This dissertation explores shifting ethical and religious relationships with water in a context of socio-ecological transformation. Between 2016-2019 I conducted eighteen months of fieldwork with farmers and fishers in a polyethnic and multi-religious village on a riverine island in the Sundarbans delta of West Bengal, India. Hindu, Muslim, and Christian migrants and refugees from different parts of eastern India and present-day Bangladesh have settled on the island over the past 150 years, transforming the space from mangrove swamps into habitable agrarian terrain. Today, the low-lying island is on the frontlines of global climate change.
This dissertation considers the ethical and religious relationships people have formed with water in this setting over time, as well as engagements with water technologies and infrastructures; with plants and animals like fish and crocodiles; and with aquatic deities, ghosts, and spirits. I argue that people’s senses of moral personhood are constituted through their relationships with the more-than-human world, and that shifts in these relationships linked to capitalist modernity and climate change generate new ethical dilemmas and debates.
Employing ethnographic and archival methods, I chart bodily experiences of water and affective relationships with water over time. I argue that the Sundarbans’ waterscape has emerged historically as a common reservoir of ethical orientation for Hindus, Muslims, Christians. Shared forms of belief and practice, such as ritual offerings to local deities when fishing, have generated local forms of place-based belonging that exceed bounded articulations of religious and ethnic difference. At present, however, relationships with water are transforming in unprecedented ways. Such changes are linked to the economization and privatization of water; groundwater scarcity; infrastructure projects such as bridges; NGO and government water initiatives; climate change impacts; and currents of religious reform that problematize established modes of ethico-religious engagement with water as “superstition.”
These changes have rendered water a deeply contested substance. Further, because of the intimacy of people’s bodily experiences with water, these changes are apprehended through the senses and encountered in both material and affective ways, generating rippling effects on concepts of human and more-than-human agency, moral personhood, and environmental ethics more broadly. / 2025-06-16T00:00:00Z
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bu.edu/oai:open.bu.edu:2144/46372 |
| Date | 16 June 2023 |
| Creators | Dowler, Calynn |
| Contributors | Korom, Frank J. |
| Source Sets | Boston University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
| Rights | Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ |
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