Veronica Strang

• DPhil Anthropology, Oxford University 1995
• Professor at University of Oxford

Over the last century, the health of aquatic ecosystems around the world has reached critical levels. In the UK, waterways are severely polluted, and yet many wells and springs are still venerated as ‘sacred’. This article presents ‘eco-pilgrimages’ as a sustainability strategy to connect key heritage sites through ecological corridors. This aims,...

Rejecting nature‐culture dualism, contemporary anthropology recognises the mutually constitutive processes that create shared human and non‐human lifeworlds. Such recognition owes much to ethnographic engagement with diverse indigenous cosmologies many of which have, for millennia, upheld ideas about indivisible worlds in which all living kinds occ...

Through an anthropological lens, this essay examines the sea’s dual capacities to bring order and chaos. Drawing on a major comparative study, it examines hydro-theological water beings who personify the sea’s agentive powers, compose the world, and move spirit and matter through time and space. It explores the oceans’ capacities to consume human l...

As environmental change and mass extinctions underline an urgent need to establish more humane relationships with non-human beings, there is a creative opportunity to reimagine concepts of kinship to promote the collective well-being of all living kinds. Anthropology draws on culturally diverse interspecies relations: some locate human and other sp...

Through an anthropological lens, this essay examines the sea's dual capacities to bring order and chaos. Drawing on a major comparative study, it examines hydro-theological water beings who personify the sea's agentive powers, compose the world, and move spirit and matter through time and space. It explores the oceans' capacities to consume human l...

Before European colonisation, the Brisbane River supported several indigenous language groups who, working with its natural variations in flow, were able to sustain stable hunter-gatherer lifeways for many millennia. In contrast, colonial settlers made strenuous efforts to control one of Australia's largest and most unpredictable rivers, driven by...

Debates in the social sciences and humanities are challenging dominant assumptions about nature-culture dualism, and urging a move away from the anthropocentrism that supports exploitative relations with the non-human domain. This shift in positionality recognises that non-human beings and ecosystems are not humankind’s passive subjects, but the co...

The Leaders’ Pledge for Nature highlights the fact that since ecosystems underpin human well-being, we need to “recognize that the business case for biodiversity is compelling”. In this article we argue that, in all areas of water management, there is an urgent need for a paradigmatic and practical shift to species-inclusive and sustainable water p...

From drought to deluge, climate extremes are mobilizing humanities scholars to reimagine water discourse, which has until now largely focused on human power over water. This volume unites preeminent and emerging voices across humanistic disciplines to develop a new discourse called the hydrohumanities, dedicated to examining water-human-power relat...

There are diverse historical trajectories in human societies’ relationships with the non-human world. While many small place-based groups have tried to retain egalitarian partnerships with other species and ecosystems, larger societies have made major transitions. In religious terms, they have moved from worshipping female, male or androgynous non-...

The water sector has a major leadership role to play in addressing the global water crisis. How can it make the radical shifts in approach that are needed? This paper highlights the reality that the management of water, and the ways in which water flows are directed, reflects social relations of power, not just between human groups, but also betwee...

In the context of globalization, post-modernity and transnationalism, identity, for most people, is no longer securely located in specific material environments. Yet the desire to 'ground' identity in place by acting in and on the material world remains, even as people shift between multiple locations. This chapter considers the materiality of iden...

Industrialized societies around the world have increasingly overridden the rights and interests of non-human beings, bringing the rivers and ecosystems on which all living things depend to the brink of collapse. This Commentary considers how we can re-imagine our relationships with rivers in ways that are more ethical and sustainable.

In response to pressure from Māori iwis (tribes), the New Zealand Government announced in 2017 that the Whanganui River had been granted the legal status of a living entity. This alternate cultural view has energised a lively international debate about of what constitutes ‘living kinds’ and ‘personhood’. This chapter asks whether non-human species,...

This epilogue provides a ‘last word’ to this rich collection of papers engaging in lively dialogue with Wittfogel’s ghost. It suggests that although his writing has been criticised as deterministic and generalising, with hindsight, Wittfogel is best appreciated as a scholar thinking within a particular historical and intellectual context. Part of t...

Ya han pasado sesenta años desde que Karl Wittfogel destacara una relación clave entre el poder político y la propiedad y el control del agua. Estudios posteriores han sugerido, en un sentido acorde, que la exclusión de la propiedad de recursos esenciales representa una forma profunda de exclusión —una pérdida de participación democrática en la dir...

