Editorial
We are delighted to publish Issues Volume 2 covering subjects of contemporary and historical importance in anthropology, urban studies, and architecture. The eight essays in this collection are on the value of water, urban renewal, caste and notions of time, and post-earthquake reconstruction and heritage. In addition to English, there are essays in Icelandic, Hindi, Dutch, and Nepali. Our contributors are Bhoomika Joshi (Yale University), Helena Onnudotir (Western Sydney University), Marten Boekelo (University of Amsterdam) and Vanicka Arora (Western Sydney University).
Joshi draws on her ethnographic fieldwork in Uttarakhand, India to foreground the implications of living “in our time.” Through the accounts of upper caste ‘savarna’ men who regard themselves as failed patriarchs, Joshi shows how time and caste credentials mediate the experience of failure. Moving between ethnography and close attention to India’s contentious history of ‘lower’ caste-based reservation in state jobs since the 1990s, Joshi lays bare the complex story of time, affirmative action and melancholia. Onnudotir in her essay, locates the changing values of water in Iceland, the nation’s main natural resource. She traces water’s transforming properties in public hot springs, clean drinking water, hydroelectricity and the sale of bottled water. Based on long term fieldwork in Iceland she argues that the value of water is not only intrinsically tied to the country’s ecology, but also to changing notions of public good and processes of commodification at the turn of the 21st century.
Boekelo’s essay on urban regeneration argues that smart city policy frameworks, despite their promises, make our cities neither more sustainable nor more democratic. Instead they fall prey to a logic of capitalist expansion, to which environmental goals can at best be occasionally accommodated. In exploring urban climate movements including the Green New Deal, he suggests instead these embrace social equity alongside reduced emissions, offering promising ways forward. In the final essay Arora draws on her fieldwork in Nepal to illustrate how the physical reconstruction of Bhaktapur’s built heritage, following the 2015 earthquake, is an exercise beyond the practice of heritage and modernity. Instead, she argues that reconstruction enacts multiple intents and agencies, and draws on diverse expertise and forms of labor. Through close attention to the dis-assemblies surrounding a temple dedicated to the goddess Vatsala, she shows how the site comes to be inscribed with new meanings: here the interplay of heritage, sacrality and construction work is a reminder of the disaster.
*Featured image by Helena Önnudóttir.
Malini Sur & Liam Magee
Editors
Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University
