berghahn New York · Oxford

Contents

List of Figures
Acknowledgements

Introduction: Tracing Scales in Hydrosocial Relations
Veronica Strang and Franz Krause

Chapter 1. Waves, In Silico: Scale, Ocean Memory and Computer Memory in a Digital Model of Worldwide Waves
Stefan Helmreich

Chapter 2. Flux and Flows in the Waters of Yolngu Country, Northeast Arnhem Land: Reflections on Scale
Frances Morphy

Chapter 3. From Rivulet to Flood: African Water Beings on Minor and Major Scales
Veronica Strang

Chapter 4. Unsettling Ice: Building Roads and Betting on Break-Up in the Mackenzie Delta
Franz Krause

Chapter 5. The Arts of Streaming Central Asian River Life
Jeanne Féaux de la Croix

Chapter 6. From Local to Virtual Water: The Industrialization of Underground Water During the Nitrate Mining Boom in the Tarapacá Region, Atacama Desert (1810–1930)
Manuel Méndez

Conclusion: Ways of Scaling Water
Franz Krause and Veronica Strang

Afterword: Reflections on Scale Inside and Outside Anthropology
Howard Morphy

Index

Water, Scale and Materiality

Anthropological Perspectives on Hydrosocial Relations

Edited by Veronica Strang and Franz Krause

Afterword by Howard Morphy

208 pages, 41 illus., bibliog., index

ISBN 978-1-83695-485-9 Hb Published (May 2026)

web ISBN 978-1-83695-487-3

Details

“An ambitious and promising contribution to the theoretical and methodological development of the anthropology of water.” • Ina Dietzsch, Institut für Empirische Kulturwissenschaft

Anthropology has an important role in articulating people’s engagements with water at different spatial and temporal scales, and in showing how local relationships with waterways and marine areas translate into larger anthropogenic impacts on regional and global ecosystems. This volume explores diverse relationships with waterbodies, and considers how these are expressed in art, material culture and infrastructures. Focusing on the multiple and overlapping scales at which people relate to water in contexts including wave science, Indigenous cosmology, extractive industries and environmental activism, it suggests that efforts to achieve more sustainable and equitable engagements with water must also be multi-scalar.

Veronica Strang is a cultural anthropologist with a longstanding interest in societies’ engagements with water. Following a decade as the Director of Durham University's Institute of Advanced Study, she is now affiliated to the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography at the University of Oxford.

Franz Krause is an anthropologist interested in the role of water in society and culture. As Professor of Environmental Anthropology, he works at the Multidisciplinary Environmental Studies in the Humanities (MESH) research hub, at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology and the Global South Studies Center, University of Cologne, Germany.

Series: Volume 36, Environmental Anthropology and Ethnobiology

Subject: Anthropology (General) Environmental Studies (General)

Area:

BISAC: SOC002010 SOCIAL SCIENCE/Anthropology/Cultural & Social; BUS072000 BUSINESS & ECONOMICS/Development/Sustainable Development; NAT010000 NATURE/Ecology