Typhoons: Between Historical Time and Historiographical Time
Clark L. Alejandrino, Trinity College
Typhoons have their own temporal rhythms and spatial patterns, all determined by earth’s hydrological cycle. In the warm waters of the Pacific, between the Tropic of Cancer and the Equator, where there is sufficient solar radiation and vorticity, typhoons are born in powerful convective events that transfer massive amounts of heat from the ocean into the atmosphere. These storms travel along paths also determined by other products of the hydrological cycle, as they are pushed west by the easterly winds along the ridge of the semi-permanent North Pacific High, an anticyclonic high pressure zone. Typhoons are active in the warm months of the year, forming their own season between summer and autumn.
So long as the earth has maintained its current configuration of oceans and continents, typhoons have travelled annually along the corridors of the Pacific often landing on the Eurasian continent’s eastern and southeastern coasts and the islands off these coasts. These natural circulatory patterns are, in Prasenjit Duara’s words, the historical time of typhoons. Humans, who migrated out of Africa, and arrived along these coasts thousands of years ago must have encountered these storms. In the absence of written records, one can only imagine how humans might have made sense of these powerful storms that battered the coast for centuries.
The earliest extant human musings about typhoons are fifth to tenth century accounts by Chinese political exiles from the temperate North China plain who found themselves in the subtropical and typhoon-prone southern coast. The violent power of typhoons were part of their experience of an alien and lethal south. Typhoons had now entered what Duara calls historiographical time, as people began purposefully recording and describing typhoons for their own particular goals.
By the sixteenth century, as more and more Chinese settled the coast, the experience of typhoons was no longer alien, and though it was never mundane, it had become normal. Late imperial societies adapted to typhoons through production of practical knowledge, seasonal rituals, and established disaster relief protocols.
By the nineteenth and twentieth century, typhoons were implicated in contests of sovereignty and dreams of modernity of a Chinese nation struggling to find its way through a new global order established by Western imperialism. Republican China sought the ability to accurately forecast and prepare for these storms through possession of a modern meteorological infrastructure. Typhoons were also part of ideological revolutions as China transitioned into communism under Mao. The specter of these storms was marshalled to convince people to participate in mass mobilization campaigns and fight typhoons.
At different stages of Chinese historiographical time, the hydrological processes that marked typhoon’s historical time were interpreted differently to suit the circumstances and needs of the humans actors of the former time. This essay explores the ways in which typhoons, perhaps the most extreme manifestation of the hydrological cycle, became part of Chinese historiographical time.
The Conquest of Vertical Space
Sunil Amrith, Yale University
Since the early 2000s, the “spatial turn” in Asian studies has given us a rich vein of work on transregional connections. The focus on inter-Asian connections has shown us how circulations of people and ideas transcended—even as they were constitutive of—the boundaries of empires and nations. Until recently, however, the physical environment has played little role in this body of work; if anything, it has been deliberately ignored, the better to overcome an older, discredited “environmental determinism.”
This volume’s focus on hydrological histories is an invitation to think again. Drawing on research in both South and Southeast Asia, my chapter will focus on a key phenomenon in modern Asian history—the conquest of the “vertical” space of water, a process both akin to and connected with the search for mineral resources underground. This is both a material history—a history of dam building and hydrological engineering on a truly enormous scale—and an intellectual history: a history of new ways of mapping, and visualizing, vertical space, going beyond cartography to encompass aerial photography and remote sensing.
A fundamental tension emerged by the 1960s: climate scientists could now see that the hydrological cycle in Asia was teleconnected across oceans and continents in a vast, coupled oceanic-atmospheric system; yet this sense of the scale of water was increasingly at odds with the engineer’s perspective—itself a transnational and, in Prasenjit Duara’s terms, a circulatory one—which saw water as a resource to be controlled in the national interest “one river valley at a time,” in the words of an Indian government publicity pamphlet of 1968.
