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Abstract

By installing fog catchers in the hills around Lima, Peru, conservationists seek to transform fog into water for use in infrastructures of fog oasis reforestation. This article describes the devices and techniques of inquiry through which fog was gradually rendered catchable. These relational engagements with the atmosphere, and the multifarious forms that fog assumed along the way, will be used to reflect on the possibilities and limitations of speculative realism for more-than-human ethnography. Particularly relevant is Graham Harman's notion of ‘vicarious causation’, which denotes how things located outside thought can be accessed vicariously and partially, for example, through allusion. My contention is that this concept may be productively adapted for ethnographic inquiry if repurposed to fit with an open-ended and relational understanding of the outside.

Abstract

This article focuses on understandings of fog capture as an alternative water supply system in Lima. In neighbourhoods where state infrastructure is missing, fog catchers promise to alleviate residents’ dependency on private water suppliers. However, the utility of these micro-infrastructures is not self-evident. I show how a local NGO attempted to bring about commitment among prospective beneficiaries by framing the fog catchers against the size and incapacity of state infrastructure. In the NGO's rhetoric, the fog catchers’ limited scale vis-à-vis state infrastructure meant that they were better suited for addressing spaces that escaped state attention. Yet this also presented fog capture as a small-scale alternative that could be scaled up to respond to a problem of substantial ubiquity. The article concludes by suggesting that anthropologists’ uses of smallness as a trope for aggrandising their own methodological dispositions be repurposed for investigating the role of smallness in pursuits of macro effects.

Darryl Li, The Universal Enemy: Jihad, Empire, and the Challenge of Solidarity. Stanford University Press, pp. 364, 2020.

Hannah Knox, Thinking Like a Climate: Governing a City in Times of Environmental Change. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 328, 2020.