How do the practices of extractive industries, such as mining and hydrofracturing, affect people's beliefs, practices, and experiences of water? Water connects and integrates realms of life that might otherwise appear separate. Through water, the extraction, refinement, and trade of natural resources are linked to individuals, households, and communities. Thirst, hygiene and health, the availability of local fish and agricultural products, and perceptions of environmental change make industry effects on water apparent in everyday life. Therefore, to fully understand how extractive industries affect people, it is necessary to investigate how these industries affect water practices and experiences. As part of the Cultural Anthropology Program's support of research into the socio-cultural drivers and consequences of critical anthropogenic processes, and the resilience and robustness of socio-cultural systems, this award supports such an investigation.
The researcher, Rutgers University doctoral student Siad Darwish, working under the direction of Dr. Dorothy Hodgson, will undertake an intensive field investigation into how a single extractive industry, phosphate mining for fertilizer, has affected people's experiences of and ideas about water in the past and continues to do so in the present. The research will be conducted in the Tunisian oasis cities of Gafsa and Gabès, two towns on the edge of the Sahara desert that were for centuries defined by their locally and sustainably managed availability of fresh water. The heightened importance of water in this context will make the relationships to be investigated particularly clear. Locally, phosphate extraction and refinement over the past century have resulted in the depletion and pollution of water resources; the industry was at the center of both the Arab Uprisings and of the country's 2012 water riots. The research will build on two prior field trips to Tunisia in 2012 and 2013 and a long-term research engagement in the region. The researcher will employ a mix of social scientific research methods. Archival research will document the emergence of the phosphate industry and transformation of water management systems. Mapping exercises and the development of a water-use typology will establish how the industry's pumping facilities and waste waters connect to local waterscapes today. Where these connections are found to be particularly salient, the researcher will use ethnographic research methods to investigate social beliefs, practices, and experiences of water in households, ritual, agriculture, and fishing. Findings from this research will have application to understanding how people everywhere cope with natural resource scarcity and to theorizing the linkages between critical resources and socio-cultural systems.
