← New Books Network
New Books Network
Jason Cons, "Delta Futures: Time, Territory, and Capture on a Climate Frontier" (U California Press, 2025)
00:51:41
Loading summary
Transcript31 lines
- [00:00]
A
My dad taught me a lot, including how easy it is to forget to cancel things. So I downloaded Experian, my bff. Big Financial Friend Experian could help me cancel my unused subscriptions and lower my bills, saving me hundreds a year. Get started with the Experian app today. Your Big Financial friends here to help you save smarter. Results will vary. Not all bills or subscriptions eligible savings not guaranteed $631 a year average savings with one plus negotiations and OnePlus cancellations paid. Membership with Connected Payment Account required. See experian.com for details.
- [00:28]
B
Experian
- [00:31]
C
welcome New Books Network
- [00:35]
B
hi everybody. Welcome to the New Books Network. I'm your host, Yadong Li, a PhD candidate in sociocultural transphobology at Tulane University. Today's podcast will take us to one of the most emblematic and unsettling sites of the planetary climate crisis, the Bengal Delta. Our new book today explores how multiple competitive visions of the future are crowded into the Delta's imperiled present and competing for control of its ecologically vulnerable terrain in southwestern Bangl. Programs that imagine the Delta as a security threat unfold on the same ground as initiatives that frame it as a natural conservation zone and as development projects that see its rivers and poles as engines of industrial growth. I'm very happy to be joined today by the new book's author, Professor Jason Combs. Professor Combs, welcome to New Books Anthropology.
- [01:25]
C
Thanks, Yihong. Thanks for having me on. I'm excited to be here.
- [01:29]
B
Thank you for attending our conversation. And the book we will be discussing today is Delta Time, Territory, and Capture on a Calamity Frontier, published by the University of California Press in 2025. Our guest today, Jason Combs is Associate professor of Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin. He works on borders in South Asia, climate and agrarian change, and rural development, and has conducted extensive field work in Bangladesh on topics including climate security, multispecies entanglement, and the politics of development. And so, first of all, Professor Combs, could you please briefly introduce yourself to our audience in your own words? How did you first come to work in anthropology and in South Asia? What broader question have guided your research over the years?
- [02:17]
C
Yeah, thanks for that question. So I have how did I come to this project and how did I come to South Asia are sort of two different questions. I guess my first book project was motivated in part by a broader interest in thinking about the questions of borders in South Asia and the lingering legacies of partition, especially in the east, which is a question that I was really interested in pursuing When I started my graduate training at Cornell back in the early 2000s. And the results of that first dissertation project, where my book Sensitive Space, which looked at the way, at the politics around a series of enclaves that were scattered on either side of the Bangladesh border. And the questions that really emerged out of that were questions about territory making and the imaginations of space and articulations between spatial imaginaries and the material realities living in those places. And those are questions that I found really animating and exciting at the time and have continued to be central to all of the work that I've been doing, not just in South Asia, but in general. And as I was wrapping that project up, the early, sort of early mid 2000s in Bangladesh were moments when many of the questions about regional politics were being recast at global scales as questions around climate. So as I was working, I was constantly carrying or running into people who had shown up in Bangladesh because they were interested in, in understanding the ways that the India Bangladesh border was the climate border and that the fence that was being constructed along the India Bangladesh border was a climate fence, which was not how I understood either that border or that fence at the time. But it intrigued my interest as an ethnographer to think more about how those politics were sort of transposed into questions around climate. So I knew that that was something that I was interested in exploring as a second project. But maybe more directly what brought me to the Delta is I've been working on and off with Bangladesh's Malambus Movement, an organization called Nidra Kori for quite some time. And alongside my colleague Kasha Paprocki and Nidra Cory, we worked on a community based project on the social impacts of shrimp aquaculture, which was the first project that really brought me to the Delta. My first research was in the North. So that was, that was what brought me into that space. And it was immediately clear that I wanted to ask more questions about the ways that development was being conceived in the present through climate change.
