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Paper short abstract

This paper tracks how silt is classified, governed and revalued at Cochin port. Following dredging practices, it takes seriously the administrative vocabularies of geology to show how sediment is rendered legible and actionable through expertise.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines silt not only as geological matter but as an object of expertise and regulation within administrative imagination. Drawing on short term ethnographic research at the Cochin Port Authority, located on an artificial island of reclaimed land, I explore how sediment is rendered legible through technical vocabularies and management regimes. The port itself as a geological intervention, which was built by dredging, depositing and stabilising sediment, is a crucial point of observation.

In port governance, silt is continuously measured and classified, encoding a different relationship to the material - framing it as a threat, waste or resource. Maintaining navigable depths requires constant dredging, producing vast quantities of displaced sediment that must be relocated, stored, or sold. The Cochin port thus, depends on a permanent cycle of excavation and deposition, where geological processes are engineered into infrastructural routines.

I trace how engineers, port authorities, and contractors speak about silt, revealing a technocratic grammar that repositions geological processes as operational challenges. At the same time, this vocabulary, does political work by naturalising certain interventions while obscuring the upstream extractive economies (e.g. construction, deforestation) that intensify sedimentation.

Engaging anthropological debates on geology and material landscapes, I treat sediment management as a form of "bureaucratic geology". In dialogue with the panel’s interest in thinking ‘from the ground up’, I will highlight how ports such as Cochin port, offer a valuable perspective to observe how earthly materials are disciplined, valued, and made to serve various economies.