Dear all
We're looking forward to submissions to this book project.
Apologies for cross-posting.
*Amphibious anthropologies: human lives between wet and dry*
*(Book Project)*
Wetlands, floodplains, tidal zones or river deltas have long fascinated
outsiders’ imaginations. Appearing like an uncanny, inhospitable and
hazardous mix of solid and fluid substances, they have been seen as
wastelands, sources of disease, and obstacles to development and progress.
Simultaneously, they have been regarded as providers of ecosystem services,
mythical loci, portals to archaeological times, gauges of climate change,
and tourism destinations. For their inhabitants, however, these milieus may
be home, livelihood, refuge, opportunity, as well as a constitutive part of
their own cultural and environmental histories.
Characterised by high degrees of both vitality and vulnerability, these
in-between environments are sites for the production and reproduction of
amphibious lives, including particular forms of social relations,
infrastructural arrangements, and processes of place-making and resource
governance. From an epistemological perspective, such spatiotemporal
amalgamations of land and water defy the very distinction between these two
elements, and their connected categorisations of human habitats. As a
consequence, studies of human society in these areas have the potential to
unmoor preconceptions based on the dry-wet binary, where dry land is the
domain of human habitation, and wetlands or other watery places are
inhabitable and hostile environments.
Ethnographies of irrigation systems, drainage schemes, damming projects,
ecological restoration efforts, drinking water infrastructure, flood risk
management, muddy environments, and riverine societies speak of human
negotiations of water and land. We contend that such studies can also
elucidate the socially and materially situated practices of learning,
shaping, maintaining and transforming culture. This collection aims at
providing an interdisciplinary and ethnographic perspective on these
negotiations and practices by exploring the following questions:
- How are categories of wet and dry employed, enforced and
resisted? Are they related to specific modes of existence, and in which
ways?
- How are water and land mixed and separated by human activities,
and how are those activities in turn shaped by land-water dynamics?
- How do people grapple with changing hydrological patterns and
their consequences?
- How do social and political relationships resonate with floods
and droughts, irrigation projects, drainage schemes and other projects of
water and land governance?
- What are the potential contributions of an anthropological
analysis of amphibious environments and societies to contemporary debates
on disaster, development, infrastructure, knowledge, sustainability,
resilience, and adaptation?
By deploying the term ‘anthropologies’ we do not intend to set disciplinary
boundaries, but to emphasize that human experiences, predicaments and
narratives take centre stage in our explorations of the amphibious.
We invite interested authors to submit paper proposals of around 500 words
to us by October 20th, 2015. Please address in your proposal how your paper
engages with the main theme of the project and the above questions.
Consider that we will expect the submission of the full chapter manuscripts
(TBD, around 5-7000 words) by March 31st, 2016. Please do not hesitate to
contact us with any question.
Alejandro Camargo, Syracuse University, [log in to unmask]
Luisa Cortesi, Yale University, [log in to unmask]
Franz Krause, Tallinn University, [log in to unmask]
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