FORUM

WHAT TO DO ABOUT ‘FLOW’?

A CONVERSATION ABOUT
A CONTESTED CONCEPT

RECLAIMING FLOW FOR A LIVELY ANTHROPOLOGY

• FRANZ KRAUSE •

We must rethink the idea of flow for anthropological research and understanding. Having
used it for so long primarily as a metaphor to describe globalisation, we should recover
the way human beings, as living and developing organisms and persons, are caught up in
material flows.
When Rob Shields (1997) declared ‘flow as a new paradigm’, he drew not only on
currently fashionable thinkers like Gilles Deleuze and Henri Lefebvre, but also on an
anthropological tradition that emphasised spatial and temporal flows in social and
cultural production. The metaphor of flow was seen as key for describing the movements
of people, ideas, institutions and artefacts that seem to characterise our present world.
Importantly, Shields (1997: 3) proposed that unlike immaterial links between otherwise
stable dispositions, ‘flows signal pure movement, without (...) suggesting a point of origin
or a destination’, and that they are always material. Flows are characterised, as Shields
summarised it, by a specific tempo, rhythm and direction. The distinction between fixed
and mobile entities, Shields argued, is the outcome of a tactical, political endeavour, not
an analytic one.
Writing in 2011, Stuart Rockefeller noted that in anthropological usage, flow mainly
refers to globalisation, and that it is generally not scrutinised as a concept. Movements
of people, money and ideas are all treated as if they behave like water, flowing in ways
determined by physical laws. Rockefeller pointed out two major problems of this use of
the metaphor: first, it reifies an opposition of static places to mobile flows; and second, it
prioritises a ‘managerial perspective’ that focuses on disembodied, aggregate phenomena
at the expense of situated actors and lived life. The first problem echoes Shields’ (1997:
4) observation that the notion is often confused with ‘b-grade Deleuze-imitators’, where
flow is erroneously treated as connections between objects. The same critique must be
extended to approaches that confuse flows with a network of relations between discrete
elements (Ingold 2011). Instead, I argue that as anthropologists we should approach flow
as the ongoing, if negotiated and often contested, fluxes in which humans come into
being.
This understanding of flow has been inspired by ethnographic fieldwork along the
Kemi River in Finnish Lapland, where I learned about people’s different and changing

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PO Box 18, 00014 University of Helsinki, Finland
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relationships with a flowing river. Water in the river represents only one out of many
heterogeneous flows that characterise the social and ecological relationships in central
Lapland; but a closer look at people’s engagement with water—the material from which
the metaphor of flow in anthropological usage is derived—may also help to refine the use
of the metaphor in anthropology.
Kemi River dwellers enjoy fishing, which can be seen as participating in the movement
of the fish. I recall a fishing trip one late spring, and helping a man who had grown up
on the river bank to check his nets. We found merely five small fish—in four nets! For
this time of year, this was a rather poor catch, the man explained, as usually most fish
travel upstream in the spring flood waters, and many get caught in a correctly placed
net. He also pointed out, though, that this year the water was unusually low due to cool
temperatures that slowed the snowmelt, and to strong winds drying the land. Because the
water in the river was behaving differently, so were the fish. He decided to take the nets
out until after the flood peak. Then, he reckoned, he would catch some large fish instead
of the dried leaves and sticks that were now cluttering his nets, washed into the river with
the rising water levels. Each time we passed the river after that, he would take a good look
at the water level. He was itching for it to stop rising so that he could set his nets again
once conditions were favourable for the fish to move upstream, and into his net.
Life on the Kemi River, along with the river itself, has changed considerably in recent
decades. Progressive damming for hydroelectricity production has replaced a ‘stream of
life’ with a ‘chain of reservoirs’ (Krause 2013a), while there has been a gradual displacement
of livelihoods from the river into offices. Many river dwellers experience dammed river
stretches as the negation of flow. But those in charge of hydropower management regard
them as crucial for flow because they are aimed at harmonising water movement with
electricity demand (Krause 2013b). To be available when it is needed, water has to
be stored. And because water released through any dam accumulates at the next dam
downstream, managing these selective flows is an intricate occupation, not going with the
flow but not ‘controlling’ it either (Krause 2011). This is even more so as hydroelectricity
producers have to take into account not just electricity prices, river discharge and dam
technology, but also the water level preferences of the summerhouse owners and cross-
country skiers whose temporary stays in the region are nevertheless routine. Moreover,
they have to consider flood risk and the life cycles of fish.
These sketches from the Kemi River suggest that we should pay attention to the specific
material that is said to be flowing (cf. Strang 2006: 157–160), and to the particular
rhythms these flows embody and engender, and not just to the ‘flows’ associated with
globalisation. The movements of water, fish and people along the river are very different
to the metaphor that Rockefeller (2011) criticised. They are not abstracted aggregates,
but specific movements emerging in relation to other movements and to their particular
properties. Successful fishing relies on appropriately negotiating the particular but different
movements of water, fish, tackle and boats. And even hydroelectricity generation is about
relating river discharge with electricity consumption, flood management and production
capacity. In the interplay of these and other flows, human lives emerge and develop.
Water does not simply flow; it flows in certain rhythms of varying intensity, tempo
and direction negotiated by human labour, infrastructure, the weather and the river bed.
And people’s practices necessarily unfold in relation to these specific watery flows—as

