ANTH 285 - Subaltern Scapes: Goddesses, Mobilities, and Climate Change

Semester Offered: Spring
0.5 unit(s)

This Intensive explores the fiction and non-fiction works of Amitav Ghosh, the anthropologist turned novelist and climate change activist. His novels and non-fiction writings, such as The Hungry Tide, Gun Island, In an Antique Land, and The Great Derangement, consistently center the workings of cosmopolitan non-Western worlds. Ghosh’s works guide readers through a process of imagining the porosity of such categories as “Hindu”, and “Muslim”, “Indian” and “African.” He also invites readers to question the solidity of distinctions such as “human” and “environment” and “local” and “global.”

In this immersive experience, we engage Ghosh’s insights “on the ground,” in West Bengal, India. We concentrate on Bonbibi– a subaltern goddess who is both Muslim and Hindu– who plays an active role in the ways that the human and non-human negotiate their relations in the often overlooked “tide country” of the Sundarbans, where tigers, mangroves, tides, dolphins and humans co-exist in intimately intertwined and precarious relations, and where residents and the landscape are mutually conflictual and sustaining protagonists.

Students are immersed in the landscape of the Sundarbans as well as the practices of daily life sutured by Bonbibi. We also meet with local scholars, students, and activists, to learn more about the role of Bonbibi in helping residents to navigate the tides of global climate change as they affect the ecosystem of the mangroves and the social imaginations to which this system is tied.

Key questions that we consider are: What are the ways in which subaltern goddesses and ever moving rivers emerge as inspirations for local and global movements, especially in the context of climate change? How is the shifting and mobile nature of the Sundarbans entangled with the seemingly more settled metropolis of Kolkata? Candice Lowe Swift.

Prerequisite(s): Permission of the instructor.

First six-week course.

One 2-hour period.

Course Format: INT