Dramatizing Water: Performance, Anthropology, and the Transnational

“Dramatizing Water: Performance, Anthropology, and the Transnational” investigates how “dramatizing water” can act as a constellation that links the basic substance of life to translocal performances across a continuum that spans water in everyday life, in ritual, and as it appears on a formalized stage. A brief genealogy of examples is developed across the everyday and ritual, but the primary focus in on the late Tamil playwright Komal Swaminathan’s 1980 Thaneer Thaneer (Water!) and its relevance as a prototype for political drama on water. There is currently a profound global crisis around water distribution and “dramatizing water” indexes an attempt to chart the possibilities of moving toward a differently configured space for our water-practices, toward an alternative and more sustainable performative cartography of water.

Provenance: Contributed to Sipnuuk Food Security Collection by Dan Sarna, PhD candidate at the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, & Management at UC Berkeley, in association with his dissertation research as well as his collaboration on Objective 12 of the AFRI Food Security grant.

Rights: Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities