Paper short abstract:

The paper analyses experimental practices and provisional arrangements in the process of re-establishing irrigation projects as a site of knowledge production and social organisation crucial in times of radical changing river regimes, displacement and existential uncertainty.

Paper long abstract:

Sociality and work among peasant communities at the Fourth Nile Cataract in rural Northern Sudan were organised through irrigation agriculture that resonated with the cycle of seasons and the rhythm of the Nile. After the construction of the Merowe Dam downstream of the area, the inundation of agricultural fields and the changing river regime radically disrupted existing links between the Nile, forms of cultivation, sociality, and agricultural infrastructures. Displacement and the changing landscape and river regime demanded but also afforded new ways of agricultural practices and ways of knowing. Based on in-depth ethnographic fieldwork, I explore the local attempt of establishing large irrigation canals and projects in the adjoining desert valleys. This type of agricultural projects and the knowledge about it had been marginal to the peasant's lifeworld, which was grounded in institutionalised small-scale irrigation projects directly located on the Nile. The new projects became important to both make use of the possibilities of the rising river and to re-establish life in the homeland on the fringes of the emerging reservoir. Building on Paul Richards (1985) concept of "people's science", I propose the notion of experimentation as a site of local "epistemic practice" (Knorr Cetina 2006) that is useful to understand and conceptualize sensory and practical engagements of re-inhabiting radical changing environments. I will show that embodied knowledge, skills, and experiences are "grafted" onto large-scale projects, to direct water flows and irrigate new fields in the desert. In turn, new spaces of work and sociality evolved around the projects.