Research methods for volatile lifeworlds in the hydrosocial Anthropocene

Theme and aims:

Anthropologists have long been keen to adjust their research methods to the changing social and cultural worlds they are studying and to the changing questions they are addressing. Multi-sited, urban, digital and multispecies ethnographies, for example, belong to the manifold ways in which anthropologists have developed alternative approaches to the presumably classic village-level study; and a closer look at even these classic studies reveals that most of them have not been as limited as they are often portrayed.

If adjustments and fine-tuning of ethnographic methods are necessary to better understand contemporary lifeworlds and produce insights that contribute to current debates, what methods do we need to study the social, material, cultural and economic volatilities that characterize the lives of so many people today? In the contexts of global economic booms and busts, of population shifts and identity politics, of climate change, hydrological megaprojects and social movements, how can we study the ways in which people plan their lives, remember their pasts and make ends meet, how they dream and what they fear, and how these macro dynamics are imbricated into their everyday lives? If change and uncertainty have replaced stability and continuity as the core principles of social life, what ethnographic tools may serve to capture and understand these worlds?

In this workshop, we will discuss and develop such methods in relation to watery lifeworlds. We will focus on research contexts that are characterized by what can be called the hydrosocial Anthropocene. ‘Anthropocene’ here refers to the realization that human activities may have global geologic impacts comparable to plate tectonics and solar radiation. ‘Hydrosocial’ points to the recognition that social and hydrologic relations often closely correspond, in that water flows may mirror political and economic power, and human subjectivities may be shaped by the qualities, quantities and timings of water. Together, these terms may guide our attention to the ways in which differently situated humans – as geomorphological and hydrological agents, and as inhabitants of wet places – participate in the formation of waters and their absence. The hydrosocial Anthropocene is shaped by the volatile dynamics not only of economies and identities that have become part of so many people’s lives today, but also by those of water and its corollaries – sediments, erosion, ice, fish, floods and droughts, among numerous others.

Having noticed how well established the conceptual vocabulary about these issues often is, but how poorly developed the respective practical methods tend to be, we will concentrate on the latter. We will establish a conversation between more junior and more experienced researchers about the potentials and limits of old and new field methods, and we will discuss the practical and ethical aspects of their application. Thereby, we will elaborate a set of tools that may help us to gear our attention to the questions that matter to our interlocutors in the field, and to produce knowledge that speaks to current debates in academia and public discourse.

Programme:

Wednesday, January 17th, 2018

1 pm - Introduction and Overview (Franz Krause)

We will introduce the workshop, including its special interactive exercises, through which we hope to stimulate productive discussion.

1.15 pm - Flying Swimming Burrowing: Life on the Inside of a Worlding World (Tim Ingold)

Introducing his ecological approach to visual perception, James Gibson argued that the terrestrial environment is made up of three components: medium, substances and the surfaces that separate them. For humans, the medium is typically air, which is a gas, but for other animals – such as fish – it may be water, which is liquid. Air for the human and water for the fish afford perception, locomotion and respiration. The solid substances of the earth afford none of these; nevertheless they do afford support. The ground – at the interface between the substances of the earth and the media of air and water – is the most fundamental surface of support. Though Gibson’s approach offers a more realistic picture of the inhabited environment than classical physics, with its view of the universe as consisting of particulate bodies in space, it takes as its starting point a world that has already settled from the fluxes of its formation. On entering these fluxes, however, the tidy distinctions between solid, liquid and gas break down. The solid earth begins to heave or melt, the air thickens into unbreathable fog, water bubbles up from beneath the ground. In this paper I will explore what it means for human beings to live on the inside of such geomorphological processes. Tim Ingold is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen, and a Fellow of both the British Academic and the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He has carried out ethnographic fieldwork among Saami and Finnish people in Lapland, and has written on comparative questions of environment, technology and social organisation in the circumpolar North, on the role of animals in human society, and on human ecology and evolutionary theory in anthropology, biology and history. More recently, he has explored the links between environmental perception and skilled practice. Ingold is currently writing and teaching on issues on the interface between anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture. His latest book, Anthropology and/as Education, was published in 2017.

