The myth of “pure” water: deconstructing Waterworld

Water isn’t something out there, it’s us. –Elena Hight

• Waterworld Components by Ben. O and Steven.C.C
• Value (natural resources and human rights)
• Equity (access and distribution)
• Governance (organization and rules)
• Politics (discourse and conflict)
• Knowledge (local and scientific systems)

Throughout the five themes of waterworld, water has been reconstructed under an anthropological context, thus providing a modular approach to how we perceive water. We live in a waterworld, we are simultaneously affecting by water while shaping it. Water’s physical property of plasticity is similarly demonstrated through its multiplicity nature when we look at it ethnographically. In different countries or regions, people’s perceptions towards water differ due to factors including divergent definitions of modernity, cultural homogenization, and cultural heterogenization, various interpretations towards nature, and the extent to the allowance of diversity controlled by the distinctive social narrative under the particular dominant power. Serendipitously, when we think of consuming water as if it is no longer a precious, yet indispensable necessity of life, but as an accessory of enjoyment, we all tend to view water as a Lacanian “thing”: it is non-symbolic, non-structural, uncomprehensible, emotional, experiential, sensorial, physiologically driving, socially influencing, conflicting, and lacking–a desire one cannot satisfy, that impels all the individuals to keep filling up the hole of negation. One can never own a “better” water.

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What is pure water?

Before we go too deep, I want to ask myself a question: why is there no tap water in China? When I was young, I traveled to America, Singapore, and Japan and saw people drinking tap water, and I was shocked as a kid. I asked Mom and Dad why and how people drink tap water? In young Alex’s mind, tap water is always “unpurified,” “unsterilized,” “and unfiltered.” The only appropriate way to drink tap water is to put it in a kettle and boil it to “kill the bacteria” to obtain the pure water we call “white (白, also indicating purity) boiled water.” My parents explained to me it’s because the infrastructures in those countries were built to purify the water. That was the first time I question about water.

Besides the white boiled water, I also remember seeing those “mineral water.” You can find countless types of bottled water: “mineral”, “distilled”, “spring water”, “weakly basic water”—those are just water without any artificial ingredients. The mostly bought bottled water with the highest revenue is the “farmer’s spring water”, with a slogan “we do not produce water, we are just the carrier of nature”. But people weren’t fascinated by it. A “farmer’s spring water” was sold for 1.5 CNY each, while “imported water” such as Evian and Fiji were sold for 12 CNY or even higher. If they are all just water, why would they have such a great price difference? Because of their amount of nature-ness, or something else?

It is surprising that China is well-known for its urbanized infrastructure, such as railways, highways, electricity networks, and communication networks, but water, as it carries such political characteristics, has not yet been politicized (at least not run by central state-owned enterprises). Nevertheless, I never had any trouble accessing pure water since boiling it would solve most of the concerns. Does a correlation exist between a developed city water system and people’s distance to this mysterious pure water? To find the answer, I will discuss how the politics of water in New York City and Pheonix changes the resident’s view of pureness. Then, I will connect back to my anecdote through the topic of modernity.

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During Thanksgiving break, I took a photo of the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir in Central Park, New York, showing the reflection of skyscrapers (photo included at the beginning of this reading). This water body carries so many things and connects so many people, which makes me think: we truly live in a waterworld. In the U.S., most urbanized cities have a city water system that provides citizens with easier access to water. As Chelcea wrote in her article, “Catch-all technopolitics: Water filters in New York City,” the city’s ethnographic structure of having an inclusive neighborhood that extinguishes underprovision issues prevents the city from leaning to a position of making one group more vulnerable than the other, is not an excuse to not look at the city’s emerging water issue.

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Ethnohydrology and hydropolitics: pureness is created by our surrounding world.

New York citizens are relying more on filters due to the aging pipe infrastructure and the system’s opaqueness, together with a watershed narration (e.g., “the water comes from the xxx mountain region”), the water flowing through the pipes has been renaturalized, and its “natural morality” has been strengthened. The “city” aspect of city water is then removed from its subjectivity. Constitutive exception, or ex-timate, is when a system or an idea achieves universality by excluding a specific factor that is intolerable to it, allowing it to be perfectly justifiable in terms of its validity. In this ongoing change of power dynamics related to water in New York, “city” itself becomes a constitutive exception to “city water”—that is, city water will not be recognized as pure enough if it is self-identified as city water. If that still sounds confusing, think of the universality of city water as an ideology, the universality is the content shown on the surface level, and the ex-timate is what it is essentially denying or hiding. The city water ideology claims that its identity is cut from its exception of the city. When such narration is made, its inconsistency has already been engraved into its consistency. In a classic bank robbery example, the bank (building a bank) is the universality, and robbing a bank is a constitutive exception; however, when a bank is built, its high-interest loan allied with government policies such as high housing prices, eventually the earnings will go to the bank. Isn’t that a type of bank robbery disguised as a capitalistic trap? The way that those citizens renaturalize city water to achieve the universality of “pure water” is the greatest constitutive exception, and the rejected exception is the universality itself.

