Download Water as Social and Cultural Space: Changing Values and

Water as Social and Cultural Space: Changing Values and
Representations
The aim of the project is to understand the meanings of water and to investigate how water – as an
essential element vital to life – plays a conceptual role in both global and local cultural orientations.
Furthermore, the project examines how these cultural practices realised in visual and literary
culture, belief systems and ideological concepts intersect with environmental concerns. The project
underlines the polyvalence of the meanings and values given to water and aims at enlarging our
understanding of the large reservoir of symbols, metaphors and images of water to enhance our
critical knowledge of technological infrastructure as part of the social imagination.
Since 2012, the project members have studied water from the viewpoints of literary and cultural
studies, as well as an object of history and environmental studies. Thus far, the project presents its
theses in three edited volumes.
Water Marks: Histories of Water and Culture in Modernity (Eds Jane Costlow, Yrjö Haila, & Arja
Rosenholm) addresses water’s cultural and material significance within the geographic area of the
East and West European (Finland, Sweden, Germany, and Russia) and North American historical and
cultural reach, emphasising the interconnections among the central categories of water and space
and the cognitive aspects of water that continue to be central to notions of the history of European
modernisation. As a comprehensive reflection on the values and meanings of water in modern
societies, the book project has implications for contemporary efforts (in both academic and
nonacademic communities) to envision and implement the sustainable management of aquatic
resources. The findings thus far are twofold: on the one hand, they relate to water and its meanings,
and on the other hand, to doing inter- or transdisciplinary research. The book project has increased
our understanding of the character of water as a genuinely polyvalent element that must be
continuously studied from different viewpoints and academic approaches. The focus covers areas
such as the use of water as an economic commodity, the dimensions of water supply and the cultural
value of water. The methodological discussion aims to be inter- and cross-disciplinary, and has
brought forth the issue of both the merits and the tensions of various methodological approaches.
Meanings and Values of Water in Russian Culture (Eds Arja Rosenholm & Jane Costlow) brings
together – for the first time – an international community of researchers examining the cultural,
historical and social meanings of water within the geographical area of Russia and Eurasia. The
volume is a major initiative in the dialogue between specialists in cultural and environmental
studies. Individually, the authors offer micro-histories of specific places, particular texts, visual
images and films, which complicate any straightforward declensionist, progressive or idyllic
narrative. The authors do, however, make clear certain key motifs in Russia’s history of water that
can be identified as the “geocultural imagination”, drawing on the fluidity of water, its forms and
material potency to give birth to and shape mythologies that are both national, local and universal.
Veteen kirjoitettu: veden merkitykset kirjallisuudessa (“Written into Water: Meanings of Water in
Literature”, Eds Markku Lehtimäki, Hanna Meretoja & Arja Rosenholm) is a volume of articles in
Finnish. The authors approach water from the viewpoints of literary and cultural studies. The book
offers various cultural, aesthetic, social and historical meanings of water as represented in various
cultures and myths in world literature. The authors work to understand the role of water in human
symbolic and ritual culture, since no area of life, knowledge or human ability exists without some
connection to water; it flows in and across human and nonhuman bodies. The papers in the volume
highlight how fluidities of water work against the conventional divisions of ‘nature’ and ‘culture’,
and show that humans are simultaneously subjects and objects in relation to water, both initiators
and objects/recipients of water circulation and water technologies. The affective and material
relationship of humans to water expresses itself in proverbial and idiomatic language, in dreams and
the imagination as symbols, rituals, and images, and in psycho-historical modes of thinking – all of
which are explored in the volume.
www.uta.fi/aqua