- [05:02]
B
It's fascinating. Thank you very much for sharing this trajectory. So you talk about how you went to the Delta, so now I want to turn to the book itself. I'm particularly curious about the origin story of this particular book and its lenses. So I can see some connections between this book and your previous work, like sensitive spaces and frontier assemblages. So were there a particular few site, encounter or particular event that made you realize that the Bengal Delta region's overlapping crisis imaginations, development projects and everyday struggles would become the focus of this Particular book project?
- [05:39]
C
That's a good question. I mean, it was not necessarily the way I imagined the book would play out when I began the research. I mean, this was, I guess, in some ways a very classic second book project in that it sort of emerged in the making. The original vision that I had started the project with changed over time, as all projects do. But I think it changed maybe even more, because as a second project, it unfolded over the better part of a decade, as opposed to the better part of a year, which a dissertation project would unfold on. And when I started the project, some of the earliest work that I did on this project felt to me like it was going to be a much more classic ethnography of development. I started with the parts of the book that were asking questions about the relationship between questions about climate security and development in a region which is not only adjacent to the Sundarbans, the world's largest remaining mangrove forest, but more or less sitting right on the border. And as I mentioned in the previous question, I had become really interested in the way that border was being reconceived at a global scale as this new side of climate security, largely because of anxieties about the displacement of millions of people across that border in both ruling and unruly ways and to both proximate and remote countries. So that project or that stage of the research really focused on those kind of questions. And that's what shaped my understanding of the politics of resilience in the Delta. But as I was doing that work, it really felt to me like a broader question was emerging more or less out of a series of puzzles that I just was having a really hard time making sense of ethnographically as I was going to the Delta and repeated visits over the years. And some of those were questions about conservation, especially about the ways that new policies regulating the Sunderbans or trying to attempting to conserve the Schunderbands for the future of humankind were increasing precarity and often, sometimes predictable, but often very surprising ways for people who were working in that space. Fishermen and other people whose livelihoods depended on the forest, and then also the fairly rapid and fairly large scale industrialization. By large scale, I guess I mean large scale in the sense of a small city, but around Mongla Port, which is Bangladesh's second largest port and was gaining significant importance at the time. So, yeah, the project kind of emerged out of me thinking it was going to be this much more constrained thing and then just being constantly confused by things that I was running across ethnographically. So it was largely an organic process.
- [08:29]
B
Exactly, exactly. Thank you for sharing this. And as you've mentioned, border and frontier are always important analytic lenses in your ethnographic exploration. Also in your writing, like Sensitive Space, is a book about, I think it's about international border between India and Bangladesh. And in this book I can also see some traces of your early work on resource frontiers in Asia in the volume From Tiers and Bluejuice. So we can see the analytic scale is moving, like you mentioned, broader in this book, as one of the key moves in the book is to frame the Bengal Delta as a climate frontier. It's not only about a single nation or between two nations, but on a planetary scale. So why is frontier such a crucial concept for you in this and your other project? What does thinking with frontier help us see about climate change, development, and global capitalism?
