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COMMON SENSES
Water, Sensory Experience and the Generation of Meaning
◆ V E R O N I CA S T R A N G
Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand
Abstract
This article is concerned with the relationship between sensory experience,
material realities and the creation of cross-cultural meanings. Focused on
water, it offers a comparison of two, highly diverse, ethnographic examples:
one an Aboriginal community living alongside the Mitchell River in Far
North Queensland, and the other describing the groups inhabiting a river
valley in the south of England. It considers how engagements with water
are experienced and interpreted within these specific cultural contexts.
Drawing on theoretical developments from studies of art and material
culture, analyses of cross-cultural aesthetics, and accounts of how meanings
are encoded in natural objects, it describes the formal qualities of water and
human interactions with these. It suggests that two important ‘universali-
ties’ – the particular qualities of water, and the physiological and cognitive
processes that are common to all human beings – generate cross-cultural
themes of meaning that persist over time and space. Thus the ethnographic
analysis provides the basis for a discussion about the relationship between
universal and cultural experiences, contributing to the critique of cultural
relativism and suggesting a need for anthropological theory to recall its
comparative foundations.
INTRODUCTION
One of the long-term debates that has enlivened anthropology is the
extent to which scholars are willing or able to entertain ideas about
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human beings never experience ‘raw’ instincts: even hunger and sexual
drives always appear in consciousness transformed and interpreted through
the network of signs one has learned from one’s culture. (Csikzentmihalyi
and Rochberg-Halton, 1981: 5)
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COMMON SENSES
The most obvious reality about water is that it is as essential to the
human body as it is to all living organisms, large and small. In a very
immediate sense, therefore, humans share an experience of water as the
substance that is most vital to their continued existence. At an individual
level, they cannot survive for more than a few hours without ingesting
and incorporating it. On a daily basis they are therefore confronted with
inescapable evidence that it is integral to their own bodies, and consti-
tutes the major part of their substance. In some cultural groups this is
stated explicitly: for example, in the Dorset research cited here, every
person interviewed was fully aware that the human body is largely
composed of water and indeed many overestimated the percentage of
water.3 As one woman put it:
People do love water don’t they? Perhaps it’s an inborn thing, knowing that it’s
so vital to our life. I don’t know – we feel part of it don’t we. You feel at one with
water don’t you. (Beryl Coward)
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Maybe it’s something to do with the womb – maybe it’s something we come into
this world with. A lot of people do seem to take to water, or enjoy it that way.
It’s very soothing to have water in the garden isn’t it? . . . It just seems to be a
soothing thing to hear water running. It’s a natural sound, and to stay at still
water, or a slowly flowing river, it’s a very calming thing. (Colin Marsh)
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whether it was exciting (as in waterfalls) or soft and lulling – this was
described as invigorating, relaxing, meditative or hypnotic.
The magic of waterfalls, there’s one you go to, and you feel good, that’s great.
(Bing Spencer)
Even if I am only watching the waves coming in and out, I just seem to get lost
in it, and its restless energy . . . the process, just being at one with the elements
I suppose, at one with nature. (Richard Lacey)
AN ANTIPODEAN ANALYSIS
The examples offered here have both been the focus of long-term ethno-
graphic research into human–environmental interaction, and they
provide a usefully disparate comparison. The first cultural context is
provided by Kowanyama, an Aboriginal community in northern
Australia, on the western coast of the Cape York Peninsula in Far North
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F I G U R E 2 Ikow, a sacred site at the junction of the Alice and Mitchell Rivers
in Far North Queensland.
Photo: the author
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surface the way that, in every language, water provides an endless well
of metaphorical imagery that people use to describe process and change
in every aspect of their lives. As Lakoff and Johnson’s work has made
clear (1980), water is the ultimate metaphor of fluidity. And as Illich says:
‘The water we seek is the fluid that drenches the inner and outer spaces
of the imagination . . . water has a nearly unlimited ability to carry
metaphors’ (1986: 24). Given the omnipresence of water in so many
aspects of life, there is a vast amount of material to consider. The follow-
ing section can only summarize some of the major themes and offer a few
illustrative comparisons.
