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Entangled Grids: Vernacular and (Post-)Colonial Planning Interactions in Contemporary Senegalese Cities
No full textIn this chapter, a variety of formalistic correspondences between indigenous grid-pattern settlements and their colonial and post-colonial counterparts are analyzed in five important contemporary Senegalese cities: Dakar, Touba, Diourbel, Tivaouane and Kaolack. By showing the reciprocal relations, co-habitation and hybridization between the two initially distinct urban design traditions, our discussion will break free from any morphological or chronological essentialism regarding the genealogy of the grid (which has been critiqued in Chap. 1). Instead, we present the more synchronic, interactive and processual approach of “entangled histories” to connect the indigenous grid planning culture (Chap. 2), to the exogenous one (Chap. 3). This “entanglement” approach – useful in cases where a strict, neat and well-balanced comparison is not always possible – provides valuable insights into how the two planning cultures have crisscrossed and become entangled. Two types of civil institutions in particular, the Lebou pénc and the Sufi order, have been consistently “tangling” with the official state-centered planning process since the late nineteenth century. In the case of Dakar, ancient indigenous spatial practices have, remarkably, survived in the very center of the city – a gridded area which, since its creation, has been considered in both academic and popular discourses as the most Westernized site in West Africa. The entanglement of grids in Touba, Diourbel, Kaolack and Tivaouane stems from the urbanization strategies of the Sufi orders, both during the colonial era and since independence. On the methodological level, we utilize a variety of secondary and primary sources, including archival material, an analysis of recent maps, satellite imagery and direct observation.</p
More-Than-Human Infrastructural Violence and Infrastructural Justice: A Case Study of the Chad–Cameroon Pipeline Project
No full textAs a new wave of infrastructure expansion takes place globally, there has been a parallel turn to infrastructure in geographical research. This article responds to recent calls within this research for less human-centered engagement with the infrastructure turn. More specifically, this article aims to destablize anthropocentric discussions about infrastructural violence and infrastructural justice. Using the Chad–Cameroon Pipeline Project as a case study, we advance two main points. First, we show that infrastructural violence is not solely directed at humans. Rather, all agents, objects, and conditions—from humans to fish to carbon sequestration—entangled in webs of relations within zones of infrastructural expansion risk being subjected to violence when new and existing infrastructures meet. To illustrate this point, we detail two examples of competitions between new and existing infrastructures along the Chad–Cameroon Pipeline route, which together reveal the various forms of violence experienced by the more-than-human world when new infrastructural arrangements are layered on top of already existing ones. Second, we advance debates on infrastructural justice by adopting a more-than-human perspective in our conceptualization of this term. Recent writing on infrastructural justice has reflected on efforts to repair and rebuild infrastructures to produce more just futures (Sheller 2018). Drawing on the observations and reflections of our fieldwork along the Chad–Cameroon Pipeline route, we argue that just infrastructure projects must not only be inclusive of marginalized human and nonhuman populations but they must also avoid interfering with the infrastructural work done by nature to sustain the more-than-human world.</p
Lost Pathways of Urban Development
No full textPhotographic images from Ho Chi Minh City’s Thủ Thiêm Peninsula draw attention to now-vanished trees and pathways from a place that has been demolished for the sake of urban expansion. The trees and pathways in these photographs evoke an aspect of sociality often overlooked in the logocentric anthropological and geographical literature on development-induced evictions. Attention to images draws attention to the history of non-human nature and to lost pathways of urban development, which in turn emphasizes their uses and the practices which maintained them, revealing the interconnection between human sociality and the non-human world. Unlike the "tragedy of the commons," which describes common resources extinguished or depleted by unregulated use, these elements appear as a collective resource, produced and cared for by their users. Reflecting on photographic images taken before and during a period of mass eviction inspires a rethinking of the idea of the commons, crafted through a cultural approach that attends to the material landscape, the role of the non-human in social relationships, and the social production of landscapes.</p
Refusing slum-centric mass housing: indigenous urbanism and national housing programmes in Aizawl, India
No full textThis paper addresses the policy encounter between a top-down, national housing programme and bottom-up housing processes in the tribal city of Aizawl, to make two arguments. First, it extends the literature analysing the outcomes of neoliberal housing policies to argue that there are important continuities and differences with Indian and Latin American cities. Similar to other Indian cities, Aizawl was strait-jacketed by national standardised norms into producing large-scale, new housing on the peripheries where dwellers faced multiple exclusions. Ironically, the programme has created slums in Aizawl, which officially had none. Unlike other Indian cities, top-down housing transformation in Aizawl concentrated power in 'modern' state institutions slanted toward individual (property) interests and away from traditional governance associated with indigenous urbanism. The paper's second contribution is the argument that top-down housing transformation was deeply contested in Aizawl because it unsettled a local urbanism rooted in notions of indigeneity. This identity politics contributed to overturning the state's conception of mass housing and selecting a role in subsequent housing programmes that reinforced exclusions based on patriarchal and property lines. The paper reinforces the importance for policymakers of treating housing as process, and supporting tribal community governance institutions while including provisions to redress exclusions.</p
