A B S T R A C T
Water in rural Iran is not understood solely as a material resource but also as a socially and culturally constituted entity embedded in relationships among humans, supernatural beings, animals, objects, and water systems. This article examines the cultural biography of water through ethnographic accounts of rain-making rituals and the marriage of qanats to human women. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork conducted in rural Iran between 2014 and 2018, complemented by documentary and ethnographic sources, the study identifies four forms of rain-making practice: supplication, appeasement, defiance, and combinations of these strategies. These practices reveal how drought is transformed from a physical condition into a social and moral crisis that can be addressed through prayer, offering, reciprocity, confrontation, and ritual inversion. The article then examines the gendering of water sources and the practice of qanat marriage, showing how qanats may be understood as male or female beings and incorporated into systems of marriage, kinship, obligation, and economic exchange. The case of qanat’s wife in Arak, demonstrates how ritual personhood could also generate material mechanisms for supporting both women and hydraulic infrastructure. Drawing on anthropological approaches to cultural biography and relational ontology, the article argues that these practices should not be understood as survivals of a primitive cognitive stage. Rather, they represent dynamic ways of relating to water in which ecological uncertainty, cultural meaning, social obligation, and material practice are mutually constituted.