CAPACITY AS AGGREGATION

PROMISES, WATER AND A FORM OF COLLECTIVE CARE IN NORTHEAST BRAZIL

Authors

  • Andrea Ballestero Rice University, Houston, Texas

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.22409/rcj.v0i0.630

Keywords:

Agregação, Brasil, Coletivos, Futuro, Forma política, Compromissos, Água./ Keywords, Aggregation, Brazil, Collectives, Future, Political form, Promises, Water./ Palabras clave, Agregación, Colectivo, Compromisos, Agua.

Abstract

As the twenty-first century gets underway, people have been experimenting with many forms of political organization. In Northeast Brazil, that experimental spirit led to the creation of the Water Pact, a process involving more than eight thousand participants through a series of public promise-making rituals in which they made pledges to care for water, attending to the specificities of their own context. The Pact gathered those promises into a multi-scalar formation that, the organizers believed, would yield the necessary resources to address the state’s water problems. The Pact would break with an unsuccessful history of infrastructural and legal reforms concerning deep-water access in the state of Ceará. This article examines how that collective was produced, what its constituent units were and how the logic of aggregation guided practices leading to its coalescence. My purpose is to re-examine the aggregate as a quantitative form of capacity that should be qualitatively reconsidered.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

Author Biography

Andrea Ballestero, Rice University, Houston, Texas

Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Rice University, Houston, Texas, where she also runs the Ethnography Studio. Recent publications include “The Ethics of a Formula, Calculating a Financial-Humanitarian Price for Water’ (American Ethnologist, 2015) and “What’s in a Percentage? Calculation as the Poetic Translation of Human Rights’ (Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies, 2014).

References

ABRAM, S.; WESZKALNYS, G. AnthropologiesofPlanning: Temporality, Imagination,andEthnography. Focaal, 61: 3–18, 2011.

AIYER, A. TheAllureoftheTransnational: Notes on Some Aspects of the Political Economy of Water in India. Cultural Anthropology 22 (4): 640–658, doi:10.1525/can.2007.22.4.640, 2007.

ANAND, N. Pressure: ThePoliTechnicsofWaterSupply in Mumbai .CulturalAnthropology, 26 (4): 542–564. doi:10.1111/j.1548-1360.2011.01111.x, 2011.

ANDERSON, B. ImaginedCommunities: ReflectionsontheOriginsand Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1991.

ANDERSON, C. W. WhatAggregators Do: Rhetoric, PracticesandCulturesof Digital andAnalogEvidence in Web-EraJournalism. Paperreadatthe 12th InternationalSymposium for Online Journalism, Austin, 2011.

ARONS, N. G. Waitingfor Rain: ThePoliticsandPoetryofDrought in NortheastBrazil.Tucson: Universityof Arizona Press, 2004.

ASSEMBLEIA LEGISLATIVA DO ESTADO DO CEARÁ; CONSELHO DE ALTOS ESTUDOS E ASSUNTOS ESTRATÉGICOS.Plano Estratégico dos Recursos Hídricos do Ceará. Ceará: Fortaleza, 2009.

BAKKER, K.A PoliticalEcologyofWaterPrivatization. Studies in Political Economy, 70:35–58, 2010.

BALLESTERO, A.Transparency Short-Circuited: LaughterandNumbers in Costa RicanWaterPolitics. PoLAR: Politicaland Legal AnthropologyReview, 35 (2): 223–241, 2012.

BALLESTERO, A. ‘TheEthicsof a Formula: Calculating a Financial-HumanitarianPriceforWater’. American Ethnologist 42 (1): 262–278, 2015.

BARNES, J. Cultivating the Nile: The Everyday Politics of Water in Egypt. Durham, NC:DukeUniversityPress, 2014.

BARTH, F. Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Culture Difference. Boston, MA: Little Press, 1998.

BHABHA, H. K. The LocationofCulture. London: Routledge, 1994.

BORCHARDT, W. G.;DAILEYAND, J. S.; NUNES, P. F. New Paths toGrowth: The Age of Aggregation. Outlook: The Journalof High-Performance Business Issue 3: 19–27, 2011.

CAPRARA, A., J.; LIMA, Wellington de Oliveira;MARINHO, A.Correia Pequeno;CALVASINA, P. Gondim; LANDIM L. Paes; SOMMERFELD, J. Irregular WaterSupply, HouseholdUsageand Dengue: A Bio-socialStudy in the BrazilianNortheast. Cadernos de Saúde Pública 25 (1): S125–S136, 2009.

