Overall reflection on the Riverside Meetings

After all of the Riverside Meetings, the PhDs prepared a general reflection relating the readings and discussions with each other, and their proposals. As an example of these reflections, we present below the one elaborated by the Riverhood PhD candidate Carolina Cuevas.

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Riverside Meeting: “The subversive politics of sentient landscapes”

Date: February 17, 2022

Engaging with what has been considered the “ontological turn” in social sciences, the three articles discussed during this Riverside meeting, allowed me to pose compelling questions regarding the “River as subject” ontology that is part of the conceptual scaffold of the Riverhood project. The question on sentient landscapes’ capacities to “sense, feel and act upon people” (Bacigalupo, 2021, p.176) challenges modern-colonial Western understandings of personhood and moral value and agency, and enables the possibility of mountains, rivers and other non-human riverine beings to become relevant and collaborative actors in contemporary political struggles. However, as Bacigalupo herself argues, examining closely how landscapes such as mountains (apus for the poor mestizos of the valleys of La Libertad) acquire moral agency for certain communities from either a radical ontology approach (that claims that sentient landscapes inhabit a radically different world that is incommensurable with modern socio-political domains) or a political ecology approach (that seeks to unravel the power relations embedded in socio- environmental struggles) is insufficient to understand how mountains (or, in our case, rivers) become moral agents for socio-environmental justice. Tracing how apus are incorporated into environmental movements beyond a merely rhetorical device required for the author to highlight the “practical dimensions of moral reasoning” (Bacigalup, 2021, p.182) and to document what kind of relationship people maintain not only with the actual apus, but with other people, plants, animals, and rocks that compose the territory. This is very relevant for my own research project, given that I will engage with the practical and material dimensions of caring socio-environmental relations, which also pertain environmental ethics and morality.

In a similar vein, the question of divergent relations to the landscape appear as central to Paredes & Li (2019), who explore people’s engagement with the Mamacocha lagoon in the midst of a severe conflict with mining companies. Their approach is relevant for my project as they also highlight the centrality of world-making practices in trying to understand people’s relationship with water, as practices are context-specific, contested, fluid, and even ambiguous. Their interest in practices makes evident how it is necessary to attend to the materiality of these relations and how they are transformed by the material and discursive irruption of the mine. In the case of my own research, examining why people consider important to care for a river —and the underlying different ontologies of practices of care— will hopefully reveal complex relationalities that, just as Paredes and Li (2019) argue, may challenge the dominant human/non-human distinctions of modern politics. Complementing the more “ontological” approach of this two readings, the paper

“Cultural politics and the hydrosocial cycle” (Boelens, 2014), argues for a political ecology approach that critically examines the conceptual, cultural and political frameworks that seek to stabilize both humans and non-humans in a dominant “water order”. Such water order is always a material-discursive dynamic constellation of ideas, rules, practices, infrastructures, and crucially “water-truths”, that are mobilized to naturalize and depoliticize the socio-ecological “natural” order framing it as self-evident and unquestionable. Bringing into the discussion the truth- knowledge-power conceptual triangle to unravel the water-worlds and relational ontologies I will encounter along my research is crucial to analyze how caring relations are embedded in contested water-power-knowledge hierarchical regimes.

Readings:

Bacigalupo, Ana Mariella. (2021). “Subversive Cosmopolitics in the Anthropocene: On Sentient Landscapes and the Ethical Imperative in Northern Peru”. Published in Climate Politics and t he Power of Religion. Ed. Evan Berry. Indiana University Press.

Boelens, R. (2014) “Cultural politics and the hydrosocial cycle: Water, power and identity in the Andean highlands”. Geoforum 57 (2014) 234–247

Paredes Peñafiel, P. & Li, F. (2019) “Nourishing Relations: Controversy over the Conga Mining Project in Northern Peru”, Ethnos, 84:2, 301-322

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Riverside Meeting: “Future Imaginaries on rivers”
Date: March 16, 2022

Continuing with the discussion on the material-discursive co-production of place, this Riverside meeting highlighted the role of (future) imaginaries in shaping people’s subjectivities and relations to place, specifically in the context of extractivism and climate change. Foregrounding the importance of studying “futures” —be them probable, possible, preferable, present or alternative— (Marien, 2009), this session invited us to think carefully on the temporal and imaginary dimension of rivers. Using the concept of temporal enclosures to analyze how mining companies “transmit images about the future that favour mining” (p.12), Jaramillo and Carmona (2022) scrutinize the complex ways through which dominant imaginaries are deployed and materially inscribed as an attempt to control the narratives of the future of a given place. Such an attempt to control and govern the future, and even intervene in “the ontology of time itself” (p.12) —presenting it as linear, fixed and inevitable— is a crucial aspect of extractivism, and it involves a set of intertwined knowledge-production processes such as modelling, risk-management, and calculation. According to the authors, controlling the expert discourse that seems to “factually” support a favorable scenario, the extractive industries may even deploy participatory tools and social mapping to justify the “participatory futures” they are able to promise and achieve. Emphasizing two crucial component for my own research project, the authors point out 1) the role of expert knowledge and the manyfold knowledge production practices regarding hydrology, ecology, geology, that converge in the attempts to legitimize the promised future-scenario that the mining project entails, and 2) the role of future-oriented affects that are also involved in how people respond to the both the hopeful promises and the uncertainties of a major socio-environmental transformation.