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well as, of course, to a host of others. Fishing and hydroelectricity production illustrate
precisely that flow is about the articulations of different kinds, directions and tempos of
movement. Flow is not simply an antithesis to stasis. Flows of particular materials move
through, along or past particular other flows, which in turn influence how they flow.
Jeanne Féaux de la Croix (2011) has suggested that an ethnography of water can serve as
critique of unfounded academic generalisations of flow. It is striking that anthropologists
using more nuanced flow metaphors in their social analyses also offer more detailed
descriptions of the actual movement of water: water shaping the ground as it runs (Tsing
2000), or water gushing in unexpected turbulences (Hannerz 2011); thus, ‘flow’ becomes
subject to frictions, discontinuities and other complications that analysis must attend to.
Furthermore, all metaphors, however well construed, have their limits; and ‘when you
take an intellectual ride on a metaphor, it is important that you know where to get off.
If for some purposes you find it useful to think about culture as flow, then, no need to
believe it is a substance you can pour into bottles’ (Hannerz 2000: 6). Besides, we must
also be aware that when we learn about flows in our research, our interlocutors might not
be speaking metaphorically at all (cf. Ingold 2000: e.g. 40).
Most importantly, flow must not be understood primarily as a metaphor of globalisation
processes, but rather as a pointer to all the fluxes and circulations in which human becoming
unfolds. As Shields observed, these flows are about specific and negotiated movements,
not generalised processes. Human beings do not move in the same ways water does, water
moves differently from fish, and these move differently from electricity and so forth.
Ethnographic attention to Kemi River dwellers’ encounters with water flows shows that
in real life, flowing, stagnating or flooding water is not taken for granted. Rather, what
is important is how particular kinds of water movement engender different social and
ecological relations, and vice versa. Certainly many of these may be used metaphorically,
as when river dwellers call the Kemi ‘the stream of life’. But as anthropologists we should
neither reduce flow to metaphor, nor imagine it as homogeneous and passive displacement
of matter.
If ‘flow’ is to serve anthropology at all today, it should be used for tracing the
simultaneously social and material exchanges through which the world comes into being.
A lively anthropology hinges on recognising the concrete flows in and through which
humans become and develop. In anthropological writing, flow should be used to describe
specific movements; flow metaphors must be examined critically, especially when they
portray phenomena that do not actually flow.

REFERENCES
................................................................................................................................................................
Féaux de la Croix, J. 2011. Moving Metaphors We Live by: Water and Flow in The Social Sciences
and around Hydroelectric Dams in Kyrgyzstan. Central Asian Survey 30 (3-4): 487–502.
Hannerz, U. 2000. Flows, Boundaries and Hybrids: Keywords in Transnational Anthropology.
Transnational Communities Programme Working Paper Series, WPTC-2K-02, online at: <http://
www.transcomm.ox.ac.uk/working_papers.htm>.
Hannerz, U. 2011. Response to Rockefeller. Current Anthropology 52 (4): 570–571.
Ingold, T. 2000. The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London:
Routledge.

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Ingold, T. 2011. Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. London: Routledge.
Krause, F. 2011. River Management: Technological Challenge or Conceptual Illusion? Salmon Weirs
and Hydroelectric Dams on the Kemi River in Northern Finland. In Michael Schmidt, Vincent
Onyango and Dmytro Palekhov (eds), Implementing Environmental and Resource Management. Berlin:
Springer.
Krause, F. 2013a. Rapids on the ‘Stream of Life’: The Significance of Water Movement on the Kemi
River. Worldviews 17 (2): 176–187.
Krause, F. 2013b. Seasons as Rhythms on the Kemi River in Finnish Lapland. Ethnos 78 (1): 23–46.
Rockefeller, S. A. 2011. Flow. Current Anthropology 52 (4): 557–578.
Shields, R. 1997. Flow as a New Paradigm. Space and Culture 1 (1): 1–7.
Strang, V. 2006. Substantial Connections: Water and Identity in an English Cultural Landscape.
Worldviews 10 (2): 155–177.
Tsing, A. L. 2000. The Global Situation. Cultural Anthropology 15 (3): 327–360.