In the city of Phoenix, a desert city in the U.S., the way people create pureness takes another direction. According to the study “Urban Ethnohydrology: Cultural Knowledge of Water Quality and Water Management in a Desert City,” due to the characteristics of a desert city, the interaction between the people and the water becomes localized and contained, which decouples the citizens from the environmental factors contributing to water quality. The ethnohydrology study conducted by the researchers shows that the income level of the group is correlated with the acceptance of the ethnohydrology model developed by the researchers and the use of filters; the higher the income, the more likely the group members will accept the model, and vice versa. In this study, the same problem arose from the opaqueness of the pipe systems, but instead of renaturalizing the city water, the way they perceive pure water is through the extent to which it has been decoupled from the environment—that is, the extent to which it has been denaturalized. The reason for such differences will be quite easy to see when looking from a waterworld perspective, where the value, equity, governance, politics, and knowledge have all contributed to the universality of pure water. NYC has more resources, easier access and more widely distributed tap water system, the power dynamics surrounding water in a hydropolitic way exclude the city from the city water, together with more widely generalized knowledge and greater transparency, all these universalities have the corresponding constitutive exceptions. Pheonix is almost like those exceptions with concrete forms: obstacles to access resources and water, hard decisions of localizing the water and decoupling it from the environment, and distinctions between public knowledge in either scientific or cultural aspects owned by different classes.

The two cities seem to represent two aspects, but as discussed above, the greatest constitutive exception is the universality itself. The pure water narration in the U.S. is essentially the narration of pipe politics, where people can grow “pipe phobia” and choose to act correspondingly to the opaqueness of the water system, whether it is to use a filter or to treat it as natural.

In the article where the authors suggested the idea of waterworld, they also mentioned the Integrated Water Resource Management (IWRM) proposed by the United Nations. This management is known as the “hegemonic paradigm” for managing the world’s water resources. However, as pointed out by Ben and Steven, this management is rather abstract. IWRM suggests that solutions to problems surrounding water can only be found when we look at water comprehensively, instead of only part of it (such as one of the four power dynamics of water), and that we should take a multi-sectorial approach; at the same time, it remains skeptical towards solving the water problems scientifically (due to the failure on dams in the past years). While IWRM calls for the importance of water management, it neglects the efforts we should put into finding new water sources, risking a reliance on bureaucratism. IWRM also aims to educate society and raise awareness of future generations; it also values water as a commodity with respect to market solutions, which contradicts the idea that water should connect to human rights and equity… The fact that all these valuations are suggested by IWRM shows its contradictory nature. Nevertheless, this complex nature of IWRM ties back to the concept of Waterworld, that water is political. When we build our perception towards water, we need to identify the universality we are grounded upon to avoid polarizing the waterworld.

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Our relationship with Waterworld is affected by our unique definition of modernity.

Quijano talked about the rise of America and the first world-system. He suggested that it is not only about subjectivity, but about the intersubjectivity between everyone in the new model of global power, and that it is crucial we acknowledge all forms of changes going on with the physically evolving social relations. Quijano then questioned the Eurocentric view of modernity as being rooted in ethnocentric hegemony—and that if we are to define modernity, we must avoid only referring to historical context, and we must keep in mind no one owns modernity. However, he also stresses that in both material and intersubjective aspects, the concept of modernity is bounded by society, so all the questions that arise will promote social progress.

Labor is controlled by capitalism, authority is controlled by nation-states, intersubjectivity is controlled by Eurocentrism, and they all interconnect with each other. On this web of life, modernity has been woven with everyone who has ever lived and is currently living on this planet. Quijano then discussed the new subjectivity of the perception of change. The world is changing, and history is no longer in past tense, but something that can be produced, designed, and bestowed with meaning. The modernization is in large part accelerated by the conflict between fixed social ascription and individual freedom, facilitating the increasing aspiration of social equity. Modernity creates hope of liberation for all those who are being exploited by capitalism.

What about feudalism? China remained a feudalistic society until 1840. The transition from feudalism to capitalism can be viewed as the transition from surplus accumulation to labor exploitation. In a capitalistic society, profit and capital are being re-invested for circulation. In major feudalistic societies, take pre-19th century Europe as an example, the production of food directly leads to more surplus and resources. When food production was devastated by climate change and the social unrest following events such as the Black Death, feudalistic societies experienced a transition into capitalistic societies. Such a transition did not apply to China. Although the country’s economy adapted to the new world system, its water did only partially. To take a glimpse of that partial change: For value, the natural resources did not change, human rights changed. For equity, people started to have easier access to resources, and the distribution of both knowledge and resources was ensured under the communist ideology. For governance, the communist party was formed, and new laws were created. For politics, the Chinese Civil War outbroke, following the Cultural Revolution that left destructive impact on the last component of Waterworld: knowledge. Modernity, similarly, is the silver lining of modern Chinese history, but the meaning the Chinese bestowed for the history they produced differs from the rest of the world’s.

A developed city water system is the universality in the U.S. and the universality of white boiled water in China is based on the ex-time of commodifying water. No one has the right to define pure water in the waterworld, just like no one owns the concept of modernity in the capitalistic world. Trying to define an exclusive pure water, an exclusive modernity, these attempts of achieving universality will only become the ex-timates that eventually reject themselves.

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Power dynamics of water: a little fun board game to help us reflect on our relationship with water.

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Reference list

Chelcea, Liviu. “Catch‐All Technopolitics.” American Ethnologist 50, no. 2 (2023): 260–73. https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.13143.

Gartin, Meredith, Beatrice Crona, Amber Wutich, and Paul Westerhoff. “Urban Ethnohydrology: Cultural Knowledge of Water Quality and Water Management in a Desert City.” Ecology and Society 15, no. 4 (2010). https://doi.org/10.5751/es-03808-150436.

Orlove, Ben, and Steven C. Caton. “Water Sustainability: Anthropological Approaches and Prospects.” Annual Review of Anthropology 39, no. 1 (2010): 401–15. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.anthro.012809.105045.

Quijano, Aníbal. “Coloniality of Power and Eurocentrism in Latin America.” International Sociology 15, no. 2 (2000): 215–32. https://doi.org/10.1177/0268580900015002005.

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Alex Chen

Instructor: Mara Dicenta