2 pm - Territorialization of Danger and Fear in Deltaic Research (Sandro Simon)

In late summer 2017, around the time of Kenya's general election and when I was about to engage into longterm fieldwork, the Tana Delta was shaken by numerous deadly attacks ascribed to the terrorist organization Al-Shabaab, which queried and finally prevented my envisioned research on water related work practices in the area. The process of trying to 'make' fieldwork possible against the odds and eventually letting it go entailed painful, yet productive insights into the definition and governance of deltas and the challenges to navigate through different (self-) perceptions and experiences of danger and fear in ethnographic fieldwork. The socio-ecological volatility of deltas largely stems from an emplacement of different forces that reach across scale, yet the management of the implications, such as flooding, travel warnings or military interventions, is often organized top-down with 'imported' tools and accompanied by discourses that render deltaic volatility as something inherent, from within. In anthropology, shifting between the emic and the etic is a key component of the discipline's main method, participant observation. Yet, in situations of danger and fear, where one is on the one hand dependent on the expertise and help of locals and on the other hand 'thrown back' at one's individual, distinct vulnerability, the categories of 'inside' and 'outside' diversify as one oscillates between (self-) alienation and (self-) trust. This talk seeks to explore, problematize and bring together different 'inner' and 'outer' aspects of danger and fear by linking ethnographic experience to deltaic governance. Sandro Simon is a PhD Student and member of the DELTA team at the University of Cologne. He obtained an MA in African Studies with the main modules Social Anthropology and Environment & Human-Wellbeing from University of Basel and has been undertaking research on human-environmental relations in Cameroon, Kenya and Senegal.

2.20 pm - Comments and discussion

2.40 - Around and Around: Kyauk pyin, kaing-kyun and the challenges of ethnographying 'volatility' in the Ayeyarwady Delta (Benoit Ivars)

In the alluvial land or island (kaing(-Kyun)) near Nyaungdone in the Ayeyarwady River Delta, life takes place in an interplay between the advance and retreat of land, depending on the path of the river, its force and tranquility. Although the river continuously enriches and fertilizes the soils, it holds the land in suspense and its meandering goes hand-in-hand with the uncertainty of the kaing dwellers. In this presentation, I reflect on the image of the 'kyauk pyin' used by a key informant to depict the 'circular' patterns that govern life in the kaing. I will argue about the need to unpack the concept of 'volatility' and to ground it in local understandings, narratives and representations of change. Following the image of the 'kyauk pyin', which I use as a heuristic for investigating volatility, I try to restate its resonating 'trope of circularity' in the larger political and ecological context of the delta. Then, I discuss, based on some fieldwork in and around Nyaungdone, my own experiences in scaling out 'volatilities'. I will suggest that the ethnographic work of researching volatility should be methodologically plural, based on approaches deriving from anthropology, political ecology and history.

Benoit Ivars is a Ph.D. student in the Cultural and Social Anthropology Department at the University of Cologne. His research interests are in water and environmental change, with an emphasis on rural development and dynamics of agrarian landscapes. His current field placement is with the Ayeyarwady (Irrawaddy) Delta communities in Myanmar.

3 pm - Comments and discussion

3.20 pm - Coffee break

3.50 pm - Of salt and drought - What methods for ethnographic research on floating places and changing flows? (Nora Horisberger)

This presentation raises and discusses some questions I am currently dealing with in my fieldwork. Flows – of various qualities and characteristics – are an important part of the history as well as the everyday life on the Canárias Island in the Parnaíba Delta. According to local narratives, several hundred years ago, moving sand dunes transformed mangrove forests into an inhabitable place – the Canárias Island was born. One of the characteristics of life on the island, also referred to as sandbank, is to “live on water”: water not only surrounds the place, it is also beneath it. To be floating on water is one of the main distinctions from life on terra firma, it confers high fertility and productivity to the environment. Part of this abundance (e.g. crabs, cashew nuts, carnaúba wax) is gathered and sold by inhabitants and literally “flows out” of the delta region to other places. Changes of these flows can have important impacts on those who live within them. For instance, rivers are drying and some fresh water flows became salty during the last years and made rice planting, a major activity of the region, impossible.
How to do ethnographic research in such fluctuating environments where flows connect pasts and presents as well as various places and actors (national and international)? Can we stay at the village level or should we do multi-sited fieldwork, for instance trying to `follow the flows`?

