Water in rural Iran has historically been more than a material substance or an economic resource. It has been embedded in ritual practices, social relationships, moral obligations, gendered classifications, and cosmological understandings through which communities interpret both abundance and scarcity. Springs, qanats, rain, rivers, wells, and even water-related animals and objects may acquire social identities and become participants in relationships between humans and the more-than-human world. Yet such practices are often interpreted either as remnants of ancient religious beliefs or as symbolic responses to environmental uncertainty. This article proposes a different approach by examining the cultural biography of water and asking how water becomes socially meaningful through relationships, practices, and material engagements. Drawing on the concept of relational ontology, the article argues that water in rural Iranian contexts can be understood not simply as something people possess, manage, or worship, but as an entity whose identity and significance emerge through relationships with humans and other beings.

The study adopts a qualitative ethnographic approach based primarily on fieldwork conducted in rural Iran between 2014 and 2018. Field observations and semi-structured interviews were undertaken with individuals selected for their knowledge of local water practices, ritual traditions, and community histories. Participants were identified through purposive and snowball sampling, with data collection continuing until theoretical saturation was reached. Ethnographic observations and oral accounts were complemented by documentary and secondary sources to corroborate reported practices and situate them within their historical and geographical contexts. Rather than treating individual rituals as isolated curiosities, the analysis considers them as interconnected practices through which communities negotiate drought, uncertainty, water availability, social obligations, and relationships with nonhuman entities.

The analysis identifies four broad forms of rain-making practice: supplication, appeasement, defiance, and combinations of these strategies. Supplicatory practices involve prayer, recitation, devotional performances, ritual objects, dolls, stones, songs, and appeals to supernatural powers for rainfall. Appeasement practices seek to satisfy or negotiate with supernatural or more-than-human entities through offerings, food, sacrifice, or reciprocal acts. Defiant practices are more confrontational, involving ridicule, ritual inversion, physical punishment, the disruption of sacred or socially valued objects, and symbolic acts intended to pressure the supernatural agent responsible for withholding rain. Combined practices simultaneously employ supplication and confrontation, revealing that ritual responses to drought cannot be reduced to a single theological or psychological logic.

These practices transform drought from a physical condition into a social and moral crisis. Rain is represented as something that can be requested, negotiated, encouraged, challenged, or restored through social action. Rituals therefore create temporary relationships among villagers, supernatural beings, animals, objects, landscapes, and water itself. Their apparent irrationality or theatricality becomes intelligible when understood as forms of relational practice rather than as failed attempts to explain meteorological processes. The article then examines the gendering and personification of water sources. Ethnographic accounts demonstrate that qanats and springs may be perceived as male or female according to their physical qualities, behavior, sound, purity, mineral composition, or relationships with other water sources. In some cases, water is imagined as seeking, attracting, stealing, or marrying other water. The practice of water theft illustrates this relational character particularly clearly: the movement of water between sources is represented through the language and actions of interpersonal relationships, transforming hydraulic circulation into a socially meaningful event.

The most striking case is the practice of qanat marriage, in which a drying qanat is symbolically married to a human woman. The case of Aunt Zobeideh in Arak demonstrates that this was not merely a ritual performance but an institution involving marriage negotiations, collective responsibility, material allowances, and long-term obligations. Her relationship with the qanat connected water availability with gender, kinship, food distribution, economic change, and the maintenance of hydraulic infrastructure. The transformation of her nafagheh from wheat into money and other goods further demonstrates how the cultural biography of water changes alongside broader transformations in rural political economy.

The article draws on anthropological approaches to cultural biography, relational ontology, and relational understandings of human–nonhuman personhood. Following the broader ontological turn in anthropology, particularly the work of Descola, relations are treated not simply as interactions between already constituted entities but as processes through which entities acquire particular identities and significance. From this perspective, the gendered spring, the married qanat, the rain-making stone, and the qanat fish are not merely symbolic representations imposed upon an otherwise objective natural world. They are constituted within networks of practical, moral, ritual, and material relationships. The article therefore avoids interpreting these practices as survivals of a supposedly primitive worldview or reducing them to symbolic expressions of environmental anxiety. Instead, they are understood as historically situated ways of relating to water in which humans and nonhumans participate in shared fields of obligation and agency.

The article argues that the cultural biography of water in rural Iran reveals a relational world in which ecological uncertainty, cultural meaning, social obligation, and material practice are mutually constituted. By bringing rain-making rituals and qanat marriage into a common analytical framework, the study demonstrates how water can move across categories of nature, society, gender, economy, and personhood. Understanding these relationships contributes to a more nuanced anthropology of water and provides a culturally grounded account of how rural communities have historically experienced, interpreted, and negotiated hydrological uncertainty.