An Engineered Tableau from the Spheres of Unintentional Agencies
Channel: Anthropology of Consciousness
Date: 2021-09-09

Getting the lay of the land: Tracking the Assiniboine River upstream, I drive west out of
Winnipeg across the prairie along Trans-Canada Highway 1 to the Portage Diversion.
In continuous motion, water rushes through the giant concrete walls of the reservoir’s
spillway and falls into the churning riverbed below. A pelican squadron floats in a little side swirl of water between base and bank. Long orange bills plunge down, then up into air, throat pouches full of deranged fish. Just downstream, a man fishes with a rod. Where line meets surface, a barely perceptible circle. On the grassy hill adjacent, a woman with small children plays on a blanket. A stranger-ethnographer stands apart, her camera silently shooting the engineered tableau. I see now as I write: pelicans, man, family—my fellow spillway visitors—teach me an early lesson: monumental infrastructures of concrete and steel unintentionally offer sustenance and connection in ways that exceed engineers’ intentions. Creating an excellent fishing spot is surely not an intentional effect of this multi-million-dollar node in Manitoba’s flood control system. An impulsive entity, the Assiniboine buoys up floating pelicans, parting its surface and splashing around them when they dive into the water between base and bank. Currents carry fish downstream to meet the hook a man knots to the end of a line: together, river (unintentionally) and man (intentionally) may trick fish into biting. Out of range of touch, families will cook and eat caught fish, absorbing river into their collective bloodstream. . . .