In North Bihar, mud ensures prosperity for farmers, but also materially signals the lower status from which their wives try to raise the family, even at the cost of risking their own and their children's lives. This article provides a semiotic analysis of mud, an ambiguous material in its physical combination of land and water, a substance with specific gendered and class dimensions, and a symbolic marker whose presence on bodies indexes their socio-political identity. The sensuous relationships that revolve around mud and the prejudices it indexes illuminate meanings of dirt within processes of environmental knowledge and risk. By attending to the semiotic processes through which we understand nature, this article suggests that mud naturalizes the discrimination at the origin of dirtiness.Historical and political circumstances, such as the progressive loosening of the links between caste and occupation, show that mud is not dirt, but it becomes dirt when other kinds of dirt lose their meaning.
No abstract
As social scientists of water, we need to keep evaluating the analytical tools we use. Through the example of floods, we here develop a critique of one of those tools, the hydrosocial cycle framework, in order to expand our conceptualizations of water. The hydrosocial cycle is a re-elaboration of the classical hydrological cycle which explicitly politicizes and denaturalizes the study of hydrological systems. In political ecology, such a conceptual framework has been pivotal to the understanding of how water circulates in society through a complex web of power relations, economic structures, and processes that are at the same time spatial and historical. But when we deploy this concept to examine floods, a number of limitations emerge. In this article, we formulate three specific theses which focus on those limitations: (a) an overemphasis on society, (b) a lack of attention to ecology and, more generally the relationships between water and other nonhuman elements and processes, and (c) a heuristic overreliance on the metaphors of flow and cycle.In developing these three theses, we discern alternative paths of analysis to conceptualize floodwaters at a time when these events increasingly constitute a significant threat to humans and nonhumans alike. Our hope is that this critique will also contribute to broader interdisciplinary debates about water and society.
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