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Talk On Debates in AnthropologyAuthor: Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology
Talk On Debates in Anthropology is a podcast of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle (Saale), Germany. In each episode of this podcast, one of our three hosts, Christoph Brumann, Xenia Cherkaev, or Jovan Maud, talks to the guest about their publications, research, and current debates in social anthropology. Language: en Genres: Science, Social Sciences, Society & Culture Contact email: Get it Feed URL: Get it iTunes ID: Get it |
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Enduring Erosions w/ Arne Harms
Episode 5
Wednesday, 23 September, 2026
In this episode, Jovan Maud and Arne Harms discuss Arne's book 'Enduring Erosions: Environmental Displacement and Relocation on India’s Sinking Coasts', based on his ethnographic research in the Indian part of the Bengal Delta. This low-lying island region is highly vulnerable to erosion, storms, saltwater flooding, and sea-level rise. Harms introduces the concept of “distributed disaster” to describe coastal erosion. Unlike sudden disasters such as cyclones or earthquakes, erosion unfolds gradually across time and space. Residents may lose and rebuild their homes five to seven times, retreating inland as the coastline advances. For them, storms are damaging but survivable; the irreversible loss of land is the real disaster. The book challenges the label “climate refugee.” Islanders are not simply settled people suddenly displaced by climate change. Their communities have longer histories of migration and uprooting, while current displacement often occurs through small movements within islands or to nearby areas. Mobility and immobility are closely connected: families send sons to construction work and daughters to domestic work elsewhere so that remittances can allow relatives to remain on the islands. Arne uses “the thinning of life” to describe both ecological decline and shrinking human possibilities. Saltwater kills trees, makes farmland unproductive, and leaves ruined landscapes. At the same time, falling land values, homelessness, declining livelihoods, and perceived state abandonment reduce people’s prospects for a secure future. The state plays a contradictory role. Residents blame port infrastructure for redirecting tides and worsening erosion, while authorities selectively build strong protections around strategically important port assets. Elsewhere, communities receive temporary mud-and-wood embankments that must be rebuilt repeatedly. This demonstrates that the state has the capacity to protect land but chooses which places and interests to prioritize. The conversation also emphasizes multiple, overlapping temporalities: tides, monsoons, repeated rebuilding, gradual retreat, personal histories of displacement, and expectations about when particular fields or homes will disappear. Residents live with both uncertainty about the islands’ long-term future and precise knowledge of which places are likely to be lost soon. Arne hopes the ethnography will encourage humanitarian and disaster-response systems to recognize slow, recurring erosion—not only dramatic events—as disaster. Although climate change may eventually make large parts of the delta uninhabitable, he rejects simplistic calls for the mass relocation of millions. Instead, he advocates better concepts and more just forms of assistance for people living through environmental decline that has become part of everyday life rather than an exceptional event.
