Anthropology

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Browsing Anthropology by Author "Ballestero, Andrea"

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    A Future History of Water
    (Duke University Press, 2019) Ballestero, Andrea
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    Capacity as Aggregation: Promises, Water and a Form of Collective Care in Northeast Brazil
    (Berghahn, 2017) Ballestero, Andrea
    As the twenty-first century gets underway, people have been experimenting with many forms of political organization. In Northeast Brazil, that experimental spirit led to the creation of the Water Pact, a process involving more than eight thousand participants through a series of public promise-making rituals in which they made pledges to care for water, attending to the specificities of their own context. The Pact gathered those promises into a multi-scalar formation that, the organizers believed, would yield the necessary resources to address the state’s water problems. The Pact would break with an unsuccessful history of infrastructural and legal reforms concerning deep-water access in the state of Ceará. This article examines how that collective was produced, what its constituent units were and how the logic of aggregation guided practices leading to its coalescence. My purpose is to re-examine the aggregate as a quantitative form of capacity that should be qualitatively reconsidered.
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    Experimenting with Ethnography : A Companion to Analysis
    (Duke University Press, 2021) Ballestero, Andrea; Winthereik, Brit Ross
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    Paradoxical Infrastructures: Ruins, Retrofit, and Risk
    (Sage, 2015) Howe, Cymene; Lockrem, Jessica; Appel, Hannah; Hackett, Edward; Boyer, Dominic; Hall, Randal; Schneider-Mayerson, Matthew; Pope, Albert; Gupta, Akhil; Rodwell, Elizabeth; Ballestero, Andrea; Durbin, Trevor; el-Dahdah, Farès; Long, Elizabeth; Mody, Cyrus C.M.; Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Human Sciences
    In recent years, a dramatic increase in the study of infrastructure has occurred in the social sciences and humanities, following upon foundational work in the physical sciences, architecture, planning, information science, and engineering. This article, authored by a multidisciplinary group of scholars, probes the generative potential of infrastructure at this historical juncture. Accounting for the conceptual and material capacities of infrastructure, the article argues for the importance of paradox in understanding infrastructure. Thematically the article is organized around three key points that speak to the study of infrastructure: ruin, retrofit, and risk. The first paradox of infrastructure, ruin, suggests that even as infrastructure is generative, it degenerates. A second paradox is found in retrofit, an apparent ontological oxymoron that attempts to bridge temporality from the present to the future and yet ultimately reveals that infrastructural solidity, in material and symbolic terms, is more apparent than actual. Finally, a third paradox of infrastructure, risk, demonstrates that while a key purpose of infrastructure is to mitigate risk, it also involves new risks as it comes to fruition. The article concludes with a series of suggestions and provocations to view the study of infrastructure in more contingent and paradoxical forms.
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    Regulatory Translations: Expertise and Affect in Global Legal Fields
    (Indiana University Press, 2014) Türem, Ziya Umut; Ballestero, Andrea
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    The Productivity of Nonreligious Faith: Openness, Pessimism, and Water in Latin America
    (SAR Press, 2012) Ballestero, Andrea; Tucker, Catherine M.
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    What is in a Percentage?: Calculation as the Poetic Translation of Human Rights
    (Indiana University Press, 2014) Ballestero, Andrea
    Increasingly, the efficacy of human rights, international norms, and commercial standards is deposited in numbers as measures of social and financial value. Taking the form of indicators, goals, and targets, these numbers are active participants in the everyday practices through which the law is constituted around the world. This paper examines the normative ability of percentages as numeric devices that transform measures of value across legal domains. The paper draws on two examples: a) the generation of indicators by NGOs promoting the Human Right to Water, and b) the technical work of regulators attempting to regulate water prices to follow the 3% affordability target that the United Nations advocates for. I argue that the process of translating human rights into numbers bestows rights with an afterlife that expands their reach into new domains. I also suggest that such process of translation is poetic and that exploring numbers and their role in lawmaking from a poetic point of view reveals the rich social lives that numbers lead. Attending more carefully to these numbers also shows the political possibilities that translation processes across genres of communication afford a philosophy of human rights preoccupied not only with their violation, but also with their implementation.