Abstract

In this talk, I develop the concept of ‘more-than-economic dispossession’ and examine how it arises from pollution in the interconnected forests, tides, canals, rivers and humid airs – the fluid commons – of the shipbreaking region Sitakunda. I ethnographically explore the lived experiences of pollution from shipbreaking among minority Zele fishermen and shipbreaking workers and suggest that this can be seen as three types of interlinked forms of more-than-economic dispossession. First, extra-economic means of accumulating profits by dismantling ships in cheaper countries enables dispossession by pollution in coastal ecologies. Second, more-than-economic points to the structures of political power inequalities making marginalised Bangladeshis exposed to toxics in ways that cannot be economically compensated. Lastly, more-than-economic draws on ‘more-than-human’ ethnographies: affective experiences of sensing, tasting, hearing and smelling pollution reveal how toxic residues biophysically damage the health of both human and more-than-human, resulting in the loss of ability to ‘sustain life’. The paper thus joins the growing body of anthropological scholarship that expands on pollution as ‘matter out of place’ by taking its materiality seriously.

Bio

Camelia Dewan is an environmental anthropologist focusing on the anthropology of development and author of Misreading the Bengal Delta: Climate Change, Development and Livelihoods in Coastal Bangladesh (2021, University of Washington Press) and "Climate refugees or labour migrants? Climate reductive translations of women’s migration from coastal Bangladesh" (2023, Journal of Peasant Studies). 

She is the co-editor of two special issues "Fluid Dispossessions: Contested Waters in Capitalist Natures" (Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology) and "Scaled Ethnographies of Toxic Flows" (Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space). 

Dr. Dewan holds an MSc in Development Studies (LSE) and a PhD in Social Anthropology and Environment from the University of London (SOAS/Birkbeck). As a postdoctoral research fellow at the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo since 2018 she has examined the socio-environmental effects of shipbreaking in Bangladesh and will be starting a tenure-track position at the Department of Cultural Anthropology, Uppsala University in January 2024. 

Visit Camelia's personal website for more information