Water Culture Matters (especially in Brazil) Part 1

I mentioned in my last blog posting (about the Centre name change) that the quotation from Bell and Oakley’s Cultural Policy (2015, 157-158), has been important to my own thinking about the direction of cultural and media policy research. So that those economic resources (energy, water, food, transport, housing, environment etc) should be seen in cultural and social terms. To cultural geographers, this is a no-brainer who have been working to understand what trees, rivers and landscapes mean to people, or how buildings, architecture and hard engineering become symbolic markers of social life to be mediated and experienced.

For myself, I kind of fell into water research! Or, perhaps was led to water research, and took a drink, while there was an inundation of water, but not much research from an arts and humanities perspective. At the time (after the 2007 Summer Floods in the UK), it was not clear to our research team of geographers, media theorists, historians and hydrologists what was the connection between media, culture, water, rivers, flooding and drought. To the participants in our research, those who lived with, loved and feared the river, the connections were clear. Managing water and water governance, is also to manage cultural activities, cultural memories and media representations. Therefore, to find the Centre for Cultural and Media Policy Studies very open to stretching and defining what counts as ‘cultural policy’ opened up new ways of thinking about what has recently been termed ‘hydro-citizenship’ by the AHRC funded project running from Bath-Spa University, led by co-author Prof Owain Jones. (His work on ‘tree-cultures’ for example influenced the research I did in the Forest of Dean on Dennis Potter’s TV fans, extras and audiences in the forest).

But, I digress. The last two years have found me exploring not simply why water culture matters in the UK (where institutionalisation of both cultural and water industries may obscure access to a clear understanding of the importance of rivers, flooding and drought to the nation, to regions, to those living with too much or without water) but to the trans-national and trans-cultural connectivity of water stories.

Why Brazil?

Water culture really matters to the Brazilian colleagues and social actors I have met in São Paulo State and in the State of Minas Gerais. As part of the Narratives of Water project, I have been working with Dr Danilo Rothberg of Unesp, to find connections and disconnections between how water is managed as an economic and cultural resource and how the management of water is represented and communicated through media and cultural activities. Developing hydro-citizenship in the Brazilian context is very much participatory in those ‘water councils’ that conjoin the social, cultural and economic. The Manuelzao Project (Worldwide Movement for Rivers) on the das Velhas River (Belo Horizonte) is a good example of this. Abers and Keck (2013, 187) in Practical Authority: Agency and Institutional Change in Brazilian Water Politics, note the connection between social movements, activism, political popularity and media mobilisation at a local water basin scale for river revitalisation. To move from armchair to policy and action meant ‘creating organizations with the capacity to implement projects, to mobilize complex, diverse networks of actors, and to communicate with a broader public’ and all this requires gaining access to media, occupying spaces where decisions are made, and insisting that water is not only understood through a hydrological, hydraulic and economic perspective.

In fact, I am reminded by my Brazilian colleague Prof Gilson Schwartz from USP that Jean-Jacques Rousseau made this point quite some time ago, concerning how water creates community because it requires co-operation, communication, social interaction and dialogue if its use, quality and availability are to be sustained as an emotional as much as an economic benefit:

‘There the first ties between families formed; there were the first rendezvous of the sexes. Young women came to fetch water for the household, young men came to water their herds. Their eyes accustomed to the same objects since childhood began to have softer ones. The heart was moved by these new objects, an unknown attraction made it less savage, it felt the pleasure of not being alone. Water became imperceptibly more necessary, the livestock were thirsty more often; one arrived hurriedly and left regretfully. There were held the first fêtes, feet leapt with joy, the impressed gesture no longer sufficed, the voice accompanied it with impassioned accents, pleasure and desire mixed together made themselves felt at the same time. There was finally the true cradle of civilizations, and from the pure crystal of the fountains rose the first fires of love’ (Essai sur l'origine des langues où il est parlé de la mélodie et de l'imitation musicale, translated and cited in ‘Diverting Water in Rousseau: Technology, the Sublime, and the Quotidian’ by Julia Simon, 2012, p. 87)

Joanne Garde-Hansen : 04 May 2017 22:50 |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem