ABSTRACT
This chapter coheres the foci of the more-than-human (cf. Whatmore 2002) and New Materialities (cf. Barad 2003, 2007; Bennett 2010; Coole and Frost 2010) moves together so as to highlight the co-productive and agential role water plays in shaping the lives and bodies of a small group of Giriama subsistence farmers in rural Kenya. This community, increasingly troubled by creeping desertification and the accompanying poor harvests that it brings, has been obliged to seek water at great distances on a daily basis. This brute reality and the exclusive reliance on environmental waters1 have altered since the successful construction of a sweet water2 well financed by a group of UK-based development agencies. This chapter interrogates the problems of disregarding the profoundly entangled corporeal and ecological continuum that flows between water and bodies generally (cf. Bennett 2010) and, using this framing, considers the material abilities of water and bodies during areas and times of water scarcity to engage and demonstrate how fluidity and movement supports their mutuality. Therefore, rather than considering water simply as a resource for human use, I am choosing to establish water as a subject that, through its physical abilities and material behaviours, not only shapes cultural ontologies but also through ingestion viscerally upholds, mobilizes and sustains bodies.
