No abstract

This chapter focuses on the working lives of cycle-rickshaw drivers in Dhaka, Bangladesh. It highlights the significance of unwaged rickshaw labour in enabling rural-urban migrants to navigate ecological and financial emergencies. The chapter argues that while hardly a safe or secure mode of work, the rickshaw industry nonetheless constitutes a relatively stable site of return when other labour projects fail. The importance of the rickshaw industry as a safety net for some drivers is increasingly undermined by the implementation of government licensing and mobility restrictions in Dhaka city. In analysing these restrictions, the chapter contests the idea that informal work is always already inherently precarious. Instead, it highlights how politics and policy interventions impact work-lives and make informal work precarious.

No abstract

This paper focuses on the spiritual and gendered experiences of dwelling-in-uncertainty in the context of Bengali char lands. Chars are temporary sandbanks in the river that continuously erode and re-emerge as the river changes course, thereby subjecting their inhabitants to repetitious cycles of losing and regaining land. In this paper I take the ethnographic literature on Bengali chars as a point of departure for exploring what the radical uncertainty of climate change might mean in a context where erosion or land loss does not necessarily involve the irreversible loss of a particular habitat, but often coincides with the anticipation of return. In analyzing the gendered ways in which char dwellers navigate this spiraling cycle of land loss and return, I draw specific attention to the churning, immaterial and spiritual powers that reside below and beyond the water, thereby highlighting the ways in which people are caught up in a land/waterscape that is only knowable to some extent. Whereas debates around climate change often treat religion and spirituality as either obstacles to knowledge or vehicles of meaningful storytelling, this paper deliberately foregrounds the more-than-human forces that linger at the periphery of people’s perception and knowledge of the world. In doing so, the paper seeks to move beyond probabilistic notions of climate change and adaptation towards a diverse understanding of the existential uncertainties of the Anthropocene.