Paper short abstract

Santhal communities read the Shilabati River through ant migrations, bird movements, and shifts in water colour that are not acknowledged. This paper argues that indigenous flood knowledge is not just about practical survival. It is a claim to govern their own rivers and define their own risks.

Paper long abstract

Indigenous communities do not simply adapt to floods. They contest who gets to say what a river is and how people should live with it. The Santhal people have a systematic knowledge system about water behaviour, risk, and survival. This system was built over generations, embedded in myth, song, and practice. But state flood management has treated this knowledge as folklore rather than governance. This paper argues that Santhal flood knowledge represents a claim to sovereignty. It offers an alternative vision of living with rivers that does not require the massive infrastructure that states love to build.

I have worked with and lived alongside Santhal communities for the last 20 years or so. I have documented their flood indicators: how they read nature before official warnings arrive. I have recorded their practices: elevated homes, banana rafts, flood songs that teach children survival drills. I have watched them manage major floods. The state embankments failed repeatedly. Santhal knowledge-holders adapted. This is not a story of picturesque tradition. It is a story of knowledge systems that work because they were built on relationship with place. State infrastructure failed because it ignored local conditions and community voice.

Anthropology must examine how indigenous communities govern their own waters. Rather than viewing Santhal knowledge as heritage to preserve, we should ask what their river practices reveal about living differently with water. This paper draws on decades of fieldwork to show how indigenous knowledge challenges state approaches to flood governance and water management.

Paper short abstract

This paper examines maritime routes shaping intellectual exchange across South, East, and Southeast Asia. Focusing on Bay of Bengal–Japan sea networks linking Tāmralipti, Calcutta, Kobe, Yokohama it traces how waterborne network shaped Japanese imagination of India as Tenjiku forging Asian modernity

Paper long abstract

This paper explores rivers and maritime routes that have profoundly shaped cultural mobility and intellectual exchange across Asia. Focusing on the historical continuum of Indo–Japanese connections through the Bay of Bengal and Japan’s coastal networks, it argues that water bodies were not passive backdrops but dynamic worlds that actively sustained, mediated, and transformed human and more-than-human life. From ancient port of Tāmralipti in Bengal to the fluvial corridors of Naniwa (Osaka), the Yodo River, and the Seto Inland Sea water networks enabled the circulation of textiles, commodities, Buddhist idea, world philosophies and people long before the emergence of modern nation-states. These waterways shaped enduring cultural imaginaries of Tenjiku (India) as a sacred and intellectual horizon, while also structuring everyday practices of navigation, livelihood, care, and risk. Merchants, monks, pilgrims, and sailors inhabited rivers and seas as ethical spaces where commerce, devotion, and survival were deeply entangled. The paper examines how fluvial environments of modern Indo–Japanese encounters shaped through colonial maritime infrastructures, especially the development of docks in British-era Calcutta, such as Kidderpore and Watgunge. The city’s contemporary landscape continues to bear silent traces of these earlier maritime ecologies standing as a living archives of encounter, preserving histories of connectivity alongside displacement, migration, and labor. Bringing together historical and cultural perspectives, the paper challenges inherited binaries between nature and society, land and sea, and ecology and politics. It proposes water routes as ethical and political actors in Asia’s transregional history, central to the making of Asian modernity and Indo–Japanese intellectual exchange.

Paper short abstract

This paper will enable one to understand char-dwellers’ relational and fluvial world through the ethnographic object of the boat, how such a world is changing because of a land favoring state’s neglect of boats and yet how the mobile char-dwellers are challenging such a fixity obsessed state.