PhD Student in the Department of Cultural and Social Anthropology at the University of Cologne and member of the DELTA Project currently doing research in the Parnaíba Delta, Brazil. Master’s degree in Environmental Anthropology at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris. Research for master thesis in riverine villages in the Maranhão Lowlands, Northeast of Brazil.

4.10 pm - Comments and discussion

4.30 - 6.30 pm - Interactive exercise I

7 pm - Dinner

(for invited speakers)

Thursday, January 18th, 2018

9 am - "Do we need research methods for watery lifeworlds?" (Willem van Schendel)

The idea that the study of delta-based societies requires special ethnographic tools requires close scrutiny. What is so special about watery environments that the societies that flourish in them must be studied in a ‘water-sensitive’ or ‘hydro-aware’ way? This presentation looks at the pros and cons of this assumption and examines the links between delta life and volatility.

Willem van Schendel (University of Amsterdam & International Institute of Social History) is an anthropologist and historian. His work deals with borderlands, illegality, nations and minorities, agricultural commodities and labour relations. Books with relevance to the study of deltas include Three Deltas: Accumulation and Poverty in Rural Burma, Bengal and South India (1991); The Bengal Borderland: Beyond State and Nation in South Asia (2005); A History of Bangladesh (2009); and The Bangladesh Reader: History, Culture, Politics (co-ed., 2013).

9.45 am - Trapping trappers, and other challenges of ethnographic fieldwork in the Mackenzie Delta (Franz Krause)

A strategy used by hunter-gatherers to procure food is to be opportunistic and flexible, improvising their activities as they go along. Furthermore, when hunting, fishing and trapping, their success often depends on luring animals into a particular place or predicting their movements, rather than directly pursuing them. Preparing, waiting, and returning empty-handed belong to hunting and gathering as much as do going out and bringing back prey. These characteristics are also prevalent in the techniques used by the people who hunt, fish and trap in the Mackenzie Delta.

Having begun ethnographic fieldwork in and around the hamlet of Aklavik in the Mackenzie Delta, I have come to think of my research as akin to trapping. I am pursuing ever-elusive stories and knowledges, and eager to participate in meaningful activities that may be long delayed or over by the time I hear of them. Every so often, I feel like I happen to be in the right spot at the right time, but I also spend a lot of time attempting to prepare useful encounters, and at least as much time waiting for things to happen.

In this presentation, I will reflect on the parallels between trappers’ and ethnographers’ work practices, based on my recent experiences in the Mackenzie Delta. I will suggest that researching a volatile social and ecological world may require opportunistic, flexible and improvised research methods.

Franz Krause is an anthropologist interested in the role of water in society and culture. He works as Junior Research Group Director of the DELTA project at the University of Cologne, Germany. In the course of this project, he is currently conducting ethnographic fieldwork in the Mackenzie Delta in the Canadian Northwest Territories.

10.15 am - Discordance and the Event of the River (Naveeda Khan)

The Brahmaputra/Jamuna River, the trans-boundary Asian river, has featured most often in my ethnographic work as a hydrological entity. In this paper I want to take up a different perspective on the Brahmaputra/Jamuna River, not as a hydrological entity but as a geological event. For the purposes of this paper the eventfulness of interest to me is the particular temporality introduced by the earthquake that made the river into an extension of the earthquake, a passageway for the sediment buildup that the earthquake produced, slated to taper off once the sediment had been successfully transported. What do we make of this movement, this gesture, which outlasts the seismic event and its aftershocks? Drawing on Doreen Massey's provocation that we think of landscape as an event, I suggest that the eventfulness of the landscape is experienced through discordant temporalities that unsettle, and that the geological sciences are available to a certain extent in making such encounters and experiences possible. This provocation serves as the impetus for this paper, which to read scientific works on the Brahmaputra/Jamuna River in a romantic spirit and with a focus on the surface, subsurface and below, in order to invite what I call an experience of discordance.

