Date of Award

12-24-2025

Date Published

January 2026

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Anthropology

Advisor(s)

Mona Bhan

Second Advisor

Susan Wadley

Keywords

Autonomy;Development;Environment;Ethics;Futurity;Statemaking

Abstract

My dissertation focuses on how riverine communities keep alive historical notions of autonomy through riverine cosmologies, ancestral agrarian practices, agricultural labor based on kinship and gender, and an understanding of time linked to riverine flows. On the northern bank of the Brahmaputra River in Assam, India, the Mising people —classified as a Scheduled Tribe in India— have built a life in sync with the river’s rhythms through ancestral knowledge, agrarian ethics and kin-based labor. Over the last decade, however, the social ecology of the region has been disrupted by increasing deposition of coarse sand, state-led revenue-extracting interventions and the downstream effects of a 2000-Megawatt large hydropower dam being constructed 30 miles upstream on the Subansiri River. This dissertation is based on twenty-five months of archival and ethnographic fieldwork along the Brahmaputra floodplains which is a region that has been at the center of British imperial projects of fossil fuel extraction, tea plantations and land reclamation for commodity crops, and post-colonial projects of resource development by the Government of India. In this dissertation, I make two interrelated arguments. First, I focus on the interlinked ways in which questions of land rights, developmental inequalities and climate-uncertain futures come together in the lives of the riverine people. While scientists working on the region theorize erratic monsoons, flash floods and geomorphological changes in the Himalayan watershed as linked to the impact of the changing climate, Mising conceptions of environmental damage speak to longer histories of environmental change rooted in unequal developmental visions of the nation-state. Second, I argue for a topological approach that focuses on how the materiality of riverine land, floods and erosion enables politics around land, ecological ethics and riverine sociality to emerge alongside ecological, political and economic transformations in riverine life. I ask the question: How does the materiality of riverine land allow local communities to build agrarian ethics for an autonomous future even when it appears that state-making processes have co-opted both land and life? In contrast to the larger politics of state making in Assam that shapes questions of exclusory citizenship within a narrow territorial lens, I argue for a place-based conception of autonomy that disrupts static property making and monolithic discourses of citizenship.

Access

Open Access

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