'Water, water everywhere but not a drop to drink': The lived experience of scarce water and its social meaning in Gozo, Malta

Abstract

Malta is among the world's top ten most water scarce countries. Only c.23million m³ of groundwater can be sustainably extracted yet Malta consumes c.65million m³ per annum. These 'dry' facts construct the official portrait which lives on the ground both express and counter through more fluid and intimate interactions with water. An ethnographic encounter with one female 69-year-old part-time farmer traces the way in which water flows through history and relationships, structuring her social domain. Her life is representative of a land-working generation, whose living memory knows water's worth and weight, once hand-pumped and carried in buckets. Born to a large, poor family, unable to read or write, emigrating to Australia where she married and had children before returning – she translates multi-cultured practices through an embodied principle of water conservation that runs in fading parallel to Malta's modernity. 'Scarcity' is experienced in terms of financial, technical and normative flows not liquid resource. At home – the first in the neighbourhood to have a bathroom – she refrains from using the costly taps and shower, proudly installed on return from Australia. Rather, in exchange for helping relations on their land, they drive over gallon-bottles of spring-water, which she stockpiles for watering, washing, and toilet-flushing. Widowed, with her children in Australia, water is a means by which she constitutes and reinforces relationships with neighbours and extended kin. It is also how she communes with nature – garden fruits and vegetables return offerings only when she provides nourishment. Due to scarcity, water, a source of delight and consternation, a discussion point and a matter for concealment in relation to hygiene and access, contains and permeates social meaning.