Reading the river through ‘watercraft’: environmental engagement through knowledge and practice in freshwater angling

Abstract

This paper examines how freshwater anglers in northern England ‘read’ rivers as landscapes and work with them relationally, through various sorts of embodied knowledge-practices, as part of their angling activity: processes that they call ‘watercraft’. We focus specifically on water as an environment that anglers encounter as a different world: unlike land and air, water is not an everyday medium in which humans (as terrestrial animals) live and breathe.We use this example of environmental engagement to go beyond visual engagement with landscapes, to show how people develop skills of environmental interpretation, mapping and nonvisual sense-making in ways that are particular to the water encounter. We conclude by arguing for a mutual and multisensory notion of environmental engagement that considers not merely human perception but also how environments, such as water, also shape that encounter.