Strang
Biographic Data
| ID | 3818 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Strang |
| FAMILY NAME | Strang |
| SIGNATURE | STRANG |
| AFFILIATIONS | Durham University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9113-5458 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 61 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 351 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 61 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1992 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Eco-pilgrimages
Over the last century, the health of aquatic ecosystems around the world has reached critical levels. In the UK, waterways are severely polluted, and yet many wells and springs are still venerated as ‘sacred’. This article presents ‘eco-pilgrimages’ as a sustainability strategy to connect key heritage sites through ecological corridors. This aims, simultaneously, to strengthen biodiversity; to enable immersive historical and ecological education;…
Relating to the river
This article considers the potential for creating new constellations of human-non-human relations in river catchment areas. It makes use of the author's ethnographic research in Australia, New Zealand and the UK, and engages with current debates about human and non-human rights in relation to water. Drawing on concepts of pan-species democracy, it explores how the rights and interests of diverse human groups, and non-human species, might be encom…
The Hard Way
Before European colonisation, the Brisbane River supported several indigenous language groups who, working with its natural variations in flow, were able to sustain stable hunter-gatherer lifeways for many millennia. In contrast, colonial settlers made strenuous efforts to control one of Australia's largest and most unpredictable rivers, driven by aims to achieve social and material stability in what they saw as a hostile and adversarial environm…
Living kindness
As environmental change and mass extinctions underline an urgent need to establish more humane relationships with non-human beings, there is a creative opportunity to reimagine concepts of kinship to promote the collective well-being of all living kinds. Anthropology draws on culturally diverse interspecies relations: some locate human and other species within distinctive and hierarchical categories, while others have more fluid and egalitarian n…
Making Waves
Rejecting nature-culture dualism, contemporary anthropology recognises the mutually constitutive processes that create shared human and non-human lifeworlds. Such recognition owes much to ethnographic engagement with diverse indigenous cosmologies many of which have, for millennia, upheld ideas about indivisible worlds in which all living kinds occupy a shared ontological space and non-human species and environments are approached respectfully, w…
The Social Life of Water
Everywhere in the world communities and nations organize themselves in relation to water. We divert water from rivers, lakes, and aquifers to our homes, workplaces, irrigation canals, and hydro-generating stations. We use it for bathing, swimming, recreation, and it functions as a symbol of purity in ritual performances. In order to facilitate and manage our relationship with water, we develop institutions, technologies, and cultural practices en…
Reflecting Nature
Seeing Through the Rainbow. Aboriginal Australian Concepts of an Ordered Universe
Human and Nonhuman Rights to Water
All living kinds, human and nonhuman, require rights to water. A UN Declaration upholds rights to clean drinking water and basic sanitation for humans, and some environmental legislation seeks to assure minimal flows of water in ecosystems. However, such rights are situated within complex social and political relations that are often far from equal. The distribution and management of water is entangled in issues such as ethnicity, class, gender, …
What Anthropologists Do
Why should you study anthropology? How will it enable you to understand human behaviour? And what will you learn that will equip you to enter working life? This book describes what studying anthropology actually means in practice, and explores the many career options available to those trained in anthropology. Anthropology gets under the surface of social and cultural diversity to understand people’s beliefs and values, and how these guide the di…
Pursuing Knowledge, Surviving Empire
Gender and Pan-Species Democracy in the Anthropocene
There are diverse historical trajectories in human societies' relationships with the non-human world. While many small place-based groups have tried to retain egalitarian partnerships with other species and ecosystems, larger societies have made major transitions. In religious terms, they have moved from worshipping female, male or androgynous non-human deities, to valorising pantheons of deities that, over time, became semi-human and then human …
Elemental Powers
Human societies have developed unique trajectories of engagement with their environments over time.Some of these long-term relationships contain more potential for sustainability than others.Early human societies worshipped 'nature beings', including water serpent deities who manifested the elemental and generative powers of water.Such beliefs supported collaborative and reciprocal efforts to co-exist respectfully with the non-human world: a form…
A Future History of Water Andrea Ballestero (Durham)
Fluid Forms
