Infrapolitics : the social life of water in Mumbai
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Framed by popular and scholarly anxieties about burgeoning cities on one hand, and disappearing water resources on the other, this dissertation is an account of how urban water is made, moved, and subsequently delivered to settlers and other marginalized residents in one of the world's largest cities- Mumbai, India. Based on twenty-two months of ethnographic fieldwork among settlers, engineers of the city's water department, and various other urban experts (plumbers, city planners, social workers), it explores how cities, citizens and their states are made and differentiated through the incremental and continuous extension of the city's hydraulic infrastructure. In theorizing how cities are claimed, inhabited and made livable, particularly for (and by) politically marginalized groups, this research seeks to make a contribution to the literature in political ecology, state formation and citizenship. Where many settlers are formally and substantively denied access to water from the city's public system, I show how they access water through infrapolitics, by drawing on relations with social workers, laws, politicians, pipes, plumbers and policies. By focusing on these everyday practices of making connections, this dissertation shows why we need to reconsider normative distinctions between rights and commodities, persistent in international debates about urban water supply. The everyday practices of settlers in making water connections effect what I suggest are forms of hydraulic citizenship; forms of belonging to the city that are enabled by effective political and material claims to the city's public water system. I show how settlers mobilize hydraulic citizenship through a diverse articulation of political, social and material relations with the city's water pipes and their various authorities. In showing how Mumbai's hydraulic infrastructure constantly and consistently escapes political control, this research also seeks to make a contribution to the scholarship in Science Studies and Political Ecology. I suggest that the materiality of the city's public water system- made through thousands of miles of pipes and employees- makes it especially conducive to the claims of marginalized groups. As settlers and other residents constantly mobilize their votes, favors and money to evaluate and respond to the dynamic flow of water in the city, their connections both elucidate and differentiate the ways in which they are able to make reliable homes in the city despite the predations of states and markets.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2011 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Anand, Nikhil Surinder |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Anthropology |
| Primary advisor | Ferguson, James, 1959- |
| Thesis advisor | Ferguson, James, 1959- |
| Thesis advisor | Gupta, Akhil, 1959- |
| Thesis advisor | Yanagisako, Sylvia Junko, 1945- |
| Advisor | Gupta, Akhil, 1959- |
| Advisor | Yanagisako, Sylvia Junko, 1945- |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Nikhil Surinder Anand. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Anthropology. |
| Thesis | Ph.D. Stanford University 2011 |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2011 by Nikhil Surinder Anand
Also listed in
Loading usage metrics...