Filming sea‐level rise: media encounters and memory work in the Indian Sundarbans

Abstract

In this article, I discuss social consequences of the visualization of climate change. I focus on encounters between film crews and displaced islanders on rapidly eroding islands at the sea‐facing edge of the Indian Sundarbans. As these islands have become the epitome of global environmental damage and dystopian futures, film crews regularly travel here to produce captivating footage on degradation and displacement. I first situate the ensuing encounters in global regimes of visibility and infrastructural possibilities. Building on that, I argue that these encounters set forth what I call unintentional memory work. By virtue of being a spectacle, by enabling a return to the film subjects’ former homes, and by staging acts of remembering, film teams unintentionally induce a reworking of memories and, at times, the production of new memories. In both instances, particular pasts are prioritized and imbued with a sense of urgency and relevance to foreign film teams and global audiences. I frame these media encounters as interfaces through which global anxieties about Anthropocene futures become implicated in the fashioning of selves on remote shores.

Climate change reception studies in anthropology

“…4 Others include the Caribbean and Indian Ocean islands, and the Sundarbans and other coastal areas of India and Bangladesh. 5 See Harms (2018) for an example from India. 6 Rudiak-Gould (2013b) notes that not just anthropologists but also some Indigenous activists have been strong advocates for the "visibilist" position that climate change is observable without scientific instruments/education, and that this standpoint is not uncontroversial.…”