With this book Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt and Gopa Samanta offer an intimate glimpse into the microcosmic world of “hybrid environments.” Focusing on chars—the part-land, part-water, low-lying sandy masses that exist within the riverbeds in the floodplains of lower Bengal—the authors show how, both as real-life examples and as metaphors, chars straddle the conventional categories of land and water, and how people who live on them fluctuate between legitimacy and illegitimacy. The result, a study of human habitation in the nebulous space between land and water, charts a new way of thinking about land, people, and people's ways of life.
With this book Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt and Gopa Samanta offer an intimate glimpse into the microcosmic world of “hybrid environments.” Focusing on chars—the part-land, part-water, low-lying sandy masses that exist within the riverbeds in the floodplains of lower Bengal—the authors show how, both as real-life examples and as metaphors, chars straddle the conventional categories of land and water, and how people who live on them fluctuate between legitimacy and illegitimacy. The result, a study of human habitation in the nebulous space between land and water, charts a new way of thinking about land, people, and people's ways of life.
Dancing with the River: People and Life on the Chars of South Asia
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Dancing with the River: People and Life on the Chars of South Asia
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Overview
With this book Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt and Gopa Samanta offer an intimate glimpse into the microcosmic world of “hybrid environments.” Focusing on chars—the part-land, part-water, low-lying sandy masses that exist within the riverbeds in the floodplains of lower Bengal—the authors show how, both as real-life examples and as metaphors, chars straddle the conventional categories of land and water, and how people who live on them fluctuate between legitimacy and illegitimacy. The result, a study of human habitation in the nebulous space between land and water, charts a new way of thinking about land, people, and people's ways of life.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780300188301 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Yale University Press |
| Publication date: | 06/25/2013 |
| Series: | Yale Agrarian Studies Series |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 296 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.10(w) x 9.40(h) x 1.10(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Dancing with the River
People and Life on the Chars of South Asia
By Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt, Gopa Samanta
Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2013 Yale UniversityAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-300-18830-1
Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Introducing Chars Where Lands Float on Water
The river exists, so does the jungle, and also does the mouza. Nothing disappears for good.—DEBESH ROY (1988: 63), Teestaparer Britanta
This book is about people living on chars. The Bengali term char, or charbhumi, denotes a piece of land that rises from the bed of a river. In this book, we present the chars as hybrid environments, not just a mixture of land and water, but a uniquely fluid environment where the demarcation between land and water is neither well defined nor permanent. The use of a contested and much-maligned term like "hybrid" requires some explanation. Many years ago, art historian Paul Zucker (1961) interpreted ruins as "aesthetic hybrids" because one could not be sure if they belonged to the realm of nature or the realm of art. Since the conceptual use of hybridity by Bhabha (1994) and other postcolonial theorists, the term has come to be closely associated with dense and opaque postcolonial theories and texts. But, at the same time, the biological source of the term "hybridity" is often conceptualized by postcolonial theorists in absolute terms: linguistic, cultural, or even racial. More abstract uses of the term are not uncommon; Canclini (1995) uses the term to show that traditional and modern cultures in Latin America are mixed, that instead of moving from one culture to another in a linear fashion, people move in and out of modernity. In recent years, individual disciplines have tended to interpret the term quite widely. For example, an urban community landscape has been interpreted as hybrid by architects Quayle and van der Lieck (1997) because it is generated by both top-down and bottom-up place-making processes. Karvonen and Yocom (2011), also urban planners, developing a relational ontology of urban nature, highlight the hybrid connections between humans and nonhumans. Archaeologist Qvistrom (2007) interprets the inner urban fringe as hybrid because it is a landscape that is out of order. Terrell et al. (2003) think of hybridity as presenting itself in the form of an interactive matrix in which people adjust and adapt their actions to circumstances to produce a hybrid domesticated landspace. By foregrounding indigenous oral histories and the politics of conservation, the historian of forests Skaria (1999) re-creates a hybrid history that primarily speaks from below. These uses of the term emphasize adulteration, contamination, and impurity and reveal how far its meaning has traveled from Bhabha's third space of hybridity, which is not an identity but an identification implying a process of identifying with and through another object (Bhabha 1990: 211). Closer to this meaning is a growing body of literature on traditional/aboriginal/indigenous societies showing that customary practices, state regulations, and market exchanges give rise to a "hybrid economy" (Altman 2009a, 2009b), a concept that finds its equivalence in Gibson-Graham's (2006) conceptualization of diverse economy. Geographers generally use the term in order to demolish the dichotomous division between nature and culture, and to highlight the coupling of nature and society (Swyngedouw 1999). One of the most influential scholars to oppose the view of nature as the cause and determining factor was Bruno Latour; in tracing the philosophical roots of Latour's various works, Blok and Jensen (2011) point out that his use of the term "hybrid networks" refers to the integrity of nature and society. Inglis and Bone (2006) suggest that this boundary-crossing has been marked by an increasing interest of social scientists in issues relating to the human manipulation of both biological life and so-called natural environmental forces and phenomena. These developments have fundamentally shaken the ways we think about nature, natural landscapes, and the natural world. Scholars have been increasingly concerned to challenge and alter what they take to be unsound, politically tendentious, and outmoded means of drawing boundaries between autonomous nature, on the one hand, and dependent human culture and society, on the other.
