What is it about?
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. Focusing on human engagements with water, this paper considers how 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 contexts.
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Why is it important?
This paper shows how focusing on the materiality of water allows us to reconcile different theoretical approaches and to bring human and non-human systems together coherently. It shifts us away from a wholly anthropocentric view by recognising that persons, ideas and things work upon and compose each other in ways that are both fluid and consistent.
Perspectives
This paper generated a very lively and useful discussion/commentary, which provided me with much enjoyable food for thought. I hope it does the same for others.
Veronica Strang
Durham University
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This page is a summary of: Fluid consistencies. Material relationality in human engagements with water, Archaeological Dialogues, November 2014, Cambridge University Press,
DOI: 10.1017/s1380203814000130.
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