My name is Veronica Strang and I'm a cultural anthropologist
and I work partly material culture but more specifically on materials.
So my particular interest is in water and I've been writing about different aspects of water
for, I guess it must be, over 30 years now.
Water, of course, is a lovely topic to work on because you can really go across a whole spectrum
from the kind of crunchy political conflicts over water, issues of water management
water shortages, you know the whole kind of environmental set of issues
that we're all painfully familiar with these days, right through to the more kind of
symbolic meanings attached to water and how it takes us into sort of deep
cultural ideas about the spirit and and how the world works
and then of course there's all the wonderful science of water and its extraordinary properties
so it's a very wide subject in which you can, you can come at it in a lot of different ways.
Water beings are a sort of way of understanding the flows of the world
but they also provide a very easily understood metaphor for those
kinds of movements of ideas and notions of flow, so you know they also contain wisdom
they also talk about the flow of knowledge through the world, as well as water
and if you believe in spiritual things also the spirit.
So they're a good way to conceptualise all of that.
So if you go to parts of the world like Australia
they're very beneficent creatures by and large but they're also extremely dangerous
because they also generate ancestral law and they punish people who transgress it
so you get a lot of stories about people being swallowed by them
because they've gone to somewhere sacred without proper respect
or they're not supposed to be there or they have been greedy with fishing or whatever
but generally they are the bringers of life but they're not soft, they're very powerful.
If on the other hand you come to this part of the world
it's got more to do with religious transitions from nature religions
through to semi-human deities as in the Greeks and Romans
to more human pantheons then to monotheisms
and that has to do with humans starting to think more about dominion over the world
as they form larger more hierarchical societies but more to thepoint more instrumental relationships
with nature, so your most beneficent water beings are those of the nature
religions where people work in partnership with a nonhuman and they feel a sense of parity
it's a reciprocal partnership when you get a real sense of that working in Aboriginal Australia
that the nonhuman and the sentient landscape is actually a partner with humankind
but when you start to move into societies that bring in agriculture and then in irrigation
and start forming the landscape a lot more instrumentally
you see a movement in religious thought away from worshiping local water beings
and other nature deities into deities who live in places like Olympus,Valhalla, whatever
and then into a far-off heaven and the closer you get to the big patriarchal religions
the more the serpent beings are demonized because, of course
you get that whole period in the medieval world where Christianity was extremely militant
in repressing the nature religions so you get a fluorescence of dragon slayers and of course you've got
some wonderful objects here in the museum and your Living with gods exhibition
you've got a nice panel with St George slaying the dragon
you've got a very rare Saint George, a black St.George slaying the dragon
and you've got some other nice icons from Russia.
So you get this kind of sudden emergence of the
saintly heroes slaying the infidel or slaying the serpent
and fundamentally it's the same thing it's about asserting Christian beliefs and subsuming those
pagan nature worshippers but of course they keep bubbling up and and we still
have strong pagan religions in many parts of the world indeed, in this country
and you've still got people having a very important discourse about how we relate
to nature, so you get linkages between pagan religious groups, environmental groups
and of course the feminist groups for whom religious patriarchy might be less appealing.
Water serpents are fascinating in that on the one hand they are incredibly diverse
they are all shapes and forms and you know so forth and they're you know
so I was just talking a little bit about some of the objects you've got here in the Museum
you've got that wonderful turquoise Mayan serpent for example
which is a double-headed jaguar headed , uh!, it's the most gorgeous object
and then you've got that wonderful Japanese articulated dragon in the
Living with gods exhibition which is, is just beautiful so they're very different
you get them with horns, you get them with plumes, you get them with feathers
you get them with fishy kind of characteristic, wolf heads up in the west coast of America
whale-like bodies if you get to the north and Canada
but they come in very different forms and what they tend to do is absorb the forms of their local environment
to the local flora and fauna so there's one theory for example the typical rainbow serpents in Australia
absorb the pipefish which has a very dragony type head and it's just...
but mostly they are snake-like and the reason that they are snake like in some form, or serpentine
is that they represent the properties of water so on the one hand
they have a lot of things in common they are serpentine, they are often coloured as water
they move like water, they have the powers of water to generate life and take life
they often have a lot of jaws and teeth and ideas about swallowing and consuming and so forth
and sometimes they're either spitting out humans or they're consuming them
and there's that notion of it being something that water can do
like a tsunami swallows whole villages and so forth.
So they represent the materiality of water which is why they have a kind of family resemblance
and at the same time they pick up local flora and fauna and that's partly because
they are made out of people thinking with water and thinking with local flora and fauna
and partly because in generating the life in the local environment
that's what they're generating local flora local fauna
and,of course, as we started off talking human beings as well so they have a tremendous power
in representing not only capacities to generate and take life
but also to connect organic life because they represent the fact that all organic living kinds
depend on water and in that sense they're all connected by water.