- [09:23]
C
I guess there are three scales that one could answer that question from. I mean, the first one is more or less a descriptive one, which is that it's useful to think about and talk about frontiers in relation to the Bengal Delta, in part because the Bengal Delta has long been figured as sort of a recursive set of frontiers for, like, quite a long period of history. It's been a frontier of settlement. It's been a frontier of different kinds of agrarian production. It's been a frontier of export oriented production around things like shrimp. So, you know, frontiers, as I've argued elsewhere, often build on each other. They're recursive, they're layered. So it's rarely the case that frontier space is fixed and steady, but it's often the case that you have the constant building of new kinds of frontiers on the ruins of old ones. And so from a descriptive standpoint, it sort of makes sense to at least ask those kind of questions about the Bengal Delta. But from an analytic standpoint, in the book Frontier Assemblages, which I co edited with Michael Eilenberg, we were really interested in trying to think about the salience and value of work on resource frontiers that understood resource frontiers as political economic projects. But we really wanted to think about a methodological approach that would allow for at least a momentary pause in the kind of capitalism, in the final analysis, to think about the ways that a range of different actors and materialities were really at play in any kind of frontier assemblage. So it became, for me, anyway, a powerful way to think about the many different kinds of factors that come to play in the production of frontiers themselves. And that even though we may ultimately talk about frontiers as extractive. And that is the way I think about the Bengal Delta as a frontier. One can't sort of simply make assumptions about accumulation by dispossession without taking the time to try and understand the broader array of actors and factors that come together at particular moments to allow frontier processes to unfold. But specifically in relation to this project, why climate frontiers? What I argue in the book is that I call the Bengal Delta climate frontier, not because everything is narrowly related to climate change within it, but rather that a series of ongoing relations of expropriation and opportunity are increasingly organized around imagination and anticipations of a future of climate change. So the challenge of the book, and the reason why I think that that concept is useful to think with there, is that it's fairly clear, even just looking at the amount of flow of development, money and projects into and out of the Delta, that something is happening there of an extractive nature. Even if we ultimately decide that some of that extraction is in the service of normatively good ends or not, that's an open question, but it's certainly the case that something is happening and that value is going into it, coming out in a changed way from the Delta. So it feels very frontier like. And the question of the climate frontier is just a way to think about how old projects are constantly being reconfigured in ways that are oriented towards this future vision of climatological transformation without any clarity about what in fact that climatological transformation might look like in delta space.
- [13:03]
B
Perfect, thank you. I think this distinction, this difference between the actual frontier and the frontier in imagination, is very helpful for us to understand what is happening in the Bengal Delta and other similar places in the world today. And related to this, I think futures and temporality are absolutely central throughout your analysis. So you show how the Delta present is shaped by multiple, often contested, incommensurable future making projects that collate and compete, whether they are visions of climate catastrophe, blueprints for industrial growth, or more local projects of long term survival. So why did you decide to foreground temporality as your key analytical lens? And how do you see from tier and time as related to.
- [13:53]
C
Well, to take the second question first, I think that frontiers are always temporal concepts almost by definition, right? I mean, frontiers, as has often been said, are not necessarily things, are not necessarily places. They're processes that unfold in particular places and are moving on. So the frontier is something that is always in motion, and temporality is always an important dynamic in thinking through frontier relationship. Frontiers are also typically future oriented. They're often talking about the possibilities of tomorrow or making claims on space based on demands for tomorrow. And I found that to be sort of doubly true in the Delta, where increasingly, what enables the frontier, what enables frontier relations or extractive relations or new projects is again, this anticipation of future change now. Whether it's projects that are speaking in the name of that change and trying to extract things now, or projects that are actually planning for transformations and seeking to rearrange political economic relations in the long run, those are both in play, and they're not necessarily always working hand in glove. But I think it's a place where the future itself feels very much like part of the resource assemblage that enables the frontier. In terms of the question of temporality broadly, I didn't again set out to make this a book about temporality per se. I mean, it's a concept that I think is quite interesting, but it wasn't really sort of in the foreground of my analytic imagination as I was beginning to work on this. It really emerged as a central question for the book as I began trying to think through some of the cognitive dissonance, at least for me, around the different kinds of projects that were unfolding in the Delta, Often like literally across the street from each other. Projects that conceived of the Delta's future in really radically different ways. One project that sort of imagines an urgent need to emplace climate, future climate refugees and make sure that migration either does not happen or happens in an orderly way. Those projects are often across the street from projects like building new export processing zones and sort of things that are thinking more about the Delta as a durable site for industrialization and growth. So there's some inherent tension and contradiction in the different ways that the future was being thought. And so temporality ends up being more or less just a way for me to try and think through and make an argument about the incommensurability of some of the different visions for what the future looks like in the Bengal Delta, and especially in Bangladesh, and maybe even more specifically to raise the question of what happens when we have a situation where some of these futures can't actually come to be in the same place at the same time. And where are the potential points of tension and conflict as those things come together? For example, it seems fairly clear that the future vision of the Bengal Delta as an engine which will continue to produce industrial growth for Bangladesh is in some significant tension with the imagination of a future conservation regime for the Sundarbans where the Sundarbans will continue to be an ecological infrastructure that protects much of life in both rural and urban spaces in the Delta from the ongoing effects of climate change, like cyclones. Right. So these futures are inherently intentional with each other. And part of what I wanted to try and think through in the book is what are the tools that are available for us to ask those questions about futures that seem to be making similar claims about climate transformation, but in fact look really different if you look at the sort of sociopolitics of how they're being brought to be.
