The economic anthropology of water

Abstract

Anthropological research on water and economy has a long and rich history, especially among archaeologists and political economy scholars. In this review article, we discuss contemporary anthropological scholarship on water and economy to identify still-active areas of long-standing theoretical interest as well as novel theoretical approaches. We present five important threads of scholarship on the economic anthropology of water: (1) commodification, exchange, and diverse economies; (2) the political ecology of water; (3) resilience and sustainability; (4) institutions; and (5) water and health. We explain how these theoretical approaches fit into broader trends in anthropological scholarship on water, explore how they advance the economic anthropology of water specifically, and identify ways that economic anthropologists can make new contributions to these literatures.