FRANZ KRAUSE, PhD

TALLINN UNIVERSITY AND UNIVERSITY OF ABERDEEN
EESTI HUMANITAARINSTITUUT
TALLINNA ÜLIKOOL
ESTONIA
franz@tlu.ee

RELATIVE MATERIALITIES
BRINGING THE CONCEPT OF FLOW DOWN TO EARTH

• VERONICA STRANG •

The concept of flow continues to generate useful theoretical debates. However, I would
question Krause’s contention (based on a ‘new paradigm’ proposed nearly two decades
ago) that it has been employed primarily to describe processes of globalisation, though it
has undoubtedly been helpful in that regard. For cultural anthropologists, and particularly
those concerned with human-environmental interactions, the concept of flow has (over
the same two decades) been employed to consider not just the spatio-temporal movements
of artefacts, people and ideas, but also (as promoted by Shields, 1997) to conceptualise
the material relations between things and persons, and the nature of materiality itself.
While this stream of ideas may not have fully permeated social anthropology, concepts
of flow have been used to think about materiality in several important ways. So perhaps
the aim should not be to ‘reclaim material flows’ so much as to encourage the social and
cultural areas of our discipline to develop stronger cross-currents.
There are two key areas in which I think concepts of flow have had particular utility,
and Krause makes an initial foray into both of these. The first is directly concerned with
theories seeking ways to express the dynamic nature of human-environmental relations.
Krause suggests there is a need for a critique of the idea that flows are merely ‘networks
of connections’ between implicitly static ‘discrete elements’. Here he notes Ingold’s work:
his comment is framed in a way that suggests this should be the subject of such a critique,

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but as Ingold (2007a, 2007b, 2011) favours a ‘flux’ of generative processes and is critical
of more static approaches, I doubt that is quite what Krause intends.
As he notes, there have been important philosophical influences, for example from
Deleuze and Guattari (1993), expressing notions of ‘becoming’ that are intrinsically reliant
on movement from one state of being to another.1 Anthropologists and philosophers alike
have made considerable use of the concept of flow to consider not just the ‘connections’
between or movements of things and persons, but also to challenge their categorical
distinctions. There is now a rich body of theory in which the notion—and putative
boundaries—of personhood have been thoroughly destabilised (Strathern 1996, 1999;
Verdery and Humphrey 2004). A more fluid concept of personhood flowing into (and
out of ) things, landscapes, other species, and between individual and collective persons,
has also enabled useful challenges to nature-culture dualism and anthropocentric visions
of human-environmental relations. Concepts of flow, which necessarily highlight the
relationality of human and non-human beings and their interdependencies, have thus
encouraged more bioethically comprehensive theories that relocate humanity amongst
other living kinds (Castree and Head 2008; Chen et al. 2013; Haraway 2008; Head and
Atchison 2009; Helmreich 2009; Ingold and Palsson 2013; Kirksey and Helmreich 2010;
Serpell 1996).
This flow extends to non-living kinds too: as well as having a busy ‘social life’ moving
through spatio-temporal milieux (Appadurai 1986; Gell 1998), things are revealed as
similarly contingent in their form and meaning. Concepts of flow have greatly enlivened
analyses of material culture by encouraging a more processual view of things and material
relations. This has generated theoretical approaches that enable us not only to imagine
flows between human and non-human kinds, things and persons, but also to locate this
in the material environment in which these interactions take place (see Bakker and Bridge
2006; Bennett 2009, 2010; Latour 2005; Pillatt 2012).
In his case study, Krause observes that fishing in the River Kemi involves thinking about
the movements of the fish, the actions of water on the river bed, and the infrastructure
built to provide electricity to increasingly urbanised populations. He describes the fishers
‘participating in the movements of the fish’, which hints at the multiple agencies at work
in the interactions between people and the river. This touches on the issue of non-human
agency or—for those who find the lack of intentionality of other species and things
incommensurable with that notion—the ‘agentive capacities’ of the non-human. The
recognition of other-than-human agency is of course, the bioethical aim of those (noted
above) proposing a more egalitarian and relational view of human/non-human relations.
This also takes us into the rather heated arena of anthropology’s debates about
material agency (Boivin 2008; DeMarrais et al. 2004; Knappett 2007; Knappett and
Malafouris 2008; Tilley et al. 2006; Tilley and Bennett 2004). But although Krause
nibbles promisingly at the edge of this issue, his disquisition about flows doesn’t really
embrace it fully. I would suggest that much fuller use could be made of the concept of
flow by considering it in materially relational terms. Thinking with water metaphorically
is indubitably useful in imagining movements such as the spatio-temporal circulation of
objects, ideas and persons (Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Strang 2004), but it really comes
into its own when we consider it in relation to other material processes of change and
transformation (Strang 2006, 2009). What I would propose, then, is that we bring the

