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.

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.

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).

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. 

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.