Calynn Dowler

This project explores how people experience, conceptualize, and respond to transformations in the more-than-human ecologies of the Indian Sundarbans delta. A waterscape ethnography, the book traces more-than-human stories through the Sundarbans’ tidal rivers and creeks, mangrove swamps, monsoon rains, freshwater ponds, and aquifers. Thinking with and through water’s relational qualities, the project foregrounds people’s complex and often ambivalent entanglements with other people, with nonhuman nature, and with local deities, demons, ghosts, and spirits. A central claim is that everyday life in the Sundarbans is underpinned by a cosmopolitical understanding of humans as existing in a web of relations that include not only animals, plants, sediments, and water, but also various forms of supernatural power. I suggest that the Anthropocene fundamentally reorganizes these more-than-human relations. On the one hand, powers associated with local ecologies wane amid processes of enclosure and commodification. On the other hand, such processes are often underpinned by modernizing articulations of religion and new relations with the deities and spirits that animate a capitalist world. In this context, I highlight “undercurrents” as alternative ways of knowing and valuing people, place, and ecology.