MAPPING-BACK WATER-
SCAPES
TROUBLING A WATERSCAPE
Our journey starts in Pravah, a village in semi-arid Maharashtra, India, where Irene spent several months conducting an ethnographic exploration into the socionatural character of a wastewater transfer scheme from the city of Pune to neighbouring villages.
The transformations of water availability and quality, its materiality, and the stories narrated by farmers in Pravah are the starting point for our reflections.
LOCATING PRAVAH
WATERSCAPE
Waterscape reflects on the ways flows of water and society are intertwined, co-shaping one another through landscapes of intertwined ecologies, society, nature, technology and politics.
TROUBLING
Troubling as a praxis
of questioning assumptions and dominant narratives or representations and
Troubling as a lens
to think about complex and uneven socionatural relations.
MAPPING-BACK
Mapping-back is a method within wider counter-cartographic methodologies that challenge and disrupt hegemonic worldviews and colonial ways of seeing.
SOME DEFINITIONS
CASTE SYSTEM
The caste system is an interconnected 'system of graded inequality' in Hindu society, maintained through endogamy, imitation and complex cultural norms.
[B. R. Ambedkar, 2014. Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar : Writings and SpeechesVol. 1 https://www.mea.gov.in/Images/attach/amb/Volume_01.pdf]
DALIT
Dalit is a term used to describe a section of the Indian population, who are economically, politically and socio-culturally oppressed in Hindu society.
MARATHA
Maratha refers to a socially and economically dominant caste group in Pravah. They also dominate politically across the state of Maharashtra.