Waterworlds ─ Anthropology in Fluid Environments

In one form or another, water participates in the making and unmaking of people's lives, practices, and stories. Contributors' detailed ethnographic work analyzes the union and mutual shaping of water and social lives. This volume discusses current ecological disturbances and engages in a world where unbounded relationalities and unsettled frames of orientation mark the lives of all, anthropologists included. Water emerges as a fluid object in more senses than one, challenging anthropologists to foreground the mutable character of their objects of study and to responsibly engage with the generative role of cultural analysis.

Kirsten Hastrup is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Copenhagen. She received an ERC Advanced Grant in 2008, enabling the collaborative research project Waterworlds (2009-2014). Among her publications are three monographs based on her work on long-term natural and social histories in Iceland. Since then she has worked in Greenland and published many edited volumes such as Anthropology and Nature (2014).