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concept of flow down to earth, and relocate it within the diverse material properties of
the other components of the world with which we think. Consider, for instance, its polar
opposites. What springs to mind (forgive the pun) is a vision of stony stability, or the
compact solidity of earth. One might imagine a continuum from this, through the flex of
wood, the crumbly textures of soil and the viscous crawl of oil, to the freer movements of
not just water, but particles, pollen and other highly mobile ephemera. Or, if we consider
the organic materialities of the body, we could contrast how the cellular inflow and
outflow of water between persons and environments may be slow in comparison with the
neuro-electrical speed of thought, but rapid in contrast with the intake of fibre, proteins
and minerals, or the building (or indeed the degeneration) of bone and muscle.
Placing the concept of flow amid the multiple materialities of the world provides an
imaginative spectrum of concepts ranging from fluidity to fixity. Thus the river bed to
which Krause refers, is slowly shaped by—and in turn shapes the faster movement of—
the river itself (see Tsing 2004). And all of the components of these interactions act upon
each other in accord with their particular properties. It is in this area that the research
of material culture specialists is especially useful in observing that it is the properties of
things and materials that compose their agentive capacities (Strang 2010, forthcoming;
Tilley 2007). Thus Harman (2009) describes how engineers constructing a tunnel have to
consider how the rock will ‘behave’, while Boivin and others, writing about minerals, clay,
stone and oil, highlight the specific ways in which these materials act upon other things—
and persons (Boivin and Owoc 2004; Boivin 2008; Coole and Frost 2010; Hodder 2012;
Taçon 1991, 2004).
A focus on the properties of things keeps the discussions about material agency at a safe
distance from faux animism, and gives us a more comprehensive context for thinking about
not just how things, ideas and persons flow, but also how they don’t. If we make material
use of Krause’s ethnographic example, then, we can consider not just what the river does,
but what the dams do: how they impede and control the flow of water, how they redirect
it to serve human interests by moving turbines, and converting that movement into the
even zippier flow of electrical energy (which in turn moves machinery and processes
of production). We can think about the local topography and its formative influence
upon the flow of water, persons and things; the flora and fauna and their contribution to
the wider ecosystem. And—as I have noted elsewhere—we can think with all of water’s
properties, including its capacities to freeze, which gives us not only concepts of both flow
and fixity, but also some very useful metaphors of change and—literal—transformation.
Flow remains a useful concept for thinking about movements within systems or, as
Krause puts it, ‘fluxes and circulations’. But I would encourage him to take the argument
a bit further downstream and relocate it within a context of multiple and relational
materialities. ‘Phenomena that do not actually flow’ have equally useful capacities to
provide both metaphor and an understanding of the relations between things and
persons, and between the human and non-human. There has been much good work
on this topic over the last two decades, so what Krause‘s piece suggests to me is that,
rather than adopting static identities within bounded areas of debate, social and cultural
anthropologists ought to flow towards each other a bit more, and share a few essential
fluid theories.

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NOTE
................................................................................................................................................................
1
One might note the deeper history of these ideas in Spinoza’s work (2001 [1677]).

REFERENCES
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Appadurai, A. 1986. The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Bakker, K. and G. Bridge 2006. Material Worlds? Resource Geographies and the ‘Matter of Nature’.
Progress in Human Geography 30: 5–27.
Bennett, J. 2009. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC.: Duke University Press.
Bennett, J. 2010. A Vitalist Stopover on the Way to a New Materialism. In D. Coole and S. Frost
(eds), New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency and Politics. Durham NC: Duke University Press.
Boivin, N. and M. Owoc (eds) 2004. Soil, Stones and Symbols: Cultural Perceptions of the Mineral
World. London: UCL Press.
Boivin, N. 2008. Material Cultures, Material Minds: The Impact of Things on Human Thought, Society,
and Evolution. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press.
Castree, N. and L. Head (eds) 2008. Culture, Nature and Landscape in the Australian Region. Special
issue of Geoforum 39 (3): 1255–1257.
Chen, C. Macleod, J. and A. Neimanis (eds) 2013. Thinking with Water. Montreal: McGill-Queens
University Press.
Coole, D. and S. Frost (eds) 2010. New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency and Politics. Durham NC:
Duke University Press.
Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari 1993 [1980]. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Transl.
B. Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
DeMarrais, E., C. Renfrew, and C. Gosden (eds) 2004. Rethinking Materiality: The Engagement of
Mind with the Material World. Cambridge: McDonald Institute Monograph Series.
Gell, A. 1998. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford, New York: Berg.
Haraway, D. 2008. When Species Meet. Minnesota, MN.: University of Minnesota Press.
Harman, G. 2009. Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics. Melbourne: Repress.
Head, L. and J. Atchison 2009. Cultural Ecology: Emerging Human-Plant Geographies. Progress in
Human Geography 33: 236–245.
Helmreich, S. 2009. Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas. Berkeley, CA: University
of California Press.
Hodder, I. 2012. Entangled: An Archaeology of the Relationships between Humans and Things. Malden,
MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
Ingold. T. 2007a. Earth, Sky, Wind, and Weather. In C. Low and E. Hsu (eds), Wind, Life, Health:
Anthropological and Historical Perspectives. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute Special
Issue Book Series. Oxford: Blackwell..
Ingold. T. 2007b. Materials against Materiality.Iin Archaeological Dialogues 14 (1): 1–16.
Ingold. T. 2011. Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. London: Routledge.
Ingold, T. and G. Palsson (eds) 2013. Biosocial Becomings: Integrating Social and Biological
Anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kirksey, S. and Helmreich, S. 2010. The Emergence of Multispecies Ethnography. Cultural
Anthropology 25 (4): 545–576.
Knappett, C. 2007. Materials with Materiality? Archaeological Dialogues 14 (1): 20–23.
Knappett, C. and Malafouris, L. (eds) 2008. Material Agency: Towards a Non-Anthropocentric
Approach. New York: Springer Science.
Lakoff, G. and Johnson M. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago, London: University of Chicago
Press.