Drawing on recent ethnographic research in Queensland, this chapter considers notions of ownership in relation to water. It observes that, as a relation between persons and things, concepts of property require some degree of material stasis and it suggests that the material qualities of water elude such conceptual fixity and enable – indeed necessitate – more fluid forms of ownership. Making comparative use of some of the principles of Aboriginal…
Negotiating the River
One of the central issues in modern anthropology is the need for theoretical approaches which deal with the complex dynamics of industrialized societies, in which there are multiple subcultures and ‘contexts’ of social being. This chapter proposes that, concretized in material culture, embedded in cultural landscapes, and promulgated by internal cultural forms, these values create a particular mode of environmental interaction, and maintain a tra…
Re-imagining the River
What Anthropologists Do
What is Anthropology? Why should you study it? What will you learn? And what can you do with it? What Anthropologists Do answers all these questions. And more.Anthropology is an astonishingly diverse and engaged subject that seeks to understand human social behaviour. What Anthropologists Do presents a lively introduction to the ways in which anthropology's unique research methods and cutting-edge thinking contribute to a very wide range of field…
Ownership and Appropriation
Foreword Chris Hann (Max Planck Institute, Germany) Introduction Mark Busse (University of Auckland, New Zealand) and Veronica Strang (University of Auckland, New Zealand) PART ONE - SUBJECTS, PERSONHOOD AND PEOPLEHOOD Chapter 1. Sharing, Stealing and Borrowing Simultaneously Marilyn Strathern (University of Cambridge, UK) Chapter 2. On Having Achieved Appropriation: the Anak Berprestasi of Kepulauan Riau Nicholas Long (University of Cambridge, U…
Epilogue
This epilogue provides a ‘last word’ to this rich collection of papers engaging in lively dialogue with Wittfogel’s ghost. It suggests that although his writing has been criticised as deterministic and generalising, with hindsight, Wittfogel is best appreciated as a scholar thinking within a particular historical and intellectual context. Part of the abiding appeal of his perspective comes from the clear and strong lines it draws connecting water…
Water
Because water permeates every aspect of human existence, ethnographic accounts describe many forms of engagement with it: for example, its centrality to modes of production; its influence on how societies organise themselves socially and spatially; its role in leisure activities and the enjoyment of its aesthetic qualities. Human relationships with water, though culturally and historically specific, share common themes of meaning, recognising wat…
Water Rights
There is a lengthy continuum of human rights to water, ranging from those concerned with meeting people's most fundamental needs for potable water and sanitation, to multifarious forms of rights to control, redirect, and make use of streams and groundwater, and to have access to aquatic (freshwater and marine) resources. Anthropology's major contributions to this complex field have been to make visible the wide cultural diversity in how rights to…
Wild Articulations
Tim Neale's comprehensive and informative text takes as its focus the issues raised by The Wild Rivers Act Queensland (2005), in which legislative efforts were made to provide rivers on Australia's
Relaciones infraestructurales
Ya han pasado sesenta años desde que Karl Wittfogel destacara una relación clave entre el poder político y la propiedad y el control del agua. Estudios posteriores han sugerido, en un sentido acorde, que la exclusión de la propiedad de recursos esenciales representa una forma profunda de exclusión -una pérdida de participación democrática en la dirección societaria-. Varios campos de desarrollo teórico han clarificado estos temas. Algunos antropó…
The Gaia Complex
The Brundtland Report (World Commission on Environment and Development, Our Common Future, The World Commission on Environment and Development. Oxford University Press, Oxford/New York, 1987) envisaged a ‘Common Future’ in which humankind would undertake ‘sustainable development’, in theory including the interests of the non-human. In the same year, James Lovelock proposed that humankind comprised the ‘brains’ of Gaia, with a directive role in re…
Common Senses
This article is concerned with the relationship between sensory experience, material realities and the creation of cross-cultural meanings. Focused on water, it offers a comparison of two, highly diverse, ethnographic examples: one an Aboriginal community living alongside the Mitchell River in Far North Queensland, and the other describing the groups inhabiting a river valley in the south of England. It considers how engagements with water are ex…
Fluid consistencies. Material relationality in human engagements with water
Material things are not just passive recipients of human categories, meanings and values, nor mere subjects of human agency. Their particular characteristics and behaviours are formative of human-non-human relations. The common material properties of things, and the shared cognitive and phenomenological processes through which people interact with them, generate recurrent ideas and patterns of engagement in diverse cultural and historical context…
Thinking Relationships Through Water
