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Program: Session IX

Session IX

Thu. 1 October

13:45–15:00
Ruuma (Linnanpuomi, ground floor)

Chair: Otso Kortekangas

Shaonli Bhowmik (Jawaharlal Nehru University)

Oceanic Untouchability: Caste, Toxicity, and Stratified Waters in the Blue Anthropocene

In contrast to Blue Humanities’ prevailing framing of the ocean as a fluid, relationally open space, the paper presents the notion of oceanic untouchability to argue that caste is not dissolved into marine environments but rather reconfigured by them. In the Blue Anthropocene, the sea does not flatten social inequalities; instead, it reallocates them by differentiating exposure to labour, toxicity, and ecological risk. Dwelling on the inter-relativised littoral areas of the Indian Ocean and Southeast Asia, the paper will track how fisheries, ship-breaking businesses, and transnational waste flows are placing marginalised coastal people in regimes of heightened vulnerability. Through these processes, the ocean is unveiled as a stratified hydrosocial body where contamination and risk are unequally distributed. The Hungry Tide (2004) and The Bone People (1983) are read in the paper as literary spaces that disorient normative conceptions of oceanic relationality. In Ghosh’s Sundarbans, conservation-driven displacement produces communities that inhabit tidal precarity without secure belonging. Similarly, the Indigenous epistemologies in Keri Hulme’s work complicate access, kinship, and sea intimacy. Combined, these sources reveal that the closeness to water aggravates, not mitigates, marginalisation conditions. Bringing Blue Humanities into the discussion of environmental justice and subaltern critique and engaging with Indian Ocean studies (Isabel Hofmeyr) and Anthropocene arguments (Dipesh Chakrabarty), the paper will redefine the ocean as both an archive of circulation and exclusion. It therefore provincialises hegemonic Blue Humanities by foregrounding caste as a structuring force in marine worlds, where histories of inequality exist as material conditions of life in water.

Firouz Gaini (University of the Faroe Islands)

The Water at the Navel of the World

Water shapes landscapes and societies; it is important for biophysical and social life and is subject to environmental challenges. In the Faroe Islands, people – historically and today – engage with and value water in different ways, not merely as a resource for use. This paper focuses on freshwater in Tórshavn, the capital of the Faroes Islands, which in a William Heinesen novels is called ‘the navel of the world’. Socio-Hydrology is the study of the relationships between societies, climates and freshwater systems, for instance rivers. Societies use these resources for different purposes: for drinking, cleaning, irrigation, sewerage, yet also for spiritual and leisure purposes.

The paper examines the meaning and value of (fresh)water for recreation using the pond in Viðarlundin-park in Tórshavn as main case. The paper explores the position of the pond and Havnará-river in the everyday life and cultural values of the inhabitants in relation to other water-developments in the town (including the covering of the city centre section of Havnará). The pond with the ducks, in the middle of a park with tall trees, gives the visitors a sense of being outside the barren Faroese landscape. Drawing on, mainly, anthropological and geographical literature on water and islands, this paper demonstrates the cultural meaning of socio-hydrology elements of the society – how water is domesticated and giving the people a feeling of moving to an altered place beyond the ‘usual’ watery Faroe Islands.

Christian H. Voie (University of South-Eastern Norway)

“The Great Drying”: Writing the Devastated Freshwaterscapes of the Anthropocene and the Biodiverse Potential of their Restoration

As the recent blue turn in ecocriticism affirms, the central narrative of the Anthropocene will to a significant extent be the story of water. By now most people know the main plot points of that narrative by heart: melting icescapes, the attacking ocean, supercharged storms, ocean acidification, desertification, flooding, and the already critical scarcity of drinkable fresh water, to name some of the most obvious. But a crucial subplot of that narrative remains underexplored. This is the story of the great anthropogenic reengineering of land-based waterscapes in the world’s temperate latitudes over the past 200 years, referred to by geomorphologist Ellen Wohl in Saving the Dammed (2019) as “the Great Drying.”

Presently, the vast majority of wetlands in the Northern hemisphere are gone, as are the organisms depending on them for habitat. The devastation has been particularly thorough in Europe and North America. If the yardstick by which the value of various biomes has been determined over the past centuries can be summed up as “what-use-are-they-to-humans,” as Annie Proulx notes in Fen, Bog and Swamp (2022), this paper explores why wetlands, in spite of their unrivaled biodiversities, have fallen particularly short in this utilitarian view. While they should be hailed as the kidneys of nature, the tropics of the Northern Hemisphere or the most effective ecosystems against climate change and species loss, wetlands remain under anthropogenic pressure. This paper will argue that at the root of this assault lies a generational culture of ecophobic disdain for swampy habitat which continues to have disastrous environmental consequences. This paper also explores literary and artistic responses to the ecophobia perpetuating the Great Drying, and the potential outlined therein of wetland restoration as a stabilizing force of resilience and diversity in the turbulent times of the Anthropocene.