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Article ID: CBB034852512

A River Is Not a Pendulum: Sediments of Science in the World of Tides (2021)

Isis: International Review Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences
Volume: 112
Issue: 1
Pages: 141-149
Publication date: 2021
Language: English

DOI: 10.1086/713567

URI: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/713567

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Hydrography Littoral zone, nearshore Sedimentology Humanitarianism Postcolonialism Colonialism Science and society Coastal zone and estuarine studies Tides Rivers Bengal (India)

This essay explores the history of the silty sediments that make up the littorals of the Bengal Delta to see how they emerged as an object of scientific inquiry and as part of a hydrosocial and political history. By using the conceptual framing of hydrosociality, the piece investigates the political and legal possibilities of amphibious landscapes to document the colonial legal engagement with and scientific puzzlement over these silty sediments and their postcolonial afterlives. As temporary landscapes, silts and sediments pose a unique problem for historians, for they leave scanty archival traces. When they emerge in the state archive it is as sites of conflict, rather than sites of life. They also emerge as a problem for science to map and solve. This essay gathers some snippets of the fragmentary journey of shoals as they emerge and disappear in the scientific and legal archive. Focusing on three moments of interruption in the colonial and postcolonial encounters with the littorals of the Bengal Delta, it argues that the inability of scientific discourse to come up with a conceptual grammar was conducive to new legal articulations about these spaces. Unfortunately, the consequences of this are playing out in the contemporary moment as a humanitarian crisis.

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Article Wilko Graf von Hardenberg (2021) Knowing the Littoral: Perception and Representation of Terraqueous Spaces in a Global Perspective. Isis: International Review Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences (pp. 108-110). unapi

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