I am happy to see that my essay has generated a lively discussion, and am most grateful to the respondents for their insightful contributions. Their comments express varying levels of agreement regarding the agency of things. Vernon Scarborough revisits anxieties about whether agency implies intentionality. Using the term ‘agency’ is indeed problematic if we assume that it entails sentience or intentionality (and I do not), but if we define it more precisely as a capacity to act (upon), it is possible to excise intentionality from the equation. This simultaneously allows us to acknowledge the agentive capacities of things without proposing or implying a form of faux animism. Anthropology has indeed drawn imaginatively on specifically cultural beliefs and knowledges, for example in composing more relational visions of human–other interactions than Western science tends to allow (see Strang Reference Strang2006a), but this is not tantamount to assuming that things contain spiritual presence, or have ‘their own sense of agency’.

Matt Edgeworth observes, however, that things do have ‘power’ to act upon each other and upon us. For him, material agency is a product of energies and forces, and his nice description of the ‘wrestle’ of human–non-human engagement highlights the reality that it is the material properties of things that define what they bring to the match. Water does indeed illustrate the materiality of power (or the power of materiality) particularly well, but I would suggest that even more static things, such as ‘museum cabinet’ objects, may have considerable material say in their making and in their possible uses. A woven basket, for example, will have emerged in part from the relative pliability of cane, reed or grass, and its strength and lightness will determine what can be carried in it. A hardwood mask might have put up considerable resistance to the carver, and its weight and rigidity will influence how it is worn or used. All things will present specific constraints and opportunities through their properties of flexibility, fragility, resilience, density, durability (and of course fluidity) etc., thus bringing material agency to the design of the technologies and practices through which human agency is exerted upon them. These technologies and practices, in turn, reflect human choices about the extent to which they work with these material properties or try to override their agentive capacities (the difference, perhaps, between a waterwheel and a dam). Material agency – as Edgeworth presents it – is a matter of physics, and whether human groups succeed in taming a river or not, it remains ‘a force to be reckoned with’. In considering the capacity of water to carve the river bank, and the ability of rock to resist, we might therefore conclude that the intrinsic agency of material things is located in their particular physical properties, and that these and their agentive capacities exist independently of human interpretation of them. However, we might also say that these properties make things ‘good to think’.

Both Matthew Davies and Ben Alberti stress the relationality of material agency, with Alberti noting Karen Barad's (2007) contention that ‘there is no such thing as a property that belongs to an independent object’ (p. 161). While allowing for some degree of Heisenbergian uncertainty, I would beg to differ, suggesting that the physical properties, energies, forces and so on of things pertain, whether we name, measure and interpret them or not. Were humankind to vanish from the face of the Earth, water, rock, organic life and so on would continue to act upon each other in accord with their particular patterns of ‘behaviour’ (though perhaps with rather less impediment). So it may be useful to distinguish between, on the one hand, the intrinsic properties of things and their capacities to exert material agency, and, on the other, the ways in which these affect mutually constituted – though, as Scarborough notes, highly unequal – relationships with persons.

Matthew Davies suggests a need to define ‘non-material agency’, and I suppose one could suggest ‘anything that doesn't involve physics’. But tangible and intangible agencies are greatly entangled: things present potential symbolic imagery (such as visions of flow) as well as expressing energetic physical forces. Human affective and imaginative responses to the materiality of things are both ideational and physical, being located in neurological and physiological processes, and ‘materialized’ through physical action. The capacity of things to ‘induce physical and cognitive responses’ (as Davies puts it, p. 153) arises from the meeting of their intrinsic material properties and what they present intangibly to the human imagination, with the specifically contextual cultural beliefs, knowledges, values and practices that mediate human engagement with them. So it is a little difficult to parse agency into material and non-material forms. As for how the agency of things differs from our own: one might say (or at least hope) that the latter is distinguished by consciousness and intentionality. But even this is not cut and dried if we include in our discussion the agency of non-human living kinds, in which case we might want to consider a continuum of possible degrees of intentionality and indeed consciousness.

