Dear colleagues,
Alejandro Camargo, Franz Krause and I are editing a book on *Amphibious
anthropologies*. While the book is at an advanced stage (revisions of
second drafts), we want to reach out to potential contributors who are
currently writing (actually, that have a *paper ready*!) on the amphibious
and whose ethnographic material is *from Africa, Asia or Oceania. *So if
this topic and any of these geographical areas fall within your research
interests and you have a paper in an advanced stage of preparation, please
email us asap.
A few days ago we sent out a call asking for ethnographers working on
floods to get in touch. While we have responded to the first 50 or so
email, we could not keep up with the many later replies as yet, apologies!
However, everybody who wrote me/Luisa about it should have received a link
to edit a google document, the first brick of a network for students of
floods. We hope that this initiative can help share common interests, stay
in touch, as well as organize conferences and publications. Do let us know
if you wrote us but haven’t received the link. By the way, some of us will
meet at the CASCA in Ottawa, so drop us a line if you are thinking of
joining.
Many thanks,
Franz Krause, Alejandro Camargo, Luisa Cortesi
*Amphibious anthropologies: living in wet environments*
*(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.
Alejandro Camargo
Université de Montréal
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Luisa Cortesi
Yale University
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Franz Krause
University of Cologne
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