1,720,962 research outputs found
Nonhuman Governance
Full text linkThe current ecological crisis and its accompanying environmental consciousness has prodded many to reject Western dualism and instead embrace animism. Taking the Sundarbans forests of India as a starting point, the author shows how several animated, nonhuman agents of the region guide both resource use and social relationships through a set of rules known as the “rules of the jungle.” The source of these rules are deities, demons, and spirits—that is, “cosmic polities”—that undeniably govern life in the Sundarbans and across the landscape of South Asia. Mehtta shows how such nonhuman forms of governance and animistic ontologies can act as a source not only of care and an ecological consciousness but also are capable of exclusion and discrimination. Consequently, the South Asian context provides an important cautionary tale about the blind embrace of animism as the sole savior of our ecological crisis by revealing a spectrum of violence within certain strands of animistic ontologies. Simultaneously the author shows how Western repertoires of thought reveal framing devices that transcend dualism and may be read as the precursors of contemporary environmental consciousness. This article ultimately proposes the importance of acknowledging a bricolage of ontologies and realities without entrenching them in a particular identity of caste, tribe, or “indigeneity” or in being of “the West” or of “the rest of the world.
Women at the water’s edge: lives of women in climate changed Sunderbans
Full text linkThe Indian poet, Bhupen Hazarika’s soul-stirring composition ‘O Ganga Boicho Keno (Oh Ganges, why do you flow?),’ inspired by Paul Robeson’s “Ol’ Man River”, plays as we see footage of communities facing irrecoverable loss of their homes, lands and assets by an aggressively advancing river.Women at the Water’s Edge is a film shot on Mousuni, one of the 54 inhabited islands of the Sundarbans delta in West Bengal, India
Intimate Antagonisms and Unlikely Friendships between State and Society in the Sundarbans Forests of India
No full textForests worldwide are often implicated in histories of violence. The Sundarbans, straddling India and Bangladesh, infamous for its tigers and tiger demons and home to 5 million human residents, sharply expresses this global conflict between those who live alongside forests and the institutions that attempt to keep them out. The Forest Department, tasked with the responsibility of selectively protecting nonhuman life, is arguably one of the most maligned bureaucracies in India. Rights-based activists and Sundarbans fishers often emphasize the forms of dominance exercised by forest rangers, including surveillance, harassment, extortion, and arbitrary punishments. However, over the course of 22 months of ethnographic fieldwork, as I obtained access and began to spend days and nights patrolling the mangrove creeks with forest rangers, alongside their punitive power, I encountered a wide spectrum of associational behaviors, including co-option, conviviality, and mutual care. Building on these experiences, this article traces varying modes of intimacy among individuals classically characterized as political antagonists. I ask why and in what contexts do rangers inhabit and defy their vocational responsibilities through forms of sympathetic relatedness with forest-dwelling humans, demons, and deities. I also examine the processes and new technologies through which these forms of “compassion in repression” might be ruptured
Women at the water’s edge: lives of women in climate changed Sunderbans
No full textThe Indian poet, Bhupen Hazarika’s soul-stirring composition ‘O Ganga Boicho Keno (Oh Ganges, why do you flow?),’ inspired by Paul Robeson’s “Ol’ Man River”, plays as we see footage of communities facing irrecoverable loss of their homes, lands and assets by an aggressively advancing river.Women at the Water’s Edge is a film shot on Mousuni, one of the 54 inhabited islands of the Sundarbans delta in West Bengal, India
Geoanthropology and the variations of (land) loss: Counter currents of erosion in the Bengal Delta
No full textA Forest of Refuge or a Forest of Refugees: Fieldnotes on Ambivalence and Risky Work in the Sundarbans of West Bengal
Full text linkConserving life: forest imaginaries and competing values in the Sundarbans forests of India