With this collection, we hope to contribute to a more explicitly relational study of water in society. Water is not just the object of social relationships, or merely a natural resource on which cl
Uncommon Ground
The Sage Handbook of Social Anthropology
Ownership and Appropriation
Foreword Chris Hann (Max Planck Institute, Germany) Introduction Mark Busse (University of Auckland, New Zealand) and Veronica Strang (University of Auckland, New Zealand) PART ONE - SUBJECTS, PERSONHOOD AND PEOPLEHOOD Chapter 1. Sharing, Stealing and Borrowing Simultaneously Marilyn Strathern (University of Cambridge, UK) Chapter 2. On Having Achieved Appropriation: the Anak Berprestasi of Kepulauan Riau Nicholas Long (University of Cambridge, U…
Fluidscapes
VOLUME 10 NUMBER 2 2006 Worldviews: Environment, Culture, Religion v o l . 1 0 n o . 2 2 0 0 6 B R I L L Special Issue: Fluidscapes Edited by Veronica Strang and Andrew Garner FEATURES Introduction to Special Issue. Fluidscapes: Water, Identity and the Senses Veronica Strang .................................................................................... 147 Substantial Connections: Water and Identity in an English Cultural Landscape Veronica…
A Happy Coincidence
Since the early development of their discipline anthropologists have attempted to develop theoretical models that elucidate the complexities of human being through a scientific comparison of differences. In recent decades, however, faced with critiques of the supposed white/male/European standpoint of anthropology and accusations of complicity with Western colonial hegemony, many practitioners have become uncertain about the comparative nature of…
Knowing Me, Knowing You
Based on long-term fieldwork with Aboriginal groups, Euro-Australian pastoralists and other land users in Far North Queensland, this paper considers the ways in which indigenous relations to land conflate concepts of Nature and the Self, enabling subjective identification with elements of the environment and supporting long-term affective relationships with place. It observes that indigenous cultural landscapes are deeply encoded with projections…
Going Against the Flow
Interactions with water are indicative not only of relationships between human groups but also of relationships with other species. In biopolitical economies few things express dominance over other species as clearly as damming and redirecting flows of water to give primacy to human needs. Yet despite growing opposition, dams—especially large ones—are still presented triumphantly, as symbols of successful nationhood and economic development. Buil…
Familiar Forms
Contestant la these selon laquelle la difference sexuelle constituerait une categorie culturelle homogene et integrale, l'A. propose de reconcilier les processus culturels et universels. Elle suggere qu'il existe une relation fondamentale entre la materialisation physique de la difference sexuelle et la creation de categories cognitives constitutives. Ces categories, basees sur une difference anatomique impregnant toutes les categories culturelle…
Lording It over the Goddess
This article considers critical transitions in the historical trajectories of most societies, from animistic and polytheistic 'nature religions' that venerated localised female, male and androgynous forces, to increasingly male-dominated and hierarchical belief systems valorising humanised and more distant religious figures.These transitions intersected with shifts from hunting and gathering to settlement and agriculture; changes in gender roles;…
On the Matter of Time
Drawing on several disciplinary areas, this article considers diverse cultural concepts of time, space, and materiality. It explores historical shifts in ideas about time, observing that these have gone full circle, from visions in which time and space were conflated, through increasingly divergent linear understandings of the relationship between them, to their reunion in contemporary notions of space-time.Making use of long-term ethnographic re…
Introduction to Special Issue
Human life is both literally and metaphorically unthinkable without water, which permeates and enlivens every form of human activity. Water is equally important for all living organisms, flowing through plants, animals and humans, through places, river systems and ocean currents, and through the entire hydrological cycle, where it constitutes a fundamental aspect of the weather and climate. For many people water epitomizes the connections and int…
The Summoning of Dragons
Living kindness
As environmental change and mass extinctions underline an urgent need to establish more humane relationships with non-human beings, there is a creative opportunity to reimagine concepts of kinship to promote the collective well-being of all living kinds. Anthropology draws on culturally diverse interspecies relations: some locate human and other species within distinctive and hierarchical categories, while others have more fluid and egalitarian n…
Relaciones infraestructurales
Ya han pasado sesenta años desde que Karl Wittfogel destacara una relación clave entre el poder político y la propiedad y el control del agua. Estudios posteriores han sugerido, en un sentido acorde, que la exclusión de la propiedad de recursos esenciales representa una forma profunda de exclusión -una pérdida de participación democrática en la dirección societaria-. Varios campos de desarrollo teórico han clarificado estos temas. Algunos antropó…
Substantial Connections
