Kirsten Henderson
La Trobe University
Water as the Medium of Cultural Traffic: Some Preliminary Thoughts
The vast body of literature about water management in Australia situates water within one or another of two competing contexts: the economic or the environmental. It is the tension between these two contexts that creates the politics of water today and the attempted responses to it by the Federal and State governments. But if, as Professor Peter Cullen of the Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists has suggested ‘debates over the directions of water policy are really debates about the sort of society and the sort of environment we want to live in’, then we need to think about water in Australia in an alternative way. In this paper, I propose understanding water in Australia as being the medium of ‘cultural traffic’, a concept borrowed from the anthropologist Nicholas Thomas which refers to the idea that culture is constituted by the movement of ideas, values, beliefs and products between two or more destinations. Using examples from my own research I show how conceptualising water as the medium of cultural traffic helps us to understand water in terms of relationships rather than the frameworks that seek to reduce it to an abstraction such as a commodity or an environmental flow. This then allows for the recovery of the significance of water within Australian society and history. Upon recognising this significance, we can then develop innovative ways to choose the sort of society and environment that we want to live in.
Biography
Kirsten Henderson is a Ph.D candidate with the Sociology Program of the School of Social Sciences at La Trobe University. She lives and studies in Mildura, a rural city in northwest Victoria located on the banks of the River Murray. Hence, the focus of her thesis: 'The Politics of Water in Australia'. She holds a Bachelor of Science Hons. (1990) and Bachelor of Arts Hons. (2003) and has lived and worked in Japan, the USA, Canberra, Sydney, Melbourne and Hobart. Her academic interests include social theory, environmental history and politics.
Email: Kirsten.Henderson@latrobe.edu.au