Recognizing the coastal location of the 2024 AAR Annual Meeting, this session features papers on water, extractivism, and anti- or de-colonial approaches to knowing and relating to waters. In keeping with the annual meeting theme, the confluence of military violence and oceanic topics will be front of mind in a conference center mere kilometers from the second largest US naval base and an influential institution of oceanography with a military history. Following the insights of scholars such as Gilo-Whitaker, Liboiron, Ballestero, and more, the papers in this session attend to slippages and flows among culturally particular epistemologies, ontologies, and ethics of water. With foci on ritual in the context of privatized waters of the Sundarbans, multi-religious tensions around extraction at sites of melting glaciers in Bolivia’s Milluni Valley, and contesting the evangelical ferver of mainstream fresh water futurisms, these papers pay particular attention to the coloniality of practices of assessing and measuring waters while confronting the contemporary narrowing of paradigms for resistance.
Divine and demonic powers play an important role in everyday life in the Sundarbans of West Bengal, India, shaping how people relate to the delta’s multispecies ecologies and to each other. This paper considers changing relations with water beings under conditions of water privatization. In the Sundarbans, certain creeks, ponds, and lakes are recognized as “awakened” (jagroto), enlivened by the presence of beings that sometimes assume embodied form in aquatic animals like crocodiles and fish. With the enclosure of these waters as private fisheries, water beings have become a point of contestation. Many say that they have departed local waters, even as fishery owners continue to enact relations with water beings through prayer and ritual. I adopt a cosmopolitical ecology framework to understand how extraction in aqueous ecologies articulates with more-than-human relations, generating material and spiritual gains for some and disorienting losses for others.
Across cultures and throughout history, glaciers have been considered to be living beings who respond to human activity, sometimes marauding mountain villages, sometimes rebuking moral infractions. Climate change is leading to rapid extinction of glaciers, with significant implications for the lifeways of local, rural, and Indigenous peoples. Placing the cryohumanities in conversation with studies of extractivism, this paper examines the ways that the global decline of mountain glaciers – terrestrial seas – sets the stage for enclosure and extraction of economically important resources including water, minerals, and land, with specific attention to the contested ontologies and epistemologies of glacier extinction in and around Bolivia’s Milluni Valley, where Catholicism, Evangelical Christianity, and Indigenous Aymara cosmovision intermingle and glacial decline has exacerbated inter and intra-community tensions around resource access. Indigenous Aymara cosmology understands mountains and glaciers as ancestors and guardians, yet glacier extinction creates emergent possibilities for resource extraction and exploitation.
Beginning with an insistence on hydrosocial pluralities of fresh waters, this paper presents a comparison among three kinds of narrative futurisms: Octavia Butler’s 1993 parabolic futurism (from Parable of the Sower) of the arid southern California of 2024; Andrea Ballestero’s ethnographic future anterior as watery ontologies are negotiated between the regnant concepts of commodity and human right; and the increasingly geopolitcally-influential mainstream Anthropocene Fresh Water futurisms. I argue against five specific totalizing dangers and evangelical fervor of mainstream fresh water futurisms, suggesting instead that the social ontologies and narrative multiplicities offered by anti- and decolonial speculative fiction writers (Butler) and contemporary social scientists (Ballestero) are necessary for thinking and relating to fresh waters.