What is a river made of? Riparian substances and political theologies in the New World

Abstract (English)

Are rivers made of water? Dilip da Cunha argues that the notion of a river as a line of water, cutting through land and contained within two banks, is an artifact of the imperial wars of Alexander the Great. For purposes of conquest, mapmakers misrepresented the goddess Ganga and the “rain terrain” in which she dwelt as a mere flow of water, the River Ganges. Reduced to a flow of water between two defined banks in imperial map-making and state-forming enterprises ever since, rivers have been conceptually and politically stripped of many of their life-giving connections and divine attributes, making them into paths for human transport and markers of territorial boundaries and sources of energy and wealth, that are harnessed to the interests of states and, increasingly, capital. Increasingly we are learning how much harm this reduction has done to rivers: ever more burdened with dams, pollution, and excessive water extraction as well as climate change, many of them are losing their ability to sustain even their flow and course, to the enormous detriment of the humans and other creatures who have built riparian lives alongside them.

Yet rivers have also long refused their reduction to a line by changing course, escaping into other moments of the hydrological cycle, silting up human infrastructures, overflowing their channels, or drying up altogether. In the so-called New World and other lands subject to colonization, this capacity for refusal marks rivers as exercising a form of sovereignty that may harken back to the powers of goddesses like Ganga. Anthropologists working with subaltern riparian communities find that they endow rivers with attributes like personhood, kinship, divinity, memory, eternity, or voice, the better to attune themselves to rivers’ sovereign desires. In this paper I use the case of rivers in Chilean Patagonia to explore what attributions like this suggest about the substance of sovereignty in postcolonial worlds, and what the telluric qualities of sovereign substances can tell us about the role of a postcolonial political theology in remaking the world to confront and survive climate change.