Paper long abstract

This paper looks at boats as an ethnographic object in riverine char-lands of western Assam to understand how state interventions (or non-intervention) have changed char-dwellers’ fluvial identity, memories and relations. It looks at the lifeworld of boats as an affective reality – how these boats have allowed char-dwellers to traditionally remain mobile, fluid, historically migrating across state fixed borders by following connected river-routes, access fluvial spaces and shape their socio-cultural identities as more relational, entangled and syncretic. Boats keep alive the rhizomatic fluidity of char-dwellers as a cultural and political community as they battle with a land favoring fixity-obsessed majoritarian state. The colonial politics of favoring land over water wherein land was not simply seen as having economic value, but also recognized as a cultural and ideological category, through which civilization was furthered is forwarded by the post-independent majoritarian state too. Consequently, relations of fluidity defining char-dwellers’ socio-political world are being slowly replaced by relations of precarity, fixity, revenue generation and criminality.

Finally, by looking at boats, I understand how the water-dependent, mobile char-dwellers are challenging such a land-favoring state and creating spaces of co-existence by establishing the state as affective. I argue ‘Affective state’ as one that is rhizomatic and allows the flow of understanding between the state and char-dwellers opening up spaces of co-existence, of fluidity. The paper largely explores what can mobile objects, used by migratory communities living in fluvial ecologies, teach us about identity, belongingness, state-society relations, human-non-human entanglements, nature of state among others?

Paper short abstract

This research explores how environmental legal geographies and legal ecologies, particularly the emerging Rights of Nature, reframe relational ontologies, reciprocal relationships, and governance of intermittent river ecosystems.

Paper long abstract

This research conceptualises rivers as living entities with rights that shape human and more-than-human lives. It explores how environmental legal geographies and legal ecologies, particularly the emerging ecocentric approach, such as the Rights of Nature, reframe relational ontologies, reciprocal relationships, and governance of intermittent river ecosystems. The research draws on ethnographic fieldwork along the Kanakarayan Aru and Malwathu Oya river basins in Sri Lanka. The riverine communities reveal that rivers’ flows intersect with local livelihoods, irrigation infrastructure, development, and traditional and modern governance. Kanakarayan Aru is the site of ongoing political contestation over water from the Iranaimadu reservoir between communities in Jaffna and farmers in Kilinochchi. These highlight uncertainties surrounding Kilinochchi farmers’ customary water rights and reflect broader injustices and inequalities in water access and livelihood security. Similarly, the lower Malwathu Oya project illustrates how state-led irrigation and settlement schemes entangle questions of land rights, demographic change, and political objectives under the guise of water management. This research thus argues that rivers are both living ecologies and political-legal actors where rights, responsibilities, and social relations are continuously interdependent by attending to fluvial ecologies, river imaginaries, relational ethics, and governance. Rights-based and relational approaches to river governance reveal how ecology, society and law are inseparably intertwined, offering new pathways for ecocentric governance. This research demonstrates how environmental legal geographies and legal ecologies could elucidate new avenues for challenging binaries between nature and society, and for recognising nature’s rights, ethics, governance, and ecological justice within emerging fluvial ecological landscapes.

Paper short abstract

This paper examines how aquatic charisma figures in the transcultural ethics of river protection to reveal insights into the intersections between human-river relationships, the legal developments by which they are increasingly formalised, and the distributive agency of rivers themselves.

Paper long abstract

Rivers are vital, lively, and fundamentally unruly. They support human sustenance, settlements, livelihoods, and security. In recent years they have also become the focus of juridical developments in environmental protection and management. Ecuador, Aotearoa (New Zealand), India, Colombia, Australia, and Bangladesh have each developed river protection laws informed by an emerging transcultural discourse calling for the recognition of the ‘rights of nature.’ Despite these developments proliferating across geopolitical and socio-cultural milieux, there has been limited scholarship exploring why rivers have emerged as the main beneficiaries of such legal protection. In addressing this epistemic gap and inspired by theoretical work on the concept of nonhuman charisma (Lorimer, 2007), I propose the concept of the ‘charismatic river.’ Ethological, relational, and affective, I examine how aquatic charisma figures in the transcultural ethics of river protection. I draw on ethnographic fieldwork conducted with two rivers subject to both intensifying ecological precarity and novel juridical developments. The Birrarung (Yarra River) is a regionally significant river located in Narrm (Melbourne) in south-eastern Australia. The River Ganga is an expansive transboundary river traversing northern India and Bangladesh. These distinct but parallel case studies reveal insights into the intersections between human-river relationships, the legal developments by which they are increasingly formalised, and ultimately, the distributive agency of rivers themselves.

