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Between a Promise and a Trench: Citizenship, Vulnerability, and Climate Change in Guyana Sarah E. Vaughn Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2013 © 2013 Sarah E. Vaughn All rights reserved ABSTRACT Between a Promise and a Trench: Citizenship, Vulnerability, and Climate Change in Guyana Sarah E. Vaughn Between a Promise and a Trench examines how science is constituted as a strategic practice and site through which citizens make claims about racial democracy in Guyana. It shows how government policymaking around climate adaptation--which drew upon the recommendations of outside actors, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the United Nations (UN), and various NGOs and international scientific networks-- profoundly disrupted the country's delicate racial-ethnic balance. A contribution to the burgeoning anthropology on the social and political impact of climate change, the dissertation also speaks to current debates over race and citizenship, the complex relationship between expertise and democracy, and the competing post-colonial claims of Indo-, Afro-, and Amerindian Guyanese to land and self-determination. The dissertation is based on seventeen months of fieldwork and archival research conducted between, 2009-11 in coastal Guyana. It brings together three conflicting perspectives: of engineers, who drew upon datasets and models about flooding and construction of canals around IPCC and UN climate data; the state officials, who sought to reduce vulnerability to flood hazards through land evictions; and of Indo-, Afro-, and Amerindian Guyanese farmers and squatters who were evicted as a result of post-2005 engineering projects. I use the concept “politics of vulnerability” to describe how states assume that citizens experience vulnerability to climate change based on their “ethnic-political status,” thereby making the extension of democratic rights contingent on citizens providing cultural knowledge to the state to manage climate change. The dissertation attends to the consequences of the canals, including collapsed housing, failed civic science programs, and erratic water allocation. In response to these failures, citizens charge that state engineering repositions environmental hazards around existing social welfare inequities between racial-ethnic communities. During my time in Guyana, I tracked these responses at four distinct sites. 1) I observed engineers at work in the field produce and interpret “datasets” and “models” about flooding and construction of canals around IPCC and UN climate data. 2) I gathered residents’ “unofficial” stories about vulnerability to floods through interviews and participant observations of everyday life in two coastal villages, Sophia (a racially mixed urban squatter community) and Mahaica (a predominately Indo-Guyanese cash crop community), where people were evicted due to the post-2005 engineering projects. 3) I analyzed “official” data generated through civic science projects and fieldwork in Mahaica and Sophia by engineers, state officials, and scientists that addressed vulnerability to flood hazards and its relationship to land evictions and property rights. 4) I conducted archival research in Guyana’s National Archives on documents relating to colonial-era canals (1920s-60s) that inform the current projects. Although there is a growing ethnographic literature on climate change, a critical anthropology of vulnerability has yet to emerge. This dissertation offers two key interventions in this emerging field. First, I argue that in applied contexts, the validity of climate science is structured by the ways in which governments hinge climate adaptation projects to address varying national racial-ethnic populations. Second, I argue that governments cultivate institutions of social welfare that encourage "racial-ethnic" niche markets to manage vulnerability to climate change to soothe citizens' fears of state failure and environmental insecurity in the everyday. In such contexts, experiences of vulnerability become privatized, informing a consumer-oriented practice of racial democracy. Table of Contents List of Illustrations iii Acknowledgements iv Notes on Transliteration vii Introduction 1 Reconstructing the Citizen 46 The Labor of Vulnerability 80 Secular Tides 130 Muddied Facts 175 i Protecting the Archive 217 Green Aesthetics 250 Conclusion 289 Bibliography 298 ii List of Illustrations Figure I. Disaster Preparedness: Be Aware (OxFam, n.d.) 70 Figure II. Richard's comic produced in 2005 in response to OxFam's comic 73 iii Acknowledgements As with many dissertations, this one has been a long time in coming and has accrued many debts along the way. I researched and