- [18:02]
B
Well, thank you for this, omsa. I originally want to ask you to. Maybe we can dive into some details of contested futures in the Bengal Delta. And if you've already given us this kind of a picture, very vividly. So I think we can turn to another concept you brought in the book. So one of the most, I think evocative concept in the book is what you call self scape. So you argue that the delta is not really land in any stable things, but an ever shifting composition of silt, water and infrastructure constantly made and unmade through erosion, dredging and embankment failures. So how do you arrive at this notion of silk scale and how, how does silt as a moving and uncertain material can help us think and rethink property, territory and development in this area?
- [18:51]
C
Well, I think anybody who either visits or lives in the delta already is forced to come to reckon with silt as a material reality of how the delta terrain is made. Right. It is the primary substance of things that we call lands, but also of things that we call rivers and embankments. And almost everything about the delta is in some ways linked to silt. It's the very thing on which people build their futures. So there's a long standing tension. Well, let me put that a different way. Silt is inherently a form of matter that's in transition. Right. It can exist in particulate forms in the rivers that flow down through the delta and out into the Bay of Bengal. Maybe one of the most famous ways or most recognizable ways that people come to know and understand the Delta is through these kind of God's eye satellite pictures of the Sundarbans, where you can see the vast amount of silt that's pouring out of the mouth of the delta. So that's sort of delta or that's silt in its liquid form. And of course, the islands that make up the delta are primarily made up of silts. So people are growing agriculture, primarily rice, on this very nutrient rich silt. They are growing shrimp in ponds made from the silt. They're building houses out of the silt. So silt is sort of this kind of present material, solid form within the delta, but it's also, and often is encountered as something which is sort of a transitory space, like in between the liquid and the solid in its sort of damp, muddy form. And that's how things are built. You turn silt into mud and then build things with it and dries into something that's fairly stable. So, I mean, silt is, I think, just something that's impossible to get away from a delta. And I arrived at the concept of siltscape in part because early in this project, I'd been thinking a lot about the ways that change and temporality happens in often surprising ways in the delta, in part because so much of the transformation that goes into, say, the process of erosion along embankments, which is a major issue for people who live near embankments in these islands, there's often moments where there's a gradual undercutting of a self of the silt embankment in such a way that large portions of land just sort of collapse into the rivers overnight. People often wake to finding parts of their home, or maybe all of their home being swept into the river. So, I mean, I'd been thinking quite a bit about sort of the ways that seepage was sort of an insidious temporality that was often at play that sort of led up to moments of catastrophe, but was sort of unfolding in surprising ways all the time. So I. I spent a lot of time trying to think through how to talk about that. And I found myself frustrated by my own habit of writing words like landscape. As I was talking about terrain and. And using it more or less as a synonym for terrain. And I realized that landscape didn't do a whole lot of justice to the way that terrain actually works in the delta. So siltscape was not so much meant to add more jargon to the text as just to find a way to actually describe the more what the material realities of making life on this inherently unstable terrain was like. And also to think about the longstanding projects and policy prescriptions that have more or less struggled to reckon with the fact that in the delta, because of its silty nature, the distinction between wet and dry is something which is far more tenuous than planning documents often make it out to be.
- [23:06]
B
So you also describe the Bengal Delta as recalcitrantly mutable. And although the term recalcitrant maybe deserve more explanation and is a terrain that stubbornly refuses to fit into classification and resist, and continuously resist technocratic projects of control, some infrastructural project, like lead by the government. So how do efforts to stabilize the terrain, for example, through embankment, through zoning, through conservation schemes, run up against the realities of this frontier environment?
