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Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on the regenerative potential of floods and erosion in riverine life. By underlining how riverine flows make it possible to retain land and life in the Brahmaputra floodplain, I ethnographically explore alternatives to resilience expressed through more-than-human alliances.

Paper long abstract:

“We are called riverine people because we follow the river to where it flows.” This is a conversation I had during PhD fieldwork, with a member of a tribal-indigenous community called the Mising in the Subansiri river region on the Brahmaputra's northern bank. Mising community members often asserted that as a ‘riverine people living at the edges of the Brahmaputra and its many tributaries in upper and central Assam, they have historically never feared floods'. These assertions are contrary to flood vulnerability and marginalization narratives in state and media reports about the annual floods in Assam.

The Mising welcome floods for the fish and fertile alluvial soil they bring. They center the possibilities of continued life in the river island shaped by ‘the river taking away but also putting back land, holding it in the river’s womb but helping it reemerge seasonally’. This paper underlines Mising articulations of the river making it possible to retain land and life through the rhythmic seasonality (Harris 1998: 65) of floods and erosion. I ask: What role do the ontologies of the river island play in Mising community experiences of historically having lived with the river’s contingencies without wording it as vulnerability or resilience? Further, I focus on alternatives to resilience expressed in Mising articulations of lively flows between water, soil, seeds, plants and animals (Ingold 2011; Bennett 2010; Raffles 2002) that contribute to the emergence and submergence of the liquid landscapes they occupy.