Haunting and Imminent Rivers
Chandana Anusha, Northwestern University. ACLS Emerging Voices Fellow
The Gulf of Kutch is where one of India’s largest port is being built since the 1990s. Port-led efforts to designate coastal lands as “wasteland” have been crucial to the creation of the port enclave. Port developers justify their existence on the grounds that the port is productively transforming degraded wasted spaces – watery intertidal areas as well as dry areas – into a thriving hub of global international trade. Against Kutch coast’s dominant image as sterile, this presentation will trace how the biological life of rivers features within coastal lifeways. Coastal dwellers are used to the rivers’ occasional flows. But they also naturalize the river as an inexorable vengeful force that will run its course and break all boundaries that come in its way. Some obsessively watch and circulate videos of floods in a landscape of arrangements that extract and redistribute the riverbed. Others search for religious allusions to their anticipations of a cataclysmic but just future. Still, others use laws on the river’s conservation to pursue their economic gain. While my book manuscript shows how the river was a historical artery of maritime trade, this paper will argue that it haunts contemporary thought and practice in its conspicuous absence. Doing so would extend my overarching intellectual aspiration, which is to argue that the marine, the terrestrial, and the riverine are interconnected spheres. We must study them within the same framework while exploring the coast.
Village Sacred Forests as Hydrological and Carbon Resource Commons: Spectral Flows and Life Currents in Monsoon Asia and Beyond
Chris Coggins, Bard College at Simon’s Rock/Open Society University Network
Imagining “wetness as the milieu of being (da Cunha 2022, personal communication)” and the assertion of a solid geographic surface as an imperial property claim on all things terrestrial, this essay challenges ontologies that relegate water to a status secondary to the lithosphere, the land, and the endless accretion of human infrastructures and artifacts. The ubiquity of aqueous agency surpasses human understanding even as embodied water informs the very mechanisms of human consciousness. Cross-cultural analysis of the relationship between the phase changes of water as it sustains carbon resources essential to the collective wellbeing of multi-species assemblages illuminates common phenomenological patterns granting spectral power to visible and invisible flows of life sustaining and denying powers that move within and around the landscape. Contrary to disjunctive conceptions of the sacred and profane, spectrality encompasses the essential convergence and divergence, or accretion and dispersal, of numinous forces constituting the path of the soul (psyche) to personhood (persona) and the institutional armatures of family and community, along with the broader cosmological, economic, and political orders contrived for their regulation. Thus, the hydrosphere and hydrologic cycle must not be conceptually detached from the human body-mind hydrologic. The intersection of the hydrologic and carbon cycles within human societies has given rise to a long history of symbolic ascriptions of purity, power, spiritual efficacy, generativity, surplus, chaos, formlessness, death, and eternity to both water and to the myriad carbon-based organisms that sustain settlements at all scales. In scientific, religious, and other cosmological senses personhood itself is conceived as an inherently aqueous assemblage of water, form, thought, and spirit. This essay examines the hydrologic cycle as it animates human beings, collective values, socio-ecology, and economic systems, each of which assumes various forms within the longue durée of land-water dialectics.
Why village sacred forests in monsoon Asia? Climatologist Tetsuzo Yasunari (2018) refers to the assemblage of biomes, habitats, and species extending from the tropical rainforests of Nusantara to the snow-capped Tian Shan as the “Asian Green Belt,” highlighting its essential role in the “land-atmosphere-ocean system” of the Asian Monsoon. Field work conducted in ten countries within ten countries of South, East, and Southeast Asia reveals that that community sacred forests remain essential to the wellbeing of communities of hunter-gatherers, swidden cultivators, and sedentary farmers and their claims on small watersheds surrounding higher-order streams Across each of these modes of resource use—and enduring at the margins of the state in various forms through diverse pre-colonial, colonial, and postcolonial world orders—sacred trees and woodlands have long formed a critical connective tissue that links and protects soils, water sources, microclimates, croplands, humans, and their non-human cohabitants within a protective cosmological order of fierce local tutelary deities, spirits, and other supernatural forces. As a network of innumerable beings, even small forest patches have long mediated the spectral hydrological processes that yield wind, humidity, condensation (fog, mist, haze, clouds), and precipitation. Contrary to common understandings of the “sacred,” these woodlands are not separate from a “profane” world, but vital for gathering and storing water and carbon resources; safeguarding and stabilizing topsoil, slopes, and beneficial organisms; moderating ambient temperatures; and sustaining food production systems. With regard to community watershed managers worldwide, this addendum to political ecology places sacred groves and the watery (and symbol-wielding) beings that sustain them within a narrative of collective regard for the wind-water-carbon cycles that connect the oikos of economy and ecology with the polis of a common social being, embraced within a cosmos, or world order bearing transcendent meaning and value. No contemporary global or even national system of accounting is adequate to the task of measuring, recording, and conserving the value flows within the networks described and objectified in this study. It is meant to serve as an opening toward a post-capitalist oikology albeit in the most rudimentary of forms.