Philosophically, efforts to look at nature and society as a complex whole are rooted in postpositivist disillusionment with normative binary divisions and dualisms. Binaries in positivist philosophy became irreducible and absolute, and were attributed with characteristics that placed the two categories opposite to each other. Such dualistic epistemologies coexisted in tension; being mutually exclusive, one had to have the attributes of one or the other, but could never be a bit of both. The binary categories also implicitly attributed agency and autonomy more to one category than "the other," invoking hierarchies within the categories. As symbols, binaries involved organizational hierarchies that also invoked regulative norms and measures of control or disallowed the imagination of possibilities that could destabilize these categories. In recent years, geographers and environmental historians have challenged the binary of nature and human culture; one strand of the critiques argues that the "nature/culture divide" is not static, and that one side is now increasingly indistinguishable from the other. The dominant approaches in these influential writings question both the "production of nature" and the "social construction of nature" and invoke materiality and hybridity to create new resource geographies (Bakker 2006; Barnes 2008; Weir 2009). Head and Muir (2007) show that nature and culture are "together" in Australian backyards, but that "culture" there is increasingly turning into the dominant partner in the relationship (Head 2007). These scholars not only claim a social construction of nature and culture, but also emphasize that the two are intimately intermingled in landscapes. Those following this paradigm shift have also challenged and, in some cases, rejected the once-abiding belief in the steady-state balance of nature. Instead, a large number of cornerstone ecological processes are now being described as nonequilibrium dynamics, long-term shifts, and historical conditionalities such as path dependencies and trajectories (Zimmerer 2000, 2007). Accordingly, the renewed emphasis on flux represents nature-society hybrids and is in bold contrast to environmental principles rooted in the belief of nature-tending-toward-equilibrium. The discipline of geography and related fields claims a territorial right over this complex domain of nature, society, territory, and scale. Geographers have contributed significantly to the ongoing debate on what is commonly described as "socionature." Drawing together notions of relational dialectics and hybridity, they have offered a rethinking of the nature-culture divide, the chasm that has most ailed the discipline and created a bipolar identity for geographers. Recently, such an effort has marked the study of the essential relations between water and society, analyzing both the history of water and how the idea of water articulates with its material and representative forms to produce this history (Linton 2010: 41).
The hybrid environments of chars offer real-life examples that challenge a number of naturalized concepts and categories, not just the nature/culture divide, but also the land/water dichotomy, one of the more foundational binaries in environmental studies. These categories continue to pervade, in spite of interventions in more recent years from a number of geographers, a wide range of subfields within geography. Similar to the traditional concepts offered by political geographers—frontiers, boundaries and borders, rim lands and peripheries—land and water are so well established as two separate entities that it is difficult to challenge them. Chars point to the uncertainty of existence of these two well-established categories by their very physical presence at the border of land and water as ambiguous/uncertain/borderline/fringe zones. The tiny chars and their hybrid environments have the power to destabilize the land/water dichotomy, which has remained one of the foundational pillars of our environmental understanding.
