Shaylih Muehlmann – Where the River Ends
16 August, 2021 -
examPrep
- 4 – Combining analytic techniques from linguistic and political anthropology, I examine how local people use symbolic and material tools, including maps, indigenous swearwords, surveys, and traditional legends, as a means to negotiate dramatic environmental and structural change and to reflect on what this change means and who is responsible.
- 4-5 – I intended to look at how people were talking about water, how water was being discursively constructed in different ways by different groups involved in the conflict.
- 6 – While water scarcity is increasingly a problem that is being felt across the world, it manifests itself in particular local meanings and struggles. In this book, I analyze the measures taken by a group of Cucapá people to maneuver through the complex structural and political changes they have experienced over the last several decades as fishing, their main form of subsistence, has become both environmentally untenable and criminalized by the state as a measure of environmental management. I examine the strategies that many local people employ to subsist and transform their lives under conditions of profound environmental and economic change as well as extreme power asymmetries. Therefore, this book explores the intersections between environmental conflict and the production of collective identities. I show how in the context of the water crisis in the Colorado delta, identity is articulated and contested through various forms of struggle, while at the same time social systems of di√erence are reproduced through contestations over natural resources.
- 15 – Throughout this book, I examine how many Cucapá people, by realigning the ways they connect to the nation and their own unique historical and political circumstances, have come to identify themselves in a particular way that both engages and critiques national and international discourses on indigeneity. In other words, this book explores indigenous identity not as a preexisting entity but as a set of historically and politically constituted practices and idioms that emerge through processes of engagement and struggle