CARSE, A.Nature as Infrastructure: Making and Managing the Panama Canal Watershed. Social Studies of Science 42 (4): 539–563, 2012.

CODDINGTON, M. A.Telling Second hand Stories:News Aggregation and the Production of Journalistic Knowledge. Ph.D. diss., Universityof Texas at Austin, 2015.

COLLIER, S. J.; ONG, A. Global Assemblages, Anthropological Problems. In: ONG, A.;COLLIER, S. J. (eds). Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as AnthropologicalProblems. Malden: Blackwell, 3–21, 2005.

DO AMARAL FILHO, J. Reformas Estruturais e Economia Politica dos Recursos Hidricos no Ceara. Fortaleza, CE: SEPLAN-IPECE, 2003.

FINAN, T. J.; NELSON, D. R. Making Rain, Making Roads, Making Do: Public and Private Adaptations to Drought in Ceará, Northeast Brazil. Climate Research 19 (2):97–108,2001.

FOUCAULT, M. Discipline andPunish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage Books, 1975.

GARCIA, A. ThePromise: On the Morality of the Marginal and the Illicit. Ethos 42 (1):51–64, 1975, 2014.

GENNEP, A. van.The Rites of Passage. Chicago: Universityof Chicago Press, 1960.

GROSZ, E. The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. GUYER, J. I. Anthropology:The Study of Social and Cultural Originality. African Sociological Review/Revue Africaine de Sociologie 3 (2): 30–53, 1999.

HARAWAY, D. Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium. In D. Haraway (ed.), The Haraway Reader. New York: Routledge, 223–250, 2004.

HARDT, M.; NEGRI, A. Multitude: WarandDemocracy in the Age of Empire. New York: Penguin, 2005.

HAYDEN, C. When Nature Goes Public: The Making and Unmaking of Bioprospecting in Mexico. Princeton: Princeton UniversityPress, 2003.

HOBBES, T. Leviathan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1651] 1991.

JURIS, J. S. Reflectionson #OccupyEverywhere: Social Media, PublicSpace, and EmergingLogicsof Aggregation. American Ethnologist 39 (2): 259–279, 2012.

LATOUR, B. Reassemblingthe Social: AnIntroductiontoActor-Network Theory, Clarendon Lectures in Management Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

LEMOS, M. C. A Tale of Two Policies: The Politics of Climate Fore casting and Drought Relief in Ceara, Brazil. PolicySciences 36: 101–123, 2003.

MALINOWSKI, B. CrimeandCustom in SavageSociety. The Gift. New York: W. W. Norton, [1926] 1966.

MIYAZAKI, H. The Methodof Hope. Stanford: Stanford UniversityPress, 2004.

MORITA,A.InfrastructuringAmphibiousSpace:TheInterplayofAquaticandTerrestrialInfrastructures in theChaoPhraya Delta in Thailand. Science as Culture 25 (1): 117–140, 2016.

MOSSE, D.TheRuleofWater: Statecraft, EcologyandCollectiveAction in South India.Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.

NELSON, D. R.; FINAN, T. J. Prayingfor Drought: PersistentV ulnerabilityand the Politics of Patronage in Ceará, NortheastBrazil. American Anthropologist 111 (3):302–316, 2009.

PHILIPS, A. List. In: LURYAND, C.;WAKEFORD, N. (eds). InventiveMethods: The Happening ofthe Social. London: Routledge, 96–109, 2012.

RABINOW, P. Marking Time: OntheAnthropologyoftheContemporary. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009.

RUPPERT, E. The GovernmentalTopologiesof DatabaseDevices. Theory, Culture & Society 29 (4–5): 116–136. doi: 10.1177/0263276412439428, 2012.

SIMPSON, L. D. IntegratedWaterResources Management, Ceara, Brazil. Washington,DC: World Bank, 2003.

STRATHERN, M. Cuttingthe Network. Journalofthe Royal AnthropologicalInstitute N.S.(2): 517–535, 1996

STRATHERN, M. AnthropologicalReasoning: Some Threads ofThought. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4 (3): 23–37, 2014.

TURNER, V. The Ritual Process: StructureandAnti-Structure. New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1995.

VERRAN, H. Science and African Logic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.

VON SCHNITZLER, A. Democracy’s Infrastructure: Techno-PoliticsandProtestafter Apartheid. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016.

WEST, P. Conservation Is Our Government Now: The PoliticsofEcology in Papua New Guinea. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006.

Published

2018-09-06 — Updated on 2021-04-01

Versions