ABSTRACT

This paper offers an ethnographic engagement with the present and futures of Bangladesh’s southwest delta. The southwest – which houses the Sundarbans, the world’s largest remaining mangrove forest – is at once profoundly vulnerable to climate change and a site critical to Bangladesh’s economic development. It figures thus both as a space of optimistic industrial growth and planetary threat. I explore what I call delta temporalities – the dissonant and possibly incommensurate imaginations of the future, and more importantly the projects seeking to bring them about, that proliferate in and shape the delta’s fragile ecology in the present. Tracing tensions between conservation initiatives, dredging projects that attempt to keep rivers flowing for shipping and transportation, and new industrial and energy infrastructure projects, this paper reveals how and why the southwest – and deltas more broadly – have become key chokepoints of the Anthropocene, zones where the future itself becomes blocked and the present imperilled.

摘要

本文提供了对孟加拉国西南三角洲现在和未来的民族志参与。西南部——世界上现存最大的红树林孙德尔本斯所在的地区——既极易受到气候变化的影响，又是对孟加拉国经济发展至关重要的地区。因此，它既是乐观的工业增长空间，也是地球威胁的空间。我探索我称之为三角洲时间性的东西——对未来的不和谐和可能不相称的想象，更重要的是寻求实现它们的项目，它们在当前三角洲脆弱的生态中扩散并塑造。追踪保护倡议、试图保持河流用于航运和运输的疏浚项目以及新的工业和能源基础设施项目之间的紧张关系，