Beyond Contradiction: Sacred-Profane Waters and the Dialectics of Everyday Religion

Studies of the relationship between religion and ecology are either highly enthusiastic about the ways that religious belief can motivate sound resource management or skeptical of the connection. Using an everyday religion approach, this text takes a middle ground to show that resources are variously interpreted in daily life and that religious orientations, while potentially supportive of environmentally sound action, are but one source of influence. Drawing from fieldwork, the discussion employs practice theory to look at how water resources in a Himalayan township are understood and the ways that notions of responsibility for sacred and profane waters are changing. The text aims to show that resource degradation is not necessarily indicative of contradictions in belief. This assertion pushes us to think more critically about the importance of everyday terrains of discourse and action, including how resource perceptions and management activities are influenced by structural constraints

Explorations of a Transforming Himalaya: Everyday Religion, Sustainable Environments, and Urban Himalayan Studies

This text serves as an introduction to a special issue introducing the work of scholars associated with the Everyday Religion and Sustainable Environments in the Himalaya project. Included in the discussion is a set of observations on the key themes that brought the research project together, and which orient the submissions in this issue

Developing the Himalaya: Development as if Livelihoods Mattered

Showcasing papers from a panel at the American Anthropological Association in 2012, the Introduction to this special issue on Developing the Himalaya highlights how each article in this collection advances critical perspectives and emerging themes on the politics of development planning and practice, with a specific emphasis on natural resource use. The author provides context for each of the articles featured, highlighting the pressing issue of survival challenges and the need for liveable features in the Himalaya, while identifying the key contributions of each submission. Covering development trends and politics in India and China, the contributions point to the need for participatory, people-centric policies that encourage meaningful capacity building while fostering resilience in this ecologically significant and culturally rich geographical region

Ganga is 'Disappearing': Women, Development, and Contentious Practice on the Ganges River

This dissertation explores conflict over development and ecological change along the upper stretch of the Ganga River in the Garhwal Himalayas, India. I focus on the circulation of competing discourses about change on the sacred Hindu river, the emergence of actors and movements that address the Ganga's management, and the transformation of actor subjectivities. I especially emphasize the meanings that people produce about a river that some fear could `disappear' due to the projected impacts of hydroelectric development and upstream glacial melt. My framing of these issues employs social practice theory to situate the past and enduring struggles that inform the conflict. In using this theoretical lens and especially its dialogic approach, I present a variety of views and discourses to elucidate the cultural or figured worlds that inform the debates about the river's management. Through the exploration of river dialogues, I demonstrate how the conflict is charged with varied understandings of the Ganga's utility, the agency of its Hindu Goddess, and the continuity of the cultural-religious practices linked with its flow. Since a number of mountain women participated in debates about the Ganga's management, my dissertation highlights their discourses and actions. I do this while drawing from feminist political ecology to show the significance of gendered practice. I also establish how some women employ particular cultural forms and genres of expression, such as devotional song, to evoke the figured worlds in which the sanctity of the river's grace-providing flow is paramount. I then indicate how the performance of these songs enable women's participation in movement activities and the influence they have on subjectivities. These points of inquiry illuminate the entanglement of cultural, religious, and gendered concerns in environmental conflict along the Ganga. The dissertation contributes to critical development studies by showing the mixed desires for, and ideas about, development; it adds to our understanding of the relationship between gendered practice in daily life and movement activity in the Himalayas; it shows how movement involvement influences actor subjectivities; and it demonstrates the meaning-making practices that people produce to interpret transformations on a river that is revered as a living Goddess.Doctor of Philosoph

Development within Multiple Modernities: Place-based Oppositions to Development Projects along the Ganges River and their Significance

Building on prior scholarship, this paper examines social responses to development projects along the northern part of the Ganges River and argues that they can be seen as a defense of place, embodied by nature, along a river that is culturally, religiously, and ecologically significant. By studying two development projects along the northern part of the Ganges in the colonial and the post-colonial eras, this discussion attempts to understand the ways that modernity, via colonialism and capitalism, transformed human relationships with the river. By focusing on the opposition to canal irrigation and the construction of the Tehri dam, I suggest that the inhabitants near the river were not against development as long as they perceived they could maintain their varied connections with the river. The two cases indicate, therefore, possibilities for the inclusion of multiple modernities and other ways of being and acting with respect to natural entities

Moral economies for water: A framework for analyzing norms of justice, economic behavior, and social enforcement in the contexts of water inequality

Over the past two decades, scholars have invoked E. P. Thompson\u27s and James Scott\u27s concept of a “moral economy” to explain how people mobilize notions of justice to make claims to water. We draw together 20 years of literature to assess the state-of-the-art present in research on moral economies for water. We trace the historical foundations of the moral economies concept and its relevance to water; define the three basic components of a moral economy for water—(1) shared understandings of justice, (2) normative economic practices, (3) social pressure mechanisms—and provide examples of how they manifest globally. We then discuss how moral economies for water can cycle through four basic states—balanced struggle, intensified reaction, mass revolt, and collapse and dissolution—at different scales. We also explore the implications of the moral economies framework for key areas of current research on water: water sharing, water commons, water markets, and biocultural outcomes, and discuss the ways in which the moral economies framework dovetails with recent advances in water research, especially the economics of water and development. We argue that the moral economies framework is a powerful explanatory tool for understanding the relationships between ideas of water justice, economic behaviors, and mechanisms of social enforcement that complements other methodological approaches and theoretical perspectives. We envision moral economies for water as a field that can facilitate a range of norm-based analyses of economic behavior and water justice, including across scales—from local to global—and in broad, integrative, multiscalar, and cross-disciplinary ways. This article is categorized under: Human Water \u3e Water Governance Human Water \u3e Value of Water Human Water \u3e Rights to Water

Ecological theory predicts ecosystem stressor interactions in freshwater communities, but highlights the strengths and weaknesses of the additive null model

Understanding and predicting how multiple co-occurring environmental stressors combine to affect biodiversity and ecosystem services is an on-going grand challenge for ecology. So far progress has been made through accumulating large numbers of smaller-scale individual studies that are then investigated by meta-analyses to look for general patterns. In particular there has been an interest in checking for so-called ecological surprises where stressors interact in a synergistic manner. Recent reviews suggest that such synergisms do not dominate, but few other generalities have emerged. This lack of general prediction and understanding may be due in part to a dearth of ecological theory that can generate clear hypotheses and predictions to tested against empirical data. Here we close this gap by analysing food web models based upon classical ecological theory and comparing their predictions to a large (546 interactions) dataset for the effects of pairs of stressors on freshwater communities, using trophic- and population-level metrics of abundance, density, and biomass as responses. We find excellent overall agreement between the stochastic version of our models and the experimental data, and both conclude additive stressor interactions are the most frequent, but that meta-analyses report antagonistic summary interaction classes. Additionally, we show that the statistical tests used to classify the interactions are very sensitive to sampling variation. It is therefore likely that current weak sampling and low sample sizes are masking many non-additive stressor interactions, which our theory predicts to dominate when sampling variation is removed. This leads us to suspect ecological surprises may be more common than currently reported. Our results highlight the value of developing theory in tandem with empirical tests, and the need to examine the robustness of statistical machinery, especially the widely-used null models, before we can draw strong conclusions about how environmental drivers combine

The TLR4 D299G and T399I SNPs Are Constitutively Active to Up-Regulate Expression of Trif-Dependent Genes

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The inflammatory microenvironment in colorectal neoplasia

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