Before we knew its name, it sustained us. It filled our bodies, nurtured our lands, and allowed us to thrive
We realized that water was a force greater than us. A bridge between the human and the divine. We immersed ourselves in its flow, using it to cleanse our spirits and purify our souls
Believing that through water, we might just touch the heavens.
The question we asked was -
How does the symbolic and practical use of water in religion create a unifying yet diverse narrative of humanity’s spiritual connection to this universal and essential resource?
And that was the beginning of And We Made From Water, Every Living Thing - an ethnographic exploration of water in religion.
Stills from And We Made From Water, Every Living Thing
Gathering the data -
The data gathering process included web-scrapping and many visits to multiple libraries.
We also reached out to the research librarians at the Harvard Divinity School to gain their perspectives on our topic.
Finally, after many searches, we narrowed down on three books to be used as our primary sources of information.
Computing the data -
We used the GPT 4.0 model on Perplexity to analyze the texts and manually built an exhaustive dataset featuring the different uses and themes of water across a set category of religions.
Our choice for the religions defined in a category was based on existing research on 10 most-practiced religions across the world.
Exploring the data -
We used Excel, P5 and Figma to explore the data we had built. We wanted to understand what the data was telling us, what were some interesting trends observed, and how was water being perceived across the different religions.
39.8%
of the rituals are not location specific
60.2%
of the rituals are location specific
Location Specificity of Rituals
Devotees
22%
3%
Other
75%
Ordinary people
Occupation of Ritual Practicers
Anyone
91%
Women
3%
Men
6%
Gender Specificity of Rituals
67%
Anyone
2%
Elders
27%
Adults
2%
Adolescents
2%
Infants
Age of Ritual Practicers
Visualizing the data -
Here we explored how we wanted to tell the story we had. What did we want the viewers to feel? What did we want the viewers to know and take away from this visualization?
A few of the ideations are depicted below.
Keeping to the theme of scriptures, we decided on a design that gives a sense of a “stack of ritual texts” that can be easily sorted for different views.
The title ‘And We Made From Water, Every Living Thing’ comes from a quote from a religious text, to highlight the relevance of water in religion.
What is water depicted as? Viewed as? And represented as? Although we seek to answer these questions from this project, the true answers lie within the viewer, and their relation with water.
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