Acknowledging that material relations are dialectically composed in the engagement between human and non-human agencies allows us to address what Alberti describes as a ‘tension’ – a ‘long-standing conundrum’ (p. 160) in the relationship between matter and meaning. His concern is that, in acknowledging the capacity of things to evoke meanings, we risk arguing that meanings are the direct correlates of properties. This recalls a much longer-running argument about environmental determinism, in which the deepest roots of contemporary debates about agency lie. There are two responses: one theoretical and the other evidential. First, it seems to me that this is not an ‘either–or’ issue. Acknowledging the agentive capacities of things – and, yes, permitting them some part in ‘determining’ events – does not obviate the (generally much more powerful) agency of humankind in manipulating and managing the material world. The properties of water intersect actively with the human particularities of each cultural context, and it is this dynamic and recursive relationship that provides the bridge between matter and meaning.

Alberti is right, though, to be wary of ‘simple correlates’: things have multiple properties and produce multiple stimuli, engaging not only with a complex array of cognitive and sensory processes, but also with all the specificities of particular cultural and historical contexts. But still, when we step back to consider the larger comparative picture and its patterns, strong and consistent relationships between properties and meanings are discernible. Those of us who pool comparative historical and ethnographic evidence on human relationships with water are so regularly confronted with recurrent themes of meaning that it becomes impossible to deny water's capacity to evoke spatio-temporally consistent meanings, for example as the substance of life, and as a metaphor for time and flow. Terje Oestigaard's helpful interjection about the multiple historical and cultural contexts in which water is considered to be holy provides just such an example, and is surely – as Alberti hopes – quite readily ‘provincialized’. One might assume similar theoretical nudges to the contributors to Boivin and Owoc's collection on minerals (Reference Boivin and Owoc, M.2004) or Rival's edited volume on The social life of trees (1998). And the latter allows me to employ an obvious analogy to make the point that this is partly an issue of scale: that the patterns visible in the bark of a particular tree may be more specific and intricate than those discernible at the larger scale of the forest, but they are ineluctably connected.

Davies helpfully highlights the importance of scale, noting the difficulty of reconciling immediate cultural and historical specificities and larger-scale spatio-temporal continuities. He finds ‘bouncing’ between these ‘confusing’ (p. 154). But perhaps confusion is precisely the right word. People's engagements with the material world are quite literally a ‘con-fusion’ of responses to the consistent material properties of things, which evoke recurrent meanings, and the particular meanings and practices pertaining in the specific cultural and historical context that they inhabit. As I have argued previously (2005a), these things are not mutually exclusive: acknowledging the consistent agency of things over time and space does not require, as Davies suggests (p. 155), ‘a retreat away from the historically contextual’ or, for that matter, the ethnographically specific.

Nor do I think that acknowledging this agency drops us into material determinism, though Davies is right to note a potential trap. While there may be a sound bioethical rationale for thinking in more egalitarian terms about non-human agency, the relocation of humankind in a bigger, more-than-human, picture does risk obscuring our collective responsibility for massive anthropogenic impacts on other living kinds and the material environment. We should indeed be careful not to lose sight of the inequities in human–non-human relations. But I would argue that this imbalance is compounded by a vision in which the non-human is seen as a passive subject to the human will. A clearer vision of the agency of ‘the other’ permits its repositioning as co-constituent of events, and so encourages a more reciprocal vision of relationality.

This is somewhat implied in Oestigaard's useful argument that agency combines nature and culture and ‘water is always culture . . . and nature at the same time’ (p. 163). This suggests that the capacity for things to have agentive effects is in itself a challenge to nature–culture dualism and to the alienation of humankind from ‘the other’. In this sense, acknowledging the agency of water requires us to recognize – maybe even celebrate – the ‘confusion’ of human and other forms of agency. Should we do so, a confluence between ‘historical and contextual analyses’ and ‘scientific analyses of material properties/biophysical process and humanistic understandings of cognitive–symbolic systems’ (p. 155) becomes not a ‘highbrow’ or ‘indulgent’ aberration, but a theoretical imperative. I’d say dive in: the water is fine.