In one form or another, water participates in the making and unmaking of people's lives, practices, and stories. Contributors analyse the union of water and social lives, thereby challenging anthropologists to foreground the mutable character of their subjects and responsibly engage with the generative role of cultural analysis.

Preface Introduction: Waterworlds at Large Kirsten Hastrup and Frida Hastrup Chapter 1. East Anglian Fenland: Water, the Work of Imagination, and the Creation of Value Richard D. G. Irvine Chapter 2. Fluid Entitlements: Constructing and Contesting Water Allocations in Burkina Faso, West Africa Ben Orlove, Carla Roncoli, and Brian Dowd-Uribe Chapter 3. Raining in the Andes: Disrupted Seasonal and Hydrological Cycles Astrid B. Stensrud Chapter 4. Respect and Passion in a Lagoon in the South Pacific Cecilie Rubow Chapter 5. West African Waterworlds: Narratives of Absence versus Narratives of Excess Mette Fog Olwig and Laura Vang Rasmussen Chapter 6. To the Lighthouse: Making a Liveable World by the Bay of Bengal Frida Hastrup Chapter 7. Enacting Groundwaters in Tarawa, Kiribati: Searching for Facts and Articulating Concerns Maria Louise Bønnelykke Robertson Chapter 8. Mapping Urban Waters: Grounds and Figures on an Ethnographic Water Path Astrid Oberborbeck Andersen Chapter 9. Water Literacy in the Sahel: Understanding Rain and Ground Water Anette Reenberg Chapter 10. Deep Time and Shallow Waters: Configurations of an Irrigation Channel in the Andes Mattias Borg Rasmussen Chapter 11. Moral Valves and Fluid Properties: Water Regulation Mechanisms in the Bâdia of Southeastern Mauritania Christian Vium Chapter 12. Reflecting Nature: Water Beings in History and Imagination Veronica Strang Chapter 13. The North Water: Life on the Ice Edge in the High Arctic Kirsten Hastrup Notes on Contributors

“This collection is a rich quarry of manifold explorations of malleable, multiple, and vital waters in social and cultural life, which are always simultaneously a matter of concern for various political actions, and expressive of their own agentive capacities. Despite – or perhaps because of – the multiplicity of waters and approaches, it can be regarded as an asset to have these contributions combined in one book.” · Anthropos “…anthropology is not a newcomer to the study of water as an object and agent of social organization and cultural imagining, and the current volume introduces the reader to a good deal of this literature. But it also makes an original contribution by assembling a quantity of ethnographic cases and applying the anthropological perspective to issues of knowledge, management, and morality. The collected ethnographies illustrate, to quote Lévi-Strauss, that water is not only good to drink but good to think.” · Anthropology Review Database “A superb book, the chapters provide a wide range of approaches, from excellent descriptive ethnography to hard-hitting critiques of development practice. Water’s qualities provide a common theme and inspire groundbreaking theory.” · Marc Brightman, University College London