Abstract
Even within the more critical literature, studies of water politics in the Middle East and North Africa tend to focus on the grand politics of transboundary conflicts – a politics between states as things, albeit one disrupted by the material properties of water as a flow resource. It’s a refreshing change to discover a book on Egypt that instead focuses on the everyday practices ‘that shape how, where, and when the water flows’ (p. 3) within Egypt. Cultivating the Nile is simultaneously a book that sets out to challenge alarmist narratives of global water wars.
The book begins by situating the overall study within the constellation of actors and practices that make up the quotidian politics of water and within the material flows that make up the larger Nile basin. The following chapter then contests narratives of scarcity by situating the production of scarcity within the distribution of water. From her field observations of farmers struggling to cope with limited water resources, Barnes notes with some surprise that, at the same time, Lake Nasser was experiencing some of its highest water levels in many years. Exploring the ways in which everyday practices can contribute to the production of scarcity, as well as the range of interventions – such as charging for water – intended to counter ‘scarcity’, Barnes is able to emphasize the material dimensions in the ongoing production and reproduction of drought ‘for some’. The following chapter troubles some of the assumptions around Water User Associations as supposedly the most effective means of achieving participatory governance of water resources. Instead, Barnes shows the exclusions that are produced within WUAs. Overall, from the author’s ethnographic observations, WUAs are shown not to work, and the interactions enabled by them are shown to have preceded the formation of the committees themselves. The question of accumulation by dispossession is taken up in the next chapter as Barnes demonstrates through two different studies how some people benefit from dispossessing others of the water resources on which livelihoods depend. The penultimate chapter then turns, in contrast, to the question of how to deal with too much water, and with the serious problem of excess. The material politics of drains then leads to a conclusion that draws the disparate everyday practices into a broader retelling of the politics of water in Egypt.
The rich ethnographic insights contained within Cultivating the Nile and the detailed analysis of the province of Fayoum, as well as the village that Barnes refers to as Warda, go a long way toward enabling a very different narrative of the politics of water in the Middle East and North Africa. Barnes is able to demonstrate, quite simply, that to neglect quotidian practices is to ignore what actually makes water flow to certain places at certain times and not to others. I particularly appreciated the discussion of scarcity, of rice as a ‘scarcity machine’, and of the brief but perspicacious critique of Sen for neglecting how the resources commanded (or not commanded) by individuals come into being, demanding attention ‘to the processes that produce a resource and govern its movement through space and time’ (p. 70).
Nevertheless, I found the analysis somewhat less convincing on the geopolitical questions. Geopolitical factors are very clearly shown to influence quotidian practices, and yet the discussion of the former never quite matches the detailed analysis of the latter. The discussion of accumulation by dispossession, for example, although promised as a refining of the concept, instead ends up blunting it. I wonder if there is a risk here of positing too sharp a dichotomy between the quotidian (important) and the non-quotidian (less important). This question is further complicated in that Barnes never really clarifies what she means by everyday practice and what function everyday practices are supposed to perform within the analysis. Is everydayness about ‘smallness’? Or repetition? Curiously, the knowledges that might emerge from situated practices are left untroubled. At times, farmers are gently chided for not thinking of the larger basin politics, and I find myself (perhaps naively) wondering if it might not be possible to explore their situated knowledges for the conditions of possibility they might open up. Occasionally too, the ethnographic tropes felt unnecessarily obtrusive. I found myself frustrated by the detailed descriptions of the rooms in which meetings took place, of the meals and drinks shared. Again, I would have liked more of a sense of the situated knowledges of the research participants and perhaps a little less of the ethnographer’s participation within such encounters. These are very minor quibbles in what remains a work of outstanding scholarship, written in a wonderfully accessible style and likely to provide a catalyst to further work on the everyday politics of water.