Events

CHAIRPERSON

Dr Rita Padawangi, Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore

ABSTRACT

All humans need water. But (to paraphrase Levi-Strauss) water is more than good to drink, it is good to think with. When people, corporations and states engage water they engage both human necessities and powerful meanings. What meanings are made, necessities managed and powers awakened by invocation of water care? Corporations transubstantiate when they focus on water, turning water into profit. Inspired by corporate imagery, New Yorkers’ love for Fijian Water, but not for Fijians, seems a classic instance of what Marx called commodity fetishism (endowing things with life and denying social relations with producers), fetishism as powerful deceit, with dire environmental consequences. But this paper re-opens consideration of water fetishism. In New York some people have a lively relationship with their water coolers, endowing water with humanity. And what about the state? In Singapore, as the state provided water-as-necessity, water also became a living state symbol, the Public Utilities Board’s mascot, Water Wally, an insouciant anthropomorphized water drop.

Karl Marx showed how to see through fetishes, making social science a demystifying practice, anti-fetishism. Bruno Latour advises “anti-anti-fetishism” asking us to track actual histories and interpret situations without resorting to reduction. But most water scholars are suspicious of corporate, calculated fetishism though supportive of public enlivenings of the world. State water care raises another dimension. Water care is good to think with, about the environment, and about the state.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Martha Kaplan is Professor of Anthropology, Vassar College, US. She holds a Fulbright Fellowship and is Distinguished Affiliated Fellow at ARI. A cultural and historical anthropologist who studies meaning in colonial and postcolonial situations, she is the author of Neither Cargo Nor Cult: Ritual Politics and the Colonial Imagination in Fiji(Duke 1995), co-author (with John Kelly) of Represented Communities: Fiji and World Decolonization (Chicago 2001) and editor of Outside Gods and Foreign Powers: Making Local History with Global Means in the Pacific (Ethnohistory special issue 2005). Her current research and publications on the cultural politics of water, comparatively focused on Fiji, the United States and Singapore, consider water simultaneously as public and privatized, as necessity and object of fantasy and desire, as locus of exploitation and as source of postcolonial innovation, as a public utility and an environmental resource. She is writing a book titled Water Cultures: Fiji, New York, Singapore.

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