Water has become an urgent theme in anthropology as the worldwide need to provide adequate supplies of clean water to all people becomes more challenging. Anthropologists contribute by seeing water not only as a resource, but also as a substance that connects many realms of social life. They trace the different forms of valuing water, examine the often unequal distribution of water, explore the rules and institutions that govern water use and shape water politics, and study the multiple, often conflicting knowledge systems through which actors understand water. They offer ethnographic insights into key water sites—watersheds, water regimes, and waterscapes—found in all settings, though with widely varying characteristics. Anthropologists provide a critical examination of a concept called integrated water resource management (IWRM), which has become hegemonic in the global discourse of sustainable development.

The North Yemeni speech event of greeting as a rich semiotic act is interesting to analyze from both a linguistic and an anthropological point of view. It is argued that an indexical or pragmatic approach combined with an “interpretive” or symbolic understanding of culture may lead to the most interesting insights into verbal forms and their social meanings. In particular, it is argued that different constructs of the “person” are created in the speech event. [Arabic, ethnography of communication, interpretive anthropology, and self]

A famous definition of power reads: In studying political organization, we have to deal with the maintenance or establishment of social order … by the organized exercise of coercive authority through the use, or the possibility of use, of physical force.

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