One drop at a time: Infrastructural entanglements in the rural waterscape of the Republic of Moldova

My PhD project explores the entanglements between people and water in rural Moldova. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rapid transition from socialism to market liberalism, the country and its inhabitants experienced profound transformations in the political, economic, and social aspects of daily life. These abrupt changes also resulted in unequal access to public services between rural and urban communities. Water is a prime example of this disjuncture: many villages are not, or only partially, connected to the centralized state-managed water system, forcing locals to turn to alternative methods of water provisioning for their daily consumption and other household and agricultural needs.

This research delves into the multifaceted nature of water by adopting a processual lens, examining how water’s materialities and meanings are embedded and evolve within a specific social context. Beyond its role as a life-sustaining substance, water offers villagers grappling with a new social reality an avenue for sense-making. Changes in the material articulations of water infrastructure and in the quality of water itself come to be understood as symptomatic of painfully experienced phenomena, such as rural depopulation, migration, economic precarity, perceived state abandonment, and environmental degradation. The affects that permeate such phenomena mediate individual and collective experiences of time, as the locals negotiate their relationship with the past, re-write their narratives to cope with the present, and orient themselves towards an imagined future that may or may not come. Combining human and more-than-human perspectives, my research explores how water indexes the ideology and power relations embedded in infrastructural arrangements, and it investigates historical transformations in the waterscape as well as the social reality of the sentient and non-sentient beings who depend on it.

This project will build on ethnographic material collected in Cinişeuţi, a village in northern Moldova, in which the access to potable water is highly variable and depends on a multitude of heterogenous arrangements. Inquiring into the ontological dimensions of water and the interplay between human and non-human agencies in the waterscape, this research advances anthropological debates on water and infrastructure by proposing a multispecies approach to water governance in Eastern Europe. In addition, this project contributes to the field of anthropology of time by investigating the ways in which individuals’ perceptions of socio-historical transformations and temporality are mediated through everyday water-related practices.