Introduction to the Themes of the Volume: Cognition and Çatalhöyük
No full textOVER RECENT YEARS, A NUMBER OF scholars have argued that the human mind underwent a cognitive revolution in the Neolithic. This book seeks to test these claims at the Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük in Turkey and in other Neolithic contexts in the Middle East. The volume brings together cognitive scientists who have developed theoretical frameworks for the study of cognitive change, archaeologists who have conducted research into cognitive change in the Neolithic of the Middle East, and the excavators of the Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük, who have over recent years been exploring changes in consciousness, creativity, and self in the context of the rich data from the site.</p
Däbrä Aron: A Rock-cut Monastic Church, Mäqet District of Northern Ethiopia
No full textThis study aims to explore Däbrä Aron, a least known monastic rock-cut church of the 14th century of Christian Ethiopia. Däbrä Aron is named after abba Aron, a famous Ethiopian monk, the founder and hewer of the monastery, which is established at Däbrä Daret, a mountain situated along the upper course of Täkkäzze River. It is a monastery that integrates troglodytic and mountainous monastic landscapes. Like Däbrä Gol, where Aron experienced his monastic life, Däbrä Daret was centre for coenobitic monastic life and opposition against immoral practices of Solomonic kings who in different times exiled Aron and other monastic men. The church is excavated in to a white soft tuff rock and it is one of the few instances for the declining rock-church tradition of the Solomonic period. Expansion works are made internally by using gudəb, abba Aron’s ax-like excavation tool which is still preserved in the church. It has a complex layout constituting different parts – elongated anteroom, aisles, nave, tripartite sanctuary and compartmented chapels – separated by unevenly shaped columns with rough capitals and arches. This cave is unique largely by its səqurät, aperture of the cave’s roof opened into the sky. The nave’s səqurät, rectangular in shape, allows, except rainfall droplets, entrance of sunlight into the church. The reputation of Däbrä Aron is partly associated with the acceptance of this feature as icon of the architectural excellence and spiritual devotion of abba Aron by whom many Christians were attracted into his monastic life. The cave also has an engraved processional cross decorated with symbolical trifoliate motifs.</p
EWS Housing for migrant labour: One-stone-two-birds solution for post-covid economic revival
No full textTemple as a site of modern contestations: <i>Kshetra punarudharanam</i> in postcolonial Kerala
No full text(temple revival) is a phrase one often comes across today in Kerala’s public spaces. It attests to an increasing presence of spike in temple activities in Kerala. This is seemingly in sharp contrast to the powerful representation of the state as a rational, enlightened entity with a strong Left/communist tradition and a strong developmental imperative. This article argues that religion has been a significant strand in modern-day Kerala and that it has interfaced intimately with various secular progressive and developmental articulations of this region. Even when secular progressive sections mounted profound criticisms against faith and ritual, temples continuously reinvented and reshaped their relevance. In fact, this paper argues that there was a significant simultaneity in the powerful critiques of religion/religiosity on the one hand, and the various calls for kshetra punarudharanam on the other. The paper argues that, contrary to the dominant perception of its irrepressible disappearance (and thus the ‘revival’), religion continued to be both present and significant in what is constituted as the public.</p
Re-thinking protracted displacements: insights from a <i>namasudra</i> refugee camp-site in suburban Calcutta
No full textSouth Asia is a site of myriad forms of dispossession and displacement. I draw on ethnographic research at an East Bengali dalit refugee camp-site in the suburbs of Calcutta, exploring how past displacements have mediated the refugees’ present and how they negotiate continued dislocations engendered by the Indian state. In this article, I pose the following questions: how do mechanisms of prolonged displacement affect lower caste and class groups in the postcolony and how do the displaced groups negotiate it from below? What is the nature of transformation they experience in the patterns of their citizenship/subject position? In exploring conditions of protracted displacement, the article foregrounds the role of strategies of informalisation and grey-spacing through which urban governance functions. While this study identifies dalit refugees to be active agents negotiating myriad forms of dispossession, a point of emphasis remains that they are placed in unequal power relations vis-à-vis the insidious mechanisms of post-colonial governmentality. The continually displaced inhabitants of spaces of ‘permanent-temporariness’ carry on struggles that are discreet, low-key and non-heroic in nature. The paper further highlights that the sense of belonging of such dwellers of peripheral grey-spaces often strikes a discordant note.</p
