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Anthropology has an important role in articulating people’s engagements with water at different spatial and temporal scales, and in showing how local relationships with waterways and marine areas translate into larger anthropogenic impacts on regional and global ecosystems. This volume explores diverse relationships with waterbodies, and considers how these are expressed in art, material culture and infrastructures. Focusing on the multiple and overlapping scales at which people relate to water in contexts including wave science, Indigenous cosmology, extractive industries and environmental activism, it suggests that efforts to achieve more sustainable and equitable engagements with water must also be multi-scalar.
“An ambitious and promising contribution to the theoretical and methodological development of the anthropology of water.” • Ina Dietzsch, Institut für Empirische Kulturwissenschaft
Veronica Strang is a cultural anthropologist with a longstanding interest in societies’ engagements with water. Following a decade as the Director of Durham University's Institute of Advanced Study, she is now affiliated to the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography at the University of Oxford.
List of Figures
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Tracing Scales in Hydrosocial Relations
Veronica Strang and Franz Krause
Chapter 1. Waves, In Silico: Scale, Ocean Memory and Computer Memory in a Digital Model of Worldwide Waves
Stefan Helmreich
Chapter 2. Flux and Flows in the Waters of Yolngu Country, Northeast Arnhem Land: Reflections on Scale
Frances Morphy
Chapter 3. From Rivulet to Flood: African Water Beings on Minor and Major Scales
Veronica Strang
Chapter 4. Unsettling Ice: Building Roads and Betting on Break-Up in the Mackenzie Delta
Franz Krause
Chapter 5. The Arts of Streaming Central Asian River Life
Jeanne Féaux de la Croix
Chapter 6. From Local to Virtual Water: The Industrialization of Underground Water During the Nitrate Mining Boom in the Tarapacá Region, Atacama Desert (1810–1930)
Manuel Méndez
Conclusion: Ways of Scaling Water
Franz Krause and Veronica Strang
Afterword: Reflections on Scale Inside and Outside Anthropology
Howard Morphy
Index