There is a lengthy continuum of human rights to water, ranging from those concerned with meeting people's most fundamental needs for potable water and sanitation, to multifarious forms of rights to control, redirect, and make use of streams and groundwater, and to have access to aquatic (freshwater and marine) resources. Anthropology's major contri...

Edited volume: Veronica Strang, Tim Edensor, Joanna Puckering. What is a lighthouse? What does it mean, do, and how does it work? Can sharing these perspectives through an interdisciplinary conversation ‘enlighten’ our thinking? This book brings a wide range of scholars together to provide input and is illustrated by numerous visual and poetic ima...

The image of the lighthouse, that plucky outpost perched on a vestigial afterthought of rock, is often one of isolation. But no constructed object is ever truly isolated. All - human and non-human alike - are material expressions of needs and desires, and of particular cultural, historical, geographical and species-specific ways of seeing, understa...

The Brundtland Report (World Commission on Environment and Development, Our Common Future, The World Commission on Environment and Development. Oxford University Press, Oxford/New York, 1987) envisaged a ‘Common Future’ in which humankind would undertake ‘sustainable development’, in theory including the interests of the non-human. In the same year...

We review a selection of published reports on the evaluation and wider peer-review of interdisciplinary research (IDR), drawing on an in-depth examination of a range of interdisciplinary projects and the work of a UK-based working group of funders and researchers. Our aim is to elucidate best practice. We focus the study on integrative, interdiscip...

It is 60 years since Karl Wittfogel highlighted a key relationship between political power and the ownership and control of water. Subsequent studies have suggested, commensurately, that exclusion from the ownership of essential resources represents a fundamental form of disenfranchisement - a loss of democratic involvement in societal direction. S...

This module for Involving Anthropology presents an account of one of the plenary debates held at the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (IUAES) World Congress held at Manchester University, 5-10 August 2013. The module begins with a brief introduction to provide the context for the debate, which included two speakers f...

Since the beginning of time humans have had a vital relationship with water. Water considers humanity's interaction with this essential substance, its physical properties and their material effects, as well as exploring how diverse societies have engaged with these in different times and places. The earliest societies worshipped water deities, and...

Drawing on several disciplinary areas, this article considers diverse cultural concepts of time, space, and materiality. It explores historical shifts in ideas about time, observing that these have gone full circle, from visions in which time and space were conflated, through increasingly divergent linear understandings of the relationship between...

Material things are not just passive recipients of human categories, meanings and values, nor mere subjects of human agency. Their particular characteristics and behaviours are formative of human–non-human relations. The common material properties of things, and the shared cognitive and phenomenological processes through which people interact with...

I am happy to see that my essay has generated a lively discussion, and am most grateful to the respondents for their insightful contributions. Their comments express varying levels of agreement regarding the agency of things. Vernon Scarborough revisits anxieties about whether agency implies intentionality. Using the term ‘agency’ is indeed problem...

Focusing on human engagements with water, this article steps back from specifically cultural or historical contexts in order to trace the larger patterns of social, religious, and technological change that have transformed most societies’ relationships with their environments. It examines transitions from totemic “nature religions” to male-dominate...

Through the sale of hydroelectric and water company shares, the building of dams to impound and control freshwater supplies, and via water trading schemes, there is continual acceleration in the privatization of water resources around the world. Key opponents to the enclosure of this ‘common good’ are indigenous communities who, having had their la...

Human life is both literally and metaphorically unthinkable without water, which permeates and enlivens every form of human activity. Water is equally important for all living organisms, flowing through plants, animals and humans, through places, river systems and ocean currents, and through the entire hydrological cycle, where it constitutes a fun...

Interactions with water are indicative not only of relationships between human groups but also of relationships with other species. In biopolitical economies few things express dominance over other species as clearly as damming and redirecting flows of water to give primacy to human needs. Yet despite growing opposition, dams—especially large ones—...

The SAGE Handbook of Social Anthropology is a contemporary landmark volume that defines the field and outlines new directions in research. Divided into four sections, each edited by leading figures in social anthropology, this exhaustive Handbook covers interfaces, places, methodologies and futures. Within each section authors at the leading edge o...

A UNESCO volume exploring a wide range of cultural diversity in relationships with water.

Este artigo baseia-se em pesquisa sobre representações visuais de seres aquáticos e sua capacidade de articular relacionamentos humano-ambientais. Seres aquáticos (como serpentes arco-íris e taniwhas) são relevantes em muitas cosmologias culturais diferentes, mais particularmente aquelas que se orientam no sentido de “religiões da natureza”, nas qu...

