Labor, Sea and Salt: Watering Landscapes in the Little Rann of Kutch
Summary
Through her engagement with the UCLA Initiative to Study Hate, Sita asks how ecological disruptions and socio-religious formations are interlinked, by examining how climate uncertainties compound the exclusionary logics embedded in categories of place, property and governance. In her fieldsite, hate operates overtly through violence, intimidation and denial of economic opportunities; and covertly through deliberate loopholes in the law, complicity of Hindu state actors and neoliberal capital in disrupting processes of Muslim ecological stewardship.
Team
Sita Mamidipudi, Anthropology
Sita Mamidipudi is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Anthropology at UCLA with an interest in the relationship of labor with materiality and ecology of place. Her doctoral research project is based in the Little Rann of Kutch, an estuarine space on the Western coast of India where water and land, human and non-human actors, saltwater and freshwater, meet. During the monsoon, Muslim fishworkers harvest prawns for local and export markets from this region, and through the rest of the year, 75% of India’s salt is manufactured here. Prior to her PhD journey at UCLA, she worked as an educator and researcher in India at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Hyderabad and at ANANDI, Gujarat.