RESEARCH
Environmental Anthropology is a broad field, and water flows into every part of it. My research interests have ‘gone with the flow’ into a number of areas:
CURRENT PROJECTS
Long term trajectories in human-environmental relationships
Societies’ interactions with their environments develop over many centuries, and some are more sustainable than others. The major global trend has been towards unsustainable patterns of growth and development, much critiqued by indigenous communities and social and ecological counter-movements. Climate change and a global crisis in water security has brought wider realisation that a radical change of direction is needed. To achieve this, we need to understand how people’s relationships with the non-human world are shaped by particular socio-political arrangements. With this in mind I have been conducting, for a number of years, a major comparative study of diverse beliefs in water beings, and how changing ideas about them reflect key shifts in societies’ beliefs and values in relation to water, nature and culture.
I recently completed a major volume entitled Water Beings: from nature worship to the current environmental crisis (Reaktion Books 2023). I have also been discussing with various international museums the potential for exhibitions on this topic, and have brought this research into collaborations with art groups in Paris, Copenhagen, Bergen and Dorset.
Non-human rights and sustainability
Much of my research is concerned with issues of sustainability, and it has been greatly influenced by the diverse cultural perspectives with which I have been fortunate enough to engage. Anthropological theoretical developments owe much to the people with whom we collaborate, and this is celebrated, for example, in ‘A Happy Coincidence? Symbiosis and synthesis in Anthropological and Indigenous knowledges’ (Current Anthropology, 2006), and in Water, Cultural Diversity and Global Environmental Change: emerging trends, sustainable futures? (UNESCO/Springer 2012).
Anthropological work on sustainability generally focuses on human well-being but, sharing others’ dismay about the mass non-human extinctions that we are also witnessing, I have become increasingly involved in debates within and beyond the discipline about the need to establish non-human rights or ‘rights for Nature’, and to rethink concepts of sustainability so that non-human needs and interests are not continually overridden. This debate is explored in ‘The Rights of the River: water, culture and ecological justice’, in Conservation: integrating social and ecological justice, (Kopnina and Washington, Springer 2020), and in ‘The Gaia Complex: ethical challenges to an anthropocentric ‘common future’’, in The Anthropology of Sustainability (Palgrave 2017). I am in the process of taking these ideas forward and linking them with the related work (below) on pan-species democracy.
Re-imagined communities and pan-species democracy
I have also been developing for several years an idea about ‘re-imagined communities’: a new theorisation of sustainability that aims to reconcile dualistic categories of culture and nature, and to give a democratic ‘voice’ in decision-making to the non-human beings equally dependent upon water flows and healthy ecosystems. These ideas are outlined in ‘Re-Imagined Communities: the transformational potential of interspecies ethnography in water policy development’ (The Oxford Handbook on Water Politics and Policy, OUP 2017). I am currently working with colleagues in the water industry to consider how we might bring this new way of thinking into the water sector. A practical vision for the future is proposed in ‘A Sustainable Future for Water’, (Aqua: Journal of the International Water Association, 2021).
Intercultural and interdisciplinary exchanges of knowledge
Articulating the needs and interests of non-human species and ecosystems requires a diverse range of expertise. It is now generally recognised that environmental issues require interdisciplinary approaches and, increasingly, that diverse cultural perspectives also provide new ideas. This recognition has been evident in my recent
Collaborative work with the United Nations High Level Panel on Water, in which I provided a report, Valuing the Cultural and Spiritual Dimensions of Water, and assisted the panel in developing some new Principles for Water strengthening the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (2017).
Having led Durham University’s Institute of Advanced Study from 2012-2021, I also have a strand of research concerned with the reflexive understanding of interdisciplinarity itself: what it means, and what enables (or obstructs) collaboration across disciplines. I am currently working on a couple of reflexive projects: a joint endeavour with historians and museum curators to consider the development of disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity since the Victorian era; and work to develop a training programme assisting academics to engage in interdisciplinary research.
