[Reader-list] Jan posting

[Karen]

Hi.  I am a cultural anthropologist, have just completed my Ph.d in Arizona, and have returned to live in Chennai. My first posting to this listserve, below, contains my proposal and then an outline of what I (we) have been thinking and doing so far.

Tapping in: Urban Water Conflicts as Citizenship Claims in Chennai
 

My project proposes to explore collective, contentious and transgressive practices of urban citizenship as articulated in claims to water in the city of Chennai.  Municipal water supply in several Indian cities remains encased in the structure of the commons, particularly in situations of chronic supply shortage. Yet, urban water sector reforms across the country, conceived along neoliberal lines, seek to reconstitute water services as industries responsive to demand, in the process turning water into a commodity and citizens into consumers with private property in water.  In Chennai, for example, an emerging component of the reforms is an effort to extend individual water connections to the slums. I found, however, that it was not the orderly administrative discipline of the individual complaint, but rather, the vocal and insistent demands presented by the urban poor, usually in collectives, that provoked effective responses from the frontline bureaucrats of the water service. This was not a smooth relationship of accountability. The officials evinced a consistent hostility to collective representations, but this hostility was grounded in their fear of the mariyal, a common local form of public protest, which usually took the form of a road-block and was particularly popular among women, who squatted or stood behind barricades of colored plastic water pots placed across the road. Even the threat of a mariyal could produce rather prompt response from field engineers or their superiors.

The proposal outlined here is an offshoot of my dissertation research, which was an ethnographic exploration of reform in Chennai's water utility, Metrowater, from the vantage point of frontline bureaucrats.  Understudying the engineers' work at the Operations and Maintenance depots gave me an insight into the anomalies, disjunctures and leakages that challenged the neoliberal order of reform as it unfolded on the ground.  Among the most significant challenges to this order were those posed by the urban slum-dwellers, who appeared in the engineers' sights as unruly and uncivil masses, unwilling to pay for services, and prone to make demands on the state through collective and politicized channels.  Failing to bring these masses into line with reformist visions of a civil society composed of individual consumers, the engineers displayed a tendency to retreat from this "impossible" sphere of the public.    

The project proposed here seeks to interrogate the narratives of order purveyed by the reforming state, this time from the vantage point of its margins, using multi-media techniques. De Certeau (2000) and James Scott (1998) contend that the totalizing administrative order of the high-modern state, or the theoretical concept of the city, is produced by being lifted high off the ground, out of the city's grasp, leaving behind the mass of wandering lifeways that inhabit its spaces.  But what these authors portray as the distanced view from above - the God's eye view, the eye of the sovereign - is, in the case of the municipal water service, situated below the ground, in the underground network of pipes that engineers presented as the principle agent of equitable distribution in the service. This anthropomorphic yet impersonal agent of order, then, gave rise to a technocratic discourse in which universal service was guaranteed through rational improvement. But my ethnography revealed that the underground grid was really a "sieve-order" (de Certeau 2000:160), punctured and intersected by bypass connections and illegal taps that revealed the contentious and compromised order of a ground-level service.  Beneath the architecture of rules and policies, the landscape of the water service emerged as patchy, layered and segmented, its so-called "givens" altered not just through the linear model of continuous rational improvement, but through unruly assertions of rights and needs. 

The underground grid thus embodied a myth of order, produced by silences, half-truths and euphemisms, which permitted and regularized the unofficial arrangements through which lower-level bureaucrats, local politicians and the public together devised solutions to the exigencies of daily life.  The myth of order was ritually performed through excavations on the city streets, where engineers publicly uncovered selected illegal connections in acts of policing the integrity of the grid.  Maps of the distribution system then, are half-truths, idealized representations which ignore some illegal additions and incorporate others as if they were part of the original plan. However they also function as performative instruments of categorization: what is not on the map is by definition illegal.  

The project I propose here would explore these challenges to the myth of orderly service from the perspective of citizens struggling for access to water.  These challenges take a range of everyday forms, from informal arrangements governing access to public fountains and water tanks, to mariyals and illegal taps. All these represent modes through which the urban public, lacking access to private property in water, assert the sovereignty of a basic need. 

My project conceptualizes the points of leakage in the urban order of the grid as sites in which local claims to citizenship are being asserted, challenging liberal (and neo-liberal) norms of individual-based citizenship.  This project, then, would seek to excavate and enunciate the histories hidden in engineered landscapes - the social relations of rule, resistance and compromise that are written into these concrete fixed and putatively impersonal structures.  It would seek, as Latour (1988) urges us, to desegregate the world of objects from the world of people, to examine the mutually interacting "social" in both domains.  Using localized water conflicts, particularly as they appear at the margins and thresholds of the piped water system, to direct the lens of the enquiry, this study will pose questions like:

-         How do the urban poor, located at the tail-end of systems and the fringes of administrative order, read and engage with the official texts of the water service? 

-         Where do they locate their own realities on the official grid maps?  How do their tales of order cohere with or intersect official tales?  

-         What texts or archives do they rely on for authoritative statements about their rights in water?

-         What kinds of texts or archives are produced through their informal/illicit claims, assertions and conflicts over water?

 

The project would use a range of media to construct this enquiry, including various techniques of mapping, oral histories and videography.  It envisages using these maps, histories and video clips to create an intertextual conversation between official and unofficial histories and geographies.  This conversation would be mediated by the core subjects of the study, groups of residents from the urban slums.  

 

REFERENCES CITED

 Certeau, Michel de. 2000. "Walking in the city." in The Certeau Reader, edited by G. Ward. Oxford

Malden, Mass: Blackwell Publishers.

 

Chatterjee, Partha 2001. On civil and political society in post-colonial democracies. In: Sudipto Kaviraj and Sunil Khilnani (eds.), Civil Society: History and Possibilities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

 

Latour, Bruno. 1988. The Pasteurization of France. Translated by A. Sheridan and J. Law. Cambridge, Mass.,: Harvard University Press.

 

Scott, James C. 1998. Seeing Like A State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. 





What I have been doing



In January I made contact with a film-maker based in Chennai who will be collaborating with me on this project. We have had a series of small meetings to bring him on board and outline the project in practical terms.  I have also been re-establishing contact with the water bureaucrats I worked with during my dissertation fieldwork,



>From the long laundry list of ideas we came up with, in brainstorm mode, here are a few things we plan to start with in Feb: 

-         Visit a number of communities with and without a camera. Speak to older people, children -- vocabularies of water, memories of water.

-         Draw maps with the women - where the water facilities are, where they should be, are there any local organizations, who handles the problems, the role of local politicians.  (can we get a gender profile of local water managers in the slums)

-         Follow transects of water access with a couple of communities - from local water control person to lorry/tank supplier to Metrowater laborer to depot engineer via politician - that kind of thing.  All the way from the source to inside the household.

-         Talk to depot engineers and find out where the excavations are, go check them out. Talk to laborers from Metrowater who do the digging ...

   

     - Revisit Ashokamitran's 1960s novel "Thaneer" which describes the restless wakefulness of the city streets in early dawn as people hustle for water...  



Comments welcome! 

Looking forward!



Karen
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