Description
Book SynopsisIn
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.
Trade Review"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 *
Table of ContentsList of Maps ix
Preface xi
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction. River Life and Death 1
1. Moving Lands in the Skein of Property and Kin Relations 28
2. History and Morality between Floods and Erosion 59
3. Elections on Sandbars and the Remembered Village 94
4. Decay of the River and of Memory 131
5. Death of Children and the Eruption of Myths 160
Epilogue. The Chars in Recent Years 191
Notes 197
References 215
Index 229