wrote this dissertation with support from the Mellon Mays-Woodrow Wilson Travel Grant Program, Columbia University’s Interdisciplinary Center for Innovative Theory and Empirics’ Mellon Interdisciplinary Fellows Grant Program, the Mellon Mays-Social Science and Research Council Pre-Dissertation Grants, Columbia University’s Department of Anthropology Scheps Summer Grants, and the Mellon/American Council of Learned Societies Dissertation Completion Grant Program. I am grateful for permission to use the resources of numerous libraries and archives: Guyana National Archives; National Agriculture and Research Institute (Guyana); OxFam International (Great Britain Office); Institute for Development Studies, University of Guyana; Sophia-Turkeyn Community Center; Guyana Parliamentary Records; Guyana National Library; and Guyana Forestry Commission. This dissertation benefited from the support and guidance of David Scott, Elizabeth Povinelli, Paige West, Brian Larkin, and Hugh Raffles. Over the years, I have also added other invaluable readers and mentors to the list including John Collins, Ben Orlove, Naveeda Khan, Anand Pandian, Mick Taussig, Alissa Trotz, and Andaiye whose enthusiastic support and suggestions have considerably strengthened my overall work. I am especially grateful for the research support, friendship, and guidance I received in Guyana from Rupert Roopnaraine, Collin Marks, Louie, Trevor, Reethall, David Singh, John Townsend, Janette Bulkan, Denise Fraser, Rufus Lewis, Phillip Allsop, Christindat Narain, Joe Singh, Bissasar Chintamanie, Linden Stewart, Charles Sohan, Keith Ford, Nigel Westmass, Bert Carter, Harold Davis, Horse, Patrick Williams, Ramon Latchmansingh, Sheik Yusoff, Terrence Fletcher, Rene Edwards, iv Garvin Cummings, Vidyaratha Kissoon, Raquel Thomas, Clive Thomas, Isabella Bovolo, Kester Craig, Annette Arjoon-Martins, Naseem Nasir, Denise Boodie, Anand Persaud, Karen de Souza, Jocelyn Dow, and the late John Ceaser. While in Guyana, along the East Coast particularly in Sophia and Mahaica, I was invited into the homes of many women and men. They patiently listened to my many questions, shared their meals with me, and engaged me in passionate discussions over a wide range of topics. I thank each one of them for sharing and making my fieldwork an intellectually meaningful and personally transformative experience. Also, I would not have been able to make the most of my time in Guyana without the friendships, ears, and patience of Chris Chin, Anand Roopsind, Chris Carrico, Steve Carroll, Nirvani Bissessare, and Zoe Edwards. My time at Columbia and in New York included building lasting friendships that have made my dissertation all the better. These friendships carried me through course work, late night writing, extended fieldwork trips, and my hang-ups over the manuscript and academic life more generally. I thank Seema Golestaneh, David Bond, Ariela Zycherman, Kiki Becker, Linda Trotter, Kaet Heupel, Anand Tanjek, and Lucas Bessire for their wise console, inspiration, humor, and for helping me put everything into perspective. I also benefitted greatly from the feedback and critique I received at many workshops including the Climate Change in Former Colonies: Challenges of Property and History at Washington & Lee University School of Law and the Workshop on the History of Environment, Agriculture, Technology, and Society at MIT. I can’t thank enough those at Cornell who shaped my initial interests in anthropology, including Viranjini Munasinghe, Terry Turner, Dominic Boyer, James Siegel, Hiro Miyazaki, and Richard Swedberg. It’s difficult to account for the ways family shapes one’s pursuits. My parents Larry v Vaughn and Carolyn Vaughn have always wholeheartedly supported my intellectual, political, and personal commitments. My sisters Jessica Vaughn and Leah Zepeda-Vaughn have indulged and supported my reflections on work and life with kindness, warmth, and a dose of sobering frankness. My family most of all has helped me sharpen my ideas and strengthen my commitments to keep exploring and building up the world around me. This dissertation is first and foremost a tribute to the countless conversations and experiences we’ve shared. vi Notes on Transliteration Interviews for this dissertation were conducted in Standard English or Guyanese Creole. As scholars of Guyana and the greater circum-Caribbean know, the distinction between the two is not hard and fast. Although Standard English is the national language, I worked with a number of people who preferred to speak Guyanese Creole. I took an informal tutorial course on Guyanese Creole at the University of Guyana’s Linguistic Department to guide my transliteration of the interviews represented in this dissertation.