Do we live in water cultures? A methodological commentary

Reading the fascinating articles in this special issue (Barnes, 2012; Carroll, 2012; Carse, 2012; Pritchard, 2012; Sneddon, 2012) made me wonder: Do we live in water cultures? I do not mean this to be an ontological question, asking about the reality in which we live. I want instead to raise a heuristic and methodological question: Does it make sense to study our world as a water culture?

I have argued that we live in technological cultures (Bijker, 1995a). And yes, I did introduce this idea originally as an ontological claim: our modern societies are permeated by science and technology. This was illustrated by a thought experiment of getting into a time machine: imagine Archimedes travelling to Leonardo da Vinci’s time, and he would, I suggested, find Leonardo’s world quite familiar. Travelling to Oppenheimer’s time of the 1940s would however, I argued, confront Archimedes with a much deeper divide. I then translated this from an ontological claim into heuristic advice: if you want to understand our current societies, do study the role of technology and science in constituting these societies. But once the value of those heuristics is recognized for current societies, it is only a small step to then also see that these heuristics would also help for understanding Archimedes’ world. Now I would indeed propose that for studying any society – including pre-modern or non-western societies – the advice to approach such a society as a technological culture also makes sense.

The heuristic advice to consider our societies as technological cultures was meant to summarize insights from Science, Technology and Society (STS) studies, and it has a double message. First it says to researchers in the social sciences and humanities that they will fail to understand our societies if they do not take into account the role of technology and science. Second, it warns engineers and scientists that they will fail to build well-functioning technological systems if they do not take into account that these systems are embedded in society. These heuristics can then be translated into methodologies, when using a social construction of technology (SCOT) framework, for identifying relevant social groups, demonstrating interpretative flexibility, describing technological frames and understanding processes of social construction (Bijker, 1995b); or, when using an actor-network theory (ANT) framework, for identifying human and non-human actants, mapping them into networks, and understanding translation processes and trials of strength (Callon, 1986; Latour, 2005; Law and Hassard, 1999).

The articles in this special issue do suggest a conceptual move similar to the one I made with ‘technological culture’. Barnes (2012) describes how water shapes Egyptian society, and how Egyptian society shapes the pumping technologies that, in turn, direct the water flows. Carroll (2012) shows how water became a political problem and an object of governance and, vice versa, how it shaped the state formation in California. Carse (2012) extends the move that Barnes and Carroll had begun, and explicitly draws nature into the analysis by describing how the natural watershed came to shape and support the infrastructure of the Panama Canal. Pritchard (2012) casts the net even more widely and draws long-term economic history into the analysis by explicating the role of water, first in imperialist and then in capitalist international relations of France and its (former) colonies. Each of these articles can be read by making, at least implicitly, an ontological argument: water is an important constituent of those societies; visiting those countries, you cannot miss how important water is, though sometimes by virtue of its absence, as in cases of the Egyptian irrigation struggles. But Sneddon (2012) describes the key role that the Pa Mong dam played in shaping the US geopolitics in Asia during the Cold War, even though it was never built. No ontology there, literally. The focus on the Pa Mong dam thus is a valuable heuristic: it offers insights into the interplay of technology, politics and expertise that otherwise might escape us.

Collectively these articles thus suggest that we can consider the societies studied as ‘water cultures’. Moreover, this suggestion has the same dual status as my statement that ‘we live in technological cultures’. First, it is an ontological claim that water is a crucial constituent of any society, including cases of excess, as in flooding, or drought, as in deserts; and cases of infrastructure, as in canals and cases of expertise, as in hydroimperialism or US geopolitics. Second, it makes the heuristic claim that societies will be better understood when the role of water is the focus of analysis. That heuristic claim implies, again, a double message: first, it argues to social scientists that they will never fully understand France’s international relations if they do not take into account the role of water, irrigation projects and hydraulic engineers. And, second, it warns engineers and policy-makers that they will not succeed in getting enough water through their locks from the Panama Canal watershed if they do not pay attention to the social embedding – in this case, the way politics and policing are embedded in local forest hydraulics and farming.

If one buys this heuristic argument, what methodological approaches does it imply? What methodological advice is implicit in the statement ‘we live in water cultures’, and can be derived from these articles? Surely, each author builds on the standard STS plea (summarized in the technological culture heuristics), that technology and science need to be studied, both as being shaped by society and as constituents of society. But they go further than this. Barnes argues that the natural-material context of water flows needs to be included, in addition to the pump technologies. Carroll argues that, by historicizing water, he can trace how water has become a problem and indeed an object of governance. This neatly fits with reviving Dewey’s (1991 [1927]) pragmatism, as for example Gerard de Vries (2007) does in his analysis of how political objects are shaped. Carse (2012) similarly demonstrates how ‘the artifice of the Panama Canal watershed – its “making” – is a result of the accretion of knowledge’, and then he further traces the detailed micropolitics of enrolling forest guards ‘to align the diverging interests of state institutions and rural social worlds’ (p. 551). Pritchard (2012: 592) shows how employing a water culture perspective (my words) offers an innovative and effective way to empirically study ‘the ways that water, hydraulic knowledge, and water management practices both revealed and reproduced unequal power relations predicated upon an expansionist mentalité, whether political or economic in orientation’, which adds convincingly to the existing frame of post-colonial studies. Sneddon (2012) shows how micro-level analysis of biophysical data is connected to macro-level strategies of the US foreign department.

We live in technological cultures; the set of articles in this special issue suggests that we live in water cultures too. Does this heuristic move stop here? Why not study societies as vulnerable cultures, as sound cultures, as food cultures? In all these cases the argument would be that vulnerability, sound or food are pervasive elements of societies, and that their shaping of societies and being shaped by social forces forms a fruitful entry point for research. Only practice will tell: when research guided by such heuristics does yield new methodological approaches, conceptual frameworks and substantive insights, then it will indeed be worth the move. In the case of water cultures, these five articles make a good promise, though time will tell whether it is indeed fruitful to study societies as water cultures – hence the question mark in my title.