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Latour, B. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor Network Theory. Oxford, New York:
Oxford University Press.
Pillatt, T. 2012. From Climate and Society to Weather and Landscape. In Archaeological Dialogues 19
(1): 29–42.
Serpell, J. 1996. In the Company of Animals: A Study of Human-Animal Relationships. Cambridge, New
York: Cambridge University Press.
Shields, R. 1997. Flow as a New Paradigm. Space and Culture 1 (1): 1–7.
Spinoza, B. 2001 [1677]. Ethics. Transl. W. White. Ware: Wordsworth Editions.
Strang, V. 2004. The Meaning of Water. Oxford, New York: Berg.
Strang, V. 2006. Turning Water Into Wine, Beef and Vegetables: Material Transformations along The
Brisbane River. Transforming Cultures 1 (2): 9–19. Available online at: <Sydney. http://epress.lib.uts.
edu.au/ojs/index.php/TfC>.
Strang, V. 2009. Gardening the World: Agency, Identity, and the Ownership of Water. Oxford, New York:
Berghahn.
Strang, V. 2010. Fluid Forms: Owning water in Australia. In V. Strang and M. Busse (eds), Ownership
and Appropriation. Oxford, New York: Berg.
Strang, V. forthcoming. Fluid Consistencies: Meaning and Materiality in Human Engagements with
Water.
Strathern, M. 1996. Cutting the Network. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 2 (3):
517–535.
Strathern, M. 1999. Property, Substance and Effect: Anthropological Essays on Persons and Things.
London: Athlone Press.
Taçon, P. 1991. The Power of Stone: Symbolic Aspects of Stone Use and Tool Development in
Western Arnhem Land, Australia. Antiquity 65: 192–207.
Taçon, P. 2004. Ochre, Clay, Stone and Art: The Symbolic Importance of Minerals as Life-Force
among Aboriginal Peoples of Northern and Central Australia. In N. Boivin and M. Owoc (eds), Soil,
Stones and Symbols: Cultural Perceptions of the Mineral World. London: UCL Press.
Tilley, C., W. Keane, S. Küchler, M. Rowlands and P. Spyer (eds) 2006. Handbook of Material
Culture. London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi: Sage.
Tilley, C. 2007. Materiality in Materials. Archaeological Dialogues 14 (1): 16–20.
Tilley, C. and W. Bennett 2004. The Materiality of Stone: Explorations in Landscape Phenomenology.
Oxford, New York: Berg.
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Verdery, K. and C. Humphrey 2004. Property in Question: Value Transformation in the Global
Economy. Oxford, New York: Berg.

PROFESSOR VERONICA STRANG

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR
INSTITUTE OF ADVANCED STUDY
DURHAM UNIVERSITY
UK
veronica.strang@durham.ac.uk

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‘EVERYBODY LOVES FLOW’: ON THE ART OF RESCUING

A WORD FROM ITS USERS
• JEANNE FÉAUX DE LA CROIX •

In his appeal to reclaim ‘flow’ for anthropology, Franz Krause makes two inter-locking
moves: first, he draws attention to the recent use of the flow metaphor in discussions of
globalization. He asks us to think more critically about the analytical language we use.
Second, Krause proposes a worldview for us to work from as anthropologists, based on
the metaphor of flowing water. I want to deal with both of these intriguing propositions
in turn, though concentrating more on the first: ‘rescuing’ terms from their users.
Bringing attention to the varied uses of an everyday vocabulary that doesn’t always shout
from the rooftops, ‘I am a concept (with such and such a pedigree)’, is a very welcome
move indeed. Some terms, such as ‘actor-network’ are self-consciously introduced into
our analytical language, but most of our vocabulary simply cycles into our thinking by
osmosis, from reading our colleagues’ work, the newspapers or social media exchanges.
Their genealogy is rarely obvious, let alone unilinear. One example of a term currently in
vogue is ‘negotiation’. Apparently, most anything can be ‘negotiated’: identities, resources,
development. It seems ‘production’ is also everywhere: production of culture, of modernity,
women, legality, futures. Such proliferation makes me a bit suspicious: what alternative
descriptions of these social processes might fit equally well, or in fact, fit more precisely?
In both the case of ‘production’ and ‘negotiation’, we might surmise that these terms surf,
deliberately or not, quite close to neo-liberal economic ideals. One might also sketch out
other pedigrees, for example a strictly Marxist one in the case of ‘production’. Proving
such an association is another issue entirely: the point here is to hone our awareness of
these seemingly rather neutral words, ones that are in fact likely to invisibly ‘format’ our
arguments, much like the settings of a word document. Of course, that is precisely why
we find these semi-metaphorical terms so very useful.
Like ‘negotiation’ and ‘production’, ‘flow’ comes with baggage, as Krause points out.
He would like to set flow free from a certain kind of baggage, and refresh and sharpen
our disciplinary usage. So how does he propose we recover our sense of ‘flow’? Krause in
fact suggests two slightly different, closely related uses: flow should help us talk about
how ‘social and material processes’ are intertwined, well beyond the current prime-arena
of globalization rendered as ‘flow’. He argues that attending to this intertwining could
help highlight that such processes are always a specific kind of flow—and also, that some
processes are mislabelled as ‘flow’, notably when there isn’t actually any flow going on.
Krause encourages us to pay attention to flow as a certain kind of movement, and to the
particularities of each of these movements.
Krause’s second way of thinking about flow is as ‘the ongoing, if negotiated and often
contested, fluxes in which humans come into being’. This should be understood as
a contrast to people and things just connecting or relating. To me, these are philosophically
connected, and yet distinctly different conceptions of flow. Do we really want to describe
the way social and material processes are entwined as ‘flux’, a synonym that Krause uses