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All Indo-Germanic pilgrims – Greek, Indic, Nordic and Celtic – cross the
same funereal landscape on their way to the beyond, and the mythical
hydrology on that route is the same: at the end of their journey they reach
a body of water. This water separates two worlds: it divides the present from
the past into which the dead move. (1986: 30)
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of ‘the goddess’ or ‘Mother Earth’ provide the impetus – and the imagery
– for many local water rituals.
There are many sacred sites to consider in the Antipodean ethnog-
raphy, and the vast majority of them are water sources of one kind or
another. In Kowanyama, Aboriginal ideas about the human life cycle are
conceptualized on a less abstract scale, being located in the immediate
landscape. According to local beliefs (which also carry a more recent
overlay of Christianity) spirit children generated by the ancestral forces
held within the landscape ‘jump up’ from the water and enliven the
foetus in a woman’s womb. Each individual’s spirit thus emerges from
a particular water source, and must be returned to this source when the
person dies, to be reunited with the pool of ancestral forces (Figure 6).
As one elder explained, his spirit would be returned home:
My home, errk elampungk10 . . . Go back to same place. Go back there . . . home
bla we again.11 Where him born, you know. (Lefty Yam)
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the ‘great sink’ that is the sea of spiritual ‘potentiality’ in the western
traditions expressed in Dorset. In effect, in both ethnographic contexts,
the hydrological cycle mediates concepts of birth, life, death and rebirth,
providing a way of visualizing, conceptualizing and describing the gener-
ation and reintegration of human life/time and spiritual being.
FLUID CONGREGATIONS
In any ethnographic context, with Durkheimian predictability, spiritual
and social identity are intertwined, and water remains critical to
baptismal rituals. In church rituals in Dorset, children are splashed with
water to signify their inclusion into a particular ‘congregation’. There is
also a growing trend amongst Baptist Church groups for adults to be
‘born again’ into particular religious communities through immersion in
specially constructed baptisteries or, increasingly, in local rivers and
lakes. There is obvious coherence between the qualities of water and its
ability to join separate flows, and the metaphors of inclusion and absorp-
tion that characterize constructions of religious and social identity and
the ‘flowing together’ of individual life times.
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ORDERLY FLOWS
The concept that the sharing of substance entitles people to a share in
resources highlights another important theme of meaning, in which
water provides the basis for metaphorical depictions of socioeconomic
order and the maintenance of systemic health and wealth. Water
imagery is used in a series of scheme transfers that describe the health
of the human body, of social groups, of economic systems and of the
environment. All depend upon ideas of ‘proper’ flow and balance or, in
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ETERNAL SPRINGS
In Dorset, St Augustine’s, as the holy well has been known since its
Christianization, is located at the foot of the famous Cerne Abbas Giant,
a particularly potent Neolithic fertility symbol. According to local
informants, couples hoping to conceive try to improve their odds by
making surreptitious (though apparently insufficiently discreet) use of
the field on which the Giant lies. The use of local holy wells to assist
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At other sites similar ritual practices (which also include singing, dancing
and the scattering of leaves or bark) enable the ‘increase’ of fish, birds,
snakes, wallabies, or the bringing of rain to improve feed for game. Thus
human groups ritually encourage the ancestral beings to provide
resources at sites devoted to particular species. For example, at one site,
the ancestral Rainbow left a dilly (string) bag full of flying foxes which
has been a key source of this popular food source ever since:
He left that dilly bag there. Rainbow left it there. Flying fox, they come out of
there, they go up that tree, you know where that big swamp? They still there today,
still going, flying fox, they go everywhere. (Lefty Yam)
As well as supplying food to their own totemic clans, the ancestral beings
are believed to punish transgressors, causing people who trespass or fail
to observe propriety to be injured, fall sick, or die.