An Embodied History of Humidity in Wuhan, 1950-2020
Christopher J. Courtney, Durham University
Most histories of the human interaction with hydrosphere focus upon surface water. Yet people do not just swim in lakes, fish in rivers, or sail on oceans; their bodies are, themselves, part of the hydrosphere. Humans live their lived enveloped in atmospheric water which helps to determine their comfort and wellbeing. Relative humidity also regulates the speed with which perspiration, a human contribution to the hydrosphere, evaporates, into the atmosphere. The varying quantity and constitution of the atmospheric water in particular regions has a profound yet rarely acknowledged influence over the communities that live there. This paper charts an embodied history of atmospheric water in Wuhan since the mid-twentieth century. One of China’s “furnace cities,” Wuhan is infamous for its extreme humidity, which is a product both of the natural wetland environment and also the urban topography crafted by humans.
This paper begins by examining how humidity was understood as a class issue in the Maoist era, with the state promoting Chinese medical techniques and various forms alternative technology to ameliorate the effect that humidity had upon labouring bodies. It continues by describing how, from the early 1980s, a range of technological and architectural forms developed to offer a seductive new form of thermal comfort to citizens of Wuhan. Though these novel technologies and techniques quickly became hegemonic, they went on to create their own problems, as the excessive use of air-conditioning contributed to the urban heat island effect – a phenomenon whereby the city became measurably hotter than its rural hinterland. In addition to their environmental effects, these technologies also created new norms for urban citizens, whose perspiring bodies came to envisioned as uncivilised and were increasingly unwelcome in the “civilised city.”
Fins in the Inland Ocean: How Modern Rivers Discovered Their pulse in British India
Rohan D’Souza, Kyoto University
Increasingly, scholarship on environmental histories of South Asia (EHSA) seem to be headed for a ‘hydraulic turn’. This turn, however, is not a simple re-orientation towards the study of rivers and by moving the concerns of environmental history away from the previous emphasis on forests and other types of landscapes. Rather, the changed lens speaks to something much more dramatic, if not almost profound. The call, in essence, is to dissolve the certitudes of geography within historical time. By crossing out, in particular, previous givens such as natural borders, national environments and ecological boundaries.
These several recent efforts, in the main, are aiming to grasp within a single frame what Prasenjit Duara aptly describes as the ‘changing relationships between the time of history and temporalities of nature’. That is, by drawing upon his notion of an ‘oceanic model of circulatory histories’, the emphasis shifts to exploring how various interactive, circulatory and inter-scalar processes couple the social and natural as a single coherent conceptual bloc. It is thus when placed within the backdrop of such a notion of circulation that Dilip da Cunha’s recent The Invention of Rivers acquires an even sharper clarity in reminding us that the river is but an instant in the enormous rhythmic movement of the hydrological cycle. Put differently, the lines between land and water are contingent, tentative and get redefined by the ‘atmospheric ocean of rain’.
By drawing upon the insights of Duara and Da Cunha, my paper will discuss how the nineteenth century imperative to pursue perennial irrigation through canals systems in British India was anchored in the strong notion that land and rivers were distinct non overlapping ecological domains. Such a neat separation, however, as I will argue, soon became a source of grief for the colonial administration not only because of their failures in dealing with floods but, critically as well, over the growing realization that rivers were biological entities rather than mere volumes in motion. In effect, the colonial notion of the modern river ─ based on hard separations between land and water and characterised principally as a regime of flow ─ found itself contending against the many complex ecological realities of the river as a biological pulse: a weave between fish, monsoonal rains and seasonal inundations as geomorphologic process.
As a biological pulse, in other words, the river was but a rhythm within the recurrent swirl of the atmospheric ocean.
Making Land Livable: Water Regime and Ecological Strategies in Late Imperial Central China
Yan Gao, University of Memphis
This paper examines how local people in the central Yangzi region adapted to an autonomous environment in which the wetlands and a subtropical monsoon climate imposed much uncertainty for hydro-agricultural activities during late imperial times. By following Merchant’s conceptualization of “two natures” (nature as creator and created nature), I analyze the characteristics of an autonomous water regime and the interplay of two natures in the central Yangzi region. Therefore, I investigate how people organized their hydro-agricultural activities and developed a flexible lifestyle to cope with frequent flooding and drought events in this region. As an attempt for an analysis of intertwined hydrosocial relations, this empirical study provides a case in which local people actively worked for a livable environment in climatic uncertainty in the central Yangzi region. It shows how the lifestyle and social activities of local people were organized through water and how they were influenced by the interplay of the two natures of an autonomous water regime in late imperial China.
