verran
H. Verran, “Number as an inventive frontier in knowing and working Australia’s water resources,” Anthropological Theory, vol. 10, no. 1–2, pp. 171–178, Mar. 2010, doi: 10.1177/1463499610365383.
FirstAuthor:: Verran, Helen
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Title:: Number as an inventive frontier in knowing and working Australia’s water resources
Year:: 2010
Citekey:: verranNumberInventiveFrontier2010
itemType:: journalArticle
Journal:: Anthropological Theory
Volume:: 10
Issue:: 1-2
Pages:: 171-178
DOI:: 10.1177/1463499610365383
Taking number as material and semiotic, this article considers the enumeration of Australia’s water resources as both a form of audit and a form of marketing. It proposes that a scientific enumeration utilizes the relation one/many while an economic enumeration utilizes the relation whole/parts. Working the tension between these two forms of enumeration can be understood as an inventive frontier in contemporary Australian life.
Annotations
Imported: 2025-01-05 5:26 pm
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Taking numbers as material is to see them as enumerated materiality – as river water of a specified ecological value for example; taking numbers as semiotic is to identify numbers as the formal relation unity/plurality.
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However, semiotic is an opaque term, being simultaneously both vague and highly technical, and combining it with material modifies the meanings others attribute to it.
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the baroque complexity of French structuralist and post-structuralist thought, and alternatively the specific categorical proposals of Peirce’s philosophy and its offspring, American Pragmatism.
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Describing the here-now workings of signs vis-à-vis the collective actions in which the objects associated with those signs come to life, these categories are not mutually exclusive (see Hoopes, 1991: 239). The terms name degrees of reciprocal co-constitution of signs and collective embodied and embedded actions in which objects come to life.
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a relation of supervenience
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a relation of supervenience
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Iconicity, indexicality and symbolism can be understood as ethnographically found forms of the workings of signs (and depending on how one understands ethnography, these names work as icons, indexes, or symbols!)
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In anthropology numbers are for the most part treated ethnographically as symbols
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One way to understand what I accomplish in Science and an African Logic is showing that while rendering number as symbols can accomplish certain important ends
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like showing the conceptual equivalence of Yoruba and scientific number and removing the stigma of Yoruba number as primitive, numbers can also be usefully understood as icons, and that doing so we can learn how to connect Yoruba and scientific numbers in practice (Verran, 2001).
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numbers enact generalizing iconically in the whole/parts mode
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characterize one/many as potentially containing unity within the plurality of a many, and whole/parts as having plurality contained within a unity.
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cardinal number
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ordinal number
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Animated by the slogan ‘you can’t sustain what you haven’t measured’, the enthusiasm that pervades Waterwatch evidences Australians’ new found commitment to ecological sustainability in the face of widespread and ongoing drought. What is much less evident is the way these numbers so enthusiastically generated by volunteers with the best of intentions towards Australia’s nature might contribute to constituting water as commodity, expanding possibilities for ‘doing business with water’.
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Unlike the ‘official data’, the confidence limits of the ‘community data’ are not specifiable.
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their consistency is not quantifiable.
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Nevertheless, the expressed hope is that when the level of discipline embedded in the hands and eyes of Waterwatch volunteers can be reliably witnessed and quantified, the data sets will be consolidated.
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cadastral
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t must manage risks and provide data only of quantifiable provenance, for much is at stake in the economic-social-political-moral project of constituting and developing an Australian water market.
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Australia has in the past invested vast sums, and in today’s world this past obsession with storing water is evident as infrastructure which translates water’s use value into exchange value.
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Extracted, stored and audited water is capable of realization as a commodity. Through its trade, marginal gains and capital gains can be realized.
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These parts and sub-parts are not given but continually proliferating as new, derived configurations which are ingeniously designed, while other configurations wither, or are killed off.
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The numbers representing water quality for the purpose of exhaustive environmental audit work the relation one/many; semiotically they are symbols.
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Ones – specified units of flowing or stored water, with specified space-time co-ordinates and specified physical, chemical and biological properties – are collected together as a many.
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Another fantasy of quite a different type is also sustained by the existence of these numbers: the vague, emergent and unspecifiable notion of ’ the ‘Australian water market’. Here the sets of numbers are no longer a representation but are now constitutive of the entity itself. They work as icons.
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are phenomena generated in disciplined interrogation of knowable water in place
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Ingenious social and technical tinkering – separating water entitlements from land rights, rebundling water as low, medium, and high security licences, inventing tamper-proof flow meters – is continually coming up with new sorts of parts in the vague emergent whole of Australia’s water market: multiple water products designed for multiple markets.
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In this combination of needy agility is found numbers’ unnerving capacity to continually evert themselves, flipping imperceptibly from their one/many manifestation to their whole/parts form of working, shifting between signing as symbols and signing as icons.
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simultaneously and seamlessly work relations between sameness and difference and unity and plurality, and to dissemble – eliding projects with very different moral and political resonances.
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The conflation of a project whose explicit purpose is for the public good – to get a better picture of the rapidly deteriorating state of the waters of Australia’s rivers and creeks, swamps and lakes – with a project whose stated purpose is to trade those waters and enable a few to reap private capital gain from that trade would be more seamless.