As a material substance, essential to every organic process, water literally constitutes human "being", providing a vital "natural symbol" of sociality and of human-environmental interdependence. Its particular qualities of fluidity and transmutability lend themselves to a stream of metaphors about flows and interconnections, and to ideas about spatio-temporal change and transformation. Moving constantly between internal and external environments…
The strong arm of the law
In the course of conducting fieldwork with Aboriginal people, anthropologists and archaeologists are finding, with increasing frequency, that some of their most important interactions are with the Rangers appointed by the communities to protect their interests. Whenever they can get the funding to do so, Aboriginal groups in Queensland are employing young or middle-aged men as 'Community Rangers' to represent them in negotiations with other group…
Boigu
Making Waves
Rejecting nature-culture dualism, contemporary anthropology recognises the mutually constitutive processes that create shared human and non-human lifeworlds. Such recognition owes much to ethnographic engagement with diverse indigenous cosmologies many of which have, for millennia, upheld ideas about indivisible worlds in which all living kinds occupy a shared ontological space and non-human species and environments are approached respectfully, w…
Pursuing Knowledge, Surviving Empire
Elemental Powers
Human societies have developed unique trajectories of engagement with their environments over time.Some of these long-term relationships contain more potential for sustainability than others.Early human societies worshipped 'nature beings', including water serpent deities who manifested the elemental and generative powers of water.Such beliefs supported collaborative and reciprocal efforts to co-exist respectfully with the non-human world: a form…
Special Module
This module for Involving Anthropology presents an account of one of the plenary debates held at the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (IUAES) World Congress held at Manchester University, 5-10 August 2013. The module begins with a brief introduction to provide the context for the debate, which included two speakers for (Amita Baviskar and Don Nonini) and two speakers against (Helen Kopnina and Veronica Strang) the …
Showing and Telling
This article draws upon landscape theory and studies of material culture to explore the process through which space is humanized, examining in particular how this process legitimizes moral rights to property. Drawing on ethnographic research in the Western Cape York Peninsula in Far North Queensland, it considers some of the performative, representational and material activities through which Aboriginal groups assert their claims to the land. The…
Boigu
Earthcare
The strong arm of the law
In the course of conducting fieldwork with Aboriginal people, anthropologists and archaeologists are finding, with increasing frequency, that some of their most important interactions are with the Rangers appointed by the communities to protect their interests. Whenever they can get the funding to do so, Aboriginal groups in Queensland are employing young or middle-aged men as 'Community Rangers' to represent them in negotiations with other group…
Uncommon Ground
Familiar Forms
Contestant la these selon laquelle la difference sexuelle constituerait une categorie culturelle homogene et integrale, l'A. propose de reconcilier les processus culturels et universels. Elle suggere qu'il existe une relation fondamentale entre la materialisation physique de la difference sexuelle et la creation de categories cognitives constitutives. Ces categories, basees sur une difference anatomique impregnant toutes les categories culturelle…
Showing and Telling
This article draws upon landscape theory and studies of material culture to explore the process through which space is humanized, examining in particular how this process legitimizes moral rights to property. Drawing on ethnographic research in the Western Cape York Peninsula in Far North Queensland, it considers some of the performative, representational and material activities through which Aboriginal groups assert their claims to the land. The…
Of Human Bondage
This article examines the cultural forms through which the young European‐Australian stockmen who work on the cattle stations of north Queensland are socialised. Exploring their interactions with a social and physical landscape and their rites of passage, as manifested in everyday actions, performance and material culture, it reveals how – and why – they are given little choice in acquiring values which are intensely adversarial to the land and t…
The meaning of water
Water is the most valuable resource and the most passionately contested. Drought has become an increasingly extreme problem in many parts of the world, and it is predicted that 60% of the major cities in Europe will run short of water in the next decade. In industrialized countries per capita water usage continues to rise intractably, despite strenuous efforts by environmentalists and resource managers to encourage conservation. Conflicts over wa…
Water Works
This paper outlines some of the theoretical developments in cultural anthropology that have been particularly useful in elucidating human engagements with land and resources. It examines some of the meanings and values encoded in water by a range of water using groups along the Mitchell River in northern Queensland, and their diverse ideas of what constitutes environmental ‘productivity’. Exploring some of the cultural and sub‐cultural beliefs an…
