River Life and the Upspring of Nature

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River Life and the Upspring of Nature

by Naveeda Khan

Duke University Press, 2023

ISBNs

eISBN: 978-1-4780-9310-7 (OA)

About the Book

In River Life and the Upspring of Nature Naveeda Khan examines the relationship between nature and culture through the study of the everyday existence of chauras, the people who live on the chars (sandbars) within the Jamuna River in Bangladesh. Nature is a primary force at play within this existence as chauras live itinerantly and in flux with the ever-changing river flows; where land is here today and gone tomorrow, the quality of life itself is intertwined with this mutability. Given this centrality of nature to chaura life, Khan contends that we must think of nature not simply as the physical landscape and the plants and animals that live within it but as that which exists within the social and at the level of cognition, the unconscious, intuition, memory, embodiment, and symbolization. By showing how the alluvial flood plains configure chaura life, Khan shows how nature can both give rise to and inhabit social, political, and spiritual forms of life.

About the Author

Naveeda Khan is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University, author of Muslim Becoming: Aspiration and Skepticism in Pakistan, also published by Duke University Press, and In Quest of a Shared Planet: Negotiating Climate from the Global South, and editor of Beyond Crisis: Re-evaluating Pakistan.

Reviews

"An empirically rich study of changing land and those seeking to carve out an existence upon it. [River Life and the Upspring of Nature] can serve as a model for other authors seeking to look at the interrelation between our environment and ourselves, and the existential questions that a changing world poses to us."

-- Andrew Alan Johnson Ethnos

"The book is well written, impressive in its scope, and detailed in its application. . . . a valuable addition to the growing literature on rethinking rivers, lands, and peoples in South Asia, especially those people who are living on river islands that had remained beyond the periphery of mainstream academic vision. It aids understanding of why people live tenuous lives on uncertain grounds, and how their lives are shaped by the river and how they shape the river’s flow."

-- Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt Asian Studies Review

"This evocative work may be primarily focused on the chars of Bangladesh—but it provides deeply thought-provoking insights into 'nature' as a mode of unconscious interiority."
-- Sophie Chao HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory