Logo: to the web site of Uppsala University

This article centers on an NGO-induced fog-capture project in Lima, Peru. While presented by the NGO as an alternative water-supply system for residents lacking state infrastructure, the fog catchers ultimately failed to live up to promises about potable water. Yet as fog turned into a material impossibility, the project’s failure yielded a series of new possibilities and expectations, for instance about the potential acquisition of a piece of land. The fog catchers creatively informed other, ongoing processes of improvised urbanization, meaning that the failure became not an end point but a site of emergence whereby the temporality of the fog-capture project folded into parallel rhythms of socio-material transformation. In conclusion, I suggest that the failure be understood not as simply dictated by a larger politico-economic order but as a generative moment through which certain urban configurations became momentarily exposed and could be productively acted on. 

This article draws on two examples of encounters with the limits of fog capture in Lima to frame limitations as creative resources for ethnographic inquiry. In both examples, fog capture rendered speculatively conceivable previously backgrounded urban and ecological (dis)connections to residents on the city's periphery, including the possibility to envisage certain relational reconfigurations. By analogously framing these experimental effects as one potential outcome of ethnographic practice, the article locates the kernel of such outcomes in the inescapability of limitations. This not only acknowledges the many obstructions and exclusions inherent to anthropological research, but taps into them as that which might allow for fieldwork encounters to properly bear on theory and analysis. Rather than things to avoid or overcome, I argue that limits by and of themselves have the capacity to suspend and modify abstractions and the course of events.