New Publication: Loose sediments: history, geology, and sand mining in Nepal's Himalayan-Tarai rivers

ABSTRACT

Loose sediments structure the deep history of the youngest Himalayas, Churia, in Nepal. In the 1950s geological surveys of Nepal, the sediments of Churia featured as geologically loose, erodible, and fluviatile with scarce economic possibilities. By 1970, however, these sediments emerged as spatial compositions of key construction aggregates in the Tarai floodplains, generating immense political anxiety on the loose nature of their regulation and governance at the riverine sites of extraction. This article examines how the mobilization of Churia’s geological history became the grounds for sand extraction from the Tarai riverbeds, eventually converting the fluviatile sedimentary cartographies into regulated domains of governance. I rely on the previously overlooked archival documents, labour participation, and ethnographic evidence on the sediments’ histories, characteristics, movements, and extraction to advance anthropology’s timely concern with colonial geology, territorial control, and spatial mapping of geological history, economy, and governance. Yet, these anthropological concerns have kept the subterranean materiality largely fixed, rarely anchoring the critical role of a movable geology into extractive governance spaces. My research intervenes here to argue that the governance mechanisms in Nepal have used Churia’s fluvial geology to legitimize riverbed extraction in the Tarai.