Differentiating Water: Cultural Practices and Contestations

Abstract

This chapter explores differentiated cultural, religious and gendered practices and rituals associated with water. Differences in the city constitute, and are constituted by, different urban sites and spaces. Differences are produced through social, cultural and material relations, and embedded in them, often in unpredictable and unexpected ways. This chapter shows how through purification rituals water makes certain kinds of differences, in this case, religious and gendered differences, visible in ways that are not typically seen. Though differences are often overlooked in discussions of everyday life, in urban policies, in politics, amongst many other spheres, thinking about water as undifferentiated in its flows through the city is to overlook an important way in which water matters.