Well-Connected: Everyday Water Practices in Cairo
Link: New Books in Anthropology Podcast Episode: https://newbooksnetwork.com/well-connected
Who is responsible for ensuring residents can access clean potable water and the separation of wastewater from human contact? In an urbanizing planet, many metropolises in the Global South are facing increasingly arid conditions, creating a future in which we will see many thirsty cities. The modern centralized water and wastewater systems that significantly expanded over the 20th century have improved standards of living but never quite reached the promise of technological encapsulation of water delivery and removal. As international paradigms have shifted in their assertions about what entities (state, private, civil) and what scale (municipal, state, national) are best able to ensure these services, water access, quality, and price have remained contentious in many places, especially in the Global South. Based on two years of ethnographic research, this book details how one informal community in Cairo, Egypt, has bent the many systems required to make water appear or disappear into connection for their homes and neighborhoods; bringing together the technological systems that exist in the center of the street with the internal piping of homes, connecting to administrative apparatuses to legitimate services, and working through kin and neighborhood networks to facilitate water’s arrival and departure. While governance structures of one sort or another often set the parameters for many of the conditions of possibility that people work within, people interact in ways that exceed their relations to systems of authority. Being well-connected is not just about proximity to government pipes, but also savvy social labor of continual construction, maintenance, and management of local social networks. The sociality of water encompasses the unfolding of human wellbeing through the provision and management of water, but this water is often provided and managed through love, social contacts, moral ideology, interpersonal relationships, friendships, domestic rhythms, embodied sensibilities, and the everyday labor of connecting.
