Download or read book Water Culture and Identity written by Terje Oestigaard and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Water Power and Identity written by Rutgerd Boelens and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-04-10 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book addresses two major issues in natural resource management and political ecology: the complex conflicting relationship between communities managing water on the ground and national/global policy-making institutions and elites; and how grassroots defend against encroachment, question the self-evidence of State-/market-based water governance, and confront coercive and participatory boundary policing (‘normal’ vs. ‘abnormal’). The book examines grassroots building of multi-layered water-rights territories, and State, market and expert networks’ vigorous efforts to reshape these water societies in their own image – seizing resources and/or aligning users, identities and rights systems within dominant frameworks. Distributive and cultural politics entwine. It is shown that attempts to modernize and normalize users through universalized water culture, ‘rational water use’ and de-politicized interventions deepen water security problems rather than alleviating them. However, social struggles negotiate and enforce water rights. User collectives challenge imposed water rights and identities, constructing new ones to strategically acquire water control autonomy and re-moralize their waterscapes. The author shows that battles for material control include the right to culturally define and politically organize water rights and territories. Andean illustrations from Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia and Chile, from peasant-indigenous life stories to international policy-making, highlight open and subsurface hydro-social networks. They reveal how water justice struggles are political projects against indifference, and that engaging in re-distributive policies and defying ‘truth politics,’ extends context-particular water rights definitions and governance forms.
Download or read book Undercurrents of Power written by Kevin Dawson and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2021-05-07 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kevin Dawson considers how enslaved Africans carried aquatic skills—swimming, diving, boat making, even surfing—to the Americas. Undercurrents of Power not only chronicles the experiences of enslaved maritime workers, but also traverses the waters of the Atlantic repeatedly to trace and untangle cultural and social traditions.
Download or read book Out of the Mainstream written by Rutgerd Boelens and published by Earthscan. This book was released on 2010 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Water is not only a source of life and culture. It is also a source of power, conflicting interests and identity battles. Rights to materially access, culturally organize and politically control water resources are poorly understood by mainstream scientific approaches and hardly addressed by current normative frameworks. These issues become even more challenging when law and policy-makers and dominant power groups try to grasp, contain and handle them in multicultural societies. The struggles over the uses, meanings and appropriation of water are especially well-illustrated in Andean communities and local water systems of Peru, Chile, Ecuador, and Bolivia, as well as in Native American communities in south-western USA. The problem is that throughout history, these nation-states have attempted to 'civilize' and bring into the mainstream the different cultures and peoples within their borders instead of understanding 'context' and harnessing the strengths and potentials of diversity. This book examines the multi-scale struggles for cultural justice and socio-economic re-distribution that arise as Latin American communities and user federations seek access to water resources and decision-making power regarding their control and management. It is set in the dynamic context of unequal, globalizing power relations, politics of scale and identity, environmental encroachment and the increasing presence of extractive industries that are creating additional pressures on local livelihoods. While much of the focus of the book is on the Andean Region, a number of comparative chapters are also included. These address issues such as water rights and defence strategies in neighbouring countries and those of Native American people in the southern USA, as well as state reform and multi-culturalism across Latin and Native America and the use of international standards in struggles for indigenous water rights. This book shows that, against all odds, people are actively contesting neoliberal globalization and water power plays. In doing so, they construct new, hybrid water rights systems, livelihoods, cultures and hydro-political networks, and dynamically challenge the mainstream powers and politics."--Publisher's description.
Download or read book Water Culture and Power written by John M. Donahue and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume presents a series of case studies from around the world that examine the complex culture and power dimensions of water resources and management. Chapters describe highly contentious cases that span the continuum of concerns from dam construction and hydroelectric power generation to water quality and potable water systems. They address the values and meanings associated with water and how changes in power result in changes both in meaning and in patterns of use, access, and control.
Download or read book The Color of Water written by James McBride and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2012-03-01 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the New York Times bestselling author of Deacon King Kong and The Good Lord Bird, winner of the National Book Award for Fiction: The modern classic that Oprah.com calls one of the best memoirs of a generation and that launched James McBride's literary career. More than two years on The New York Times bestseller list. As a boy in Brooklyn's Red Hook projects, James McBride knew his mother was different. But when he asked her about it, she'd simply say 'I'm light-skinned.' Later he wondered if he was different too, and asked his mother if he was black or white. 'You're a human being! Educate yourself or you'll be a nobody!' she snapped back. And when James asked about God, she told him 'God is the color of water.' This is the remarkable story of an eccentric and determined woman: a rabbi's daughter, born in Poland and raised in the Deep South who fled to Harlem, married a black preacher, founded a Baptist church and put twelve children through college. A celebration of resilience, faith and forgiveness, The Color of Water is an eloquent exploration of what family really means.
