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CANCELED: Water and Land: Words that Contain Worlds

Time: March 25, 2020, noon - 2 p.m.

Location: 341 Eggers Hall

Sponsored in part by the CNY Humanities Corridor

Sponsored by the CNY Humanities Corridor

UPDATE: This event has been canceled in response to emerging COVID-19 precautions and advisories

Luisa Cortesi (Cornell University)

How do people who live in the midst of floods think about water? Informed by multidisciplinary long-term ethnographic fieldwork, this presentation presents ethnographic evidence that, in North Bihar, land and water are though of as in intimate correspondence with each other. By virtue of comparison, then, the ethnographic encounter is held to defy other ontologies of water that see the two substances as in opposition. Since ontologies of natural substances are often “watertight”, mutually exclusive and unable to adapt, this presentation suggests, their encounter may result in semiotic conflict.

For more information, contact Carol Babiracki.

This event was organized by the “LLC23 Social and Cultural Sustainability in South Asia” working group of the CNY Humanities Corridor, from an award from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Carol Babiracki, Art and Music Histories