Agenda

Veronica Strang
Oxford University and NICHE Ca’ Foscari

Abstract
This paper describes the findings emerging from the author’s major comparative study of water deities. This research draws on her own and others’ ethnographic studies and museum collections, as well as on archaeology, history, the classics, the cognitive sciences and theology.
Multiple serpentine deities have appeared ubiquitously throughout human history and across cultural boundaries, expressing the generative and sometimes destructive powers of water, its material properties, and its central role in human lives. Venerated in prehistoric cave paintings and petroglyphs, and in ancient carvings and images, ophidian water beings remind us that all early human societies worshipped ‘nature’. While some societies continued to venerate non-human deities for millennia, others shifted their religious beliefs towards humanised and (with the emergence of monotheisms) exclusively male gods. Water beings nevertheless continued to flow through many cultural contexts, including the classical traditions influencing the Arts across Europe.
Following their fortunes through different societal trajectories is revealing. With direct relevance to contemporary environmental concerns, what happens to water beings over time illuminates key changes in human relationships with water and the non-human domain, showing how and why many societies shifted from respectful nature worship to the exploitative practices that have led to the current environmental crisis. Today, in the contemporary political arena, water deities are resurfacing, enabling indigenous people, environmental and social activists and artists to articulate a critique of unsustainable neo-liberal practices and promote social and ecological justice. In providing hydro-poetic inspiration, water beings can help to turn the tide away from climate crisis and towards the flourishing of all living kinds.

Veronica Strang, presently on a Fellowship as a Visiting Professor at NICHE Centre, is a Professor of Anthropology affiliated to Oxford University. Her research focuses on human-environmental relations and in particular societies’ engagements with water, encompassing conflicts over ownership and governance; cultural beliefs and values; human and non-human rights; and people’s sensory and cognitive interactions with water. She has conducted ethnographic research in Australia, the UK, and New Zealand. In 2000 she received a Royal Anthropological Institute Urgent Anthropology Fellowship, and in 2007 she was awarded an international water prize by UNESCO. Some of her key publications include Uncommon Ground: cultural landscapes and environmental values (1997); The Meaning of Water (2004); Gardening the World: agency, identity and the ownership of water (2009); Ownership and Appropriation (2010); Water: nature and culture (2015); and From the Lighthouse: interdisciplinary reflections on light (2018). She has recently completed a major study of culturally and historically diverse water deities, focusing on how they reveal diverse societal trajectories in human-environmental relationships. This research is described in Water Beings: from nature worship to the environmental crisis (2023). For more information go to https://www.veronicastrang.com/