Description

Rejecting nature-culture dualism, contemporary anthropological thinking recognises the mutually constitutive processes that create shared human and non-human lifeworlds. Such theoretical progress owes much to disciplinary engagement with indigenous beliefs and values that have, for millennia, upheld ideas about indivisible worlds in which all living kinds occupy a shared ontological space. In such spaces non-human species and environments are approached respectfully, with expectations of reciprocity and partnership, rather than as resources to be exploited.

As many societies confront the global chaos caused by anthropocentric prioritisation of human interests, anthropologists and indigenous communities are well placed to offer alternative models in which the non-human domain is dealt with more equitably. Water beings such as Māori Taniwha and Australian Rainbow Serpents quintessentially embody ideas about the generative and potentially punitive powers of water, as well as providing ways to articulate rising concerns about the unsustainable impacts of human activities on rivers and marine areas.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in New Zealand and Australia, and on a wider comparative study of water deities, this paper explores how such beings are resurfacing in the political arena. Representing non-human agency, and promoting the beliefs, values and interests of indigenous communities, ‘traditional’ water beings are gaining a centrally important role in conflicts over water ownership and governance .

Speaker

Professor Veronica Strang is the Executive Director of the Institute of Advanced Study and a Professor of Anthropology at Durham University.

She is a cultural anthropologist whose research focuses on human-environmental relations, materiality, cultural landscapes, property, and, in particular, societies’ engagements with water. She has conducted ethnographic research in Australia, the UK and New Zealand. She also has a close interest in interdisciplinarity, and in developing a reflexive understanding of the processes that enable collaboration across the academy.

Since completing a DPhil at the University of Oxford in 1995, she has held teaching and research positions at the Pitt Rivers Museum and the University’s Environmental Change Unit; the University of Wales; Goldsmiths University; and the University of Auckland. She returned to the UK in 2012 to take up her post in Durham, and from 2013-2017 she served as the Chair of the Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and the Commonwealth. She was recently appointed to HEFCE’s Interdisciplinary Advisory Panel.

In 2000 she received a Royal Anthropological Institute Urgent Anthropology Fellowship, and in 2007 she was awarded an international water prize by UNESCO. Current work includes assisting the UN in developing new ‘Principles for Water’ to complement its Sustainability Goals; research re-theorising human-non-human relations in river catchment areas; and writing a comparative text examining historical and contemporary beliefs about water beings.

Her publications include Uncommon Ground: cultural landscapes and environmental values (Berg 1997); The Meaning of Water (Berg 2004); Gardening the World: agency, identity and the ownership of water (Berghahn 2009); Ownership and Appropriation (Berg 2010) and Water: nature and culture (Reaktion and Chicago University Press 2015). Further details are available on her website (https://www.veronicastrang.com).

Other Information

Seminar paper for MSc in Water Science, Policy and Management in the School of Geography and the Environment and the Oxford Water Network.

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Description

Speaker

Making Waves: the power of indigenous water beings in contemporary debates