Associate Professor Gay Hawkins
University of New South Wales
From the Tap to the Bottle – the biopolitics and branding of bottled water
The phenomenal rise of bottled water represents significant changes in the way water is collected, distributed and drunk. Much of the recent growth has been in Asia and Australia, where the market has expanded by up to 500%. Consumption of bottled water is highest in countries that have access to safe drinking water, though levels are growing in countries that are rapidly modernising, and where water infrastructure is underdeveloped. Alongside the tap, and its provision of water as a cheap public good, has emerged the bottle: delivering branded water, at massive mark ups, to diverse and rapidly growing markets. This development indicates a complex new biopolitics of water. If water is the first necessity of life, and providing access to it one of the fundamental functions of the modern polity, the rise of the bottle signals important shifts in the technical delivery and cultural framings of water. These framings not only distinguish bottles from taps but also, often, promote them as better, safer and more convenient. The marketing of bottled water can involve anything from pseudo-scientific information about hydration, and water’s role in sustaining health and vitality; to claims about its organic or ‘natural’ purity. Far from being just a food fad, the ubiquitous presence of plastic bottles on office desks, in tourist backpacks, in lecture theatres, and just about everywhere else, shows how drinking water is now caught up in new conducts and wider social changes from the rise of risk culture to the links between techniques of the self and mobility. Or as the ads like to say ‘hydration on the go!’
These changes in everyday conduct are evidence of the emergence of a distinct ‘regime of living’ in which mundane acts become subject to new norms, reasoning and material practices. This paper explores the distinct processes whereby consuming water has become implicated in new ethical regimes and conducts, and the ways in which plastic bottles have come to mediate the meanings, uses and governance of water. A central focus will be on the dynamics of branding. Specifically, bottled water’s distinct appeals to ‘nature’ that attach new values to water often by fetishising its source. Mountain springs or remote island aquifers (cf. Fiji Water http://www.fijiwater.com.au/) are invoked to signify purity, and to disavow the industrial mediations of collecting, bottling and transporting. This fetishisation of source implicitly devalues tap water, rendering it both ordinary and suspect. Its purity cannot be guaranteed because its piped origins are anonymous; it hasn’t been authored by nature. Branding shows how representations of ‘nature’ are crucial to the commmodification of water, and to the linking of water to life and health. The biopolitical approach developed in this paper will extend existing analyses of branding in critical ways. It will investigate how the economic power of branding shapes understandings of nature as both a site of timeless purity and as essential to the vital character of living human beings. It will also investigate how consumers perceive branded water, how they apprehend the appeal of ‘natural’ water.
Email: g.hawkins@unsw.edu.au