Attending to the ways through which those in power attempt to foreclose imaginable alternative river-futures is necessary to also trace how “other imaginaries” resist —materially and discursively— to those attempts. Situating their argument in how imaginaries are mobilized, contested and resisted in the current climate crisis, Davoudi and Machen (2021), argue for a co- productionist approach to climate imaginaries. This approach understands the discursive-symbolic and material aspects of imaginaries in a continuous process of co-production, and thus highlights the importance of ideas, stories, and metaphors, as well as infrastructures, technology, tools, and other “material” elements. Because imaginaries have been primarily understood as symbolic, the authors foreground the role of the material “within the production and circulation of climate imaginaries by employing the concept of ‘medium’ , which we understand as an ensemble of material, infrastructural, discursive, and practice-based influences.” (Davoudi and Machen, 2021, p.4). From this mediation-oriented understanding of imaginary (extrapolated to the contested river-imaginaries we are examining in the Riverhood project), I found many connections to the concept of hydrosocial territories (Boelens et al., 2016), specially in their acute attention to the contested socio-technical practices that materially make and discursively make-sense of a territory’s space-temporalities.

Readings:

Davoudi, S., & Machen, R. (2021). “Climate imaginaries and the mattering of the medium”. Geoforum, 137, 203-212

Jaramillo, P., & Carmona, S. (2022). “Temporal enclosures and the social production of inescapable futures for coal mining in Colombia”. Geoforum, 130, 11-22.

Marien, M. (2010). “Futures-thinking and identity: Why “Futures Studies” is not a field, discipline, or discourse: a response to Ziauddin Sardar’s ‘the namesake’”. Futures, 42(3), 190-194.

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Riverside Meeting: “Water, infrastructure, power”

Date: June 2, 2022

Riverside Meeting: “Counter-cartographies”

Date: June 30, 2022

When approaching rivers as socio-natural assemblages composed of techno-social and bio- physical dynamic interactions, it is crucial to consider the role of technologies and the ways they shape (and are shaped by) multiple visions and modes of life. Considering technology as simultaneously material, social and symbolic (and not merely a material object void of social meaning) allows us to pay attention to how it provides structure and meaning to human life through specific socio-political visions that are woven into it (Pfaffenberger, 1988). This means that technology is never politically neutral and, on the contrary, as it becomes part of daily life, it tends to “harden” and hide the social processes and choices through which it acquired —and continues to reproduce— a dominant set of uses, social relations, exclusions, and meanings. According to Pfaffenberger, the task of an anthropology of technology would be to unveil these processes and to critically examine what are the effects of certain technologies in a given society or community, specially since successful technologies become mystified and naturalized black boxes that “render invisible the social relations from which [they] arise and in which any technology is vitally embedded.” (Pfaffenberger, p. 242).

One of the most revealing examples of how technology operates as a set of “hardened” social relations and meanings is hydraulic infrastructure. Analyzing the case of Israel’s attempt to transform water infrastructure in Golan Heights as a means to exert colonial domination, appropriation of land, and the subordination of Indigenous people, Dajani & Mason (2018) offer an illustration of how people respond to a dominant hydrosocial order that relies heavily on infrastructure. According to these authors, “the configuration of hydrosocial domination is enacted by state appropriation of land and water resources, providing settlers with continuous, subsidised and connected water infrastructure, whilst systematically denying equal water access to the non- settler indigenous population” (Dajani & Mason, p.132). Such complex processes of domination, inequality and exclusion are embedded in the artificial lakes, dams, and reservoirs that are being built across the occupied territories. Yet, the authors impel us to also consider how alternative hydrosocial realities are also being built and sustained through counter-infrastructures even if more precarious and even residual (Dajani & Mason, 2018). This attention to what remains and resists despite (settler-colonial) socio-environmental transformations and processes of exclusion can support us in our efforts to understand how rivers are crucial sites for power disputes that involve water flows, infrastructures, and social, ideological and symbolic contestation.

Just as water infrastructure, the role of cartography and mapping techniques should be equally examined, as maps also operate as artifacts that may reproduce or challenge dominant social orders. Acting as a sort of technology that produces, conceptualizes and organizes space, maps are not neutral nor “simple representations of a supposedly legible reality” (Oslender, 2021, p.2). On the contrary, maps are the result of a series of ideological choices, life-experiences, and ways of relating to the world, that usually appear hidden in the “final” output. According to Oslender (2021), as a key component of euro-centric colonial enterprises, maps have been a central tool in the colonization of our cartographic and geographical imaginations. As social scientists interested in researching rivers, we are interested in understanding how people produce and experience riverine spaces across scales and layers that extend from the everyday life, participant’s identities and embodied experiences to wider structural oppressions (Gieseking, 2013). And for this, mapping turns out to be a very promising method. However, as provoked by these readings, our research should also take into consideration how maps are used to (re)produce hegemonic representations of space and time, occluding the many alternative possibilities of representation that may emerge from people’s imaginations and memories. In this sense, Oslender (2021) encourages us to acknowledge the long-standing existence of riverine “cartographies otherwise”, as well as the more contemporary efforts to imagine emancipatory counter- cartographies (that may present us with a fluid bottom-up “informational chaos of rivers, mountains, resources, animals, peoples, and cultures” [Oslender, p.4]).

Readings:

Dajani, M. & Mason, M. (2018). “Counter-infrastructure as resistance in the hydrosocial territory of the occupied Golan Heights”. In: Menga, F. & Swyngedouw, E. (eds) Water, Technology and the Nation-State. Routledge

Gieseking, J.J. (2013). “Where We Go From Here: The Mental Sketch Mapping Method and Its Analytic Components”. Qualitative Inquiry, 19(9) 712– 724

Oslender, O. (2021). “Decolonizing cartography and ontological conflict: Counter-mapping in Colombia and “cartographies otherwise”. Political Geography 89: 102444

Pfaffenberger, B. (1988). “Fetishised Objects and Humanised Nature: Towards an Anthropology of Technology”. Man, 23(2), 236–252.

By Carolina Cuevas  | Water Resources Management Group, Wageningen University