Fred Wojnarowski
Frederick Wojnarowski is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in Anthropology at the LSE, interested in the political, historical and economic anthropology of the Middle East, with an ethnographic focus on Jordan and especially the central highlands region around Madaba, and a thematic interest in poetical economy and ecology, social change, the construction of identity categories, and infrastructural and environmental imaginaries. His dissertation (University of Cambridge, 2021), entitled ‘Unsettling Times: land, political economy and protest in the Bedouin villages of Central Jordan’, studied Bedouin identity and politics in a time of mass-migration, economic uncertainty and unrest. His published work has featured in History and Anthropology, Nomadic Peoples and Contemporary Levant. He is currently working on book project, entitled Bled dry: contested flows and infrastructural relations in Jordan’s water system, based on his recent research.
Current Research:
Across central Jordan, each morning, thousands of lowly paid operational staff fan out from the offices of Miyahunna (‘our water’) to turn on valves to send water to various different neighbourhoods and villages; part of a complex and carefully-calculated rationing system. As the water arrives, or fails to arrive, different experiences and subjectivities emerge.
In the Wala River valley near Dhiban in central Jordan farmers complain that the state is bleeding them as the dammed river empties, in part to supply urban domestic users, irrigation becomes fraught and as local wells become saline and unusable. As the local agricultural and natural environment degrades, water scarcity has become a new cause taken up by longstanding local protest movements. In the nearby villages of Jabal Bani Hamida, a woman from a family of former pastoralists in an area experiencing high unemployment and decades of agricultural decline gets up at 1am to turn on the taps to receive the area’s weekly ration of piped mains water, flowing for less than 2 hours a week, at a pressure too week to fill roof storage tanks, complaining as she does about how places less than an hour’s drive away receive piped water for three days a week, saying ‘water is form God… next to the well and you die of thirst’.
In the nearby Madaba plains, a powerful landowner and tribal leader pays a well-regarded construction firm to sink an illegal well, to sell water to nearby farms and to private tanker drivers, and to irrigate his fruit trees. In the sprawling informal suburbs of East Amman a family displaced from Palestine struggles to afford to be connected to the semi-privatised water system, relying instead on an unofficial connection to a neighbour’s pipe, put in illegally by a plumber. They discuss how their own subversions pale against the scale of water abuses they imagine to be carried out by agri-businesses in rural areas, and by large tribal landowners. A few kilometres away in West Amman, a wealthy family with young children who have used up their water tanks before their next window of mains water piping get in contact with a local security guard who manages a contact network of people able to 'get things done', often in the shadow of official processes. He puts them in touch with a tanker company, who may well draw from wells like that being sunk by the Madaba landowner. In a glassy West Amman office, a water consultant with a background in Engineering, part of a surge of new water-based initiatives, shrugs in exasperation at the unknowability of how and why so-called ‘non-revenue water’ is disappearing from the piped system, officially estimated to constitute about 50-60% of the total supply, maintaining that socio-economic factors are beyond his remit but speculating about poor residents of supposedly lawless East Amman and rural tribal areas like Dhiban. Scarcity though, he says, cannot be tackled through better management along, but is only amenable to supply-side solutions from vast new engineering and desalination projects, deferred to eve more distant future dates.
As water scarcity gains traction as a globalised element of anthropogenic climate change, and as it comes to be a defining cause célèbre in Jordan (widely said to be the second most water-poor country in the world) and a vital tool for attracting development aid and investment, questions of accessing, distributing and using water have become increasingly politically contentious. Tensions emerge between water used for irrigation and for domestic consumption, and water given over for domestic use by the ever-larger population of the capital –host to several million refugees– and that reserved for regions from which it is pumped. While grand hydropolitical discourses and schemes abound around global environmental change, transboundary water diplomacy, demographic explosions and the merits of various megaprojects, the everyday hydropolitics of water distribution and usage remains obscured. My research, which moves between the restive and economically marginalised rural region of Dhiban, and areas of the capital, Amman, seeks to centre these realities and experiences, exploring ethnographically how different people and places are bought into relation with each other and with the state through water infrastructures.
All of these people and settings are brought into often contested relationships with each other by Jordan’s relatively recent but constantly unravelling water infrastructure. Starting from my long-term ethnographic engagement with Dhiban and Jabal Bani Hamida, my recent fieldwork has expanded outwards to the people and places, who are, in part, drinking the water taken from the Wala. I am working with a Jordanian postgraduate student and local community development organisations to understand domestic experiences of water, as well as with water policy makers and officials at different scales, to trace the contested flows of water in Jordan, as it self-defines as one of the world’s most water-poor nations. I look at ideas around the ethics of distribution, and of economic and environmental justice in these different settings, and how they emerge from and also reproduce different mediated relations with and through water infrastructure. Water, with its materiality and promise of quantifiability, seems to offer the possibility of materialising and substantiating long-felt but abstract relations of moral economy with the capital and its elites, in ways which tap into national and globalised water and environmental discourses which seem apolitical, in this way mirroring earlier discourses of corruption. Through this ethnographic material, I argue that water by its nature tends to resist legibility and calculability, but also to bring attention to ethical and political issues of distribution and flows that bring people into relation.