immediately threatening--but who among themselves distinguish between Iroquois, Navajo, Menominee, Klamath or other identities. Parallels could doubtless be drawn for indigenous Australia, in which the classification indigenous/Aboriginal breaks down to 'Koori' or 'Nyungar' or 'Murri' etc, and which for the former in turn breaks down to Badjalung, Kalibal, Kamilaroi, Arakwal and so on. This point is relevant in the East Timorese context, where during the twenty-five years of Indonesian occupation local identities were downplayed in favour of constructing a unified pre-national resistance. Now that the country has secured nationhood, however, the reaffirmation and strengthening of local ethnic identities--as Mambai, Galoli, Tokudede, Kemak, Tetum and so on--has begun to emerge. Recently this seems to have taken a somewhat hostile form with the resumption of the pernicious (and imprecise) kaladi/firaku division of west versus east that informed the 2006 crisis and is associated with internal struggles between the army and police and within the police force itself (Fox 2001).
The construction of local identities, while constituting an 'imaginative and creative rediscovery' (Hall 1990), is also a strategic process, yielding a variety of alternate identities that may be deployed when something is at stake. In the case of water, real material resources may be at stake in situations where access and tenure has been or is likely to be challenged. For instance, in relation to the recognition of customary marine tenures in East Timorese environmental policy and legislation, McWilliam (2002) argues that ritual enactments based around water may well become critical as evidence for the authenticity and persistence of these. The political potential of local ritual practices and traditions is affirmed in Gose's (1994) study of two Andean communities in which 'the indigenous enactment of ritual and daily labour leads to the construction and perpetuation of cultural identity'. Gose suggests that the images created through these ritual enactments, as well as through the forms and routines of daily labour, provide a means of reflection through which Indians are able to distinguish themselves from the non-indigenous ruling elites. This then forms the basis for future political action launched by the newly self-conscious collective (Gose 1994).
Such a set of circumstances should not imply that the central significance of water in local understandings of space and identity should only be valued for its pragmatic importance in current or future resource negotiations. When Strang, in this issue, observes that local communities in southeast Queensland 'make use of the cultural meanings encoded in water to articulate social connections and notions of belonging,' this has social value irrespective of economic considerations. Theoretically, local communities will continue to develop affinities...
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