Vital Frontier

Andrea Muehlebach is Professor of Maritime Anthropology and Cultures of Water at the University of Bremen and author of The Moral Neoliberal: Welfare and Citizenship in Italy.

• Preface  viiIntroduction. A Vital Frontier  11. You Cannot Sell to Us What We Already Possess!  352. No More Blood from These Stones!  673. We Berliners Want Our Water Back!  1034. Just Price  135Epilogue  167Notes  179References  213Index  239

"Muehlebach's book is a riveting read, not only because the text brilliantly captures the complexity of a story ... It also ingeniously connects the struggle of Italian water campaigners across the Peninsula with comparable grassroots political experiments in Berlin and Cork, Ireland to demonstrate the political generativity of these movements ... Masterfully researched and eloquently written, it demonstrates the power that ethnographic writing acquires when situated alongside a critical use of social and economic history and directed by an ambitious methodology and research agenda ... A stupendous achievement." - Andrea E. Pia (Anuac) "A Vital Frontier offers the reader a rich, grounded ethnography on the many tactics used by European water insurgencies against private encroachment into public life. . . in our increasingly financialised world, Muehlebach provides a timely intervention on groups fighting against the fundamental contradiction of valuing priceless resources like water." - Claudia Díaz-Combs (Antipode) "In this tour de force, Andrea Muehlebach offers readers ethnographic insight into the vital issue of water sovereignty, at the intersection of two historical and ongoing processes: the financialization of public water utilities and the subsequent struggles that ensue over the control of water, or life itself as many of her interlocutors call it." - Kailey Rocker (Political and Legal Anthropology Review) "This book is exemplary, closely researched, and yet very accessible. It reveals the predatory nature of capitalism encroaching ever more on people’s daily lives, but it also demonstrates their ability to fight back, to ensure priority of the public over the private, of life over profit maximization. In short, it is also a message of hope. A must read-I most strongly recommend it!" - Andreas Bieler (Journal of Anthropological Research) "Muehlebach got me with [her] first sentences, and I was reading the 250 page book almost without a break." - Roland Brunner (Blue Community) "The book reads as a thriller, holding the attention from the first to the last page of each chapter ... Muehlebach brings the reader so close to the activists that you can just feel what moves them to stand up against the legalized deprivation that they are faced with. A great example that shows that water cannot be reduced to a monetary value or economic good and a must read for all who are engaged in water governance and water justice." - Jerry van den Berge (Water Alternatives) "In an age where debt financing increasingly shapes the contours of public life, Andrea Muehlebach’s A Vital Frontier stands as a vital contribution to understanding the politics of resistance." - Tarini Monga (LSE Review of Books)