Paper short abstract:

An ethnographic analysis of fisherfolk's care for waterbodies and their other inhabitants, juxtaposed with multi-scalar political-economic and ecological challenges and aspirations, to probe multi-species approaches for how they intersect with amphibious omens of environmental justice.

Paper long abstract:

In North Bihar, India, a place ridden by water disasters and caste-based violence, care about the wellbeing of the river, plants, animals, of nature in general is labor socialized through caste. Yet, the embodied ways in which fisherfolk interact with waterbodies, its banks, plants, fish, is constantly redefined by the social-political aspirations of their caste as well as by the political-economic challenges from the state and its tangled ways about social justice. Unfortunately, such challenges and aspirations seem to dangerously intersect with poverty, disasters, lack of access to health care, and other socio-environmental difficulties to counterproductively influence fisherpeople’s practices of environmental care and wellbeing. Yet, such practices also reveal a finely grained political awareness and ecological imagination, and could be read as stunning examples of class consciousness against all odds: weapons of the weak, and even an attempt to counter processes of hegemony. This ethnographic analysis is juxtaposed with other stories written in the water—omens of wastelands and harmful algae blooms—to probe multi-species approaches for how they intersect with environmental justice.