Small Hydropower and Region Formation in Jinhua County, Zhejiang
Arunabh Ghosh, Harvard University
Between 1960 and 1980, China became a global leader in small hydropower, building a claimed 90,000 stations. In this paper, I will focus on Jinhua County in Zhejiang Province in Eastern China to explore the question: does a collection of small dams make a region or, conversely, does an (administrative) region define the dams that get built within it? In the study of large dams, and hydraulic activity more broadly, some scholars have proposed the river basin as the ideal unit through which to understand “a host of interrelated water development and management activities.” Conversely, others have investigated region formation and territorialization as outcomes of hydraulic engineering. In exploring this tension, and its implications for the environment, water management, ecology, and society, this chapter will draw upon county-level documents and gazetteers from Jinhua. Comparisons with other leading small hydropower counties, such as Yongchun in Fujian and the Dayi in Sichuan, will also inform the analysis.
Sovereignty, the Hydrosphere, and the Modern Cosmopolis
David Gilmartin, North Carolina State University
The organizing focus of the workshop on “Territorial histories in the Hydrosphere” can be interpreted as an invitation to think about the relationship between the particular (embodied in territorial histories) and the universal (embodied in the concept of the hydrosphere as an interconnected aqueous energy system central to all human life). It is the argument of the paper that no historical concept provides a better entrée for considering the relationship of the particular and the universal in relationship to the hydrosphere and its territorial politics than the concept of sovereignty, the framing concept for the legitimation of modern state power. Modern sovereignty involves not only appeals to both the particular and the universal, but also embodies the tensions between these. Indeed, it will be the argument of this paper that the history of state policies relating to water provides one of the most important arenas in which the tensions of modern sovereignty are evident.
On the one hand, sovereign legitimacy of states (and their exercise of power) depends on state claims to rule in accord with the universal order of the cosmos (understood preeminently in modern times through scientific discourse and what some have called the “enchanted” autonomy of human reason, which has shaped also the idea of sovereignty vesting in autonomous “peoples” who delegate constituent power to the state through law). This is what the paper refers to as the “modern cosmopolis,” an overarching framework for state legitimacy transcending the specificity of the power of particular states. (The term “cosmopolis” is used to suggest a continuity in form, if not in substance, with premodern universalizing frames for sovereignty). On the other hand, modern sovereign legitimacy also depends critically on the exercise of control in particular territories, based on the cultural specificity of distinctive “peoples” and on the territorial state’s management of specific “societies” and “economies” composed of competing interests, classes, ethnic groups, etc., a process often involving the pragmatic use of violence. These are almost always in significant tension, as territorial politics (a realm defined by particularistic interests and conflicts) and cosmic order (which transcends human politics) tend to be widely perceived as at odds. Yet effective state connections to both are central to sovereignty’s claims.
These contrasting elements of sovereignty are critical for understanding how modern states tend to approach the hydrosphere simultaneously in two conflicting ways. In one respect, state adaptation to, and manipulation of, the hydrosphere requires an understanding of the flow of energy in the cosmos (understood through the discourses of science and engineering) that is generally projected as transcending politics, or as extrapolitical. Engagement with this frame justifies a relatively autonomous vision of state power, but also the liberatory promise of engagement with cosmic energy flows. At the same time, the effective management of competing interests and socio-economic conflicts requires an approach that is deeply political and sensitive to the power of competing groups. In relating the hydrosphere to “society” and the “economy,” the state thus projects the hydrosphere less as an autonomous energy system than as a set of resources that need to be pried apart to be effectively managed, and whose management necessarily gives voice to the competing interest groups whose fortunes are linked to flows of water, and whose support is important to the power of the state.
The paper will use the history of the Indus basin (and its vast irrigation development over the last 150 years) as an example, both during the colonial era (with its distinctive variant on the structure of modern sovereignty described above) and since.
Oceanic Temporalities and Terraqueous Work
Nadin Heé, Freie Universität Berlin, Max-Planck Institute for the History of Science
The emergence of Capitalism is seaborne. The global ocean as a trade route, geopolitical and strategic place, a frontier for marine resource extraction played a crucial role in the advent of capitalism. Still, the relationship between ocean and capitalism is not a simple one-way story.
It is also destruction that accompanies the reproduction of capitalism in its interaction with the sea as a historically transformative force on its own. Ocean currents, tides, weather patterns, or material characteristics such as salinity, as well as geographical features such as reefs produce risks, and obstacles for capitalist accumulation. Despite the power and logic of commodity exchange, capitalism regularly confronts geophysical barriers to its own self-expansion, which in the case of the sea are especially challenging. Furthermore, not only on the spatial, but also on the temporal level we see mutual interaction. Capitalist time is confronted by seasonal cycles, temporalities of non-human oceanic species, while similarly being the basis for long-range extraction. By the same token, capitalism has found in the sea a vital conduit for long-distance trade, a route for labor migration, and the place from which to embark on imperial expansion. For capital, the sea thus presents both risks and opportunities. This contribution explores this complex relationship by focusing on terraqueous work and the territorialization of the ocean as one of the most crucial turning points in the 20th Century. By terraqueous work I mean labor that is conducted both on land and sea while using the oceans as an extraction frontier. By so doing I aim at overcoming a terrestrial bias in historiography without creating an oceanic one. We will sea how the ocean and the sea, as well as the air space reinforced each other, when it comes to extraction regimes of both horizontal and vertical expansion.
Trust in Science, Trust in Nature: Drinking Water’s Meanings (Conscious and Unconscious) in Singapore and the US
Martha Kaplan, Vassar College
“We have to think about water as an endlessly re-usable resource” (Singapore Public Utilities Board 2018). “Nature’s Gift to you. Untouched by Man” (Fiji Water ads addressed to US consumers 2004 on, see Kaplan 2007). In Singapore, since 2002, public drinking water includes NEWater (recycled sewer water). Certified by science and the state, trust in tap water and the postcolonial state’s successes in urban water provision makes perfect sense in Singapore for planners and for drinkers. But in the US since the 1990s American consumers of corporately marketed bottled water do not long for scientific water. They embrace tropes of healthful, untouched nature. Singapore and the US are both clearly water-conscious societies, where powerful water planning entities make decisions with serious political and environmental consequences. Both societies are obviously capitalist and historical. Neither exemplifies any stage or ideal type of water experience. But comparison will throw into sharp relief some “variety in human understanding, imagination and practice in relation to the hydrologic cycle” (Duara 2021 Concept Note).
The 19th century colonial British were linear in their water-thinking. They literally built a pipeline from Johore state in what is now Malaysia into Singapore when the reservoirs to hold rain could not keep up with growing population on an island without an aquifer. Thus, at independence and separation from Malysia in 1965, it seemed that Singapore faced a tragic water challenge. But since independence and especially from the 1990s onward, both in NEWater technology/infrastructure (and maybe desalination) and in water ideology Singapore’s Public Utilities Board (PUB) explicitly theorizes a tension between linear models and their preferable cyclicity of water re-use (now developed as the food, water, energy nexus (Khor, Singapore Ministry of Sustainability and the Environment (MSE) 2020)). The result for everyday water drinkers in Singapore is nationally embodied water, increasingly composed of a very particular portion of the earth’s “human biological water”(Westcoat 2022 abstract). Experientially, they “eliminated yuck” (to adapt Leong 2010, cf Douglas 1966). In contrast, in the US, in the 1990s global beverage corporations created the US bottled water market. Promising health through pristine nature they have overtaken public water (the key mid- 20th century site of civil rights struggle for inclusivity), overtaken water planning and even the shaping and refining of public water consciousness, and in particular the shared imagination of possible water futures. Aligning US hopes of health and happiness with entitlement to the world’s nature, bottled water reinforces local and global asymmetries. In both societies water counter-practices add interesting ethnographic dimensions: In Singapore intergenerational family water practices (Kaplan 2016) and in the US unexpected workplace water care (Kaplan 2011).
