Retreat or Remain? Notions of a Full Life and a Slow Death from Sundarbans’ Eroding Coastlines
Ronald O. Perelman Center for Political Science & Economics
133 South 36th Street, Suite 230
Philadelphia PA 19104-6215
About the Seminar:
As sea level rise erodes coastlines of the Sundarbans, “managed retreat”—a process of relocating people to supposedly safer areas—is put forth by policymakers globally, and in India, as an adaptation solution. Through long-term ethnographic research with residents of Sundarbans’ coastal communities, this seminar examines their desires to remain in their villages despite recurrent experiences of floods, cyclones, and land erosion. The motivations to remain are because many know the alternative—enmeshing themselves within India’s precarious and risky informal economy—to be worse, akin to what some call a slow death, even as coastlines classified as uninhabitable by policymakers, counterintuitively, offer a safer and fuller existence. Furthermore, this seminar disaggregates what it means to remain and capacities (or incapacities) of aspiring for relocation, in relation to residents’ land ownership, livelihoods, gender, disability, and age. Prof. Mehtta examines the dense relational webs of kinships, sociality, ritual, and non-human life that make a space into a shongshar (household/home/world).
About the Speaker:
Megnaa Mehtta is an Assistant Professor in Social Anthropology at the Department of Risk and Disaster Reduction, University College London (UCL). She is currently working on a book manuscript titled Conserving Life: Political Imaginaries from a Submerging Forest, based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in the mangrove forests of the Sundarbans. Her writings have appeared in journals such as the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Comparative Studies in South Asia, Africa and the Middle East and Current Anthropology. Her next phase of research, funded by an AXA-UNESCO research fellowship, is interested in migration, informality, health, and social reproduction as these themes intersect with climate adaptation policies, land dispossession, and long-standing vulnerabilities. This research is multi-sited and follows a rural to urban continuum of migrant labor from the coastlines of Bengal to a range of worksites, including factory shop floors and construction sites across India, Bangladesh, and Italy.