Water, Scale and Materiality - Anthropological Perspectives on Hydrosocial Relations

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.

About the author

Veronica Strang is a Professor of Anthropology and Executive Director of the Institute of Advanced Study at Durham University. An environmental anthropologist, she has written extensively on water, land and resource issues in Australia and the UK, and is the author of Uncommon Ground: Cultural Landscapes and Environmental Values (Berg 1997), and The Meaning of Water (Berg 2004). She also co-edited, with Mark Busse, the ASA Monograph, Ownership and Appropriation.

Franz Krause is an anthropologist interested in the role of water in society and culture. He works as Junior Research Group Leader of the DELTA project at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology and the Global South Studies Center, University of Cologne, Germany.

Product details

• Assisted by: Franz Krause (Editor), Strang Veronica (Editor)
• Publisher: Ingram Publishers Services
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Release: 01.05.2026
• EAN: 9781836954859
• ISBN: 978-1-83695-485-9
• No. of pages: 208
• Series: Environmental Anthropology and Ethnobiology
• Subjects: Social sciences, law, business > Ethnology > Ethnology; BUSINESS & ECONOMICS / Development / Sustainable Development, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Anthropology / Cultural & Social, Social & cultural anthropology, ethnography, Social impact of environmental issues, Social and cultural anthropology, Water industries