Seminars

This paper is an invitation to conceptualize anthropocenic temporalities—of infrastructure, conflict, and climate change—from the Indus Basin, the world’s most heavily engineered and irrigated river system. Moving from the 1960s, when the world’s “largest earth-moving task” was underway in the basin, to ongoing litigation over shared rivers and hydropower development between the riparian neighbours India and Pakistan, the paper traces how dams mediate political and ecological time. Dams have been widely studied for their devastating effects, as well as through tropes of technological dispersal, mimicry, and seduction. This paper expands scholarship by considering dams as time devices and by focusing on one of their core, increasingly contested functions: water storage. Traversing national water politics, international courts of arbitration, and engineering discourse, it intervenes in an anthropological literature on infrastructure often oriented toward the “small,” and advances the analytic and method of “infrastructure as archive”.

How do relationships transform and ethical reorientation take place in historically fraught relations between communities and a wild animal? Drawing on ethnographic research in Ladakh and Spiti in the Indian Himalayas, this article examines how snow leopard tourism is reshaping relations between residents and an apex predator long regarded as a livestock-threatening pest. Moving beyond accounts that explain changing attitudes primarily through income or disciplinary conservation, it traces the processes through which the qualitative nature of the human–snow leopard relationship is transformed as the animal becomes a configuring force in social life. Reworking domestication “inside-out,” the analysis conceptualizes this shift as a process of affective domestication, through which the snow leopard reorganizes human worlds without becoming domesticated itself. This unfolds through three interwoven processes: residents’ livelihoods and forms of expertise develop around the animal’s presence; affective registers of fear and indifference are tempered by curiosity and fascination; and the snow leopard emerges as an ethical reference point that shapes rigour and responsibility. The discussion contributes to multispecies scholarship by showing how affective change arises not only through intimacy or care, but also through ambiguous relations between humans and nonhumans, and how such transformations become stabilized over time.

During the rainy season, the homes and streets of the poor across Mexico City’s urban periphery are routinely flooded with sewage-laced waters that refuse to drain for hours on end. On the surface, these floods seem to represent the failure of the urban drainage system. But drainage engineers in Mexico City offer a different, more provocative explanation: the homes and streets of the poor are, in fact, increasingly integral parts of a drainage system that has long since lost the capacity to function otherwise. By temporarily turning these peripheral neighborhoods into de facto detention basins, engineers reduce the inflow into the drainage system, allowing them to protect the lives and property of the powerful in the city center. This paper traces how engineers reluctantly came to this practice of temporarily “conscripting” the streets and homes of the poor into the drainage system as the pressures of capitalist urbanization have both systematically undermined detention basins and increased runoff into the system. It examines how this infrastructural conscription enables continued capital accumulation in the city by dispossessing residents of their security – their ability to feel (and be) safe in their own homes. This engineered dispossession is far less tangible, and the actors involved far more ambiguous, than the outright seizure of land, leaving residents with few options for demanding reparations.