Ecology of capture: Conservation, infrastructure, and material engagements with ground-touching clouds in coastal Peru 

Abstract

This paper centres on material engagements with fog in Lima and coastal Peru, where rapid urban expansion is raising concerns about water scarcity and the gradual disappearance of urban fog oasis ecosystems. I draw on fieldwork conducted among two collectives: 1) a Peruvian NGO that was tapping into ground-touching clouds as a water source in areas where state infrastructure was missing, meaning that their activities aimed to render Lima’s hilly surrounds inhabitable for informal residents; 2) a network of local fog oasis conservationists who intended to capture fog for the purpose of making the very same areas uninhabitable for squatters. 

The main focus of my presentation are the relations of capture and entrapment that unfolded between the different actors in question. For example, conservationists frequently slipped into the illicit practices that their activities aimed to hold at bay, thus rendering themselves vulnerable to denunciation by the very collectives they tried to marginalise. In contrast, enrolling fog in alternative water supply systems entailed becoming entrapped by contradictory expectations: those of funders, beneficiaries, and the Peruvian state. Drawing on idioms of capture, hunting, and trapping routinely invoked by my interlocutors, these relations will be described as constitutive of an ‘ecology of capture’: an emergent web of relationships held together by conflicting aims and expectations, the possibilities and limits of fog capture, and the material qualities of fog itself. 

Against this backdrop, I outline an analytic of capture that I am currently developing for an ongoing book project, in which ‘ecology of capture’ will serve as a leitmotif that concerns multiple aspects of ethnographic practice. By framing the productive impossibility of fog capture by analogy to anthropology, the monograph seeks to offer an understanding of the limits of capture as a resource for ethnographic experimentation. 

Bio

Chakad Ojani is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology, Uppsala University. His research is concerned with the socio-political relations and possibilities that infrastructures enable and foreclose, as well as the practices of speculation that the infrastructure-environment nexus engenders. He is currently working on a monograph on fog capture in coastal Peru and a series of articles on outer space infrastructures and imaginaries in Sweden. Other research interests include datafication, digital infrastructure, and the connections between science fiction and anthropological analysis. Chakad’s work has appeared in journals such as Cultural Anthropology, Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, and Social Analysis: The International Journal of Anthropology.