Rivers and Their Cultural Values: Assessing Cultural Water Requirements

Water has always been culturally significant. Throughout history, humans have shaped rivers for navigation, irrigation, and flood protection. In turn, the relationships people have maintained with rivers and other waters have shaped societies. How people relate to and through water is a topic of growing interest to researchers, particularly as threats to rivers and pressures on water supplies increase. Freshwater and its essential and multifaceted role in social and cultural life is now a focus of considerable scholarship in the social sciences, yielding rich insights into norms that shape how water is known, used, and valued, the meaning of water to diverse sociocultural groups, and the role of water in societal power structures and material cultures. Ethnographic studies of customary hydraulic systems and their communal water management institutions have, for instance, contributed to an understanding that departs from the bifurcated concept of nature and culture so prevalent in Western thought. Recent scientific efforts to identify water requirements (of human groups and/or features of the environment) have emerged as a response to the regulation and degradation of rivers, and these efforts form an important focus of this entry. Research has advanced our understanding of the diversity of human relationships with rivers and ways in which water management institutions and scientific practices, such as environmental flow assessments, can satisfy the flow needs of human populations dependent on rivers and connected watersheds for their livelihood and well-being. This article serves as an introductory guide for scholars and students with an interest in understanding how researchers from the social sciences and humanities have researched rivers, the role of water in sustaining diverse forms of social and cultural life, and the varied ways of valuing, managing, and using rivers. It focuses on the conservation paradigm of environmental flows that grew out of efforts in the United States to allocate water to instream uses threatened by dams, thereby conserving culturally embedded relations that the settler society had with its western rivers. Until recently, this approach to the allocation of water and protection of unregulated river flows had not explicitly acknowledged its cultural roots, though many of the early studies revealed the importance of recreational activities (fishing, boating, canoeing) and aesthetic values to the conservation agenda. New categories of cultural “use” have since emerged in response to widespread social changes (Indigenous rights and resistance to dams, for example). These challenge the conception of environmental flows as a technical, apolitical process reliant on Western scientific knowledge alone and the authority of the state to allocate water. A deeper appreciation of the cultural significance of rivers and cultural interpretations of water governance arrangements will enable appreciation of the diversity of ways of knowing, relating, and utilizing rivers and local solutions to water problems.