As an archaeologist who ‘works’ with water, my experience has largely focused on the historical ecology of water management within agricultural landscapes (particularly in Eastern Africa) and I have only just begun to think about the broader materiality of water itself, but in this context I find Strang's essay thought-provoking and extremely useful with a great deal to commend. If I read it correctly, Strang's key premise is that water is ‘good to think with’ since it permeates all aspects of human and biophysical processes – thinking through water thus allows us to think across scales, from the molecular to the global, and to explore recursive relations at each level. At the same time, as an element integral to the physical/biological sustenance of all life, and also a core symbolic or cognitive referent, tracing relationalities of water within and between communities therefore also forces us to bridge common disciplinary boundaries and theoretical approaches. Thus at the same time as using water to ‘think through’ human–material relations, Strang also uses water to think through and reconcile different approaches within social theory. Finally, Strang's focus on materiality argues that water's immutable physical properties determine certain ‘universal’ and ‘non-arbitrary’ approaches to water – both physically in the sense of its management (capture, storage, irrigation, drainage) and symbolically and cognitively in terms of water's various positions in ideological regimes and its consequent uses in ceremonial and ritual life. Overall, Strang argues that the immutable physical properties of water induce physical and cognitive responses such that we should think of water as possessing a certain material agency.
To my mind Strang's concept of ‘relationality’ requires further elaboration, but it is the question of the material agency of water itself which will continue to polarize audiences and which unfortunately is not satisfactorily theorized. Repeated statements point to the inherent properties of water (fluidity/flow, dampness, weightlessness, taste, conductivity), but the essay lacks a concise examination of what forms material agency takes, how it coincides with or differs from human agency, and exactly what common and ‘non-arbitrary’ approaches it induces. This is unfortunate, because I think there is much to be gained by focusing very clearly on the material properties of water and the commonalities of response that these properties specify (whether or not these are defined as ‘agency’) – while at the same time making it more precisely clear what a strictly ‘materialist’ approach does not explain and thus differentiating between theories of materiality and more historical and contextual analyses (see below).
Strang's choice of ‘water’ as an analytical tool is nevertheless very well made, not only because water allows us to explore human life across scales but also because, as a substance which bridges scales, process and cognition, it also acts a vehicle for thinking about scalar and analytical approaches within archaeology itself. However, while thinking through water thus allows us to explore material and cognitive relationality across biophysical scales and methodological approaches, Strang's essay to my mind confusingly bounces between the search for generalizing universals and commonalities and deeper degrees of particularistic historical and contextual analyses, as well as between the methodological scientific analyses of material properties or biophysical process and humanistic understandings of cognitive–symbolic systems. These boundaries naturally need to be dissolved and the search for both universals and the particular are to my mind mutually compatible and indeed mutually desirable. But at the same time I think it is often confusing when the recursive interrelations between the universal and the particular (however fuzzy in practice) are not made analytically explicit, and to this extent Strang's essay fails to take full advantage of the methodological impact it might otherwise make.
As Strang suggests, the primary utility of theories of materiality (and especially the materiality of water) is their ability to bridge deeply entrenched theoretical and methodological divides, both in archaeology and in cognate disciplines. However, to fully understand this issue I think we need to more deeply historicize the emergence of theories of materiality within archaeology (at least in the UK) as this helps us to explain what materiality rallies against, its context of application, and what it does and does not help us to understand. First we must think about the way in which archaeology has tended to polarize scale in its approaches – in particular between, on the one hand, analyses of broad-scale human–environment–ecology-type relations, often via discussion of ‘landscapes’, and, on the other, studies of the small-scale, most notably material objects, but also things like human bodies. This polarization of scale is doubly interesting in that there is also a polarization of analytical response evoked at each scale. Although naturally a gross oversimplification, analysis of the former has often tended towards generalization from universal biophysical processes to generalized understandings of ecology, while the latter has tended towards understandings of human cognitive and symbolic systems and the particularities of certain historical and cultural contexts. The more generalizing approach to human–environment relations has been increasingly challenged in recent decades by humanistic, phenomenological and practice-based understandings of landscape which tend towards the particular and contextual (interestingly they often do so by focusing on the ‘built’ landscape, the nature of monuments and other physical ‘material’ transformations). Similarly, historical ecology attempts to bridge the generalizing versus particular and the scientific versus humanistic by analysing the specific historical context of human–environment conditions and emphasizing the anthropogenic nature of the world from soils and vegetation to more obviously built features of the landscapes (field boundaries, terracing, architecture). In various formats, landscape-environment studies are therefore gradually shifting from the general to the contextual and from the universal to the particular.
At one end, theories of materiality intersect with the landscape-scale focus on ‘monuments’, but at the other they have become popular within much smaller-scale and higher-resolution analyses of material objects. Interestingly, to some extent, the analytical trend here is quite the opposite to that found in landscape-environment studies – a focus on the raw physical properties of the materials utilized in the construction of artefacts aims to explore the more universal and generalizing aspects of material-culture production and the consequent ‘non-arbitrariness’ of seemingly relativistic human material–symbolic systems. Materiality thus rallies against an absolute focus on human worlds as purely human-constructed symbolic–cognitive systems and instead argues for the non-human agency of things and animals (or actants). There is a contrasting move here from the contextual and particular to the universal.