Paper short abstract

Drawing from ethnographic account from Barito and Martapura Rivers in Banjarmasin, I explore how the development of road transport infrastructure, industry, and household plumbing in Banjarmasin reoriented the communities’ relationship with the riverine environment

Paper long abstract

The development of road transport infrastructure, industry, and household plumbing in Banjarmasin reoriented the communities’ relationship with the river, the way they view water (in)security, waste, pollution and daily survival. The shift from river as the main transport channel to its more connected and more popular land transport changes how people engage with the river in their daily lives, one of which is reflected on how the houses switch its orientation from facing the body of water to facing away from it. In this paper, I explore how the infrastructural shifts influence how people’s lives entangle with the riverine environment, from water use, environmental destruction, food source, and recreational needs. Departing from Sara Ahmed’s concept of use (2019), I will explore how the changes of use and disuse of the river and water shifts the relationship dynamics of the people and its riverine environment as part of their day-to-day lives. This paper draws from ethnographic account of the community living along riverbanks in Banjarmasin, Indonesia. I am collecting the data from two of the main rivers in the city, Barito as the main artery of inter-province transport for people, coal, timber, and other commodities, and its smaller counterpart, the Martapura river that cuts through the city centre providing the main transport, recreational area and sustenance for the communities living alongside it.

Paper short abstract

This paper examines forms of “telling the river” after the 2022 Oder disaster among people closely connected to it—artists, residents, photographers, and biologists. It frames attunement and eco-elegy as affective ways of living with a damaged river and caring for its future.

Paper long abstract

In recent years, the Oder and its valleys have come to appear as anthropogenic landscapes marked by degradation, uncertainty, and the specter of future catastrophes. Images of dead fish, foul-smelling sludge, and a pervasive silence momentarily made the river hyper-visible. Yet after the media spectacle subsided, the consequences of ecological violence—anger, grief, and broken relationships—remained a daily experience for residents along the Oder’s banks. Rather than a passive backdrop to human action, the river has become a contested and fragile relation shaped through entanglements of ecological processes, political neglect, regulatory failure, and situated practices of care.

This paper analyzes visual, sonic, and narrative practices that have emerged around the Oder as affective responses to the “slow violence” of environmental degradation and as modes of living with a damaged river. Drawing on short-term sensory ethnography conducted with people living with, on, and near the Oder River, I introduce attunement as a category linking affect, embodied perception, and an ethics of care. Walking muddy riverbanks, drifting with the current, listening, recording sounds, and creating photographic archives generate time-extended forms of attention through which humans and the river are co-attuned, sustaining relations beyond the moment of spectacular disaster.

I describe these practices as eco-elegies: not nostalgic laments for a “lost nature,” but affective narratives that remain with fragility, uncertainty, and responsibility over time. As forms of river storytelling, they are oriented toward possible futures rather than merely recording loss, and they aim to provoke political and ethical responsibility.

Paper short abstract

Hindus in Bangladesh see rivers as deities who protect and care. Climate change disrupts rituals, wounding sacred bonds. Communities respond with ritual improvisation for access rights. This more-than-human view reveals fluvial worlds as living labs for the ethics and politics of dwelling.

Paper long abstract

In Hindu cosmology, rivers are sacred more-than-human beings integral to ritual practice. For Hindu followers in Bangladesh, rivers are not mere waterways, but sentient beings, deities, and kin deeply embedded in their ritual lives. Without the river's water, many rituals would not be possible; moreover, if the rivers were to dry up, the rituals associated with specific rivers may one day disappear. This paper offers a more-than-human human-centric analysis of key river-based rituals—Idol immersion, ritual bathing (snan), ancestral tarpan, daily ghat worship, marriage rituals, and lifecycle ceremonies—where rivers function as living interlocutors addressed through care, reverence, and negotiation

Based on ethnographic research in Bangladesh's riverine regions, I demonstrate how these rituals constitute the river simultaneously as a deity, a purifier, a moral witness, a well-wisher, and an unharmful neighbor. Climate change, embankment construction, pollution, and state regulation to close some areas, narrow immersion routes for deities, and address contaminated waters—these are experienced not merely as geographical changes but as ethical wounds to human-river relationships.

