Short Abstract

This panel explores rivers as living ecologies that shape human and more-than-human life, highlighting how fluvial environments reframe anthropological understandings of environment, care, politics and the ethics of life in fluvial spaces.

Long Abstract

Living with Rivers: Ecologies, Politics, and the Making of Fluvial Worlds: This panel invites scholars to think of rivers as social, political, and ecological worlds. Rivers are not merely naturally occurring bodies or resources to be managed—they are dynamic entities that sustain, unsettle, and shape human and more-than-human life. For communities who live with and on the river, the river is at once livelihood, kin, and force, both sustaining and undoing life.

Bringing together scholars from across South Asia and beyond, this panel explores how fluvial ecologies reveal the entanglement of environment, politics, and infrastructure. We ask: How do rivers become sites of care and contestation, of governance and dispossession? How might attention to these flows help reimagine the ecological as inherently political? How do communities engage with rivers as living archives of memory and loss? What forms of knowledge, care, and struggle arise from dwelling in fluvial environments that are increasingly transformed by climate change, development, and state regulation?

By foregrounding the relational and political life of rivers and communities which live with it, this discussion aims to unsettle inherited binaries between nature and society, ecology and politics, flow and fixity. Participants will reflect on how attention to rivers might reorient anthropological understandings of environment, agency, and the state, while offering grounded insights into the ethics and aesthetics of living with water bodies.

This Panel has 22 pending paper proposals.
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