Thinking with water, from policymaking, everyday experiences and from counter-practices in Singapore and the US, intensifies the question (faced by political leaders, scientists, water practitioners, marketers, and activists) of how conscious policies and often implicit habits are, can, and should be related. In the wake of Latour’s resurrection of the 1920s Dewey-Lippman debate raising primary questions about science and democracy, conscious planning and public culture, there are good reasons to refine our understanding of conscious and unconscious dimensions of embodied water and to better situate them. Do counter- practices come from necessity or ideology, or always both? Are the most important dimensions of water experience conscious or unconscious? Clearly the American connection to nature and the Singaporean connection to science have conscious ideological dimensions and unconscious ones. When we study meaning seriously, we don’t need to choose between conscious and unconscious dimensions, we should study both.
References Cited:
Douglas, Mary 1966 Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. Routledge and Keegan Paul
Kaplan, Martha 2016 “From Big Data to Thick Data: the value of ethnographic research to urban practitioners” Centre for Livable Cities Insights 15 1-6 (May 2016)
2011 “Lonely Drinking Fountains and Comforting Coolers: Paradoxes of Water Value and Ironies of Water Use” Cultural Anthropology 26 (4) 514-541
2007 “Local Politics and a Global Commodity: Fijian Water in Fiji and New York” Cultural Anthropology 22 (4) originally 2007 reissued 2010 in a virtual issue of CA on the anthropology of water, including author-interviews.
Khor, Amy, Senior Minister of State for Sustainability and the Environment 2022, Speech at the “WATER-ENERGY-FOOD” NEXUS – TOWARDS A CIRCULAR BUSINESS ECONOMY conference ON 11 JANUARY 2022 https://www.mse.gov.sg/resource-room/category/2022-01-11-water-energy-food-nexus-towards-circular-economy accessed 7/7/2022
Latour, Bruno and Peter Weibel eds. 2005 Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy. MIT Press
Leong, Ching 2010 “Eliminating ‘Yuck’: A Simple Exposition of Media and Social Change in Water Reuse Policies” Water Resources Development 26 (1) 113–126
Developing ‘whole basin’ measures to address Mekong delta subsidence
G Mathias Kondolf, UC Berkeley
The Mekong Delta extends over 40,000 km2, one of the most economically vibrant places on the planet, supporting a population of 17 M and producing 7-10% of all the rice traded internationally. The Delta exists thanks to the historically generous sediment loads carried by the Mekong River, sediments eroded from the Tibetan Plateau and other mountainous areas in the 800,000 km2 river basin. As the volume of sediment supplied by the Mekong exceeded the rate at which delta subsided and was eroded by coastal waves, the delta built out and expanded. Over the past 7000 years, the coastline has prograded from the site of present-day of Phnom Penh southeastward 250 km to its present location. Over the last two decades, however, the Mekong Delta has begun to recede due to lack of sediment supply and accelerated subsidence resulting from current management practices. The supply of sediment has been cut off by dams and in-channel mining of sand for the construction industry. In addition, subsidence is accelerated by over-pumping of groundwater and exacerbated by the global acceleration of sea level rise. The delta (with an average elevation of less than 1 m) is now being eroded and subsiding at rates that will put it mostly under the sea by 2100 if “business as usual” management continues.
By virtue of its national, regional, and global importance, the Mekong Delta has attracted extensive interest nationally and internationally. Yet the severity and urgency of the existential threat – that most of the delta will sink below sea level by 2100 – has not been explicitly mainstreamed in key policies and investment plans. To prevent the Mekong Delta from disappearing by century’s end will require not only changes in delta management within Vietnam, but also concerted action involving Cambodia and other basin states. The needed changes are: minimize dam impacts by strategic siting of dams and by designing and operating dams to pass sediment, control and phase-out riverine sand mining, redesign and reoperate levee systems in the Delta so that sediment-laden floodwaters spread out and deposit suspended sediment over the Delta surface, and control groundwater pumping in the Mekong Delta to prevent subsidence. These proposed measures will entail major costs, and will require coordination between civil, business, and political actors to navigate trade-offs between sectors at national and regional scales. While not easy to implement, consider the alternative: allowing the Mekong Delta to sink beneath the sea within a human lifetime. While much of the accelerated subsidence of the Delta could be addressed through actions taken in Vietnam only, ultimately the Delta depends on a supply of sediment from upstream, which can only be restored through basin-scale understanding of the challenge and implementation of corrective measures.