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too? Might there not be an issue with the anthropocentrism of the second definition? And
how do these two uses of ‘flow’ relate to each other?
Leaving these niggles behind, let me turn to the author’s suggestion that water is the
root metaphor for images of flow. It is true that colloquially—and to a certain extent in
the realm of natural sciences too—we tend to talk about the movements of wind currents
or electricity as if they behaved very much like water. In fact, if we want to be precise, it
is streams and rivers that this language of watery flows invokes, rather than rain, glaciers
or marshes. But are streams and rivers truly the root image of ‘flow’ talk? Is there not a
case to be made that by now the root metaphor may have shifted (and may shift again)
to the arena of globalization itself, to financial capital streams, or indeed migration? It is
likely that if flow is regularly invoked as a component or quality that joins the multiple
processes we call ‘globalization’, this will create a new dynamic of word associations. If
that were the case, flow would come to have less clean and healthy associations than rivers
and streams, and come to have a far more political taste.
Wondering about other contexts of ‘flow’, I stumbled across an astonishingly wide
range of use. It is a key term in factory and business management practices. Geologists
study the flow of continents, philosophers on occasion the flow of time, yoga and
other meditation practices promise to help you ‘find your flow’. Psychologist Mihaly
Csikszentmihalyi pioneered the study of ‘flow’ as an ideal state of happiness, achieved
when one is wholly immersed in a task. Flow-speak as a family of words seems to combine
a process-orientation with a here-and-now ethic, an image of serenity as well as the idea
of a mysterious, though always positive force. It seems most everybody strives for ‘flow’
(whatever they mean by it). Where flow has ‘gone viral’, it agrees with Krause on flow as a
mostly pleasant kind of (river) process, rather than some far nastier versions of flow, such
as flash floods, tsunamis or miserable canalized trickles of pollution. It seems flow does an
awful lot of work, colloquially, in helping us to talk about desirable change, or (mobile)
conditions such as meditation. Enquiring into our own immersion in these popular
discourses, and into how we are inspired by them, I think we can see that in all these
domains, a striving for something called ‘flow’ goes with a turn away from structure. If in
the anthropology of becoming that Krause advocates, there is little scope for structuralism,
in ‘flow’ there is also something that seems to capture an element lacking in our lives and
in our disciplinary tool box.
Seeing that flow does so much work in public for us, I am somewhat sceptical about
the possibility of ‘rescuing’ the word for a streamlined and fine-tuned use, even within our
own discipline. It might be a good idea, but I am doubtful for two reasons. Firstly, it seems
like a Sisyphean task to try to safeguard words from improper and inexact use. Secondly,
flow seems to thrive precisely on having multiple associations and connotations, as does
water. Flux too is comfortable in its own ephemerality, and lives off a bit of mystery—as
does water. So in the case of flow, I’m afraid I’m not very optimistic about recovering it for
an academic audience, or about separating anthro-speak flow from its multiple popular
uses.
However, Krause is doing much more here than ‘consciousness-raising’ about our
disciplinary vocabularies. He is in fact proposing a world-view for anthropologists; a
world in which objects figure less prominently than movements, and the prototypical flow
of water. In the world Krause wants us to attend to, we might also play with substituting

