The Anthropology of Wonder: Exploring Human Responses to Water and Light | Waterscapes Lectures Series
Veronica Strang
University of Oxford, Visiting Scholar at NICHE
Ca' Bottacin, Main Hall, Venice
Abstract:
In her talk Veronica Strang is going to present at the NICHE Centre, she will reflect on Venice as a city of water and light, captivating people from around the world with its beauty and unique environment. Venice exemplifies a reality that water and light are powerfully fascinating, mesmerising people and eliciting deeply affective responses.
To explore this phenomenon evoking wonder and awe, the presentation brings art and material culture studies into dialogue with biological and evolutionary anthropology, and the cognitive sciences. Considering how water and light are encoded with shifting cultural meanings across time and space, Veronica Strang suggests that the material
properties and behaviours of water and light are co-creative in forming human sensory and social experience, and offers new perspectives on people’s responses to the ‘city of water and light’.