Naveeda Khan is associate professor of anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. Her past work includes Muslim Becoming: Aspiration and Skepticism in Pakistan and Beyond Crisis?: Reevaluating Pakistan. Her more recent work is on silt islands in the middle of the Jamuna river system in Bangladesh on which she is writing a manuscript titled Towards a Romantic Anthropology: River Life and Climate Change in Bangladesh. She is currently considering research on seismology and seismologists working on Bangladesh and conducting research on the emergent contours of climate governance under the 2015 Paris Agreement, two different orders of seismic events projected for Bangladesh.

11 am - Coffee break

11.30 am - Interactive exercise II

1 pm - Lunch

2 pm - Excursion

4.30 pm - Coffee break

5 pm - River Deltas in the context of debate about the Anthropocene up to now (Matthew Edgeworth)

This paper looks at how river deltas have figured in the context of the broader interdisciplinary debate about the Anthropocene up to now. Deltas are radically influenced by human activities upstream - in the form of both soil-eroding activities which increase amounts of sediment carried, and the construction of dams which reduce the amounts of sediment reaching deltas. These changes in sediment flux constitute a significant part of the stratigraphic signature of human impact on Earth systems, with implications for people who live in Delta regions.

Matt Edgeworth is senior project officer at the Cambridge archaeological unit, University of Cambridge, and honorary research fellow at the University of Leicester, UK. He wrote the book Fluid Pasts: archaeology of flow" (Bloomsbury Academic 2011). He is also an active member of the Anthropocene working group.

5.45 pm - Lost in translation and standardization? Collecting and evaluating quantitative social-science data in coastal Bangladesh (Amelie Bernzen & Boris Braun)

In this presentation, we report on a standardized (quantitative) household survey in five districts of coastal Bangladesh between October and December 2014, which was to generate locally representative data of rural livelihoods in the Ganges-Meghna-Brahmaputra Delta. This survey was part of the international Belmont Forum BanD-AiD project that assembled an interdisciplinary team to assess sea-level rise and climate change and the adaptation of the rural population in coastal Bangladesh to these challenges. Nine study sites were selected to represent three of the four major eco-zones and a broad variety of geographic, climatic and socio-economic coastal circumstances, including current land uses, varying exposure to natural disasters such as floods, severe river erosion, storm surges and cyclones, and demographic trends. The final sample size was 1,188 households, covering data of more than 6,000 individuals. Not only during the preparation phase of the survey but over the course of the three months of data collection and during data cleaning and evaluation later on, we were able to reflect further on the cultural, logistic, technical and resource-related advantages and challenges of our methodological approach. These may in some cases be typical of “Global South” experiences for “Global North” researchers or related to the distinct quantitative approach, some however reflect the particular case of the Bangladesh coastal environment.

Amelie Bernzen is post-doctoral research fellow of Economic Geography at the Institute of Geography, University of Cologne. Her recent work has focused on rural and smallholder livelihoods in coastal Bangladesh and India.

6.15 pm - Path dependency and networks: Development initiatives and the management of the Ayeyarwady (Jean-Philippe Venot)

Myanmar has witnessed tremendous changes over the last decade, including regime shifts towards more democracy that notably translated in a surge of development aid interventions including in the agricultural and water sector in the Ayeyarwady river basin and delta. The main contention of this paper is that in such a context where global and bilateral development actors support a multitude of projects, understanding delta dynamics partly hinges on decentering attention from the delta itself – and the people who live in it - towards national and international level actors who engage with notions such as delta management and delta planning. Drawing from the field of anthropology of development, this paper is a preliminary analysis of the development networks that organize themselves around the Ayeyarwady Delta and how they have come into being. This provides a complementary understanding to more “classic” anthropology approaches that aim to provide insightful accounts of what living in/with a delta means.

Jean-Philippe Venot is a social science researcher with the French Research Institute for Sustainable Development (IRD) and is currently based in Phnom Penhm Cambodia. His research focuses on the policies and politics of water management and irrigation development with specific attention to the socio-technical networks shaping development practices in these fields.