Full text linkThe Sundarbans mangrove forests which range across the border of India and Bangladesh are internationally famous as a protected habitat for the Royal Bengal tiger. Less well known are the Sundarbans’ 4.5 million people, many thousands of whom venture into the forests on a daily basis to earn a living collecting fish, crabs and honey. This thesis interrogates what conserving life means to the people living alongside a global conservation hotspot. It explores how the fishers themselves understand their relationship to the forest and its resources, which is based on a set of ethico-religious codes known as the “rules of the jungle” [jongoler niyam] and other overlapping values. I explore fishers’ notions of a sufficient life, what it means to sustain a household, and ultimately the kind of life they seek to conserve for themselves in relation to the surrounding landscape. This vision is under constant renegotiation. I trace how several forces, including increased surveillance by the Forest Department, recent campaigns by forest rights activists, and changing global supply chains variously challenge and reaffirm it. In doing so, I also explore how these forces, and the groups that direct them, make sense of, value, and construct competing visions of the forest. These groups, all with their own stake in the conservation of the region, are linked by a web of local politics that transcends the “tiger versus people” binary and which reveals unexpected fractures, accommodations, and alliances between them. By privileging the perspectives of the people most affected by conservation, I reconceive what it means to conserve life in the Sundarbans
Conserving life: forest imaginaries and competing values in the Sundarbans forests of India
Full text linkThe Sundarbans mangrove forests which range across the border of India and Bangladesh are internationally famous as a protected habitat for the Royal Bengal tiger. Less well known are the Sundarbans’ 4.5 million people, many thousands of whom venture into the forests on a daily basis to earn a living collecting fish, crabs and honey. This thesis interrogates what conserving life means to the people living alongside a global conservation hotspot. It explores how the fishers themselves understand their relationship to the forest and its resources, which is based on a set of ethico-religious codes known as the “rules of the jungle” [jongoler niyam] and other overlapping values. I explore fishers’ notions of a sufficient life, what it means to sustain a household, and ultimately the kind of life they seek to conserve for themselves in relation to the surrounding landscape.
This vision is under constant renegotiation. I trace how several forces, including increased surveillance by the Forest Department, recent campaigns by forest rights activists, and changing global supply chains variously challenge and reaffirm it. In doing so, I also explore how these forces, and the groups that direct them, make sense of, value, and construct competing visions of the forest. These groups, all with their own stake in the conservation of the region, are linked by a web of local politics that transcends the “tiger versus people” binary and which reveals unexpected fractures, accommodations, and alliances between them. By privileging the perspectives of the people most affected by conservation, I reconceive what it means to conserve life in the Sundarbans
Geoanthropology and the variations of (land) loss: Counter currents of anthropogenic erosion in the Bengal Delta
Full text linkAn island named Ghoramara in the Bay of Bengal has lost 84 percent of its landmass over the last 100 years. Climate change-induced sea-level rise, however, does not explain the reason behind the extent of land lost from Ghoramara Island to the sea. What then, if not the rising waters, explains this erosion? This essay dwells on other causations. I draw on Kathryn Yusoff and Nigel Clark’s (2017) notion of the “geosocial”—that is, an invitation for the social to meet the geologic—as a means to understand this loss. I acknowledge the surprises of the earth’s strata and what cannot be controlled: shifts in the tectonic plates, the Bengal Delta’s eastward tilt that changed the course of the river, tides, and the forcefulness of sediments that make and unmake islands. At the same time, I reveal how the earth’s surface is being transformed through what Sheila Jasanoff (2015) calls “sociotechnical imaginaries.” Dams and barrages change the course of the rivers, trap sediments, and lead to downstream erosion; ports and shipping vessels that require dredging break new land formations; heavy and tall concrete embankments weigh the muddied coastlines down and often collapse with large chunks of land. Each of these mega-infrastructures (and many more) are responsible for the loss of land and act as impediments to the flourishing of humans and nonhumans on these watery lands. In a time of totalizing climate change narratives, in what is indeed an ongoing climate emergency, this essay hopes to move away from large abstractions toward regional ecological variations. Understanding the scars imposed on land and water by dams, ports, embankments and commercial shipping corridors provides the grounds upon which actors, interventions, infrastructures, and policies at regional, national, and deltaic levels can be held accountable for their direct attribution to erosion of land, lives, and life-worlds. Ultimately, pinpointing geosocial variations of land (and other) losses is one step towards reparative climate justice
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