- [23:42]
C
Thanks for that question. I mean, it's a really complicated one, and there are more answers than I think one could give in the space of just a podcast. There's a really wonderful literature in the Bengal Delta that looks at sort of the history of colonial management of the space, that asks really pointed and for me, really foundational questions about the relationship between colonial schemes that relied on the predictability of land being in a certain place and water being in a certain place for tax purposes and for other kinds of extractive purposes in ways that sort of superimposed a fixed landscape onto a space that was profoundly not fixed, that was very mutable, constantly in flux, often on the move. And what I meant by recalcitrant, building on some of that critique was I think that it's not just the landscape or the silkscape itself that's recalcitrant in the Delta. It's not just the material, it's also the ways that people engage with these projects. So there's kind of a wonderful collision of sort of vernacular ways of engaging with silt and silt's refusal to stay fixed in place that have been really central to not just the transformation of governmental schemes, Because I think governmental projects of building infrastructure in the Delta have also been responsive to these transformations, but often in surprising ways. It's also been about repurposing these things. So one example of that is the embankments that are a central point of much of the Delta that ring many of the islands of the Delta. Many of them date to the 1960s in this large scale World bank funded infrastructure project called the Coastal Embankment Project, which was designed effectively to provide permanent embankments for people to encourage migration into these islands and to facilitate the adoption of green revolution technologies for. For growing rice, which would turn the Delta essentially into even more of a breadbasket for what was then East Pakistan and indeed for Pakistan at large. And these projects were quite successful to a certain extent, but then were transformed by larger shifts in the global economy in the 1980s, around what we call the Blue Revolution, when people realized, especially landholders and larger landholders at that, in these islands, realized that the embankments were also quite good for keeping water in, and that they could be transformed as ways to not keep water out, but rather to produce the shallow pools which are necessary for growing brackish water. Shrimp aquaculture. Now, that itself has a series of ongoing and recursive effects in the delta, some of which we've talked about elsewhere in this conversation. But in terms of the politics of embankments and the politics of silt, shrimp aquaculture has encouraged a number of practices that are degrading to embankments themselves, which has in turn made people who live in islands where there's quite a bit of shrimp aquaculture even more vulnerable to the effects of things like cyclones, which are increasing factors in delta life in light of climate change. That, in turn, again, has turned embankments into sites of quite vital politics within these islands. And often elections rise or fall on the ability of politicians to convince people that they have the capacity to create governmental interventions to rebuild failing embankments better protect people who are living inside of these spaces from the next cyclone and the cyclone after that. So the silkscape and the politics of life within these spaces is really intimately bound up in each other in ways that kind of constantly confound and transform any sort of project that tries to maintain distinctions between wet and dry. You constantly have a process of the delta kind of merging back into its damp and much more muddy, sticky, complex matter or mode.
- [28:07]
B
But it's precisely in this transitory landscape, People living there are eager to capture something. And in one of the chapters, you turn to the delta's fishing and crab industries to develop the notion of ecologies of capture to trees, how crab collectors, dakars, or so called vendors and estate agencies are all involved in different but interrelated forms of capture, of crabs, of bodies, territory, or revenue. So how do this overlapping practices, from shrimp driven disposition to this kind of state regulation, help rethink capture by the signature condition of life on the climate frontier?