7.30 pm - Dinner

(for invited speakers)

Friday, January 19th, 2018

9 am - Scaling a River (Mark Harris)

How can we know a watery space? This contribution to the ‘hydrosocial Anthropocene’ will focus on techniques and methodologies for the ethnographic and historical investigation of riverine societies. Here I will examine three ‘moments’ to explore how we can open ariver to ethnographic and historical investigation. The first is swimming and how this practical activity provides an insight into the charater of the space and body of the river, its flows and currents. The second is encounter: the river as a meeting point for human community and its nurturing. The final moment is the river as a ‘being’; here questions of a river’s legal rights and ownership come to the forefront. This trinity of approaches help shift our terracentric notions towards a more liquid appreciation of human life. Underlying this shift is the work of scaling. The activities on and around rivers and seas produce different levels and depths of engagements: some intense and close up and others make use of its immeasurable surfaces for long distance movement. Scaling then is a composite technique for knowing about human life and its embeddedness in the liquid environment.

Mark Harris is the Head of the School of Philosophical, Anthropological and Film Studies at the University of St Andrews. He has conducted field and archival research in the Brazilian Amazon. His research interests encompass historical anthropology, spatial history, political ecology, peasantries and the state, the anthropology of skill.

9.45 am - Hybrid Riverscapes: Governing rivers beyond land and water dichotomies (Alexander Follmann)

The inherent complexity of environmental change along rivers requires a change of perspective going beyond binary conceptualizations of water/land, and nature/culture. By linking a discourse analytical approach with theoretical concepts from governance research and urban political ecology, this conceptual paper develops the framework of hybrid riverscapes – spatially referring to the riverine landscape formed by the natural forces of the river and human interventions – and outlines an innovative conceptual framework to study environmental change and governance along rivers. Using the case study of Delhi’s riverscapes along the Yamuna, the paper focuses on the multiple city-river relationships from the 1970s to current processes of urban environmental change. The paper analyses dominant discourses and their associated story-lines, which have remained persistent over decades and still influence current processes of urban environmental change and governance. It highlights that different approaches for the integration of the river in the fabric of the city, dynamic land-use changes and the reclamation of ecologically sensitive riverscapes are closely connected to changing discursive framings of the role and function of these socio-ecological hybrids in the remaking of the city.

Alexander Follmann is a human geographer interested in human-environment interactions, (peri-)urban environmental change and governance. His past and current research focuses on (urban) rivers and peri-urban transformations in India and Kenya. He is currently a post-doctoral lecturer and researcher at the Institute of Geography and the Global South Studies Center, UoC. His book "Governing Riverscapes. Urban Environmental Change along the River Yamuna in Delhi, India" was published in 2016.

10.15 am - Walking in the Anthropocene: Exploring Multispecies Relations in Coastal Ecuador (Michael Vina)

What anthropological methods are best suited for studying multispecies relations in the Hydrosocial Anthropocene? How can we simultaneously grapple with human and nonhuman assemblages without reducing the latter to a template for the desires and meanings of the former? How can ethnobiology and multispecies ethnography—two subfields firmly anchored in grappling within human-nature relations—establish a more productive engagement? This paper aims to explore potential answers to these questions by juxtaposing freelists and structured interviews, standard tools in ethnobiological research, with walkabouts, also known as participatory transects in rural appraisal studies. While freelists and interviews expanded my knowledge about marine fauna nomenclature and morphology, they also obscured the situated orientations that generate ecological knowledge as well as the unexpected encounters that revealed how landscapes emerge through those humans and nonhumans that carve out their lifeworlds in shifting sites dominated by water, fish, and sediments. Multispecies ethnography offers an opportunity, following Tsing’s (2015) suggestion that walking is a way of “taking notice,” to learn about deep seated memories and fragmented histories that stir hope, angst, and worry, thus revealing the uncertainty of building and dwelling in landscapes which are subjected to and implicated in socio-ecological changes of different intensities.

I am a PhD candidate at the department of social anthropology, University of Bergen, Norway. My interests include human-fish relations, ethnoecology, political ecology, and multispecies ethnography. I am currently working on my dissertation titled: When Rivers do not Meet the Sea: Environmental Change, Seascape Assemblages, and Fishers’ Ecological Knowledge.

10.45 am - Coffee break

11.15 am - Interactive exercise III

1 pm - Lunch and farewells