In Dorset, many wells still carry echoes of beliefs in which they were
seen to have sentient abilities to foretell the future, discern sin, and exact
punishment. There are records of a number of ‘cursing wells’ in Britain,
and the draining of lakes has also been said to cause storms and other
forms of retribution. In modern Dorset, as in other parts of England, a
local legend persists to the effect that the Stour demands an annual
human sacrifice,17 and this is repeated in the media whenever there is a
drowning in the river. Such stories underline a reality that water always
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WATER POWER
In contemporary Dorset, the meaning of water as a symbol of power
emerges more often in discourses about owning water and having social
power and agency. Aspirational visions of wealth focus on swimming
pools and giant fountains, and local expressions of wealth and status
frequently centre on the ownership of riparian land, or the construction
of lakes and water features in the garden. This theme also emerges in
patterns of usage within the domestic sphere, where abundant water
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CONCLUSION
The ethnographies reveal some major themes of meaning, presenting
water as a matter of life and death; as a potent generative, and regener-
ative force; as the substance of social and spiritual identity; and as a
symbol of power and agency.
These meanings permeate all aspects of human life: the social, the
spiritual, the economic, the political and the environmental. They flow
into every interaction with water, whether personal, familial or collec-
tive, literal or metaphorical. The Antipodean comparison – situated in a
much wider ethnographic literature from around the world – suggests
that, though cultural specific and diverse in form, the broad themes of
meanings encoded in water are similar in substance, providing import-
ant undercurrents of commonality.
These commonalities appear to arise directly from two major factors.
One is the observable and experiential characteristics of water: its essen-
tiality; its fluidity and transmutability; and its aesthetic qualities. At
local, national and global scales, these qualities enable scheme transfers
from one vision of systemic order to another, offering both a medium
and metaphor of change and transformation. Water’s characteristics
remain constant at micro and macro levels, and pertain in every environ-
mental context, providing a literally substantial basis for cross-cultural
meanings, while the particularities of each social and environmental
context generate myriad cultural variations on these broad themes.
Equally important are human sensory and perceptual experiences of
the qualities of water. Though – like its qualities – these are shaped and
influenced by particular cultural landscapes and engagements with
water, it appears that common human physiological and cognitive
processes provide sufficient experiential continuity to generate common
undercurrents of meaning. These undercurrents persist over time and
space – inter-generationally and inter-culturally. This suggests that
anthropological understandings of human–environmental relationships
should incorporate a greater appreciation of sensory experience and of
the part played by ‘natural’ resources and their characteristics in the
generation of meanings. It seems that meaning is the product not just of
human individuals and groups, but also of the common – and diverse –
material characteristics of their environments.
Notes
1. Some temporally and geographically diverse examples include Tylor (1873);
Durkheim (1995 [1912]); Eliade (1958); Schapera (1971); Douglas (1973);
Furst (1989); Lansing (1991); Rose (1992), Astrup (1993); Giblett (1996);
Blatter and Ingram (2001); Ogilvie and Palsson (2003); Sanders (2003);
Strauss and Orlove (2003).
2. Although any material object, including water, can be acculturated and thus
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devoured their ka-la or spirit. On devouring persons it becomes thirsty and comes
down to drink, when it is seen in the sky, drinking water.
The Zulu ideas correspond in a curious way with these. The rainbow lives with a
snake, that is where there is also a snake; or it is like a sheep, and dwells in a pool.
When it touches earth it is drinking at a pool. Men are afraid to wash in a large
pool; they say there is a Rainbow in it, and if a man goes in, it catches and eats
him. The Rainbow, coming out of a river or pool and resting on the ground, poisons
men whom it meets. (1873: 294)
19. Furst (1989) also records that the ‘water of life’ in the mythology of the
Kwakiutl tribes and their neighbours in British Colombia is a substance of
such supernatural potency that even a few drops will suffice to wake the
dead and revitalize them, or drive away monsters and spirits. It is given by
supernatural beings as a gift to shamans.
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