- [28:47]
C
So this was one of the ways that I found my way into the kind of broader problematic of the book, thinking about incommensurate futures. As I mentioned before, there were a series of paradoxes and puzzles that I was just having a difficult time of making sense of ethnographically, particularly in relation to each other. And one of the early puzzles that ended up driving a lot of my thinking about this book, and especially the writing that I did around the concept of capture and ecologies of cap emerged from being repeatedly surprised. I mean, so I spent quite a bit of time working with fishermen who were working, who were fishing the Schunderbahns. And when I first started talking to them, I had anticipated this was early on in the project When I still had kind of imagined it as a more classic development or anthropology of development. And I was constantly surprised by when I asked them about new kinds of conservation policies that were coming into the region and transforming what could be fished, how you could fish it, when one could fish, they would often respond not by talking about the policies, or at least not by first talking about the policies, but rather by saying that the biggest issue that they were facing was that they were constantly being kidnapped. Which I found to be both surprising and something that was hard to make sense of, especially given that at the same time that all these policies were being put in place, there was a parallel increase in funding for paramilitary policing within the Schunderbands, both from new forms of new ways of policing conservation, but also attempts to sort of police and settle the territory and control banditry within the region. So it was surprising to me to hear that the major problem people were facing was being kidnapped. And it turned out that what was happening there was that banditry within the forest has been a long standing issue. And people have moved into and out of banditry as a lifestyle or as a sort of a strategy of survival for quite a long time. Lifestyle is not the right word, but survival, I would say, is. And what had happened is that with the new amount of money that had come into policing, none of that had really done much to reduce the amount of banditry or the number of actual bandits who are working inside of the Sundarbans. But rather, it had significantly changed both their territorial basis of organizing the mangrove forest and also the way that they extracted rents. So in the past, forest bandits had more or less kind of extracted small amounts of threats from people who were fishing in their regions. And it was fairly easy to know whose territory you were fishing in. So you would pay essentially a small amount of protection money that allowed you to work safely inside of a particular zone. New kind of paramilitary policing units had essentially broken up the old systems in such a way that now, instead of a few large groups that were controlling large portions of the forest, you had this fragmentation of DACA groups that were not able to control territory. And it wasn't really possible for fishermen to understand whose territory they were fishing in. Right. So it was so they couldn't protect themselves in advance by paying a small amount of protection money. Rather, it was now up to now that now DACATs were essentially asking for significantly larger amounts of ransom money from a smaller number of fishermen. So that was what was at the heart of the increase in kidnapping. But the more that I started to explore that question the more I realized that the problem of dacaathi in the Sundarbans in the present wasn't just a question of that fragmentation by conservation policing. There are a range of other questions about capturing and controlling rents and species and humans that were centrally bound up in the problem. For example, one of the tensions around the question of managing the Sundarbans and managing small scale resource extraction in the Sundarbans relates to the fact that in part due to the incursion of export oriented shrimp aquaculture in the region, there's been largely a collapse in the agrarian labor market which has both displaced a number of people into urban areas but also pushed more people into small scale resource extraction in the Shundrabans itself. So the very time that international actors and government actors were trying to regulate how much fishing was taking place in this ecologically vulnerable region, you had an explosion of people who are trying to fish in it. Right. So there. And as those conservation policies were being more rigorously implemented, people were finding more and more ways to capture resources in different kinds of ways. Whether it be poison fishing or illegal fishing at night or, you know, any number of things. So I ended up understanding what was happening specifically with the. With daca t inside of the Schunderbance as only being sort of one really telling piece of a much larger set of questions about the capture and management of territory, rents and resources.
- [34:17]
B
So we can see you at the nether apology side is also trying to capture something in this kind of shifting landscape, the south scape. I mean, it's intellectually so, methodologically speaking. I think Delta Future is very mobile and multi sided. You move between villages at the edge of the subdurines, embankments and also industrial zones and various infrastructural and bureaucratic spaces. So how did you design your fieldwork in such a shifting environment? And what did you find most challenging or illuminating about trying to hold together this various phenomena from tigers and tiger prompts to development meetings and piracy?
- [34:58]
C
Yeah, I think that the. To say that that was part of the research design is to maybe give. Give that a little more credit than it. Than it deserves. I mean, I think that the answer to your question is as much an analytic one as a methodological one. I. As I was talking about earlier, a lot of this research really unfolded as. As I was doing it in the making. I'm not sure understood when I was starting off this project even maybe what the object of my ethnographic attention was. I had this kind of vague notion that it was about territorial transformations related to climate change. But as I worked, and over a period of several years of repeated visits, I came to realize that what I was really working on was the Delta itself. It was sort of an inversion of that famous Geertzian line. Anthropologists don't study villages, they study in villages. Well, in my case, it really ended up feeling like I wasn't doing an ethnography in the Delta, I was doing an ethnography of the Delta. And that brought its own set of complications, less so methodologically, from the standpoint of research. I came to that conclusion just by moving from site to site repeatedly, but over a fairly long period of time. Analytically, it was much harder to try and figure out how to make sense of all of these different things that were happening. I had a strong ethnographic sense, and the people that I was talking with had strong empirical senses that all of these processes were somehow linked, but they were quite difficult to talk about. So the challenge, if you, you know, to use your framing of this capture the challenge, was how to capture the sometimes quite direct and sometimes quite loose articulations between such radically different projects, which often the most obvious connection to them was that they were all affecting the people that I was working with. So it was really a challenge to think about what is the relationship between the industrialization of Mongla, the port, and profusion of new policies that were about essentially restricting fisher livelihoods in the Delta. And to the extent that I was successful in doing that, that was really more of a project of writing than a project of doing the research itself, if you know what I mean. It was a challenge, but a rewarding one.