Before we present the chars as offering a challenge to the conventional land/water binary, it will be useful to offer a tour d'horizon, a synoptic view of the principal arguments in understanding hybrid environments and landscapes. Reece Jones (2009) begins his essay on the "paradox of categories" by quoting Newman's lament over the lack of a "solid theoretical base" that would allow one to understand boundary phenomena that take place within different social and spatial dimensions: "[a] theory which will enable us to understand the processes of 'bounding' and 'bordering' rather than simply the compartmentalised outcome of the various social and political processes" (Newman 2003: 134). On the other hand, in dealing with the liminal and multidimensional challenges posed by the frontiers, borders, and edges, Howitt feels that the challenges are "on the ground," that the challenge is to understand that edges are not necessarily boundaries and that the distinction between "land" and "water" is not an ontological given (2001: 239). Theory and empirical evidence are not mutually isolated. While environmentalists are rethinking the ways certain categories, borders, and boundaries are used as definite, watertight, and foolproof, a similar need arises to ensure that in critiquing "empty concepts," we do not resort to empty rhetoric. Cleary (1993) defines frontiers as unexplored areas or undeveloped spaces that get integrated into the national or global economy—from this perspective, chars, as metaphors, are frontiers in environment and resource studies. Moodie (1947: 73–74) is famous for his statement that "[f]rontiers are areal, boundaries are linear," and the idea that the frontier is "natural" and the boundaries are artificial or human-inspired is attributed largely to him. Borders have a political connotation acquired as a result of historical specificities that necessitated their formation—frontiers are zones at the periphery of a political division (Prescott 1987). This marginal zone in the last two centuries has been replaced by boundaries or lines of political control (for details of this discussion, see Banerjee 2010: xxiii–xxix). Moodie's views are not supported by Mikesell (1960: 62), who characterizes a frontier as "the outer edge of a settlement within a given area." In settlement expansion, "free land" is just one manifestation of a frontier, other aspects being social and economic fluidity (Agergard et al. 2010).
Central to the politics of nature and waters is the question of environmental knowledge, not only that of the subjective position of the knowledge producer, but also that of how this knowledge is produced, contested, legitimated, and hybridized. South Asian environmental scholars have emphasized the interdependence of biophysical and sociocultural domains, and highlighted the importance of thinking of the poor people's livelihoods as entrenched in local ecology (Gadgil and Guha 1992; Guha 1994). Agrawal (1994) has pointed out that any form of knowledge is embedded within a specific social context, a context that influences the process by which information is generated, processed, and disseminated. Such attention to specific social contexts, environmental historians Saberwal and Rangarajan (2003) comment, allows avoidance of the rhetorical stances on the value of scientific knowledge versus indigenous knowledge. Geographers have contributed to appreciating socially embedded knowledge, ideology, and institutions that mediate between people and nature to fill a gap in resource management and livelihoods and in rethinking the environment. They have pointed out that a "pure nature" or a "physical environment" as conceived earlier hardly exists. What we see as "the environment" is a product of human interaction and modification over many years. Bakker (2006) has shown that environmental discourses are embedded within institutional configurations of power, knowledge, and accepted authority, producing the effects of power within the self as a form of discipline. In understanding chars, one might want to use the lens of environmental history. If we take it that the environmental historians' conceptualization of nature is best expressed in William Cronon's idea of nature as a historical actor, "exist[ing] apart from our understanding of it" (1992: 40), then we are forced to return to the dualism that has had serious impact on the academic identity and integrity of geography as a discipline and that has been questioned by recent geographers. By viewing nature as a historical actor, they distinguish themselves from other historians, who typically treat nature as an object of human contemplation and controversy or as the physical stage for what are quintessentially human social, political, or situational developments. In making statements to the effect that "no landscape is completely cultural, all landscapes are the result of interactions between nature and culture" (Worster 1990: 1144), environmental historians seize upon the work done by cultural geographers.
