Abstract

To contribute to a reflection on the role of contemporary ethnographies in the production of knowledge, in this essay I examine the water-object as an entry point to explore the diversity of realities that are woven around it. For this purpose, I analyse three open-access doctoral theses, where water is a central element of their participant observation. Through an exercise of description and interpretation of these works, incorporating thematic analysis, I conclude that water allows us to reveal different social and material worlds through ethnography. Among them, the certainties and uncertainties of inhabitants of an atoll in the central Pacific Ocean in the face of rising sea levels; networks formed by residents of an urban slum in Cairo to ensure basic services such as drinking water and sewerage; and irrigation practices in small-scale mango export agriculture in the Andean altiplano that overflow the binary logic of modernity/non-modernity. This same diversity of socio-material interweaving reflects the multiple character of the water-object in the ethnographies analysed, whose different versions unfold in the forms of salt water, wastewater or turbid water.

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