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other types of material flows for water: a world of winds and colliding clouds flowing
past each other, carrying rain, pollution or hot air balloons. A world of flowing smoke,
hair, oil, T-cells, clouds of locusts. What if we proposed magma as a flow prototype: a
world of red-hot flows of different size, age, heat and chemical constitution? All these
visions imply a naturalness to flow as a process. Each version suggests a world of great
beauty, of intertwining Art Nouveau tendrils, a marine world of surges, ripples, eddies
and collisions. The result would be an organic anthropology that speaks of enmeshings
and intertwinings, well suited to a particular kind of environmental anthropology. Yet
an exercise of using the vocabulary of liquid growth and dynamism does not seem leave
that much room for discussing pain or conflict. I am suggesting that however we seek
to constrain it, the imagery of flow works beautifully for talking about certain kinds of
connections, such as those between fish, fishermen and the Kemi River. It works less well
for talking about disconnection, inequality, injustice. Stefan Helmreich has suggested that
water has frequently acted as a ‘theory machine’, as in the case of globalization (2011). As
he traces a history of the inspiration water has provided, for example to the aesthetics of
arrival in early anthropological writing, Helmreich further suggests that what we see in,
and take from, the idea of water varies enormously, both experientially and in its role as
a ‘theory machine’.
I would like to thank Franz Krause for highlighting flow’s pitfalls and potentials as
a lubricant to our theory machines. I would be very curious to see an anthropology
that experiments with flow to talk about issues beyond environmental anthropology: on
education, war, the media?

REFERENCES
................................................................................................................................................................
Helmreich, S. 2011. Nature/Culture/Seawater. American Anthropologist 113 (1): 132–144.

DR JEANNE FÉAUX DE LA CROIX

JUNIOR RESEARCH GROUP LEADER
CULTURAL HISTORY OF WATER IN CENTRAL ASIA
ASIEN-ORIENT-INSTITUT, ABTEILUNG ETHNOLOGIE
EBERHARD KARLS UNIVERSITÄT TÜBINGEN
GERMANY
jeanne.feaux@uni-tuebingen.de

FLOW: A CONCEPT TO TRAVEL WITH

• HUGH RAFFLES •

It’s true, as Franz Krause points out in this stimulating piece, that not so long ago in
anthropology the concept of flow conveyed a kind of energy and excitement, seeming
to capture a key characteristic of a confoundingly dynamic contemporary world that
appeared to be defined above all by the paradoxes of scale. At a moment when scholars

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were struggling to wrest language into a form commensurate with the times (and coming
up with painful neologisms such as ‘glocal’), flow and its vision of a constantly in-motion,
frictionless planet promised to express something fundamental about a world described
over and over in terms of its newness.
Now that we’ve lived through the war on terror and the rise of extreme nationalisms,
that moment seems not only distant but naïve. And, perhaps, anyway, it’s only the
rare academic concept that avoids this arc from energy to exhaustion. Flow, as Krause
rightly argues, convinces now as neither description nor metaphor for a globalized world.
Instead, anthropologists’ attention is held by interruptions, disruptions, truncations and
detachments, by borders, sicknesses, materialities, entities and ontological difference. The
relations these make and that, in turn, make them are too variegated and involuted to
come under such an apparently one-dimensional rubric.
So what to do with a term whose meaning was conceptually fixed in a moment of
different theoretical preoccupation? Do we avoid it; use it warily; or, as Krause proposes,
do we try to re-enchant and re-invigorate it as a component of a different theoretical
apparatus? Do we, for example, reclaim ‘flow’ from the anthropology of globalization and
restore it to the semi-Deleuzian lexicon to which it also self-evidently belongs?
Flow signifies movement of a general type. Its loci are rivers and streams. Its direction
and velocity are undetermined. Its familiar is water, but it can also conjure vehicular
traffic and molten metal, liquefied earth, air and lava. Still, to follow Krause, we don’t
need so much to resignify it as to recontextualise it for its associations to become clear.
Open as it is, it’s available to all kinds of conceptual projects. And if, as he argues, one of
these is to draw on flow as an expression of becoming, then the opportunities the term
offers—as both verb and noun—are perhaps even greater than he suggests.
Because flow does not have to be only about the human, either ‘the fluxes in which
humans come into being,’ or the way human beings ‘as living and developing organisms and
persons, are caught up in material flows’. Of course, it’s important to attend to these, but
flows—material and otherwise—are, we could say, as much a condition of a world conceived
as process as are the things of the world, humans included, themselves. If, that is, we wish to
conceive of the world as becoming, as a becoming-world in which life itself is flow, whether
flux or stream or transformation or whatever we prefer, then humans, we could say, along
with all other forms of matter and spirit, are not caught in flow, they are flow, and flow is not
extraneous and abstractable from existence, it is its condition and its form.
It’s a simple observation and the less radical version might be just to say that if we can
take anything from the current resurgence of ontological thinking in anthropology, it is
maybe that there is no longer any reason beyond the heuristic to abstract the human from
other forms of life, matter and being but, instead, to think it in relation.
Either way, flow can be a serviceable term. So, yes, let’s reclaim it. But let’s travel with
it, wherever it might take us, rather than attempting to manage and delimit the channels
it creates and in which it moves.