Download or read book Cultural Dynamics of Water in Iranian Civilization written by Majid Labbaf Khaneiki and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-09-23 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book traces “water” back to the most primitive animistic notions that are still lingering on in the shape of such rituals as qanat marriage or rain-making. Water, in the Iranian philosophy, is used in an attempt to find an explanation for the genesis of the universe, as described in Zoroastrian Akhshij philosophy, according to which water is one of the four fundamental elements of the creation. The concept of time began to germinate in the Iranian mind, when they had to count the passage of time in order to divide their scarce water resources. Water became so omnipresent in Iranian culture that it reached even the most mysterious seclusion of the Sufi monks. In Iran’s local communities, water culture is a thread that runs through different types of production systems. This book goes beyond indigenous water knowledge and traditional irrigation techniques, and conceptualizes water as a pivotal element of Iran’s social identity, cultural dynamics and belief systems, where it examines the role of intermittent droughts in engendering and diffusing intangible cultural elements across the Iranian plateau. This book delves into Iran’s political organizations most of which were ensnared in a water-dependent lifecycle constituting a historical pattern described in this book as “hydraulic collapse” .
Download or read book Water Cultural Diversity and Global Environmental Change written by Barbara Rose Johnston and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2011-12-07 with total page 594 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Co-published with UNESCO A product of the UNESCO-IHP project on Water and Cultural Diversity, this book represents an effort to examine the complex role water plays as a force in sustaining, maintaining, and threatening the viability of culturally diverse peoples. It is argued that water is a fundamental human need, a human right, and a core sustaining element in biodiversity and cultural diversity. The core concepts utilized in this book draw upon a larger trend in sustainability science, a recognition of the synergism and analytical potential in utilizing a coupled biological and social systems analysis, as the functioning viability of nature is both sustained and threatened by humans.
Download or read book The Social Life of Water written by John R. Wagner and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2013-08-01 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Everywhere in the world communities and nations organize themselves in relation to water. We divert water from rivers, lakes, and aquifers to our homes, workplaces, irrigation canals, and hydro-generating stations. We use it for bathing, swimming, recreation, and it functions as a symbol of purity in ritual performances. In order to facilitate and manage our relationship with water, we develop institutions, technologies, and cultural practices entirely devoted to its appropriation and distribution, and through these institutions we construct relations of class, gender, ethnicity, and nationality. Relying on first-hand ethnographic research, the contributors to this volume examine the social life of water in diverse settings and explore the impacts of commodification, urbanization, and technology on the availability and quality of water supplies. Each case study speaks to a local set of issues, but the overall perspective is global, with representation from all continents.
Download or read book The Struggle for Water written by Wendy Nelson Espeland and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1998-09 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nearly fifty years ago, the Bureau of Reclamation proposed building a dam at the confluence of two rivers in Central Arizona. While the dam would bring valuable water to this arid plain, it would also destroy a wildlife habitat, flood archaeological sites, and force the Yavapai Indians off their ancestral home. The Struggle for Water is not only the fascinating story of this controversial and ultimately thwarted public works project but also a study of rationality as a cultural, organizational, and political construct. In the 1970s, the three groups most intimately involved in the Orme Dam—younger Bureau of Reclamation employees committed to "rational choice" decision making, older Bureau engineers committed to the dam, and the Yavapai community—all found themselves and their values transformed by their struggles. Wendy Nelson Espeland lays bare the relations between interests and identities that emerged during the conflict, creating a contemporary tale of power and colonization, bureaucracies and democratic practice, that asks the crucial question of what it means to be "rational."
Download or read book The Cultural Dynamics in Water Management from Ancient History to the Present Age written by Xiao Yun Zheng and published by IWA Publishing. This book was released on 2021-05-15 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Cultural Dynamics in Water Management from Ancient History to the Present Age focuses on exploring the idea of water culture and how water culture has been generated from water management and social life. It discusses the structure, attribute, type, and the dynamic mechanism of water culture theoretically. It also deals with its diversity and practice in water management with cases from twelve countries, geographically covering most continents of the world. This book is divided into five main sections which include the theoretical discussion of water culture, the historical water culture, the water culture and water management in indigenous societies, the cultural role in local water management, the water cultural practice in the present age using the case of water museum, etc. It is based on a historical and geographical approach to exploring the cultural dynamics in water management. It shows how people abide by their culture to manage water in ancient society and in indigenous, local, social, and urban society. This helps to provide an in-depth understanding of the cultural dynamics in water management to bridge the cultural idea of water management from history to the present and to the future. This book highlights that technical and engineered ways are not enough to solve water problems and achieve water sustainable management if we neglect the cultural dynamic role. Successful water management is always based on the culture from history and this is likely to continue so as to achieve better water management.
Download or read book Gardening the World written by Veronica Strang and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2009-08-01 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Around the world, intensifying development and human demands for fresh water are placing unsustainable pressures on finite resources. Countries are waging war over transboundary rivers, and rural and urban communities are increasingly divided as irrigation demands compete with domestic desires. Marginal groups are losing access to water as powerful elites protect their own interests, and entire ecosystems are being severely degraded. These problems are particularly evident in Australia, with its industrialised economy and arid climate. Yet there have been relatively few attempts to examine the social and cultural complexities that underlie people's engagements with water. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in two major Australian river catchments (the Mitchell River in Cape York, and the Brisbane River in southeast Queensland), this book examines their major water using and managing groups: indigenous communities, farmers, industries, recreational and domestic water users, and environmental organisations. It explores the issues that shape their different beliefs, values and practices in relation to water, and considers the specifically cultural or sub-cultural meanings that they encode in their material surroundings. Through an analysis of each group's diverse efforts to 'garden the world', it provides insights into the complexities of human-environmental relationships.