- [37:36]
B
Exactly, exactly. I guess it definitely is both challenging but rewarding, and it's definitely contributing directly to your serialization of Celtic and authority things. In your book, and at several points in your book, you suggested that Delta residents need interventions grounded in this kind of underground livelihood realities, rather than in distant imaginaries about securitized climate crisis. So this is basically also what you want to reveal from your critical use of the term climate frontier. So what do you Hope development practitioners, NGOs or policymakers will take from this book? Are there some examples from your book, your field work, that may be related to this kind of grounded forms of resilience or good intervention that work with rather than against, the dynamics of the stealth scale?
- [38:28]
C
Yeah, and as you're pointing out, I think a lot of the ways that I thought about resilience in the context of this book were in keeping with a line of critique that emerged about resilience around the time that I was doing this research that saw it essentially as sort of the latest round of, of governmentality in relation to climate change and development, and saw it quite often as a project of reconfiguring people's relationship to the state in often problematic ways that placed huge amounts of responsibility on them for being prepared to deal with crisis with limited support and intervention from NGOs, states and so on and so forth, and led often to these kind of. Of paradoxically, maybe paradoxical is not the right word, but maybe bizarre is the right word, bizarre interventions of the landscape that I found it quite easy to feel somewhat cynical about. But I've been pushed by a number of generous colleagues to think about the ways that resilience itself is not a closed analytic category and has a lot of different meanings. And so from the standpoint of what do I hope people who are involved in climate change programming and development programming might take from this? I think it would be a sort of variant of the anthropologist of developments creed occur, which is largely. It would be really nice to take the sort of aspirations and ideas of people who are the objects of development seriously in planning and implementation. You know, I think that people who live in the Delta actually do have really robust, and also speculative, but just no less speculative than a lot of these projects, ideas about what a resilient future could look like. But it's often. Those visions are often compelling to me when I see them in part because they feel really profoundly rooted in people's lives and in the Delta scopescape itself. So, for example, I would often run across groups of farmers who had come together to form small scale collectives to think about questions about what does it look like if we intersperse indigenous varietals of rice with engineered varietals that we can buy in the marketplace as a way to hedge against uncertain weather? Or how might we put together our seed banks that would allow us to preserve some of these varietals of seeds which maybe work well in one year but don't necessarily work well in the next? Or how do we petition local government agencies to build things that we recognize as needing for our for managing unpredictable weather? And what was notable about a lot of those projects of resilience was that the temporal horizon of them was often quite different than the other projects that were claiming to instill resilience. There were often things about like what do we need to get our crop to market this year? What does next Year look like, you know, sort of a much more short term horizon of time, which was often profoundly absent some of these other, you know, frustrating to quizzical projects that were popping up all over the delta landscape, which kind of imagine a remote future of climate chaos in which you have atomized families living alone as opposed to communities working together. So I guess that would be one answer. But I think that beyond what individual groups of peasants are already doing, to think the question of resilience differently, I do think that there are a number of groups that are working in the Delta that are less present in this book, but also present alternatives to the kind of international interventions and development planning which I argue in the book are actually interventions and development security. So there are organizations that are supporting things like seed banks. There are organizations that take the question of rights and empowerment really seriously and in exciting ways. I mentioned the organization Nijarakori, which I've worked with or at the privilege of working with on and off throughout my career, that are really focused less on service provision and really more on helping people figure out how they can press their claims to inclusion, the rights that at least are nominally granted to them through constitution and law. And I think that those are models of resilience that look really different than sort of what large international organizations often call resilience, but in some sense are much more exciting, at least to me, as someone who thinks about livelihoods in a more grounded way. I guess.
