A Future History of Water by Andrea Ballestero (review)

W was declared to be a human right by the United Nations in 2010, yet universal access to water is still not a reality. In A Future History of Water, anthropologist Andrea Ballestero provides a sophisticated and intriguing analysis of the everyday, mundane work done by bureaucrats, politicians, NGO workers, and activists to render water a human right while working within existing legal and political-economic frameworks. These actors are not especially radical, but they wish to make a difference in the world by shaping the future history of water. Through a material-semiotic lens, Ballestero explores the constant work of differentiating water as a human right from water as a commodity that takes place in bureaucratic and political spaces. She analyzes this work as processes of disentanglement and forms of bifurcation that never seem to end; new distinctions are always required, but they are never fully finalized, resulting in a “neverending bifurcating mesh” (6). Ballestero does not enter into direct conversation with the many ethnographies of water published in the past decade, most of which focus on users, their relations to water bodies and infrastructures, as well as the role of engineers and bureaucrats as key actors in the distribution of water. Instead, she makes a point of doing something different. Taking a radical move away from the physical water sources, users, and canals, Ballestero intentionally looks for water elsewhere, “in places where we might not usually explore its material politics” (15). The ethnographic material of the book derives from many years of research with technocrats, documents, models, and calculations in offices,