This special issue explores the materialities, (im)mobilities and meanings of dwelling on and with water by asking how is water experienced, narrated, and understood. Water’s physical qualities both afford mobility and create frictions, thus complicating the boundaries between moving and staying, while waterscapes are also full of political, socio-cultural, and metaphorical meanings. Dwelling on water presents a challenge to overwhelmingly sedentary states and their terra-centric logics, which compels us to further discuss water both in a phenomenological and a political manner. This special issue suggests avenues for studying dwelling on and with water by examining various practices of being on water with their related meanings as well as with(out) water in terms of water scarcity, thus underlining the need for an anthropology of water.
COBISS.SI-ID: 45584429
Melanesian mythology, which also defines people’s lives in the present, reveals how different features of their landscape and waterscape were created. Emplaced events are remembered and retold in myths of origin, local legends and ordinary daily stories, commemorated in songs and invoked in carvings, dances, rituals, and everyday practices. People’s rights to use water resources are for the people as important as the rights to use the land. Different practices are not simply a reflection of their landscape and waterscape – and the life-world therein – they actually generate it. Landscape and waterscape are never fully formed, but require the continuous action of humans and non-humans to manage their fluid characteristics. In this chapter the author explores the many ways in which such action is performed among different Melanesian societies including those, which due to the unexpected impact of the mining industry have come to realize that they are not in charge of their landscape and waterscape anymore.
COBISS.SI-ID: 44765741
The chapter addresses the various meanings of Europe as expressed in people’s daily conversations in Albania as well as in the media and political discourses on the EU accession. It discusses the ways in which people define themselves in view of geographically, politically, and historically shifting borders. The chapter is important for its conceptualisation of the future which is generated on the structural resemblances of the past. The past is spilling over to the future which is predestined and pre-defined with the kinship and other social ties. This conceptualisation of the future is important for the understanding the water futures in Albania.
COBISS.SI-ID: 44143917