Abstract
Water politics tends to focus on the pragmatic: supply, sanitation, contamination, scarcity, power relations that affect distribution. Rightfully so. Yet even the humble jungle babbler knows that water is for playing as well as drinking. To explore the question of whether there is room for embodiment, play, and aesthetics in a sea of utilitarian treatments of water, this talk examines a water-themed concept mall outside New Delhi, the kind of project that investors love and environmental critics love to hate. Rather than simply dismiss fountains and mermaid shows in the desert with a neti-neti critique of all that they are not (“not sustainable”), what happens when an analysis also takes the visceral appeal of such spectacles into account? Might the carnivalesque atmosphere and sparkling displays of water staged in places like this have the potential to reanimate relationships with neglected and exploited surroundings that critics assume to be evacuated of care and meaning, even as developers of such spectacles put added pressures on workers and ecologies?
Bio
Kath Weston is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Virginia in the U.S. Her latest book, Animate Planet: Making Visceral Sense of Living in a High-Tech Ecologically Damaged World, will be published in early 2017 by Duke University Press. Her research focuses on embodied engagement with the world: how “blood” figures into kinship and race/class relations; bodily inscriptions of identities; the impact of scientific investigations into how bodies work on contemporary finance and notions of prosperity; and most recently, how sensory engagements with industrial products have reconstituted what it means to live. A Guggenheim Fellow and two-time winner of the Ruth Benedict Prize, Weston is also the author of Families We Choose, Gender in Real Time, and Traveling Light: On the Road with America's Poor.