A joint initiative between the University of Bergen
and CMI – Chr. Michelsen Institute
Welcome to book launch with Veronica Strang.
Early human relationship with water were expressed through beliefs in serpentine aquatic deities: rainbow-coloured, feathered or horned serpents, giant anacondas and dragons. Representing the powers of water, these beings were bringers of life and sustenance, world creators, ancestors, guardian spirits and law makers. Worshipped and appeased, they embodied people’s respect for water and its vital role in sustaining all living things.
Yet today, though we still recognise that “water is life”, fresh- and saltwater ecosystems have been critically compromised by human activities. In her book, Veronica Strang explores water beings, and what has happened to them in different cultural and historical contexts.
She demonstrates how and why some – but not all – societies have moved from worshipping water to wreaking havoc upon it, and asks what we can do to turn the tide.
In this book launch, Strang will meet doctoral researcher Saumya Pandey for a conversation on her new book Water Beings: From Nature Worship to the Environmental Crisis.
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Veronica Strang is a cultural anthropologist who has conducted ethnographic research in Australia, the UK and New Zealand. Her work is concerned with human-environmental relations, materiality, cultural landscapes, and societies’ engagements with water.
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Saumya Pandey is a doctoral researcher working on sediments of the Himalayan river systems. Her research project follows world’s second most sought-after resource, sand, which is central to future-oriented economic structuring.
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Veronica Strang is a cultural anthropologist who has conducted ethnographic research in Australia, the UK and New Zealand. Her work is concerned with human-environmental relations, materiality, cultural landscapes, and societies’ engagements with water.
Strang has worked with UNESCO and the UN on water and sustainability issues and conducts research assisting indigenous communities’ land and water claims. Her work has contributed to debates on non-human rights, and she recently completed a major comparative study examining historical and contemporary beliefs about water deities and their capacities to illuminate different trajectories of development in human-environmental relationships.
Since completing a DPhil at the University of Oxford in 1995, Veronica 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. In 2012 she took up a role as the Executive Director of Durham University’s Institute of Advanced Study. From 2013-2017 she served as the Chair of the Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and the Commonwealth, and from 2017-2022 assisted Research England’s national advisory panel on interdisciplinarity.
In 2000 Veronica received a Royal Anthropological Institute Urgent Anthropology Fellowship, and in 2007 she was awarded an international water prize by UNESCO. In 2019 she was elected as Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences.
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); Water: nature and culture (Reaktion 2015) and Water Beings: from nature worship to the environmental crisis (Reaktion 2023). Further details are available on her website.
Saumya Pandey is a doctoral researcher working on sediments of the Himalayan river systems. Her research project follows world’s second most sought-after resource, sand, which is central to future-oriented economic structuring.
Pandey is trained in social anthropology from the University of Oxford. Formerly, she was a journalist in training for The Telegraph where she edited political commentaries and was involved with the daily editorial-page production. From 2014-16 as a student at TISS, her fieldwork focused on marginalised livelihoods, anti-displacement movements, education, and domestic violence in Maharashtra, India. These experiences built her insights to pursue questions that most concern her on extraction; inequality; environment; work; feminist thought; and ethics and politics of knowledge-making practices.
She currently serves as a Contributing Editor for the Society for Cultural Anthropology, and is an Associate Editor at the Public Anthropologist.
Bergen Global is a joint initiative between the University of Bergen and Chr. Michelsen Institute that addresses global challenges.
