SOAS Research Online

Abstract

As we grapple with the pressing issues of water management and its impact on ecosystems, economies, and societies, this conference seeks to explore a transformative perspective. Can diverse religious philosophies and practices offer lessons for sustainable water use? How can sacred knowledge inform water regulation, challenge existing legal frameworks, and raise public awareness about water scarcity? Sustainability may require a reconceptualisation of water and an unlearning of the anthropocentric language of goods, services, and economic value. Can we turn to forms of sacred knowledge, old and new, to think water ‘otherwise’, as a way out of the global grip of consumerism, expressed through a pervasive utilitarian perception of the world, in which water is but an instrumentalised resource to be efficiently extracted and absorbed? Could religious orientations, in their diversity, offer us conceptual and practical tools of being with water beyond ‘usage’ and ‘efficiency’, in ways that do not progressively deplete the earth and impoverish all that it holds? Rituals, scriptures, and context-specific religiosities locate different answers to these questions, and so this conference invites ethnographic, theological, and historical analyses of water-human relations from across the world. Various studies have already portrayed waterworlds in which the human/nonhuman distinction is ungrammatical, in which the bodies of water have various agentive qualities, or come into focus as animate beings, in which water not only traverses political and religious boundaries but connects all domains of the social. Is a reparative genealogy of such connections, on a global scale, an appropriate answer to an already global anthropogenic environmental injury? Being with Water Otherwise is a two-day conference organised by the Cambridge Interfaith Programme (CIP) in the University of Cambridge’s Faculty of Divinity. It is aligned with CIP’s involvement in the Ofwat-funded project Water efficiency in faith and diverse communities. The conference will include a keynote address from Professor Veronica Strang (Oxford), thematic panels, a Scriptural Reasoning session, and a combined book launch of recently published volumes on water and religion. The Academic Convenor of this conference is Dr Safet HadžiMuhamedović.