Political Economy, Climate, and Erosion Discourse on the Loess Plateau
Ruth Mostern, University of Pittsburgh
This paper advocates for a river history focused on processes of sediment transportation and for opting to gaze upstream as well as downstream when contemplating rivers. It proposes a turn towards river history narratives about the drainage areas that bear minerals and organic materials into river channels to augment those that focus on water itself. For the Yellow River, which is today the most sediment-laden river in the world, such an approach means a turn toward the Loess Plateau, the origin of the river’s namesake sediment, and the region that the Yellow River traverses in its middle course, including the Ordos region in Shaanxi and the Lüliang Mountains in Shanxi.
This paper explores two interrelated stories of the Loess Plateau. One story is about the timeline of erosion history itself. Soil cores and some historical documents from the region both attest to significant changes in the rate of sedimentation over time and to a series of inflection points in the erosion rate, each of which can be associated with changing human land use. Among these are the emergence of agriculture in the neolithic era, the military fortification and commercial revolution of the medieval period, and the introduction of maize and potato farming in the eighteenth century.
The other story concerns discourse about erosion. Erosion on the Loess Plateau had devastating consequences from an early date. Sediment clogged irrigation canals, destroyed soil fertility, and contributed to devastating flooding. However, few sources refer to erosion in accounts of Yellow River floods during the imperial era. Testaments about erosion in sources about the Loess Plateau itself are sparse. Hardly any commentary from the imperial era refers to changing erosion rates or to erosion control measures. This paper identifies the sources of commentary about erosion that do exist in order to explore how writers at the time understood the ecological changes that they were experiencing and in order to comprehend why erosion may not have been a significant topic of commentary during imperial times.
In the context of large-scale twentieth-century erosion control intervention on the Loess Plateau and massive investments in twenty-first forestation efforts there, a longue durée approach may offer useful insights for contemporary history and policy in the region as well as historical insight.
Deep Blue Visions in the Drafting of Japan’s Terraqueous Geographies
Jonas Rüegg, The University of Zurich
Japan holds a unique position in world history as a Pacific archipelago-turned continental empire. Its ambiguous position between the island Pacific and the continental rims is reflected in the changing paradigms of the empire’s maritime ideologies. If the myth of national seclusion created an appearance of resource-poor insularity in the past, the ongoing discovery of the archipelago’s oceanic dimensions reveals Japan as a terraqueous zone awash in streams of energy, nutrients, and animate resources. I argue that historicizing the aquatic part of the archipelago’s metabolism is essential to understanding both the resource base and the environmental cost of Japan’s modern emergence.
This contribution traces Japan’s discovery of the ocean’s inner life from the early nineteenth to the twenty-first century, observing how visions of underwater worlds reflected changing anxieties and expectations. My analysis of oceanic futures past begins with the nativist reorientation in the eighteenth century. The domestic discovery of oceanic geographies led the largely terracentric cartography of the time to absorb practical knowledge of currents and drifts. The geopoliticization of the seabed towards the late nineteenth century evolved around deep-sea cables at first, but with the perfection of bathymetric visions under the influence of the Challenger and other international expeditions, visions of subaqueous landscapes were opened to new imperial claims: if the “contours of Our Country emerge[d] on the peninsula of Kamchatka,” then the islands of the Pacific and Southeast Asia were recast into the geological outskirts of Japan’s archipelagic realm.
Claims to the deep sea frontier continue to express visions and assurances for future growth. In the context of climate change, these visions are taking on new meanings. With its reluctant ratification of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) as late as 1996, Japan initiated a balancing act between its centuries-old resource scramble, and a rule-based and ostensibly sustainable use of marine resources. With just the minerals necessary for the shift to renewable energies, planned deep sea mines today support visions of a greened economy, while the ocean’s alleged function as a sinkhole of anthropogenic impact mitigates climate fears. Japan has begun to unilaterally territorialize the deep sea in zones claimed as “extended continental shelf,” or as a part of internationally recognized frameworks over regions such as the offshore Clarion-Clipperton Zone. At the same time, terracentric claims to the ocean face new challenges as rising sea levels are expected to drown some essential insular footholds for Japan’s vast maritime sovereignty.
Connecting the historically changing meanings of the deep sea in the Japanese discourse to changing maritime practices, this contribution argues that the history of the Japanese economy needs to be understood as embedded in the rhythms of its oceanic environment. This project pays special attention to the way seasonal monsoons, inter-annual El Niño/Southern Oscillation events, and decadal meanders in currents were interpreted. As these rhythms are being altered in the Anthropocene, they represent intersections of historical and geological time. In this context, I test volumetric and dynamic frameworks to study the archipelago’s economic development as embedded in changing climatological, geophysical and biological processes.