Knowing Me, Knowing You
Based on long-term fieldwork with Aboriginal groups, Euro-Australian pastoralists and other land users in Far North Queensland, this paper considers the ways in which indigenous relations to land conflate concepts of Nature and the Self, enabling subjective identification with elements of the environment and supporting long-term affective relationships with place. It observes that indigenous cultural landscapes are deeply encoded with projections…
Common Senses
This article is concerned with the relationship between sensory experience, material realities and the creation of cross-cultural meanings. Focused on water, it offers a comparison of two, highly diverse, ethnographic examples: one an Aboriginal community living alongside the Mitchell River in Far North Queensland, and the other describing the groups inhabiting a river valley in the south of England. It considers how engagements with water are ex…
Substantial Connections
As a material substance, essential to every organic process, water literally constitutes human "being", providing a vital "natural symbol" of sociality and of human-environmental interdependence. Its particular qualities of fluidity and transmutability lend themselves to a stream of metaphors about flows and interconnections, and to ideas about spatio-temporal change and transformation. Moving constantly between internal and external environments…
Fluidscapes
VOLUME 10 NUMBER 2 2006 Worldviews: Environment, Culture, Religion v o l . 1 0 n o . 2 2 0 0 6 B R I L L Special Issue: Fluidscapes Edited by Veronica Strang and Andrew Garner FEATURES Introduction to Special Issue. Fluidscapes: Water, Identity and the Senses Veronica Strang .................................................................................... 147 Substantial Connections: Water and Identity in an English Cultural Landscape Veronica…
A Happy Coincidence
Since the early development of their discipline anthropologists have attempted to develop theoretical models that elucidate the complexities of human being through a scientific comparison of differences. In recent decades, however, faced with critiques of the supposed white/male/European standpoint of anthropology and accusations of complicity with Western colonial hegemony, many practitioners have become uncertain about the comparative nature of…
Donald Thomson and the Freedom of Exclusion Donald Thomson
Reclaiming culture
Wellsprings of Belonging
This article considers how local communities in South Queensland make use of the cultural meanings encoded in water to articulate social connections and notions of belonging. Drawing on recent ethnographic research, it compares the activities of a community catchment group in Brisbane, and participants in a water festival in Maroochydore, exploring how each group engages creatively with local water sources to materialise particular beliefs and va…
Cosmopolitan Natures
Environmental management in Australia has recently shifted away from local rural communities into the hands of largely urban environmental and government agencies, sparking an intensifying contest for the control of land and resources between geographically and socially stable communities and more mobile translocal groups. There are major disjunctions between the conceptual models promulgated in this contest. Highly specific, holistic, and integr…
People and nature
Integrating the social and natural sciences in environmental research
Competing perceptions of landscape in Kowanyama, North Queensland
Environmental Social Sciences
The relationship between human communities and the environment is extremely complex. In order to resolve the issues involved with this relationship, interdisciplinary research combining natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities is necessary. In this 2010 book, specialists summarise methods and research strategies for various aspects of social research devoted to environmental issues. Each chapter is illustrated with ethnographic and envir…
The Summoning of Dragons
Representing Water
Este artigo baseia-se em pesquisa sobre representações visuais de seres aquáticos e sua capacidade de articular relacionamentos humano-ambientais. Seres aquáticos (como serpentes arco-íris e taniwhas) são relevantes em muitas cosmologias culturais diferentes, mais particularmente aquelas que se orientam no sentido de 'religiões da natureza', nas quais as paisagens terrestres e aquáticas são vistas como animadas por seres sensíveis. As análises de…
Water, Cultural Diversity, and Global Environmental Change
A product of the UNESCO-IHP project on Water and Cultural Diversity, this book represents an effort to examine the complex role water plays as a force in sustaining, maintaining, and threatening the viability of culturally diverse peoples. It is argued that water is a fundamental human need, a human right, and a core sustaining element in biodiversity and cultural diversity. The core concepts utilized in this book draw upon a larger trend in sust…
Sociology (39 works) · Political science (29 works) · Environmental ethics (25 works) · Geographies of human-animal interactions (23 works) · Geography (23 works) · Law (21 works) · Water Governance and Infrastructure (19 works) · Anthropology (14 works) · History (12 works) · History (12 works)