Staging Climate Security: Resilience and Heterodystopia in the Bangladesh Borderlands

Abstract

In the spring of 2015, while working in the countryside of Munshiganj in the borderlands of southwestern Bangladesh, 1 my colleague and I came across a strange and visually striking project rising incongruously from the flat delta landscape. 2 It was an earthen mound, or mattir killa, meant to be used as a storm shelter. The mound was fourteen feet in height and a half-acre in size. It had been constructed in 2011 in the aftermath of Cyclone Aila, which caused widespread infrastructural damage and displacement throughout the region in 2009. The killa was built by a local NGO, Shushilon, and financed by Christian Aid, an international NGO. 3 It formed part of a vast wave of new projects in the region to address disaster preparedness and climate change following Aila. What seemed strange about the project was not only its visual appearance, climbing abruptly from its otherwise horizontal surroundings, but its stated purpose: what kind of shelter could this raised mound provide? In contrast to the concrete cyclone shelters that dot the region, the killa seemed to offer limited protection. Moreover, though nominally a public good, it had been built on private land. Striking up a conversation with the farmer who owned the land and whose home stood in the killa's shadow, we asked about the project and its uses. He lived some distance from the nearest cyclone shelter, so when the storms came, he claimed,

Cultural Anthropology in 2018: Captivity and Its Unruly Failures

“…This work implicitly and explicitly built on what Petryna (, 571) described, according to her interlocutors, as “runaway change”: “a rapid departure from long‐established baselines, systemic patterns, or historical trends,” which challenges our ability to project the future and therefore respond to it. For some, the Anthropocene and climate change served as the cause of runaway change (Cons ; Hecht ; Mathews ; Petryna ; Vine ), while others contested the way the Anthropocene concept itself obscures rather than clarifies human and environmental relationships (Bauer and Ellis , 209). Petryna () paid ethnographic attention to knowledge about and responses to forest fires, while many others took up similar themes of uncertainty, temporality, and ways of knowing in relation to more overtly economic trends: the financial crisis of 2008 (Hart ), or neoliberalism, late industrialism, and global capitalist expansion more broadly (G. Smith ).…”

“…Other work demonstrated the creative (if sometimes limited or ineffectual) strategies and landscape practices people implement to cope with new and unpredictable patterns of rain and drought. Cons (, 270) interpreted Western projects in which rural Bangladeshis are taught to build storm shelters against future floods and rising waters as “spectacles of containment and securitization” that symbolically assuage Westerners’ climate insecurity. Vine (, 405) examined how people in Southern California's deserts “attempt to cultivate alternative ways of feeling at home in the Anthropocene,” outlining their experiments in the ecology of everyday life in the face of increasing drought.…”

“…Captivity has long been central to empire, settler colonialism, capitalist expansion, and imperialism—and the forms of violence and genocide that accompany them—as well as in the anthropological work that examines those themes. In 2018, cultural anthropologists circled around captivity through analytics of enslavement (Lainez ; Wengrow and Graeber ), containment (Cons ; Gershon ; Hamberger ; Stone ), control (Cardoso ; Cooper ), confinement (Besteman, Biondi, and Burton ; Gomez‐Temesio ), compliance (Kazi ), suppression (Berman ; Sen ), constraint (Degani ), concealment (Hackl ; Rakopoulos ), boundary (Elisha ), exile and entrapment (Hinkson ; O'Neill ; Saleh ), and harmony (Yang ).…”

Uneasy Entanglements

“…They belong to the category of decentralized humanitarian technologies (Cross 2013;Redfield 2016), whose services are targeted to the individual or household rather than the community, restructuring relationships of responsibility and obligation. Jason Cons (2018) suggests these technologies may foreshadow a dystopic future of climate crisis, where atomized families are responsible for their own survival and resilience with the help of these humanitarian tools. Taken to this extreme, autonomy represents not freedom from an oppressive and coercive state or from unequal economic and political attachments, but bleak hopelessness and pessimism about perpetual and permanent state and institutional failure.…”

The Delta is Dead: Moral Ecologies of Infrastructure in Turkey

“…Neither did they posit infrastructure as destructive of ecology: in different ways, they understood them as coproduced. Anthropologists have often foregrounded the damaging effects of infrastructures—including river dams (Errington and Gewertz ), orchard fences (Bird Rose ), landmines (Kim ), and flood shelters (Cons )—threatening the livelihood and existence of human communities, nonhuman animals, plants, and agrarian landscapes. Alternatively, studies have called attention to emergent ecologies that (somewhat unexpectedly) thrive in infrastructural rubble and ruins (Tsing ; Stoetzer ) and in infrastructures that unintentionally become habitats for nonhuman creatures, such as water sewers (Bruun Jensen ).…”