There are many diverse cultural engagements with water: different spiritual and secular beliefs and understandings; multiple views about how resources should be owned, used and managed; varied interactions with water in all its forms; and a wide spectrum of ideas about how to achieve sustainability and engage with environmental change.

In a world of finite resources, expanding populations, and widening structural inequalities, the ownership of things is increasingly contested. Not only are the commons being rapidly enclosed and privatized, but the very idea of what can be owned is expanding, generating conflicts over the ownership of resources, ideas, culture, people, and even pa...

Drawing on recent ethnographic research with river catchment groups and other environmental managers in Queensland, Australia, Professor Strang considers notions of ownership in relation to water. Making comparative use of principles of Australia's Aboriginal Law, she considers alternative "ways of owning" in contrast to conventional legal property...

This chapter considers “cultural mapping” as an ethnographic method. Like many anthropological ideas (and indeed the concept of “culture” itself), this methodology has achieved wider utility. UNESCO (2009)makes use of it, as do many local community projects. There are now cultural mapping “toolkits” available, and newsletters and websites designed...

There is a garden in the mind’s eye: vision of a perfect world; a productive, well-fed, well-watered world in which societies coexist amicably; in which ecosystems are allowed to maintain themselves and all of their extraordinary intricacies; in which resources are only used at a rate that can be replenished; and in which the words starvation, conf...

This paper outlines some of the theoretical developments in cultural anthropology that have been particularly useful in elucidating human engagements with land and resources. It examines some of the meanings and values encoded in water by a range of water using groups along the Mitchell River in northern Queensland, and their diverse ideas of what...

This paper considers the practical and intellectual challenges that attend efforts to integrate the social and natural sciences in environmental research, and the broader political, social and economic context in which this takes place. Based on the experiences of researchers in Australia—but with obvious relevance for researchers in many countries...

Around the world, intensifying development and human demands for fresh water are placing unsustainable pressures on finite resources. Countries are waging war over transboundary rivers, and rural and urban communities are increasingly divided as irrigation demands compete with domestic desires. Marginal groups are losing access to water as powerful...

Environmental management in Australia has recently shifted away from local rural communities into the hands of largely urban environmental and government agencies, sparking an intensifying contest for the control of land and resources between geographically and socially stable communities and more mobile translocal groups. There are major disjuncti...

This article considers how local communities in South Queensland make use of the cultural meanings encoded in water to articulate social connections and notions of belonging. Drawing on recent ethnographic research, it compares the activities of a community catchment group in Brisbane, and participants in a water festival in Maroochydore, exploring...

There is a tendency in environmental discourses to classify relationships with water as either ‘spiritual’ or ‘commercial’. This chapter suggests that both are concerned with regeneration and productivity. What differentiates them more critically is a shift from relatively passive, low-key interactions with water to more actively managerial forms o...

Since the early development of their discipline anthropologists have attempted to develop theoretical models that elucidate the complexities of human "being" through a scientific comparison of differences. In recent decades, however, faced with critiques of the supposed white/male/European standpoint of anthropology and accusations of complicity wi...

As a material substance, essential to every organic process, water literally constitutes human "being", providing a vital "natural symbol" of sociality and of human-environmental interdependence. Its particular qualities of fluidity and transmutability lend themselves to a stream of metaphors about flows and interconnections, and to ideas about spa...

The Brisbane River starts high in the Jimna Ranges in a network of small streams that are often no more than a thread of green in the dusty hills. By the time it reaches the Port of Brisbane, it has been captured, used and turned into many things: beef and vegetables, fruit and wine – things that can be bundled into containers and shipped to the tr...

Based on long-term fieldwork with Aboriginal groups, Euro-Australian pastoralists and other land users in Far North Queensland, this paper considers the ways in which indigenous relations to land conflate concepts of Nature and the Self, enabling subjective identification with elements of the environment and supporting long-term affective relations...

This article is concerned with the relationship between sensory experience, material realities and the creation of cross-cultural meanings. Focused on water, it offers a comparison of two, highly diverse, ethnographic examples: one an Aboriginal community living alongside the Mitchell River in Far North Queensland, and the other describing the grou...

Water is the most valuable resource and the most passionately contested. Drought has become an increasingly extreme problem in many parts of the world, and it is predicted that 60% of the major cities in Europe will run short of water in the next decade. In industrialized countries per capita water usage continues to rise intractably, despite stren...

Focusing on water resources this paper traces the conceptual relationships between the formal characteristics of water, the ways in which these are experienced and observed, and the imaginative use made of these qualities in the representational imagery which describes each aspect of Aboriginal life. It considers how these relationships provide sys...