Communities respond through ritual improvisation, not allowing alternative rivers, rejecting modified offerings, or substituting waters, and through political claims framing river access as both religious rights and ecological care. This more-than-human human-centric perspective destabilizes nature vs society and religion vs secular environment binaries, positioning Bangladesh's Hindu River rituals as a living laboratory for the ethics and politics of dwelling in fluvial worlds.

Paper short abstract

This paper analyzes the Ergene River in Turkey as a site of slow violence. It explores how pollution turns soil into a "flesh-like" texture, trapping farmers in a toxic agroecology. The river is examined as a toxic agent that actively reshapes material entanglements, rural memory, and daily life.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how industrial pollution in Turkey’s Ergene River has reconfigured human and non-human entanglements, transforming a vital waterway into a site of slow violence. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, I analyze the river not merely as a polluted resource but as a toxic agent actively making and undoing the social world. The study traces this transformation through a naturecultural rupture. Initially an archive of loss marked by silenced frogs and vanished fish, the pollution has fundamentally altered the land's ontology. Farmers describe the polluted soil as becoming "flesh-like"—a diseased texture that resists cultivation. Crucially, this material shift traps farmers in a toxic agroecology. To cope with yield losses caused by flesh-like soil and toxic water, farmers are forced to intensify synthetic fertilizer and pesticide use. This creates a vicious cycle where the attempt to sustain life in a dying river deepens dependency on the very industrial logic that poisoned the land. By intertwining the visceral materiality of flesh-like soil with the political ecology of this agrochemical trap, this paper reveals how living with a dying river becomes a complex negotiation between memory, adaptation, and the banality of toxicity.

Keywords: Ergene River, slow violence, flesh-like soil, toxic agroecology, new materialism, Turkey.

Paper short abstract

Drawing on ethnographic research along the Gambia River, this paper examines how increasing salinity reshapes riverine livelihoods, land use, and multi-species relations, transforming wetlands into uneven and contested fluvial spaces.

Paper long abstract

Based on anthropological research in a riverine village in The Gambia, this paper examines life along riverbanks and wetlands as the Gambia River becomes increasingly saline. These fluvial spaces - rice fields, grazing grounds, fishing sites, forest edges - are environments where changing salinity reorganizes human and more-than-human relations amid ecological change.

Saltwater intrusion driven by climatic shifts is making central wetlands infertile, reshaping livelihoods and labor in uneven ways, particularly along gendered lines. Rice cultivation, once the village’s primary subsistence activity and central site of women’s labor, is increasingly abandoned as salinity undermines yields. As rice fields lose viability, riverbanks are reworked into dry-season grazing grounds for livestock from across Gambia and Senegal, while simultaneously offering diminishing refuge as salinity and drought intensify. Fishing, hunting, and herding are increasingly concentrated along the same river margins used by wildlife, producing zones of heightened proximity, competition, and care.

Seasonal rhythms further intensify these dynamics. During rainy season, flooded wetlands briefly restore productivity while reshaping access and mobility. In dry season, salinity and water scarcity compress people, livestock, and wildlife into fewer viable spaces, increasing encounters along river edges. Shifts away from rice cultivation also generate new forest-farm boundaries, altering patterns of land use and resource negotiation.

Through ethnographic attention to farming, herding, fishing, and forest use, this paper shows how salinization transforms wetlands into sites of adaptation and struggle. I argue that rive-shaped landscapes are ecologies whose changing qualities simultaneously connect and polarize labor, multi-species lives, and futures within fluvial worlds.