Body Fluid Circulation: From Medical Hydrology to Gandhian Hydrotherapies
James L. Wescoat Jr., Massachusetts Institute of Technology
My initial workshop paper traced the divergence of scientific hydrology from medical hydrology, or hydropathy, in the late-19th and early 20th centuries. It was largely a Euro-American story. A parallel story at that time, which has importance for the study of human biological water, involved the divergence of medical hydrology from human physiology. At a conceptual level, the latter distinguished intracellular and extracellular fluid compartments, and experimentally discerned biochemical mechanisms of exchange between them from the 1920s onwards. Medical hydrology focused increasingly on therapeutic baths and thus became separated from scientific hydrology and physiology.
However, a further set of developments at that time involved the diffusion of hydropathy to South Asia (and South Africa) through Mahatma Gandhi’s engagement with German naturopathic therapies (e.g., Louis Kuhne’s The New Science of Healing, and Adolph Just’s Return to Nature). Gandhi mentioned these works in early correspondence in South Africa and compiled his views toward the end of his life in writings like a Key to Health (1948). Previous research has focused on Gandhi’s health experiments and philosophy (e.g., Alter’s Gandhi’s Body: Sex, Diet, and the Politics of Nationalism); and relationships with antecedent rasa, yoga, Unani, and Siddha theories of body fluid circulation (e.g., Zimmerman, The Jungle and the Aroma of Meats; Diamond, Yoga: The Art of Transformation; Alavi, Islam and Healing: Loss and Recovery of an Indo-Muslim Medical Tradition; White, The Alchemical Body: Siddha Traditions in Medieval India).
Gandhi’s ideas about water flows within and beyond the body have received less attention. This paper examines his evolving ideas about water in health and hydrology in the Collected Works (100 vols). These ranged from accounts of personal experiments with bathing, drinking, and fasting to recommendations for water-related sanitary improvements, drought relief, and transoceanic quarantine. Gandhi’s water-related health legacy persists in part through the National Institute of Naturopathy, named after him in Pune, which established that therapy as one of six complementary medical traditions in India’s Ministry of AYUSH (an acronym for Ayurveda, Yoga and Naturopathy, Unani, Siddha, and Homeopathy). The paper concludes with Gandhian insights for rethinking persistent drinking water problems in India and beyond.
Water as a Moral Relation: Riparian Solidarity and Sustainable Hydropower Along Laos’s Highland Rivers
Jerome Whitington, New York University
This paper looks at emergent forms of life at the shifting, unstable boundaries between water and land along highland rivers in Laos. Tributary rivers of the Mekong basin have figured into many regimes of social and political life over the last several centuries, but in widely divergent ways. Beginning in the 1960s, the importance of hydropower to nationalist state projects became a signature of post-war modernization, offering a characteristic image or paradigm of the quite literal naturalization of the state within an energetic assemblage. Most recent iterations have attracted environmentalists and sustainability experts who concern themselves with forms of criticism and care, even while market relations and shifting cultural values have moved attention from living along rivers towards living along roads. Yet large dams, even relatively modest ones, enact many orders of magnitude greater extraction from riparian flows than even the largest of the earlier hydrological regimes, with substantial consequences for the qualities of water and the relations between people, water and land in the riparian zone.
My interest in the dynamism of living along Laos‘s rivers is two-fold: first, to consider distinctive capacities for being human as a kind of ecological experimentation—let’s call it forced resilience or forced adaptation, in which specific capacities for living are made possible or impossible within novel, constantly shifting anthropogenic ecologies. Secondly, I wish to attend to water not simply as a volumetric variable or flow but also in its wide-ranging, distinctive capacities and characteristics, its many personalities if you will. If water is not an abstraction, not one thing but many, if water is received as one might receive a person, then I am reminded of Marcel Mauss’s important lesson that the person is a moral category, not a biological or psychological entity. I try to think about moral relations in an affirmative mode as a category of practical reason or agentive action, in which the ability to act in meaningful ways places obligations on the subject. And if the nation state is built on forms of imaginative solidarity, including the energetic solidarity of large hydropower, then I wonder what forms of solidarity might be forged in construing water in terms of its personhood, its plurality and distinctiveness.
