Skip to content

CANCELED: Water and Land: Words that Contain Worlds

341 Eggers Hall

Add to: Outlook, ICal, Google Calendar

Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs 

South Asia Center 

presents


Luisa Cortesi, Taylor Stanford Postdoctoral Fellow in STS and Anthropology, Cornell University


Water and Land: Words that Contain Worlds


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. This talk is part of the Sustainable South Asia Initiative. It is co-sponsored by the Central New York Humanities Corridor from an award by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.


Please contact Emera Bridger Wilson at elbridge@syr.edu for any questions or concerns. 


Open to

Public

Contact

Accessibility

Contact to request accommodations

Exterior of Maxwell in black and white when there was no Eggers building

We’re Turning 100!


To mark our centennial in the fall of 2024, the Maxwell School will hold special events and engagement opportunities to celebrate the many ways—across disciplines and borders—our community ever strives to, as the Oath says, “transmit this city not only not less, but greater, better and more beautiful than it was transmitted to us.”

Throughout the year leading up to the centennial, engagement opportunities will be held for our diverse, highly accomplished community that now boasts more than 38,500 alumni across the globe.