- [43:22]
B
Exactly. I think what you provided are very critical and concrete, but also helpful source based on the experience of the Bengal Delta, to think about how to deal with, how to cope with the relationship between the on the ground realities and imaginations. Thank you very much for this contribution. And as we move toward the end of our conversation, I'd love to hear a bit about your current and future projects. So what are you doing now and planning to do in the future? The future?
- [43:50]
C
Well, there's three things that I'm working on now that really are taking up a bunch of my time, and some of them are sort of more directly related to this project than others. What I've been spending a huge amount of my time doing over the last handful of years is I have had the tremendous privilege of being part of a group of scholars who've been working to revitalize the journal limb, which had existence between 2010 and around 2018 and provided a really exciting medium for thinking about ways to destabilize what felt like very pressing contemporary issue and think of these kind of very timely things in a timeless way. As we like to say, and that has been a really fantastic pleasure. I've had the opportunity to work on projects within the editorial collective that are in some sense directly related to the kinds of questions that I've been asking in Delta Futures. I recently edited a volume alongside of Sarah Baske and Alex Nading on climate's Interiors, which asked about the ways that our perspective on climate change might shift if we thought about it from inside of spaces, bodies, objects and so on and so forth, as opposed to always thinking about it as an external phenomenon. And that has been, as I said, quite rewarding and exciting from a more less editorial and more research oriented project. There's two things that I've been working on, one of which asks similar questions about frontiers, but specifically in relation to species and ecologies in Texas that I've been carrying out with my colleague Michael Eilenberg at Aarhus University, and that that project has looked at a number of different things in Texas, but has had at its heart the question of the management of feral hogs, which are sort of a large problem of both pest management and political management here in Texas. And so that's been a lot of fun to think about and engages some similar questions around the question of frontiers. And I'm in the process of starting a project with Aaron Lentz here at the University of Texas that will think, or that we hope will think broadly about the politics of humanitarian forecasting. It's a project that we had thought quite a bit about before the demise of USAID ID under the Trump administration and doge, and we're still in the process of trying to rethink what that project is and will be. But I think it will similarly draw on questions about the ways that the future is mobilized as both a source of anxiety and as a potential resource.
- [46:37]
B
Thank you, thank you very much for sharing all these plans and ongoing project with us. I've had a chance to learn about LIM at the AAA Annual Conference last year and it's a truly exciting journal, exciting project and I was so happy to know your exploration of Frontier continues in your future projects. I'm really looking forward to, you know, keeping learning from them.
- [47:00]
C
So yeah, thank you.
- [47:01]
B
Thank you. So Professor Kong, thank you for sharing your insights with us today and for the rich and unsettling portrait of life in the Bengal Delta. It has been a real pleasure chatting with you about the book.
- [47:13]
C
It's been a pleasure being part of this podcast. Thank you so much for inviting me on and thank you for engaging with the book. It's exciting to talk about it. It's exciting for it to be out in the world. It was a long process of writing it and it's a pleasure to now be able to talk about it.
- [47:28]
B
Yeah, exactly. It's definitely a rewarding journey. And by the way, a free ebook version of Delta Futures is available through Luminal's University of California Press Open Access Publishing program, so you can definitely find the link in the interview's blog post. So in today's episode, I've been speaking with Professor Jason Combs about his new book, Delta Time, Territory and Capture Our Clientele Frontier, published by the University of California Press last year. For listeners interested in climate change, South Asia, agrarian and ecological anthropology, all the politics of resilience and development and security, this book offers an ethnographic account of how competing futures are making one of the world's most iconic deltas. You are listening to the New Books Network. I'm your host, Yadong Li. We hope to see you next time.
- [48:21]
C
Sam.