The foremost among them is Carl Sauer, who led the Berkeley School of Cultural Geography, and whose work during the 1920s laid more emphasis on human civilization in modifying nature. This "cultural landscape" school took the dualism within geography (of physical and human, or nature and culture) for granted, and wrote primarily about human impacts on the natural landscape as a product of cultural preferences and potentials and many generations of human effort. Their efforts did not challenge the binary, but accepted it, thus resulting in an overall schizophrenia in geography that took nature either as an "immaculate linguistic conception" (a mental or social construction) or as knowable only through an absolutist knowledge of the real world entities and processes (pure physical geography) that are separate from human intervention (Whatmore 2002: 2). Grove and Damodaran (2006) have drawn attention to the early contributions made by geographers in developing the understanding of human interactions with environmental elements that shaped the branch of knowledge called environmental history today. They quote Gordon East (1938) to show how contemporary colonial anxieties were expressed in the work of academic geographers, who had begun to understand the extent and consequences of human interventions on nature, that is, "man's role in changing the face of the Earth." East, a geographer belonging to the old school, was noted for his concern over sudden and disastrous natural events like earthquakes: "If only by its more dramatic interventions, a relentless nature makes us painfully aware of the uneasy terms on which human groups occupy and utilise the earth" (1938: 11). This anxiety was rooted in the realization that dramatic and disastrous natural events have remained unpredictable, yet they repeat themselves in different contexts. Indeed, such views led to the rise of what is known as "neodeterminism" in geography, fully represented in the Russian geographer V. A. Anuchin's (1977 [1957]: 52) conceptualization of nature as more flexible but still an "advisor" to humans, and his statement that determinism is "one of the most indispensable facets of dialectical thought." Environmental determinism had split the discipline of geography and led to a set of essential dualisms of which the "physical" versus "human" had been the most contested.
Generations of geographers were trained to treat the physical environment as the core of geography, the very foundation on which the rest of the elements of geographical interest are placed. Although some of these geographical ideas about nature and the natural landscape have significantly contributed to the overall understanding of the environment, in recent years, many geographers have challenged the views that have created an unbridgeable chasm within the discipline. Two factors—a "cultural turn" within geography and a "spatial turn" in other social sciences (such as anthropology and history)—have enabled a wider and more continuous conversation among a number of disciplinary borders. At the same time, some recent geographical contributions have attempted to challenge such binaries and boundaries, particularly that of nature and culture. These recent contributions of geographers highlight the complex relationships of nature and culture and show that hybrid landscapes are not always in full agreement with the ways environmental historians conceptualize nature. The critique of the dangers posed by neoenvironmental determinism in methodological discussions has two major strands. One emerges from the postmodernists, who equate nature with a text whose meaning depends on the reading of it. This perspective has proven valuable in denaturalizing hegemonic ways of seeing the environment. But environmental historians have been dissatisfied with this strand of thinking because to them the world is not "denatured" and too sharp of a focus on human ways of seeing makes nature seem illusory (Demeritt 1994: 164). The other strand of critique has come from cultural ecologists, who have contested this nature-culture binary and highlight the coupling of nature and society. Inglis and Bone (2006) suggest that this boundary-crossing has been marked by the increasing interest of social scientists in issues relating to the human manipulation of both biological life and environmental forces and phenomena.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xv
List of Abbreviations xix
Chapter 1 Introducing Chars: Where Lands Float on Water 1
Chapter 2 Char Fage: A Char Rises 31
Chapter 3 Controlling the River to Free Up Land 51
Chapter 4 Bhitar o Bahir Katha: Inside and Outside Stories of Chars and the Mainland 78
Chapter 5 Silent Footfalls: Peopling the Chars 98
Chapter 6 Living with Risk: Beyond Vulnerability/Security 135
Chapter 7 Livelihoods Defined by Water: Nadir Sathe Baas 150
Chapter 8 Living on Chars, Drifting with Rivers 200
Appendix: Full Census Data for Surveyed Chars 209
Notes 217
Glossary 231
References 237
Index 263
What People are Saying About This
A powerful evocation of life on the silt banks that rise and fall erratically in the Bengal rivers. Water, land and the pioneers who ‘dance with the river’ appear as equal agents of change in this challenge to social theories constructed on nature/culture dualism.—Willem van Schendel, author of A History of Bangladesh
There is a greater need for the literature in environmental studies articulating fluidities between human and environment from the perspectives of environmental social science and environmental humanities. Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt and Gopa Samanta’s careful study of charland dwellers fulfills this need.—Tun Myint, Carleton College, author of Governing International Rivers
This is a refreshing perspective on what remains a little understood region…it can be put alongside a now speeding train of thought on classics such as Seeing like a State and The Art of Not Being Governed and a cascade of writings on post-development and geographies of hope literature.— Rohan D’Souza, Jawaharlal Nehru University, author of Drowned and Dammed: Colonial Capitalism and Flood Control in Eastern India