The Meaning of Water

Tales from the riverside: What community stories can tell us about sustainable water resources management practices

“…This story tells us that there is a community presumption around how the river should function—it should flow, be clear, provide a thriving ecosystem, and be free of smell or of any attributes of anthropogenic artifice. Yet rivers are intimately linked with our industrial heritage (Strang, ) and emblematic of Victorian enterprise and economic wealth. In industrialized economies, communities relied upon rivers to convey goods and still act as a means to discharge human and other effluent.…”

“…The research's empirical focus was the UK. Within the UK some work has been undertaken to explore the connectivity between people and their local waterscapes (Strang, ), although this is generally framed within a specific context such as flooding (Lane et al, ; McEwen, Krause, Hansen, & Jones, ), drought (Dessai & Sims, ) or water quality (Faulkner, Green, Pellaumail, & Weaver, ). To capture the intimacy of the stories of people who live and reside alongside their local water resources the research approach was to select three interconnected riparian villages, all sharing one riverside, but with their own distinct array of springs, ponds, sewers, drains, streams, ditches and brooks, which collectively make up their local water resources.…”

I Want to Tell You a Story: How Narrative Water Ethics Contributes to Re-theorizing Water Politics

“…Researchers from the critical social sciences and the humanities have consistently drawn attention to the dialectical relationships of people and societies to their waters [14,[21][22][23]29,42,[68][69][70][71]. On this reading, water is appropriated symbolically and culturally in various ways and thus acquires its meaning through the social and cultural circumstances in which it performs its roles while simultaneously shaping the identities of the people who interact with it.…”

“…Narrative water ethics thus understood refers to concrete persons, actions, geographies, institutions, as well as value and norm systems and explores how these are all entangled in water stories [15,16,43]. In doing so, we would not do justice to the depth of water as a reservoir of cultural meanings if the analysis of these stories were to refer solely to literature, and in particular high literature [13,16,28,70,71,105], as Böhme cautions: "The symbolic use of water has a formative effect in superstition as well as in creation theology, in fountain culture as well as in baptism, in myth and poetry, in adventure novels as well as in the sailor's yarn, in folk-literary traditions as well as meta-poetological narratives, in spontaneous dream images as in artificial water landscapes, in water music as in fairy tales, in temple rituals and horticulture, in magic as in psychoanalysis, in sagas about water monsters as in sacred texts about the dwelling of God in water" (own translation) [16]. Innumerable narrative formats thus deal with water; and often, water and its metaphors structure our ways of thinking in the first place [42,106,107].…”

Flooding water and society

“…Flooding has historically shaped the experience of life and death in many societies and diverse environments. Although floods are known to renew soil's fertility, invigorate biodiversity, and sustain livelihoods (Chibnik, ; Ehlert, ; Lahiri‐Dutt & Samanta, ; Strang, ), the current reality of floods is increasingly cruel: more often than not floods wreak havoc in the life and livelihood of thousands of people around the world. Our direct ethnographic observation has alerted us to increasingly dangerous floods in India, Italy, the United States, and Colombia, where their damages greatly exceed their potential benefits.…”