In this article, I examine the Rajapur Irrigation Project (RIP), a large-scale infrastructure project to “modernize” a farmer-managed irrigation system in Nepal, as a political encounter between two ontologies or what Blaser called “ways of worlding”: Tharu farmers’ fluid practices of living with the Karnali River and engineers’ methods of structurally training waterways. In tracing how the logic and world-making practices of the RIP overwrote the place-based ontologies of local farmers through the concrete structures it enacted and left behind, I introduce ontological marginalization as a political process that can occur when one situated understanding of what the world is and how it should be (re)made is imposed on another through structural interventions. I demonstrate infrastructure’s power to enforce certain ontologies while marginalizing others, and I also explore how people reassert agency and world-making practices through acts of ontological reclamation in the aftermath of interventions. Ultimately, this article contributes to emergent discussions on infrastructure and its ontological impacts within geography by developing the dual concepts of ontological marginalization and reclamation as ways for scholars to better account for the political implications of infrastructure on diverse ways of worlding.

在本文中，我研究了拉贾普尔灌溉项目 (RIP)，这是一个旨在“现代化”尼泊尔农民管理的灌溉系统的大型基础设施项目，作为两种本体或 Blaser 所说的“世界化方式”之间的政治相遇： Tharu 农民在卡纳利河中生活的流畅实践以及工程师对水道进行结构训练的方法。在追踪 RIP 的逻辑和世界创造实践如何通过它制定和留下的具体结构来覆盖当地农民的基于地方的本体论时，我介绍了本体论边缘化作为一种政治过程，当一个人对世界是什么以及应该如何（重新）创造世界的理解通过结构性干预强加给另一个人时，就会发生这种政治过程。我展示了基础设施在强制执行某些本体同时边缘化其他本体的能力，并且我还探讨了人们如何在干预之后通过本体回收行为来重申代理和世界创造实践。最终，本文通过发展本体边缘化和回收的双重概念，为学者们更好地解释基础设施对不同世界方式的政治影响的方式，促进了关于基础设施及其在地理学中的本体影响的新兴讨论。