“Andrea Ballestero masterfully brings analytic complexity to wide-ranging fields while simultaneously showing us that these fields are not as separate as they first seem. If this sounds like ethnographic magic, that's because it is: the magic of a most creative method carefully and brilliantly pursued to provide awareness of scholarly habits of thought, in the process, offering alter-inspiration.” - Marisol de la Cadena, author of Earth Beings: Ecologies of Practice across Andean Worlds
“Andrea Ballestero is one of the most eloquent environmental ethnographers of her generation and one of the most important ethnographers of scientific practice that I have ever encountered. Her writing is beautiful, her theoretical and analytic ability are stunning, and the connections that she makes between her empirical evidence and larger conversations in the social sciences are breathtaking. While there are other anthropologists who write about the kinds of techniques that Ballestero dissects, historicizes, and theorizes, nobody does it while always grounding them in social relations and social reproduction.” - Paige West, author of Dispossession and the Environment: Rhetoric and Inequality in Papua New Guinea
"Through the brilliant selection of the devices to exhibit her ideas, the author invites readers to think deeply beyond courts or treaties establishing a human right to water and shows how many other factors also contribute to and shape this." - Gayathri D Naik, LSE Review of Books
"[Ballestero's] insightful analysis convinces the reader that such apparently mundane technical devices are indeed wonderful in their capacities to compose the water worlds of the future." - Veronica Strang, PoLAR
"The book holds profound insights on how the powerful—in this case, those who find that the fate of water rests in their hands—develop a philosophy of history and engineer the ways that their work will be remembered and built upon in the future. Ballestero also pushes fellow ethnographers to reflect on people’s vision not in terms of their effectiveness or how well they map onto one’s own desires. A Future History of Water rather convincingly presents ways to engage with how interlocutors manifest their visions into being in spite of the clouded visibilities of the present." - Kessie Alexandre, Current Anthropology
“Throughout her ethnography, Ballestero emphasizes the messiness and oftentimes mundane work it takes to make access to water a human right within capitalist society…. A Future History of Water showcases how everyday technolegal devices perform the essential work of creating a future in which water is accessible to all.” - Kelsey Kim, Catalyst
“Ballestero’s elegant formulation allows for an anthropology of water not found elsewhere. It is an account attentive to both ethnographic detail and to the insight that anthropology can bring to larger debates over water’s value, management, and meaning. A Future History of Water should be on shelves of water scholars interested in the intersections of politics, economics, and the material relations of water. It will make an excellent contribution to courses at undergraduate and graduate levels in anthropology and critical social sciences.” - Jeremy J. Schmidt, Anthropos
“A Future History of Water is an important contribution to the literature on urban infrastructure, water policy and the urbanisation of the global south, as well as to environmental anthropology. The book reveals how widespread global water policy is; the policy of water pipes, the functioning of local policy and the unforeseen consequences of economic reforms…. Through a careful choice of devices, the author encourages the reader to think globally about the human right to water and shows how many factors, outside of laws and treaties, still contribute to supporting and shaping the recognition of water as a human right.” - Simona Zupanc, Anthropological Notebooks
“Dense and beautifully detailed, Ballestero’s story shows how government bureaucrats and regulators moved beyond the declarative to the actual performance of the exacting work that a commitment to rights demands. In the process, the book unravels a set of seemingly uncharismatic devices, such as the consumer price index. Ballestero makes these technical tools appear as exuberant microcosms of technopolitical craftiness, unexpected historical depth, and ethical future-making."
- Andrea Muehlebach,
Public Works
“After many years of relative abandonment, the topic of water has flooded back into anthropology.... At the forefront of this renovated interest in the topic of water is Andrea Ballestero, and her excellent book A Future History of Water.” - Casey Walsh, Luso-Brazilian Review
“Proportions and bifurcations play a central role in Andrea Ballestero’s mesmerizing and indispensable monograph on the practical futures of water governance.... Such is the virtue of this wondrous book :an ethnography of proportions that is disproportionately rewarding."
- Alberto Corsin-Jimenez,
Allegra Lab
“By enriching the literature oriented towards the material-semiotic interplay between corporeality and knowledge, [A Future History of Water] offers STS scholarship new approaches for reconceptualizing semiotic artefacts, like equations and taxonomies, as ethnographic objects and technologies capable of rearranging social relations and constructing reality both within and against the logics of capitalism.” - Johannes Chan, Science as Culture
“How do people create separations between unruly categories, to what end, and how do devices help them do so? . . . Ballestero offers an extensive and nuanced methodological-philosophical guide for how to approach the worldling of relations and counter the mystique of exceptionalism.” - Gabriela Valdivia, Latin American Research Review
