When Costa Rican regulators set water rates, they effectively transform the human right to water into a price. I propose the notion of a “calculation grammar” to grasp the inventive patterns and vibrant social engagements that fuse the ethical investments, ontological assumptions, and quantified expressions involved in this process. This grammar governs the relative weights and proportions of the elements in numeric propositions, giving them distinct meanings and political valences. The liveliness of these propositions derives from the power of numeric techniques in their inevitably place‐specific expressions as well as from the legal principles of sociality that enable them. I follow the mathematical formula regulators use to set water prices to reveal the inconspicuous financialization of human rights and the humanitarization of finance as they currently unfold across technocratic centers of calculation. I also argue for an ethnographic approach that remains committed to the ontological indivisibility of the technical and the cultural in any quantification effort. [human rights, prices, water, calculation, regulation, finance, Costa Rica]

This page intentionally left blankintroduction Around noon on the fourth day of the World Water Forum, held in 2006 at Mexico City's convention center, fifty out of the ten thousand participants managed to sneak in the necessary tools to stage a surprise protest. As the demonstrators went through the metal detectors that turned entry doors into security checkpoints, the guards inspecting their personal belongings ignored the water bottles, small coins, and folded pieces of cloth that they were bringing into the building. The would-be protestors walked briskly toward the lobby, where three levels of meeting rooms connected through an intricate system of balconies and escalators, creating an ideal stage for attracting an audience. Within minutes, empty plastic water bottles emerged, coins were dropped into them, and cloth signs unfurled. The protestors began shaking their bottles rhythmically and chanting: El agua es un derecho, no es una mercancía! El agua es un derecho, no es una mercancía! (Water is a right, not a commodity! Water is a right, not a commodity!)With the opposition between a right and a commodity, the demonstrators were not invoking just any right; they were referring to the human right to water. Their voices were tactically recruiting water's universalism to denounce the injustices and dispossession occurring around the world as a result of its commodification. Their chant was more than a mere demonstration slogan; it was a calculated rhetorical move marking the practical and material distinctions between human rights and commodities. The demonstrators were convinced, as were many other participants in the forum, that water should be a universal human right accessible to all, and for that reason should never be commodified. But they also knew that those distinctions need to be produced in all sorts of places; courts were not the only spaces where rights were enacted, and markets did not hold a monopoly over commoditization practices. introduction introduction about water's confounding nature. They were conceptual things, material abstractions.These protest bottles, with their unruly embroilments, became the conceptual locus of my research on the technolegal politics of water. What kind of relation was there between the activists' words, with their clear partitions, and the bottles in their hands, with the transubstantiation they suggested? If water is to be a human right, and not a commodity, how do you differentiate these two legal and economic formulations? And more generally, how do people create distinctions and bifurcations if the world in which they live constantly drifts toward entanglement, blurring stark oppositions?These questions are not only relevant to our thinking about the politics of water, they go beyond. Human rights and commodities directly shape or distantly hover over much of the organization of value, collective life, and nature. The relations between property and body parts, health and healing, food, nature, and even access to the internet are all discussed through similar o...

The anthropology of water is a self-declared relational field that attempts to transcend nature/culture distinctions by attending to the fact that the social and ecological aspects of water are separated only by convention. Despite its recent coming of age, the anthropology of water is incredibly expansive. It attends to molecular, embodied, ecosystemic, and planetary issues. I provide an overview of that breadth in four thematic clusters: (in)sufficiency, bodies and beings, knowledge, and ownership. These clusters highlight issues of materiality, ontological politics, and political economy. They are the grounds on which questions of water justice are elucidated. Furthermore, I show how water is always more than itself; its force and material presence constantly frame people's efforts to address the fundamental question of what it means to live life collectively in a world that is always more than human. I close with two directions for research: the denaturalization of water's materiality and the diversification of the moral undertones of our analytic vocabularies.

This paper is an ethnographic examination of the early social life of a project to map Costa Rica’s aquifers using LandSat imagery and a specialized algorithm. The project aims to make subterranean formations accessible for public agencies mediating recent environmental conflicts over underground water, which have been diagnosed as the country’s first “water war.” I analyze the presentation to the public of this project and the technology it uses to show how vision and touch are conceptual resources that people use to describe the technicalities of satellite imagery. Attending to the semiotic and technical power of vision and touch requires a nonessentialist understanding of the senses. It requires moving away from a narrow understanding of sensing as embodied, phenomenological practice. Focusing on the role of texture as that which operates in the interstices of vision and touch, I propose going beyond panoptic imaginaries in order to grasp the diverse social lives that technologies such as satellite imaging have.

Critical algorithm scholarship has demonstrated the difficulties of attributing accountability for the actions and effects of algorithmic systems. In this commentary, we argue that we cannot stop at denouncing the lack of accountability for algorithms and their effects but must engage the broader systems and distributed agencies that algorithmic systems exist within; including standards, regulations, technologies, and social relations. To this end, we explore accountability in ''the Generated Detective,'' an algorithmically generated comic. Taking up the mantle of detectives ourselves, we investigate accountability in relation to this piece of experimental fiction. We problematize efforts to effect accountability through transparency by undertaking a simple operation: asking for permission to re-publish a set of the algorithmically selected and modified words and images which make the frames of the comic. Recounting this process, we demonstrate slippage between the ''complication'' of the algorithm and the obscurity of the legal and institutional structures in which it exists.