Guided Reading by Saad Quasem

Ghosh, Amitav. 2021. The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

My ethnography takes place on chars which can be defined as shifting sandbars on the Brahmaputra River on the Bengal Delta. As landmasses which form and de-form with the flow of the river, chars contribute to the volatility of the lives of their inhabitants who need to find homes when land disappears. Chardwellers believe in the permanence of water based on parables which Hindus and Muslims acknowledge alike. These act as a form of solace as well as a guiding force which organizes everyday life. They carve out ways of abiding with distresses which can be attributed to routine stressors of precarity endemic to late post-colonial capitalism. Parables can also be a handy tool to address eco-distress in the classroom. Woven into the climate crisis, eco-distress is induced by unknowability. Parables can offer guiding principles and solace in times of uncertainty. This tool asks students to make room for interpretation of parables they may have learnt, or to pick-up new ones, using as their guide Ghosh’s The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Climate in Crisis (2021). It remains pivotal that parables be taken as instructive stories, not as prophecies. The unknown, uncertain of this age of planetary undoing needs to mingle with the openness of interpretation.

Pedagogical Tool: Nature for One’s Own by Anjana Bala

Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Elissason’s Ice Watch (2014) is a public installation of massive chunks of melting ice that toured across the United Kingdom and Europe. Practitioners of ecological art argue that it creates a sense of knowing the environment and the climate in a way that scientific data alone cannot foster. I myself developed an interest in ecological distress through my engagements with ecological art. Somatic, embodied, material practices may concretize otherwise seemingly temporally and spatially distant notions of change, and prioritize embodied, attentive, and sensuous ways of knowing. This has potential in mediating the unknowability of climate change, which itself is a driver for ecological distress. One can see an ice cap melting, feel, touch and hug an ice cap melting—can even say goodbye to it—as opposed to the unknowability of an ice cap melting somewhere temporally and spatially distant (Simoniti 2023). However, Eliasson’s Ice Watch evokes a paradox central to much of ecological art. Ice Watch consisted of 12 huge blocks of ice fished out of the Nuup Kangerlua fjord in Greenland after becoming detached from an ice sheet and transported to various parts of Europe and the United Kingdom. Is this a form of extraction or a subversive response to the conditions that have produced more detached icebergs (which have contributed to rising sea levels)? Using Ice Watch as a starting point, students may debate the pros and cons to alternative forms of knowledge production about the climate and the politics of using nature for one’s own gains.