Event Description
Chandana Anusha went to the Gulf of Kutch in Western India to explore what India’s largest port project does to coastal lands, lives, and livelihoods. The region’s rich ecology overwhelmed me. Tidal mangroves and fishers seemed to coexist awkwardly with cattle and camels in the desert. Seafaring urban merchants lived alongside goats and snakes. How was she to make sense of this frenzied mosaic? And the frenzied mosaic inside of me amid rapidly changing personal and academic circumstances? This prelude to her book explores what it means to reckon with an individual past, what it means to know, and how these might help address a central ethnographic question: how does she study the coast-as-landscape? She then asks how the past is imagined in memory, how cognitive frameworks define what it means to imagine, and how the coast is carved out as an object of inquiry through such ways of knowing. The embodied lexicon offers answers to these questions. It takes you to the region through local idioms that coalesce to present the coast as a meshwork of freshwater, seawater, sediment, and emotion. They frame the region not just as a site for mega-port building, but as a space from which to think about what it means to survive and thrive amid ecological and economic uncertainty.
Event Speaker
Chandana Anushavent, Research Associate at the University of California, Berkeley
Event Information
Free and open to the public; registration required via email to Antara Chakrabarti at [email protected]. For more information, please visit the event webpage. Please visit the Faculty House website for directions.
Hosted by the Ecology and Culture University Seminar at Columbia University.
