Abstract
Parables about humans and fish (and water as a medium), abound as cultural markers of power, gender, and stories that encompass narratives of politics as well. Water is a medium that sustains both belief and life. One of its characteristics is as a symbol of power and destiny. In the Upper Nile it carries meaning as a place (point of origin, the spring at Gish), a conduit for travel, a source of food and a link to spirituality. In Orthodox Christian belief it is an allusion to magical revelation, and spirituality and those meanings about human identities are ubiquitous at its source and in its flow. Yet, this is both a fish story and one that reveals conflicting identities of the modern world. It includes the sequencing of that adaptation to geological movement, and the efforts of human engineers to move, store, and redistribute Nile waters in that modern world. The project here is ostensibly a story about a fish, but one that narrates a deeper regional history of environmental and political change in one of the world’s most storied watersheds. This presentation explores symbols of the beliefs and substance of history as a setting for more current issues.