Sister Water

  • Andrea Muehlebach

One of the most precious legacies of the thirteenth-century Franciscan order, writes Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, was the Franciscans’ heretical attempt to live a life in a world that would “never be substantiated into an appropriation. That is to say: to think life as that which is never given as property but only as common use.”1 The Franciscans were part of a group of religious movements seen as heretical by the Church because they proposed a new type of life in common; a life that hinged on no one claiming ownership over any possessions. They thus renounced everything except use itself, since use was necessary to survival and human life. Because the Franciscans attempted to realize a practice outside of private property, the Church thought they were practicing an animal form of life, analogous to the lives of little children “who do not own but merely use the property of the father,” or madmen “who all lack the disposition to possess.”2

One trace left of this heretical worldview is a song composed by Francis of Assisi, “Canticle of the Sun.” They say that it was first sung by Francis and two of his brothers as he lay dying, praising a wide panoply of relations: Brother Sun, Sister Moon, Brother Wind, Brother Fire, Sister Mother Earth, and Sister Water, who is depicted in the song as “useful, and humble, and precious, and pure.”3 The song raises profound challenges today as it asks what it would mean to think of the world outside of the paradigm of the private and the proprietary, and to think of it instead as inappropriable.

We know, of course, that the Franciscan tradition runs counter to centuries of proprietary thinking about the world as full of individual, private possessions. Take John Locke, one of the first theorists of “possessive individualism,”4 who provided the philosophical basis for the transmutation of the commons into private property, specifically in the New World. Locke gave water as an example which, when “running in the fountain be everyone’s,” but when taken out with a pitcher belongs only to “who drew it out.” After all, “his labor hath taken it out of the hands of nature, where it was common, and belonged equally to all her children, and hath thereby appropriated it to himself.”5 Here, Locke is incapable of developing a theory of use that exists outside of the paradigm of individual ownership, incapable of envisioning an individual embedded within a group with whom she might want to share that water. Locke’s philosophy became the foundation for much of Western liberal thought, which holds that things only become useful when taken from the commons and transmuted into private property. For Locke, whatever is not taken and appropriated is merely wasted.6 He provided the reasoning upon which the establishment of private property regimes in both the Old and the New Worlds hinged—a process we know to be violent to the core. After all, the word “private” is derived from the Latin privare: to deprive or bereave.

And yet today, as the world is confronted with apocalyptic scenarios of water scarcity and pollution, some feel compelled to ask: Is it possible to think about use without appropriation? In Canada, it is Indigenous peoples who are posing these questions most powerfully and insistently: Is it possible to think of water as something we use but do not possess? Is it possible to treat water as a relation?

This is more than abstract philosophy, and more than a Canadian question. In 2011, Italian citizens soundly rejected the privatization of water through a national referendum initiated by one of the largest social coalitions ever seen in the country. Deeply indebted to the Catholic imaginative universe and buoyed by autonomist Marxist theorizing on the commons, many activists in this movement drew on water’s vitalism, juxtaposing water as life to what they called neoliberalism’s “culture of death,” and water’s sacrality to its desacralization through commodification. Many also drew on the “Canticle of the Sun” by referring to water as sorella acqua (Sister Water), asking “How can you sell your sister?” In a historically unprecedented move, 27 million Italians rejected the commodification of water and insisted that it be conceptualized as a bene comune—a common good. At stake was a new vision of property distinct from both public (state) and private (corporate) ownership. Instead, water was a commons to be held for future generations and for life itself, and thus in need of special constitutional protection.

For now, however, the centuries-old Lockean compulsion towards appropriation has the world in its grip. A huge global capital liquidity is intersecting with the growing anticipation that water is rapidly emerging as one of the most lucrative commodities on the planet. Public water works are prime targets for the “new water barons” who have, at least in larger urban areas in middle-income countries, rushed to invest in water. One of Citigroup’s top economists announced in 2011 that the water market will become hotter than the oil market: “Water as an asset class will eventually become the single most important physical commodity-based asset class, dwarfing oil, copper, agricultural commodities and precious metals.”7 Global Water Intelligence (GWI) is a good example of this trend.8 A self-described “unchallenged leader in high value business information for the water industry” and the “ultimate strategy and navigation tool for the global water market,” GWI is an online monthly round-up of the most important water-related news for global investors. GWI is updated daily and tracks “hundreds of desalination, reuse, water treatment plants, waste water treatment plants and utility projects from conceptual stage to contract award,” while also providing “full progress and status reports including plant capacity, project structure, expected cost, relevant submission dates and full client contact details.” It carefully scours world political developments to discern the laws and policies that might “unlock” water infrastructures and ready them for future investment: Is Chile’s new government backing the reforms to water utility regulation? How to interpret the language of a $1.4 billion environmental bond bill introduced in Massachusetts late last week? GWI does not even attempt to veil what is at stake: A global war over water about which intelligence must be collected. Water here is explicitly a resource to be grabbed, not a part of the commons to be protected; an asset to be appropriated, not a relative demanding our care.

This year, GWI awarded trophies to new members of the “Leading Utilities of the World” network. Among them was Stefano Venier, CEO of the Italian Hera Group. Hera is the third largest of four major Italian water corporations (“the four sisters of water”—le quattro sorelle dell’acqua—as a recent Italian news report sarcastically referred to them [9]) leading the way towards the steady privatization of Italy’s public water utilities and rapidly becoming what the report calls the four new “masters of Italian taps” (padroni dei rubinetti italiani). The referendum in Italy, it seems, merely slowed down what appears as inexorable.

But this, to me, is a question rather than a fact. What if more of us were to think heretically about using things without appropriating them? What if more of us were to think about water as a sister—a relative who can never be owned? There are those who already think and live in the world beyond appropriation. Our task is to listen, learn, and think alongside and with each other as we attempt to build, expand, and maintain these relations.



Andrea Muehlebach is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto Mississauga. An economic and political anthropologist, she explores the ethics and politics of economic life—as notably on questions such as welfare, citizenship, and morality and, more recently, on the political, economic, and ethical implications of water privatization and financialization. She is the author of The Moral Neoliberal (University of Chicago Press, 2012). Her book-in-progress, A Vital Politics: Water Insurgencies in Europe, is a study of different water movements in Europe and the question of how water—as commons or “resource”—should be governed and valued now and in the future.

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