State, scarcity, and survival
A minor history of people and place in the Lower Bari Doab, Punjab
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4464580 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Abdul Aijaz (0009-0005-4812-0970, Indiana University Bloomington, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2023 |
| Volume | 6 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 2576-2594 |
| Publication date | 2023-12-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Environment and Planning E Nature and Space (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2514-8486 • E-ISSN: 2514-8494 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1177/25148486221147172 |
| OpenAlex | W4313433249 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
| References cited | 34 |
The progressive materialization of the modern state and capitalist agrarian production in the interfluvial uplands of Punjab was enabled by colonial ideologies of control over nature as progress. The colonial project of the transformation of the people and place in Punjab was built upon the imperial aesthetics of waste that imagined the local landscape as hideous and pastoral communities as "semi-barbarous." These imaginaries justified the colonial project of technological control over nature through installation of hydraulic infrastructure and the political control of native communities as investments in cultivation and culture. These statist narratives of progress are built upon an elision of the voices of subaltern communities and their interactions with the modern state. Based on my ethnographic and archival works on pastoral Baloch tribes of the Lower Bari Doab region of Punjab, I argue that a different history emerges if traced from the perspective of the communities located on the margins of this hydrosocial assemblage. This is a minor history that does not privilege state as the protagonist of progress rather traces the stories of survival in the face of eco-scarcity. As the current environmental crisis accentuates the inherent instabilities of the hydrosocial assemblage in the canal colonies, it also reveals limitation of the narratives of control over nature as progress. In a world threatened by the anthropogenic climate crisis, the possibilities of a better future might emerge in curating the stories of survival against the histories of control
Agrarian society · Archaeology · Colonialism · Geography · Ideology · Mainstream · Narrative · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Scarcity · Sociology · Subaltern · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Geographies of human-animal interactions · History · Law · Water Governance and Infrastructure
The Great Agrarian Conquest
The tentacles of progress
Liquid Power
The Punjab Under Imperialism, 1885-1947
The paradox of patronage and the people’s sovereignty
Selected Subaltern studies
Habeas Viscus
The Afterlives of “Waste”
The Imperial Sublime
The irrigation technozone
The unbearable modernity of ‘development’? Canal irrigation and development planning in Western India
History outside civilisation and the mobility of South Asia∗
A thousand plateaus
After Post-Development
Everyday Forms of Resistance
Assembling the 2011 Thailand floods
The topologies and topographies of hydro-social territorialisation in Jordan
To Each According to his Power? Participation, Access, and Vulnerability in Irrigation and Flood Management in Pakistan
Towards Minor Theory
The Anarchy of Colored Girls Assembled in a Riotous Manner
Malign Growth? Agricultural Colonization and the Roots of Backwardness in the Punjab
Pastoral predicaments
Scientific Empire and Imperial Science
Subaltern Studies I. Writings on South Asian History and Society
Venus in Two Acts
Unifying minor sciences and minor literatures
The Bureaucrat's Wage
The moral ecology of colonial infrastructure and the vicissitudes of land rights in rural Pakistan
Class, Power, and Patronage
| Unique citing works | 3 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1,5 |
| Citation span | 2024 - 2026 (3) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 3 |