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Paper short abstract

This paper explores how spiritual water activists in Cambridge flatten usual hierarchies of knowledge production and evidence in ways that both enable new modes of working together and reinforce polarities between industry, academy, and activism, sometimes impeding the very work they seek to drive.

Paper long abstract

In Cambridge (UK), a group of spiritual water activists are building a case for extractivist orientations as drivers of water degradation, recognizing water’s spiritual dimensions, and calling for alternative human-water relations. These activities involve a complex of evidences rooted in diverse modes of knowledge (co)production, including stats on water quality, performances of grief over loss of intimacy with local waters, eclectic rituals around water bodies and framing certain characteristics of those bodies as mystical, and excavating pre-Christian Iron Age sites near contemporary waters. Not only does their work dehierarchize these radically distinct evidentiary streams, it collapses the ususal binary categories of scientific/spiritual or religious, and knowledge/belief that drives – and limits – most water conservation work. At the same time, the processes by which they produce evidence also tend to (re)produce existing polarities between activism and industry. As an anthropologist working on/with/via Cambridge’s rivers and their enmeshments in spiritual networks, my own position and research is drawn into this eddy of evidence in ways that similarly enable novel modes for working together towards riverine justice and reiterate existing divides between academy and practice. Drawing on ongoing fieldwork, this paper examines how spiritually-motivated activists produce evidence to demonstrate the more-than-human nature of water and move people to new actions, including new collaborations. I argue that the same knowledge co-creation and evidentiary practices used to support truth claims about expanded relationalities and care may also inadvertently bolster existing binaries in ways that sometimes impede those same regenerative efforts.