Abstract
Water sharing offers insight into the everyday and, at times, invisible ties that bind people and households with water and to one another. Water sharing can take many forms, including so-called “pure gifts,” balanced exchanges, and negative reciprocity. In this study, we examine water sharing between households as a culturally embedded practice that may be both need-based and symbolically meaningful. Drawing on a wide-ranging review of diverse literatures, we describe how households practice water sharing cross-culturally in the context of four livelihood strategies (hunter-gatherer, pastoralist, agricultural, and urban). We then explore how cross-cutting material conditions (risks and costs/benefits, infrastructure and technologies), socioeconomic processes (social and political power, water entitlements, ethnicity and gender, territorial sovereignty), and cultural norms (moral economies of water, water ontologies, and religious beliefs) shape water sharing practices. Finally, we identify five new directions for future research on water sharing: conceptualization of water sharing; exploitation and status accumulation through water sharing, biocultural approaches to the health risks and benefits of water sharing, cultural meanings and socioeconomic values of waters shared; and water sharing as a way to enact resistance and build alternative economies. This article is categorized under: Human Water > Value of Water Human Water > Rights to Water.
Original language | English (US) |
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Article number | e1309 |
Journal | Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Water |
Volume | 5 |
Issue number | 6 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Nov 1 2018 |
Funding
The coauthors came together to work on this paper thanks to the Water Sharing Workshop, hosted by Arizona State University's Center for Global Health as part of the Society for Economic Anthropology 2018 Annual Meeting on Water & Economy. We gratefully acknowledge funding provided to the Household Water InSecurity Experiences (HWISE) Network by Arizona State University's School of Human Evolution and Social Change, Texas A&M University College of Geosciences and the TAMU Water Security Initiative, and Northwestern University. Individual authors were supported under the following grants: E.A.: NSF GSS-1434203; C.D.: NSF SES-1462086, NSF DEB-1637590, NSF GRFP 026257-001; W.J.: NSF BCS GSS-156092; C.S.: Lloyd's Register Foundation; A.W.: NSF SES-1462086, NSF DEB-1637590; S.L.Y.: NIMH R21MH108444. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the funding agencies. We thank our colleagues Michael E. Smith, Kim Hill, Shauna BurnSilver, Alan Terry, and Shalean M. Collins for their help with earlier versions of this paper. Amber Wutich gratefully acknowledges the insights of Terry McCabe, Mark Moritz, and Bill Irons in her early efforts to understand water sharing in pastoralist communities. We thank Farhana Sultana, Laura Eichelberger, Jaime Shinn, and our many other HWISE collaborators for their important intellectual contributions to the larger HWISE network.
Keywords
- Exchange
- Gift
- Household
- Reciprocity
- Sharing
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Oceanography
- Ecology
- Aquatic Science
- Water Science and Technology
- Ocean Engineering
- Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law