River Life And The Upspring Of Nature Naveeda Khan by Naveeda Khan 9781478019398, 1478019395 instant download after payment.

I de cided to study how people made lives
for themselves alongside capricious rivers, specifically the Brahmaputra­
Jamuna River, and the ever­ shifting land that the river provided and whose
status as a curse or a boon was never certain.
I de cided to try to understand how the physical volatility of the river­
ine landscape was absorbed into the sinews of the social. The colonial and
postcolonial history and po liti cal economy of Bangladesh went a long way
in helping me to see how ragtag communities of itinerant farmers and fish­
ermen came to be in these locations and to be eco nom ically vulnerable in
very par tic u lar ways. I also found much, from gestures and feelings to sud­
den organ ization into patterned be hav ior as a group to flashes of intuition
and senses of invisible forces, that could not be explained through the usual
analytic frameworks. Although sometimes attributed to the omniscient pres­
ence of the divine through the language of the theological, very often such
excess was referenced as simply a lure, an invitation, a pulse, or a presence,
sometimes within oneself as much as an external cue.
This book is about giving an adequate description of this existence,
without claiming for it the status of settled sociality. It is also about learn­
ing to ascribe authority to nature as one of the forces at play within this
mode of existence, without allowing this to mean only the physical land­
scape and the human and nonhuman animals living in it. And it is about
acknowledging that we still have to contend with nature both as concept
and as alive in the world, or rather as concept precisely because it is alive
in the world.