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Introduction.

Article Excerpt
In Australia, as in many other parts of the world, there is a growing realisation that freshwater resources are finite and cannot support unlimited growth and development. Intensifying economic practices have led to the degradation of major aquatic ecosystems, while simultaneously creating conflicts between water using groups. Urban communities now compete with irrigators for water resources; environmentalists are increasingly concerned that ecosystems are being starved of sufficient aquatic flows; governments are struggling to find ways to contain conflicts and meet the demands of different constituencies.

This collection of articles brings an anthropological perspective to bear on a series of competitions for the control and management of water resources. The case studies examine the way that social, economic and environmental pressures are dealt with in different ethnographic contexts. In doing so, they consider broader questions about social and political power, human engagements with (and through) material resources, and an eternal tension between aspirations for communality and competitive advantage. These issues are elucidated through ethnographic case studies from several geographic areas, including Australia, Papua New Guinea and East Timor.

The case studies engage with several areas of anthropological literature: in particular, work concerned with human-environmental relationships in general; cognitive and sensory interactions with environments; the construction of cultural landscapes and waterscapes; cosmological models and religious beliefs and practices; concepts of social identity and pollution; water as attachment to place; and the political economy of resource ownership and management.

Being the most vital of resources, fundamental to human and ecological well-being, water is invariably central in human-environmental relationships. This centrality, and its irreducible fluidity, mean that water is encoded with powerful themes of cross-cultural meaning: as the essence of life; as the source of human and environmental regeneration; as the basis for wealth and health (see Bachelard 1994; Douglas 1973; Rothenberg and Ulvaeus 2001; and Strang 2004, 2005). The case studies show that, while these broad themes recur in diverse cultural and sub-cultural contexts, they are very differently interpreted and prioritised.

Water is the lifeblood of processes of production and of human abilities to acquire agency and to act upon the 'natural' world. It is thus an integral aspect of every cultural landscape and waterscape, and engagements with it are shaped by...