Convenor
Atsuro Morita
Osaka University
Co-covenors
Jakkrit Sangkhamanee
Chulalongkorn University
Casper Bruun Jensen
IT University of Copenhagen
Abstract
Recent years have seen the rise of a number of critical examinations of nature, traditionally the counterpart to culture, anthropology’s concern. Water has gained a certain prominence as part of these reappraisals, not least because it is often the medium through which the message of climate change is delivered. Thus, one critical dimension of climate change is the projected and already occurring intensification of water related disasters such as drought and flood due to changes in global water circulation and sea level rises.
In some sense, aquatic environments present humanity with an ultimate otherness, since humans are after all a profoundly terrestrial species. Thus, it is no accident that mangrove, marshland and high sea landscapes are always located at the margins of human worlds, as places of refuge or frontier adventure and entrepreneurship. The spread of modern development has progressively eliminated such marginal aquatic spaces by land reclamation and drainage, however, rising sea levels and intensified floods may contribute to reestablishing them. In many parts of the world, water seems to be flowing back into land, submerging coastal areas on a semi-permanent basis and creating rising threats of flooding in urban centers. In response, urban planners, civil engineers and architects devise new infrastructures adaptive to increasingly amphibious environments. An anthropology of the amphibious explores these conceptual and empirical challenges by following the changing relations between and ontologies of the amphibious and the terrestrial.
This raises several important questions. If climate change is ending modernity’s longstanding separation of water and land, what practices and imaginaries emerge out of increasingly amphibious landscapes? If the world is slowly becoming more amphibious in general, what does this entail for a reconsideration of existing marginal amphibious worlds? And if a dimension of otherness is embedded in watery worlds, what demands on our horizons of thought will be demanded by the progressive extension of such worlds? With these questions in mind, we seek papers that elucidate evolving and transformative relations between humans and nonhumans, infrastructures and environments, and sociality and materiality, emerging from actual and anticipated amphibious worlds.