Friday Talk: Living With the River – New ways of thinking about water

Professor Veronica Strang is a cultural anthropologist. Her work focuses on human-environmental relationships and people’s engagements with water, particularly in Australia, New Zealand and the UK. She is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, and has worked with UNESCO and the UN. From 2012-2021 she directed Durham University’s Institute of Advanced Study, and from 2013-2017 Chaired the Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and the Commonwealth.

Based on ethnographic research along the river Stour in Dorset, her influential book The Meaning of Water (Berg 2004) explored the cross-cultural and local meanings encoded in water, and how these affect patterns of water use and people’s attitudes to conservation. She has recently completed a major comparative study of societies’ changing beliefs in water deities: Water Beings: from nature worship to the current environmental crisis, will be published by Reaktion in 2023. More information about her work is available at https://www.veronicastrang.com/

Veronica will talk about her research in Dorset and how this has contributed to ongoing debates about environmental management, rights for nature, and new ways of thinking about and living with rivers.

Admission to the talk is £5 for museum members, £8 for non-members.

Drinks and homemade food will be available from 6.30 pm, and the talk will start at 7.30 pm.

We have a wide variety of talks about our history and heritage from a range of expert speakers lined up for Spring and Autumn 2022. These will take place on Fridays (usually, but not always, the last Friday of the month) at the Parish Centre in Blandford. Please see our Events Calendar for the dates and details of other talks.