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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.