Faith and Flood: Indigenous Responses to Ecological Catastrophe in Coastal Pakistan

This talk highlights creative practices of cosmological speculation born in the wake of ecological catastrophe on the Makran Coast of Pakistan. Coastal ecologies on the Makran Coast along the Arabian Sea are dying. The UN’s report on climate change (IPCC 2022) marks this region as one of the ten most vulnerable to catastrophic climate change. Recent weather patterns have borne this out: the catastrophic floods in Pakistan in 2022 that killed roughly two thousand people and displaced forty-five million being the latest in a series of extreme events amidst more dire and persistent trends. 

Scientists use sophisticated measuring and modeling to confidently explain the accelerated erosion of coastlands, large-scale mangrove forest depletion, the loss of traditional fishing zones, and the intensification of deadly drought-flood patterns on the Makran coast. The communities that inhabit the Makran have access to no such resources. They have had to assemble a real-time response to ecological destruction in the context of state abandonment, resource deprivation, and global apathy. And they have. This talk is an exploration of how the people of the Makran adapt ancestral knowledge forms, transnational kinship networks and faith-based modes of self-organization to patch together an autonomous, indigenous response to climate change.

This event is co-sponsored by the departments of Religion and Geography and the Environment.

Suhail is assistant professor of anthropology at Franklin and Marshall College. His research engages the anthropology of violence, social theory and urban studies. His current project, "Machines of Violent Desire," interrogates how non-state violence and transnational kinship networks contribute to order-making in urban South Asia, especially in contexts of ecological and political fracture. He is concurrently working on a co-authored book addressing how human communities confront emergent ecological and political crises globally. His recent publications include "Urban Rearrangements: A Movement in Five Suites" (IJURR, 2023) and "Unarchiving Baloch History: ‘Small’ Account of Baloch Women that Make Waves in the Indian Ocean" (2023).