We use cookies to improve your website experience. To learn about our use of cookies and how you can manage your cookie settings, please see our Cookie Policy. By closing this message, you are consenting to our use of cookies.

Rising Tides: Water Beings as Agents of Change in Environmental Activism

  • 10/12/2024
  • 18:00-19:30
  • online talk

Rising Tides: Water beings as agents of change in environmental activism

A Folklore Society online talk

by Veronica Strang

Tuesday 10 December 2024, 18:00 GMT

In early human history, when all societies worshipped ‘nature’, serpentine deities personifying the powers of water had central roles in stories of cosmic origin, and in beliefs about how life was generated and cyclically renewed. Creating social and material order, bringing consciousness and enlightenment, and providing the laws that governed societies, water beings exemplified the co-creative role of the non-human domain. In many indigenous societies such beings are still venerated, upholding collaborative partnerships with non-human beings and ecosystems.

However, a major comparative study exploring the role of aquatic deities in different cultural and historical contexts (Strang 2023) has shown that, as larger societies embarked upon more instrumental trajectories of development, their narratives about supernatural divinities changed, reflecting increasingly exploitative beliefs and practices. In a key pattern of religious change, water beings and other non-human deities were humanised or superseded by human gods; demonised; or relegated to the (putatively) ‘harmless’ category of folklore. Highlighting the social and environmental implications of this disempowerment, this talk considers the new and potentially transformative role of water beings in contemporary environmental activism. Deployed in the political arena, they articulate important critiques of unsustainable lifeways, support non-human rights, and promote more reciprocal models of human-non-human engagement.

Professor Veronica Strang is a cultural anthropologist in the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, University of Oxford. Her work is concerned with human-environmental relations, in particular societies’ engagements with water. She has worked at the Pitt Rivers Museum and Oxford University’s Environmental Change Unit; the University of Wales; Goldsmiths University; the University of Auckland, and Durham University, and has served as the Chair of the Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and the Commonwealth.

Tickets £6.00 (£4.00 for Folklore Society members with the Promo Code–log in to the Members Only area to find the Promo Code) from https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/rising-tides-water-beings-as-agents-of-change-in-environmental-activism-tickets-1044040642667

Note to iPhone/iPad users: in-app ticket purchases via the Eventbrite application is not possible on Apple devices, so to purchase a ticket, please paste the Eventbrite link into your browser.

Every ticket sold helps to support the work of The Folklore Society

Image: Composite: Left: Pagoda in Saigon, Vietnam; photo Veronica Strang. Right: cover of Veronica Strang’s book Water Beings (2023)