Drinking the Winds: Monsoon as Atmospheric Spring (original) (raw)
Related papers
Drawing the Monsoon into eco-critical conversations
Monsoon as method: Assembling monsoonal multiplicities, 2021
This an essay in the edited collection, Monsoon as method: Assembling monsoonal multiplicities (Barcelona, Actar, 2021) by the ERC funded Monsoon Assemblages project. It discusses the role of drawing as a research method in the project.
Monsoon as method: Foreword and Introduction
Monsoon as Method: Assembling Monsoonal Multiplicities, 2021
This file comprises two extracts from the edited collection, Monsoon as method: Assembling monsoonal multiplicities (Barcelona, Actar, 2021) by the ERC funded Monsoon Assemblages project - the Foreword by Karen Coelho and the Introduction by Lindsay Bremner.
Cultural Geographies, 2023
This paper is a reflective discussion of the research method developed by a small research team over a 5-year period as it intra-acted with the south Asian monsoon in three south/southeast Asian cities. It reflects on how the team's practice was transformed from being research on or about the monsoon as a discrete unit of analysis, to research in the monsoon and with its agential materiality. The paper first outlines the theoretical resources from cultural geography, anthropology, feminist theory, posthuman theory, and science and technology studies that the project drew from. After this theoretical section, the paper then discusses the practical implications of the method and the two emergent strands of research ('weather matters' and 'construction matters') that were followed in Chennai, Dhaka, and Yangon. The final section of the paper reflects on the extension of the method into the formatting of a book and an online exhibition. The paper concludes by arguing that what the method offers to cultural, weather-based research in monsoonal and other climes, is a situated, non-formulaic method that recognizes the affordances of the Earth's agency, of matter and of otherthan-human lives for generating knowledge of and ways of being in changing weather-worlds.
Movement and Place-making in a Monsoon Terrain
Dearq, 2020
The territorialization of the Western Ghats, India, is an act of colonial power either by settled or marginalized particular peoples, practices, and ecologies, privileging a wet-dry binary and spa-tializing a monsoon landscape. The environment of the Western Ghats, in particular, has been politicized and polarized. Today, indigenous peoples and other 'forest dwellers' have been compromised through the inherited colonial framework; they are excluded by conservation action as is their knowledge that is based on dynamic everyday relationships with place. Efforts to be inclusive are fraught with inadequacies of colonial imaging and use the language that continue to objectify and spatialize nature and culture, which, in turn, propagates the wet-dry divide. The disciplining of the Western Ghats is perpetuated through environmental laws: from the Indian Forest Act, 1865, guarding the land for production, to the Forest Rights Act, 2006, which gives rights to forest dwellers to protect it. Despite these laws, conflicts over access to land and resources continue as the lives of these inhabitants and their relationship with the ground, or world, were never considered on their own terms. How can design unravel how these inhabitants lived prior to colonialism? There is the possibility that they understand place by moving, occupying, and temporally appropriating dynamic conditions of 'wetness' in their ordinary everyday lives. What can be assembled from existing clues, and from a new imagination, to design futures that correspond (Ingold 2011) to a changing environment? This paper will reveal the possibility of a local/ indigenous 'wet ontology' (Steinberg and Peters 2015) which privileges everyday practices across time and continually 'makes home' in this monsoon terrain. Resumen La territorialización de los Ghats occidentales, en India, es un acto de poder colonial bien sea por asentamiento o por marginación de pueblos, prácticas y ecologías particulares, privilegiando una bipartición de lo húmedo y lo seco y espacializando un paisaje monzónico. El entorno de los Ghats occidentales, particularmente, ha sido politizado y polarizado. Actualmente, los pueblos indíge-nas y otros "habitantes del bosque" se han visto comprometidos por el marco colonial heredado; son excluidos, por acciones de conservación, al igual que su conocimiento el cual está basado en relaciones dinámicas y cotidianas con el lugar. Los esfuerzos por ser inclusivos están cargados con deficiencias del imaginario colonial, que usan el lenguaje para continuar la cosificación y es-pacialización de la naturaleza y la cultura, lo que a su vez, disemina la división entre lo húmedo y lo seco. La disciplina de los Ghats occidentales se perpetúa a través de leyes ambientales: desde la Ley de Bosques Indios de 1865, que protege la tierra para la producción, hasta la Ley de Derechos Forestales de 2006, que otorga derechos a los habitantes de los bosques para protegerla. A pesar de estas leyes, los conflictos por el acceso a la tierra y a los recursos continúan, ya que la vida de estos habitantes y su relación con la tierra, o el mundo, nunca fueron considerados en sus propios términos. ¿Cómo puede el diseño descifrar la forma en la que vivían estos habitantes antes del colonialismo? Existe la posibilidad de que comprendan el lugar moviéndose, ocupando y apro-piándose temporalmente de las condiciones dinámicas de "humedad" en su vida cotidiana ordi-naria. ¿Qué se puede ensamblar a partir de pistas existentes, y de una nueva imaginación, para diseñar futuros que correspondan a un entorno cambiante (Ingold, 2011)? Este trabajo revelará la posibilidad de una "ontología húmeda" local/indígena (Steinberg y Peters, 2015) que privilegia las prácticas cotidianas a lo largo del tiempo y que continuamente "encuentran su hogar" en este terreno monzónico. Palabras clave: Colonialismo, Ghats occidentales, ambientalismo, investigación en diseño, ima-ginación. * This paper presents ongoing doctoral research work that is part of an unpublished thesis.
The Himalaya and Monsoon Asia: Anthropocenic Climes Since the 1800s
2023
This chapter addresses the climatic connections between the oceanic and mountain worlds through monsoons in Asia, and offers a history of the anthropocenic changes in the Himalayan highlands and Bengal since the 1800s. Manifested as a series of intertwined natural and human events, climate change in this chapter is understood as what the authors call clime change, which refers to actual meteorological, ecological, geomorphological, livelihood, and social transformations. It is physical, political, and affective as shown in the colonial history and the postcolonial environmental state of South Asia. As an alternative way to understand climate change, the clime perspective, as the authors argue, allows us to see place, specific places in all their particularity, as embodiments of climate as well as agents of climate change in both natural and anthropogenic senses. Based on the authors’ archival and field research, this chapter builds a case of a modern terrestrial nexus of the Himalaya, Bengal, and the Indian Ocean as a set of monsoon climes that have undergone human-induced changes from the colonial era to the present. It invites readers to rethink the climatic meaning of being human in the Anthropocene.
This book surveys the intersections between water systems and the phenomenology of visual cultures in early modern, colonial and contemporary South Asia. Bringing together contributions by eminent artists, architects, curators and scholars who explore the connections between the environmental and the cultural, the volume situates water in an expansive relational domain. It covers disciplines as diverse as literary studies, environmental humanities, sustainable design, urban planning and media studies. The chapters explore the ways in which material cultures of water generate technological and aesthetic acts of envisioning geographies, and make an intervention within political, social and cultural discourses. A critical interjection in the sociologies of water in the subcontinent, the book brings art history into conversation with current debates on climate change by examining water's artistic, architectural, engineering, religious, scientific and environmental facets from the 16th century to the present. ‘This eclectic collection of essays attempts to capture an ineffable quality of waterscapes: that they shape imaginations and actions in ways both fluid and enduring. At a time when the challenge of climate change calls for creative cultural politics, this exploration of ways of seeing and being is all the more valuable.’―Amita Baviskar, Professor of Sociology, Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi, India https://www.routledge.com/Water-Histories-of-South-Asia-The-Materiality-of-Liquescence-1st-Edition/Ray-Maddipati/p/book/9781138285316