Reviews:
“The Invention of
Rivers is a radical and timely book that will stimulate considerable
debate on matters of the greatest contemporary urgency.”
—Arjun Appadurai, New
York University
“A highly original
argument and extraordinary piece of scholarship that comes at a time when rain
is behaving unpredictably and challenging humanity’s attempt to contain it
within banks. It offers an alternative way of thinking about our relationship
with the hydrological cycle and of living with wetness.”
—Lindsay Bremner, University
of Westminster
Description:
Dilip
da Cunha integrates history, art, cultural studies, hydrology, and geography to
tell the story of how rivers have been culturally constructed as lines granted
a special role in defining human habitation and everyday practice. What we take
to be natural features of the earth’s surface, according to da Cunha, are
products of human design and a particular way of seeing that has roots
stretching as far back as ancient Greek cartography. Although Alexander the
Great never saw the Ganges, he conceived of it as a flowing body of water, with
sources, destinations, and banks that marked the separation of land from water.
This Alexandrine view of the river, da Cunha argues, has been pursued and
adopted across time and around the world. With ever more sophisticated mappings
of its form and characteristics, the river’s essential features are refined and
standardized: its source identified by a point; its course depicted as a
stroke; and its propensity to flood imagined as the erasure of the boundary
between water and land.
While
da Cunha’s vision of rivers is a global one, he takes an especially close look
at the Ganges, as he traces the ways in which it has been pictured, mapped,
surveyed, explored, and measured across the millennia. He argues that the
articulation of the river Ganges has placed it at odds with Ganga, a “rain
terrain” that does not conform to the line of separation, containment, and
calibration that are the formalities of a river landscape. By calling rivers
into question, da Cunha depicts an ecosystem that is neither land nor water but
one of ubiquitous wetness in which rain is held in soil, aquifers, glaciers,
snowfields, building materials, agricultural fields, air, and even plants and
animals.
Printed
in full color and featuring more than 150 illustrations, The Invention
of Rivers proposes rain, or “the rainscape,” as an alternative
starting point for imagining, understanding, and designing human habitation.
Contents:
Preface
Introduction. River Literacy
Chapter 1. Alexander’s Eye and Ganga’s
Descent
Part
I. COURSE
Chapter 2. River of Rivers
Chapter 3. Separating Ganga
Part
II. SOURCE
Chapter 4. Waters of Eden
Chapter 5. Calibrating Ganga
Part
III. FLOOD
Chapter 6. Ocean of Rain
Chapter 7. Containing Ganga
Conclusion. River Colonialism
Notes
Index
Acknowledgments
About
the Author:
Dilip da Cunha is an architect and planner
working out of Philadelphia and Bangalore. He teaches at Harvard University and
Columbia University and is author with Anuradha Mathur of Mississippi
Floods: Designing a Shifting Landscape; Soak: Mumbai in an Estuary; and
Design in the Terrain of Water.
Target
Audience:
People
interested in hydrology, ecology and geography.