Household water sharing: A review of water gifts, exchanges, and transfers across cultures

Abstract

Water sharing offers insight into the everyday and, at times, invisible ties that bind people and households with water and to one another. Water sharing can take many forms, including so-called “pure gifts,” balanced exchanges, and negative reciprocity. In this paper, we examine water sharing between households as a culturally-embedded practice that may be both need-based and symbolically meaningful. Drawing on a wide-ranging review of diverse literatures, we describe how households practice water sharing cross-culturally in the context of four livelihood strategies (hunter-gatherer, pastoralist, agricultural, and urban). We then explore how cross-cutting material conditions (risks and costs/benefits, infrastructure and technologies), socio-economic processes (social and political power, water entitlements, ethnicity and gender, territorial sovereignty), and cultural norms (moral economies of water, water ontologies, and religious beliefs) shape water sharing practices. Finally, we identify five new directions for future research on water sharing: conceptualization of water sharing; exploitation and status accumulation through water sharing, biocultural approaches to the health risks and benefits of water sharing, cultural meanings and socio-economic values of waters shared; and water sharing as a way to enact resistance and build alternative economies.

Water sharing, reciprocity, and need: A comparative study of interhousehold water transfers in sub‐Saharan Africa

“…As predicted (Wutich et al ), we found a general pattern of more transfers from higher‐status households to lower‐status ones; however, this was not uniformly replicated in every community. In some places, the lowest quintile households were given less water compared to those in higher quintiles.…”

“…For example, when people collect or buy water for their own household use, it may then be seen as belonging to the person or household that collected or purchased it, regardless of its provenance. As such, another potential form of coping with water shortfalls is the direct sharing of such private water between households; in other words, the acts of giving or receiving water from one household to another as gifts, loans, exchanges, or sales (Wutich and Brewis ; Wutich et al ), sometimes operationally referred to as transfers . By household water sharing , we are referring to transfers of water between households designed to meet daily needs inside the receiving household (i.e., drinking, cooking, sanitation, washing clothes, cleaning, and bathing, but not maintaining livestock or crops).…”

“…Social scientists have previously documented interhousehold water transfers occurring within low‐resource communities in rural Ethiopia (Maes et al ), Malawi (Adams ; Velzeboer, Hordijk, and Schwartz ), Sudan (Zug ; Zug and Graefe ), Uganda (Pearson et al ), and Tanzania (Nganyanyuka et al ). A recent review proposes that such transfers should emerge with consistency in water‐insecure environments, and this may reflect a broader strategy to mitigate some of the effects of managing unsafe, intermittent, or insufficient local water sources (Wutich et al ). Yet, the lack of systematic documentation of water sharing practices as they occur across diverse sites means it is difficult, on the basis of the current empirical evidence, to theorize better what those might be and how they might mitigate resource risks (like water unaffordability).…”

“…We began our effort to clarify water sharing with a key question: why would people in water‐insecure communities share household‐owned water at all, especially when they themselves may also have need? The limited water sharing literature is not especially clear on this point (Wutich et al ). Economic anthropologists, working from both sociocultural and evolutionary perspectives, though, have provided a variety of reasonable answers, particularly from studies of food sharing, that could be relevant.…”

“…This perspective can sit comfortably with varied forms of generosity and moral economies. For example, wealthier households might share water with those in greatest need to build political capital or to reinforce patron–client dependencies (i.e., perform self‐interested charity) (Wutich et al ). In this vein, Pearson et al's () observations in three rural Ugandan villages noted that wealthier, higher‐status households tended to gift water to the poorer and lowest ones (who were more likely to be forced to purchase water).…”