HUGH RAFFLES,
PROFESSOR OF ANTHROPOLOGY
DIRECTOR, GRADUATE INSTITUTE FOR DESIGN, ETHNOGRAPHY & SOCIAL THOUGHT
THE NEW SCHOOL
rafflesh@newschool.edu

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RESPONSE: LIVELY FLOWS AND DEBATES

• FRANZ KRAUSE •

Very gratefully I have received the extremely insightful responses by Féaux de la Croix,
Strang and Raffles to my thoughts on the concept of flow in anthropology. Their sheer
variety opens up all kinds of exciting directions to go from here, but it also demonstrates
that ‘flow continues to generate useful debates’ (Strang). Raffles suggests we should
acknowledge that humans are not only caught up in flows, but are flows themselves;
Strang argues that flow should stimulate thinking about non-human agency, bioethics
and material culture; and Féaux de la Croix warns against the futility of trying to pin
down a concept that can describe such heterogeneous phenomena as electricity, banking,
migration and meditation.
The unbroken power and appeal of the flow metaphor is evident in all three responses,
for instance in Féaux de la Croix’s writing about the unconscious circulation of ideas as
‘osmosis’ through the ‘immersion’ in discourses, and more explicitly in Strang’s aim ‘to
relocate [flow] within the diverse material properties of the other components of the
world with which we think’. Beyond this focus on the cognitive, I would like to reiterate
that this is not just the world we think with, but also the one we act, grow, suffer and
enjoy with. Where Stang’s comments seem to differ most from my suggestions is that my
focus is precisely not on ‘properties’ and ‘components’ but on flows, as I fear the former
risk reproducing things as objects, and their relations as secondary. I also feel that an
insistence on the properties of things and thus their ‘agentive capacities’ runs counter to
my propositions about flow, which highlights the relationality of the development and
experience of such aspects. I find such formulations may too easily close the flow down, or
make it appear as an add-on attribute of a primarily objectified entity, forgetting that all
entities are snap-shot views and concepts in a world that comes into being through flows.
Analytically, the snap-shot should not be mistaken for the world.
Given this appeal of the flow metaphor, all responses comment on the potentials
and challenges of re-signifying the flow concept in anthropology. Raffles finds that
the ambiguity of flow is a strength rather than a problem: it is open, and therefore
‘available to all kinds of conceptual projects’, which can be evaluated only to the extent
that they produce interesting new insights. Strang’s comments follow and elaborate on
my suggestions, illustrating some possible implications of flow in studies of material
culture and personhood. Féaux de la Croix remarks that it can be a ‘Sisyphean task to
try to safeguard words from improper and inexact use’, especially a term as popular and
inspiring as flow. But what are we to do once we realise that some uses of the term are
more productive than others? I would argue that, Sisyphean as it may be, trying to use
our terms as properly and exactly as possible should nevertheless be our declared goal. In
fact, anthropologists do police their use of certain key terms, like ‘culture’, which we are
often at pains to distinguish from how it is used, for instance, in the fields of intercultural
communication or indeed microbiology.
Raffles advises not to attempt to define the concept, but instead to ‘travel’ with the
flow, ‘wherever it might take us’. I am sympathetic to this advice, but would do so very

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cautiously, asking at regular intervals what precisely is flowing here and what does it
do or hide to call this phenomenon flow. Féaux de la Croix suggests using flow to talk
about issues beyond classical ecological anthropology, with which I fully agree, as all
relationships need to be thought of as ecological in a wider sense. When she posits that
the root metaphor of flow itself might have shifted to globalisation, however, I wonder
to what extent the displacement of capital and migrants can be truthfully described as
flows at all. Does money not appear somewhere and disappear somewhere else, without
there being any continuous movement of it in between the two points/countries/bank
accounts? And do migrants not spend more time in insular diasporas and at impermeable
borders than moving back and forth? My distinction of things that flow and don’t flow
must not be read as an opposition of more solid and more liquid materials, as Strang
illustrates. But does personhood flow, as she seems to suggest? Do artefacts?
It will be fascinating to follow up these and other discussions. For instance: to what extent
do my suggestions regarding flow foster anthropocentrism, as Féaux de la Croix posits or
do they undo it, as Strang argues? Also left largely unaddressed here is Féaux de la Croix’s
inspiring remark about the ‘taste’ of flow. Does the term naturalise specific relationships?
Does it confer a naively benign sense of movement for an ‘organic anthropology’ blind
to conflict and pain? I entirely agree that the concept needs to taste right, and again it is
in the closer attention to specific flows that form part of people’s lifeworlds that I think
an adequate conceptual seasoning is to be found. Floods and droughts demonstrate that
water flows are not unambiguously benign; recent work on what has been called the
‘hydrosocial cycle’ illustrates that water flow is not simply a natural phenomenon, but
shaped by social relations, markets and infrastructure; finally, an organic anthropology—
one that takes the organism-person as an analytical starting point—does not taste like
an organic substitute for an industrial product, but is necessarily attentive also to the
unpleasant and agonizing relationships through which people and their environments
come into being alongside the more benign ones. The flows of pathogens, pollutants and
policing, for instance, fall into this category.
It may be cumbersome, hold various pitfalls, and require frequent checking for ‘taste’,
but the concept of flow holds most potential for anthropology when it is used for analysing
the material-semiotic movements that constitute life.

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