Lunch Lecture - Luisa Cortesi

Amphibious Omens: Adapting to Dangerous Wetness

In North Bihar, India, a place ridden by water disasters and caste-based violence, care about the wellbeing of the river, plants, animals, of nature in general is labor socialized through caste. Yet, the embodied ways in which fisherfolk interact with waterbodies, its banks, plants, fish, is constantly redefined by political-economic challenges from the local and global market, from the state and its tangled ways about social justice, and by informal ways of raising from the mafia, as well as by the social-political aspirations of their caste. To a certain extent, such challenges and aspirations counterproductively influence their practices of environmental care and wellbeing, and dangerously intersect with poverty, disasters, lack of access to health care, and difficulties in attaining proper nutrition. Yet, such practices also reveal a finely grained political awareness and ecological imagination, and could be read as stunning examples of class consciousness against all odds: not only weapons of the weak, but even attempts to counter processes of hegemony. But there are other stories written in the water—of wastelands and harmful algae—stories that question who we are to distract our understanding of questioning standard ideas of environmental justice.