Download or read book How Water Makes Us Human written by Luci Attala and published by University of Wales Press. This book was released on 2019-04-01 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a novel cross-disciplinary approach to water, demonstrating the role water plays in shaping human lives. It uses anthropological information about water in Kenya, Wales and Spain to show how what water does in those areas has influenced the way that people can be with it.
Download or read book Art and Identity at the Water s Edge written by Tricia Cusack and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2012 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection shows how the marginal territory of the water's edge has been represented in art in different places at various times and how such art contributed to the formation of cultural and national identities. Essays explore visual cultures of the Jordan and Vltava Rivers; the South African seaside resort of Durban; post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans; and the French Riviera, among other margins of river and sea.
Download or read book Water Power and Identity written by Rutgerd Boelens and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-04-10 with total page 389 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book addresses two major issues in natural resource management and political ecology: the complex conflicting relationship between communities managing water on the ground and national/global policy-making institutions and elites; and how grassroots defend against encroachment, question the self-evidence of State-/market-based water governance, and confront coercive and participatory boundary policing (‘normal’ vs. ‘abnormal’). The book examines grassroots building of multi-layered water-rights territories, and State, market and expert networks’ vigorous efforts to reshape these water societies in their own image – seizing resources and/or aligning users, identities and rights systems within dominant frameworks. Distributive and cultural politics entwine. It is shown that attempts to modernize and normalize users through universalized water culture, ‘rational water use’ and de-politicized interventions deepen water security problems rather than alleviating them. However, social struggles negotiate and enforce water rights. User collectives challenge imposed water rights and identities, constructing new ones to strategically acquire water control autonomy and re-moralize their waterscapes. The author shows that battles for material control include the right to culturally define and politically organize water rights and territories. Andean illustrations from Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia and Chile, from peasant-indigenous life stories to international policy-making, highlight open and subsurface hydro-social networks. They reveal how water justice struggles are political projects against indifference, and that engaging in re-distributive policies and defying ‘truth politics,’ extends context-particular water rights definitions and governance forms.
Download or read book Adaptive Strategies for Water Heritage written by Carola Hein and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2019-10-18 with total page 435 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Open Access book, building on research initiated by scholars from the Leiden-Delft-Erasmus Centre for Global Heritage and Development (CHGD) and ICOMOS Netherlands, presents multidisciplinary research that connects water to heritage. Through twenty-one chapters it explores landscapes, cities, engineering structures and buildings from around the world. It describes how people have actively shaped the course, form and function of water for human settlement and the development of civilizations, establishing socio-economic structures, policies and cultures; a rich world of narratives, laws and practices; and an extensive network of infrastructure, buildings and urban form. The book is organized in five thematic sections that link practices of the past to the design of the present and visions of the future: part I discusses drinking water management; part II addresses water use in agriculture; part III explores water management for land reclamation and defense; part IV examines river and coastal planning; and part V focuses on port cities and waterfront regeneration. Today, the many complex systems of the past are necessarily the basis for new systems that both preserve the past and manage water today: policy makers and designers can work together to recognize and build on the traditional knowledge and skills that old structure embody. This book argues that there is a need for a common agenda and an integrated policy that addresses the preservation, transformation and adaptive reuse of historic water-related structures. Throughout, it imagines how such efforts will help us develop sustainable futures for cities, landscapes and bodies of water.
Download or read book Island Rivers written by John R. Wagner and published by ANU Press. This book was released on 2018-06-19 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anthropologists have written a great deal about the coastal adaptations and seafaring traditions of Pacific Islanders, but have had much less to say about the significance of rivers for Pacific island culture, livelihood and identity. The authors of this collection seek to fill that gap in the ethnographic record by drawing attention to the deep historical attachments of island communities to rivers, and the ways in which those attachments are changing in response to various forms of economic development and social change. In addition to making a unique contribution to Pacific island ethnography, the authors of this volume speak to a global set of issues of immense importance to a world in which water scarcity, conflict, pollution and the degradation of riparian environments afflict growing numbers of people. Several authors take a political ecology approach to their topic, but the emphasis here is less on hydro-politics than on the cultural meaning of rivers to the communities we describe. How has the cultural significance of rivers shifted as a result of colonisation, development and nation-building? How do people whose identities are fundamentally rooted in their relationship to a particular river renegotiate that relationship when the river is dammed to generate hydro-power or polluted by mining activities? How do blockages in the flow of rivers and underground springs interrupt the intergenerational transmission of local ecological knowledge and hence the ability of local communities to construct collective identities rooted in a sense of place?
