Water Brings No Harm. Matthew V. Bender
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WATER AND SOCIETY IN LITERATURE
In the past decade, water has emerged as a critical topic of study in the social sciences. Most published work has come from scholars and activists concerned with current or impending water scarcity.3 Works in this genre tend to approach the topic similarly. For one, they almost exclusively discuss water in terms of its physical properties and its necessity for sustaining life, focusing on specific cases in which the available water supply is inadequate due to excessive use, lack of investment, pollution, global water trading, or political manipulation. They also emphasize conflict that will arise from competition over water, the impending “water wars.” Many focus on the countries of the Global South that face the greatest challenges to accessing clean water. While such literature draws attention to rising scarcity in many parts of the world, it depicts water in limited terms: water’s physical utility and the conflicts over access. Such studies detach water from cultural specificity, suggesting that most people think of water in essentially the same way. A notable exception is Vandana Shiva’s Water Wars, which shows the spiritual and traditional role of water in communities in India, as well as the importance of culture in ensuring access to water.4
Historical scholarship that examines water in the context of social and political development actually predates this literature by decades. One of the earliest studies to examine this intersection was Karl Wittfogel’s 1957 book Oriental Despotism.5 In this work, Wittfogel sees the control of water, in particular large-scale irrigation works, as crucial to the rise of despotic power in Eastern societies such as dynastic China. Defining such societies as “hydraulic societies,” he argues that the development of waterworks and the bureaucratic structures needed to maintain them was critical to the development of large bureaucracies and despotic state power. Oriental Despotism broke ground as one of the first works to analyze the relationship between water management and political power. As such, it has become required reading in the field of water history. The book has inspired fierce criticism from historians concerned with Wittfogel’s Marxist interpretation of Asian history and from those who question the extent to which water was a critical factor in the rise of state power. Today, scholars consider the book as a piece that has raised important questions but whose conclusions no longer hold water.
In the years since Oriental Despotism, scholars have examined the relationship between water and power in various contexts. Their work has done much to extend the analysis beyond the physical, looking at how water control and management have intersected with broader social, cultural, and political issues. Donald Worster’s Rivers of Empire examines the centrality of water control to the rise of the American West. In this arid region, the control of water resources by political actors, and its manipulation by engineers, led not only to radically transformed landscapes but also to the economic rise of the region.6 Richard White’s seminal work on the Columbia River, The Organic Machine, eloquently shows how human and natural history are intertwined, to the point where one cannot be understood without the other.7 More recent works such as Paul Gelles’s Water and Power in Highland Peru, Stephen Lansing’s Priests and Programmers, and David Mosse’s The Rule of Water have gone further, looking at the intersection of politics and culture as related to irrigation works in Peru, Bali, and South India, respectively.8
Scholarship on water in African history has developed more slowly than scholarship on water in other regions, which is surprising given the continent’s struggles with water scarcity. The continent has, however, been the focus of a wealth of scholarship in the fields of agricultural and environmental history, but while much of this work touches on water issues, it tends to focus on land spaces. James McCann’s work on agriculture in Ethiopia, for example, discusses the importance of water by showing how farmers developed techniques specially adapted to the natural cycles of rainfall.9 Rain is an important factor influencing farmers, but the core unit of analysis is the land. Likewise, the work of scholars of Tanzania such as Chris Conte, James Giblin, Isaria Kimambo, Helge Kjekshus, and Gregory Maddox has shown the importance of water in shaping patterns of settlement, agriculture, and disease control.10 Scholarship that touches on water has extended beyond agriculture as well. Richard Grove’s work has shown the influence of water in forming colonial island “Edens” that shaped early conservationist thinking.11 Robert Harms’s study of the Nunu shows how the Congo River shaped the lives of those living along its banks.12 Steven Feierman’s Peasant Intellectuals discusses rainmakers, along with other community intellectuals, in Shambaa society.13 These works, and others on topics such as drought and boreholes, do not focus on water per se but rather on broader cultural, economic, and political issues that relate to water.14 Though engaging, they discuss water in a way that obscures its dimensionality and uniqueness.
In recent years, studies have emerged that feature water more centrally. A good example is the scholarship on the development of African rivers. Heather Hoag’s Developing the Rivers of East and West Africa examines the role of waterways in the continent’s economic, social, and political development.15 Hoag treats water as the “lead actor” in her narrative, which allows her to examine the centrality of watercourses to the lives of those who live near them and to see the broader impact of colonial attempts to harness rivers through damming. Allen and Barbara Isaacman’s Dams, Displacement, and the Delusion of Development examines the Zambezi in the context of the development of the Cahora Bassa Dam.16 By focusing on the river, they demonstrate the disconnect between the rhetoric and the actual political, economic, and environmental impacts of the project. Another area that has featured water centrally is the study of irrigation. John Sutton’s work on the Engaruka irrigation system in the Rift Valley of Northern Tanzania is some of the earliest and most noteworthy.17 More recently, Monica van Beusekom’s work on the Office du Niger’s irrigation project in Mali has shown the importance of water development in relationships between colonial experts and local farmers.18 Maurits Ertsen’s recent book on irrigation in colonial Sudan focuses a bit more on water itself. He sees irrigation as a process that generated “continuous negotiations” between farmers and the colonial state.19
Although these recent works have broken new ground in analyzing the deeper significance of water, many important areas have yet to receive attention. There has been virtually no scholarship on how communities of Africans manage water. Each day, people use water in myriad ways, in their homes and on their farms. Each of these actions reveals much about their understandings of the resource and about broader social and political relationships. Furthermore, much of the existing work examines rivers, dams, or irrigation systems. The focus on single manifestations of water—naturally occurring or human engineered—allows the authors to dissect their political, social, and cultural dimensions and the conflicts that they have generated among users, between specialists and users, and between locals and outside actors. The drawback is that this makes it more difficult to get a holistic perspective as to how people think about water. It assumes that the water system in question is—or is perceived to be—discrete from other forms of water, such as rainfall, clouds, glaciers, wells, or neighboring systems. The question of where such boundaries are drawn is highly relative and culturally contingent. Yet in colonial contexts, such boundaries are often contested.
KILIMANJARO AS WATERSCAPE
This book approaches water in an innovative way. It examines how a community of people—the residents of Kilimanjaro—has managed its water resources amid a changing world and strong external pressures. Rather than focusing on a particular manifestation of water, it uses the concept of waterscapes to analyze multiple water resources in tandem and their intersections with society. What is a waterscape? In short, it is a term that describes how people see water. Many water features, such as rain and rivers, appear naturally. Others, such as irrigation canals and dams, are engineered by people. Most are visible to the eye, while others, such as underground rivers, are not. Water features show tremendous dynamism. Rain and surface water resources move, often covering very large distances. They vary seasonally and with long-term shifts in climate. What people see, therefore, depends on time, place, and perspective. Furthermore, the impression of these watercourses and their relationships with one another are socially and culturally constructed. When people describe places as lush