On Permeable Waters and Landscapes: A Special Commentary
By Sayd Randle, College of Integrative Studies, Singapore Management University. Walking along a covered aqueduct’s path through the desert, water can seem remarkably contained, cleanly se…
Tag: water
The Many Worlds of Brine: Disputed Water Worlds in the Argentine Puna and Beyond
By Melisa Escosteguy (Non-Conventional Energy Research Institute-INENCO-CONICET, Universidad de Salta) and Maria Labourt (Department of Sociology, University of Southern California). Transform…
Water Scarcity, Hydropolitics, and the Importance of Materiality at the Foothills of the Rocky Mountains
How is growing water scarcity experienced by livestock producers? And to what extent does the materiality of water and the infrastructures on which users rely influence social relations…
The Water of Our Gods: How Protecting a Psychedelic Cactus and Local Water Created a Popular Environmental Movement in Mexico
By Salvador Contreras § Havaiko’s safe return to his family was a stroke of luck. In a village nestled in the Wixárika Sierra of Western Mexico, Havaiko and…
Can Archaeology Help Restore the Oceans?
On the Channel Islands, archaeologists draw lessons in sustainability from historic Chumash fishing practices. USING THE PAST FOR THE FUTURE Off the southern California coast lies a little-known…
The Persistence of Fukushima’s Fisherfolk
In a new book, an anthropologist with long-term ties to northeastern Japan shares stories of how fishing communities have continued making a living in uncertain waters after the…
On the Quandaries of Aquatic Forensics
A team of scientists, including an anthropologist, explains the challenges and methods for locating, identifying, and retrieving human remains from underwater. This article was originally published a…
Piecing Together the Puzzle of Oman’s Ancient Towers
In recent years, the Omani government has invested in archaeology and heritage tourism to boost its economy—renewing interest in mysterious 4,000-year-old stone towers that dot the Southeastern Arabia…
Call for Posts: Disputed Water Worlds
Chorros Blancos Waterfall, Cajamarca, Colombia. Photograph by Ángela Castillo-Ardila, 2019. How do people and other beings relate to water across its multiple forms and scales? Water exists in…
A Birth and a Death—a Haunting of Igbo Landing
A Ghanian American poet-anthropologist crafts her own African diasporic and Indigenous identity through weaving herself into a famous story of African resistance and survival. “A Birth and a…
The Mexican River Defenders Fighting for the San Pedro
Nature-loving volunteers in the Mexican state of Chihuahua gather weekly on the banks of the San Pedro River to collect trash. But their aims are bigger. ✽ If…
Fishing in the Shadow of Oil
In the Persian Gulf and Gulf of Oman, fishing communities have become part of a complex “assemblage” of human and natural worlds shaped by the global fossil fuel…
Tree Rings Are Evidence of the Megadrought—and Our Doom
I love trees. I also love dendrochronology—literally, “the study of tree time.” This science, which uses data derived from tree growth rings, provides scientists with a wealth of…
Hard Water
I. That cloud hovering looks like it came all the way from Ukraine, sadness has darkened our skyline. The rain is hail shattering the landscape into pieces of…
Surfing in Color
“Surfing in Color” is part of the collection Lead Me to Life: Voices of the African Diaspora. Read the introduction to the collection here. Floating, my gaze and…
Adapt or Abandon? Hard Choices in the Himalayas
The Loba tribespeople living in the village of Dhe in Nepal are increasingly abandoning their homes as climate change transforms the landscape. Taylor Weidman/LightRocket/Getty Images On …
Making the Invisible Seen: The Infrastructure of Modern Groundwater Governmentality in Taiwan
In 2009, the Taiwan High Speed Railway Company (THSR) claimed that severe land subsidence in Changhua and Yunlin counties was compromising and damaging the structural integrity of the…
What Do Goats and Wars Have to Do With Glacier Loss?
A local guide stands near Shali Kangri glacier in the Ladakh region of the Indian Himalayas. Hélène Lapierre-Messier For scientists, the layers of ice that make up glaciers…
And You Watch as We Make Woodwater Again
[no-caption] Arterra/Universal Images Group/Getty Images and you wonder how we remember our culture of traumatization our body beings tied to a land we were told was not ours…
How to Survive Climate Change in the India-Bangladesh Borderlands
Homes along a river in the Sundarbans face a concrete embankment that protects land on the opposite side from rising waters. Megnaa Mehtta The Sundarbans is a region…
Indigenous Water Ontologies, Plurilegal Encounters and Interlegal Translation
Lieselotte Viaene (Universidad Carlos III de Madrid) will talk about “Indigenous water ontologies, plurilegal encounters and interlegal translation: some reflections from the field”. Andrea Ballestero…
The Struggles of a “River People” in Assam
A member of the Mising, a tribal, Indigenous community in Assam, India, explains how erosion displaced people along the banks of the Brahmaputra River. Nimisha Thakur One night…
Arrival Waters
[no-caption] Traumlichtfabrik/Getty Images I am about 70 years away from the experience that led to this poem and about 50 years away from anthropology. Some 20 years ago…
How Plants Become Bits: The Politics of Harmful Algal Bloom Mitigation in Lake Erie
The Power of One While seated at my kitchen table in my apartment in Columbus, OH, the site of my dissertation fieldwork, I attended an Ohio Agribusiness conference…