It remains, therefore, to be seen whether we are in the process of witnessing a convergence of approaches and scale or whether landscape-environment analyses and ‘material’ analyses will bypass each other analytically. However, Strang's focus on water is seminal because it emphasizes these interconnections of scale from object to landscape and argues for analytic approaches which bridge material and biophysical science and the symbolic–cognitive. What I find particularly important to emphasize is that archaeological scientists and others who might be wary of ‘highbrow’ theory and who might all too easily dismiss theories of materiality as yet another indulgent theoretical fad might do well to look again. The reason for this is that theories of materiality refocus emphasis on the physical, material properties of the world, whether these be understood through the scientific analysis of material objects or through wider ecological processes. To an extent, then, theories of materiality potentially represent a new convergence of theory and scientific method and practice which should be welcomed. But my worry here is that this convergence may in itself encourage an uncritical retreat away from the historically contextual and particular, and a loss of focus on the intersection between material agency and its recursive interactions with human agency (choice, intentionality, improvisation, innovation) which undeniably sits within and remains shaped by symbolic–cognitive understandings (cosmology, belief, language, semiotics) which themselves are only partially based on universal material properties.
There is, of course, generally a non-arbitrariness of technique and task (e.g. in technologies of water management) and experience (as in phenomenology) and symbolic selection (forms of communication) in human–material engagements. But as Moore (Reference Moore1996, 126–27) informed us some time ago, while symbols (e.g. ash) and referents (e.g. female fertility) are often non-arbitrary, unambiguous and highly durable, it is the historically and situationally contextual interpretation of the symbol–referent relationship which gives rise to secondary meanings or significations and frames the practical deployment of actual behaviour (ash as pollution versus substance of resistance). As such, I worry that a refocus on universals and non-arbitrary understandings could all too easily lead to a form of material determinism which neglects human agency and contextual historical analysis (see Moore Reference Moore2011, 178–87, for discussion). To state this in a more practical form: stone is hard and it endures, hence it is used to construct durable things and becomes a symbolic referent for the quality of durability, but how this hardness is employed to construct enduring things of certain forms and in what ways the qualities of ‘durability’ and ‘permanence’ are understood and deployed are multiple, historical and contextual. Similarly, water flows, hence its fluidity determines certain responses in its harnessing and capture and makes water the symbol for fluidity and movement par excellence, yet the physical ways in which water is harnessed and used and the various powers and uses of ideas about water are historical and contextual, with their own unique trajectories. Take, for example, the difference between beer and tea as means of purifying drinking water (both specified by the universal propensity of water to carry bacteria) and the consequent historical and cultural trajectories that have followed.
Moreover, I wonder if the emphasis on the universal properties of materials requires greater theorizing – water in particular needs to be understood as a rather unique material form which differs in most respects from more solid materials – water moves, flows, changes; it is, in this regard, an atypical material form, worthy of atypical discussion. As Strang alludes, water uniquely takes on multiple material forms of its own (steam, ice, drizzle, fog etc.), each of which is often used, understood and experienced in rather different ways, and not always ‘as water’. Water is also a vehicle for other things both visible and invisible (any East African irrigation-using farmer will tell you that irrigation water not only ‘waters’ but also carries rich sediments and chemical nutrients: see e.g. Stump Reference Stump2006; Davies, Kiprutto and Moore, in press) – but as a carrier, water both ‘brings’ and ‘carries away’. However, while these variations in form and property are most dramatically evident in the case of water, we may also need to think harder about the inherent material properties of other substances: how they take different forms; not only how they feel, but also how they move, their temperature, taste, and their ability to carry or catalyse other things or substances. While focusing on the universal and immutable properties of materials, we must realize that Western conceptions do not represent a universal and comprehensive understanding of what a material ‘property’ is and what range of properties are experienced and should be studied.
To my mind, Strang's emphasis on relational materiality is therefore highly important but any suggestion that it is, or should be, an all-encompassing theoretical turn overemphasizes its primacy. At the same time, I believe that studies of materiality still require considerably greater theorizing if they are to reach their full potential, but in that context Strang's paper is a very welcome addition. Theories of materiality and indeed the materiality of certain substances such as water are clearly very useful tools to think through and they are ones which help bridge scales and analytical approaches, but materiality must be seen as a springboard or jumping-off point for other analyses at different resolutions and different scales of space and time. Interestingly, Strang's case study is to my mind less explicit on the ‘material properties’ of water in Brisbane and actually provides more of a historical and contextual analysis of water management. To this extent it therefore makes a strong case for the utility of ‘thinking through water’ but a less clear case for understanding the universal agentive actions of water cross-culturally.
