Description:
- The book sees the making and unmaking of people's lives through the shared lens of water, yielding great comparative potential across different regions and approaches.
- Through the notion of waterworlds, the book addresses human and non-human actors as mutually constitutive.
- The book advances reflections on anthropological analyses as generative of their objects.
Brief description:
Kirsten Hastrup is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Copenhagen. She received an ERC Advanced Grant in 2008, enabling the collaborative research project Waterworlds (2009-2014). Among her publications are three monographs based on her work on long-term natural and social histories in Iceland. Since then she has worked in Greenland and published many edited volumes such as Anthropology and Nature (2014).
Review Quotes:
"This collection is a rich quarry of manifold explorations of malleable, multiple, and vital waters in social and cultural life, which are always simultaneously a matter of concern for various political actions, and expressive of their own agentive capacities. Despite - or perhaps because of - the multiplicity of waters and approaches, it can be regarded as an asset to have these contributions combined in one book." - Anthropos
"...anthropology is not a newcomer to the study of water as an object and agent of social organization and cultural imagining, and the current volume introduces the reader to a good deal of this literature. But it also makes an original contribution by assembling a quantity of ethnographic cases and applying the anthropological perspective to issues of knowledge, management, and morality. The collected ethnographies illustrate, to quote Lévi-Strauss, that water is not only good to drink but good to think." - Anthropology Review Database
"A superb book, the chapters provide a wide range of approaches, from excellent descriptive ethnography to hard-hitting critiques of development practice. Water's qualities provide a common theme and inspire groundbreaking theory." - Marc Brightman, University College London