Thinking (and feeling) with water
People’s interactions with water are rarely just utilitarian. Water mesmerises and enchants, and provides powerfully affective sensory and aesthetic experiences. It permeates not just material bodies and environments, but the mind and the heart. People across cultures, and through time, have used water to imagine concepts of time and flow, and the movement of the spirit through material and non-material domains. Curiosity about how people think with water and encode it with powerful meanings led to an ethnographic study of the River Stour in Dorset, described in The Meaning of Water (Berg 2004), and ‘Common Senses: water, sensory experience and the generation of meaning’ (Journal of Material Culture 2005).
I am currently working on an interdisciplinary article focusing on people’s affective engagements with water and light, exploring human responses to their material properties, and how, particularly in combination, they evoke ‘wonder’. The paper draws on ideas from both evolutionary anthropology and cultural anthropology/material culture studies. It considers the evolution of vision, and pan-human responses to movement, colour, and ‘shine’, while also drawing comparatively on ethnographic case studies with Aboriginal communities in northern Australia, and with the inhabitants of the Stour Valley in the southern UK.
Material agency, infrastructure, and the control of water
Water is not a passive object upon which humans act: it brings its own material properties to the equation in ways that range from reliable and beneficial to volatile and destructive. I have retained a long-term interest in ‘how things mean’ and am currently working on a piece that considers how materials such as stone and water are used to express ideas about stability and volatility in people’s imaginative and practical efforts to manage their relationships with water.
The infrastructures through which societies seek to control such relationships manifest their values in relation to water and to the environment. The importance of major water infrastructures in creating nations is explored in ‘Materialising the State: the meaning of water infrastructure’ in a recent ASA Monograph Shifting States (Bloomsbury 2020). There are also major issues raised by the transnational ownership of water, and control over water flows, considered in ‘Infrastructural Relations: water, political power and the rise of a new ‘despotic regime’ (Water Alternatives 2019).
LONG TERM RESEARCH INTERESTS
Cultural land and waterscapes
My doctoral research focused on a comparative study involving indigenous people and European cattle farmers in the Australian outback. I had previously worked on a stock team at a cattle station on the Mitchell River in Cape York, and this provided ideal ‘street cred’ when it came to exploring how these groups created very different relationships with the same material environment. The research was published as Uncommon Ground: cultural landscapes and environmental values (Berg 1997).
Ownership and rights
Ethnographic research with indigenous Australians led naturally to involvement in issues of land and water ownership. The Native Title Act in 1993 opened the door to Aboriginal land claims, which needed precisely the kind of cultural mapping work that I had done previously with communities in Cape York and which I continued with a Royal Anthropological Institute Fellowship in 2000. The Alice-Mitchell National Park was returned to its traditional owners in 2009, and Native Title rights were recognised over the community’s Deed of Grant in Trust area and contiguous pastoral holdings in 2014.
A move to New Zealand in 2002 led to similar endeavours with Māori iwis in relation to water rights. This work is described in ‘The Taniwha and the Crown: defending water rights in Aotearoa/New Zealand’ (WIRES Water 2014). In 2008, with my colleague Mark Busse, I co-convened a major international conference on Ownership and Appropriation, and co-edited an ASA monograph of the same title (Berg 2011).
In 2022 I provided an expert report for an Australian Federal case in which the traditional owners in the Tiwi Islands took on a major multinational, Santos, to prevent them drilling into a nearby reef comprising part of their ‘sea country’.
Agency and identity
The ownership, control and use of water is integral to the way that different groups seek to express social agency and compose their identities. The award of an ARC Discovery Grant, to myself and an Australian colleague, Sandy Toussaint, supported a major study of four Australian rivers. As well as returning to the Mitchell River in Cape York I chose an urban comparison, the Brisbane River, to encompass a wider range of water using groups. Their diverse engagements with water, and the values these promote, are described in Gardening the World: agency, identity and the ownership of water (Berghahn 2009).
