On Solid-Fluid Grounds in River Deltas
How do delta inhabitants negotiate the ongoing and accelerating volatility of water? This was one of the core questions that the DELTA project1 at the University of Cologne pursued between 2016 and 2023. Four anthropologists studied life amidst “volatile waters” in Brazil, Canada, Myanmar and Senegal, documenting how uncertain material transformations intersected with ongoing social, cultural and economic shifts. We found that hydrological dynamics are indeed often dramatic, especially to outsiders like us: fields and villages are washed away by an eroding river; buildings, vegetation and landscapes collapse as the permafrost underneath thaws; some tides bring rich catches in shrimp and other seafood while others bring only disappointment; and the combination of large-scale infrastructures, climate change and a shifting coastal landscape lead to widespread salinization and drought.
We also found that these hydrological dynamics were always tightly interwoven with political questions: how can people displaced by erosion claim new land on emerging alluvial territory? Or, how does the collapse of agriculture on salty soils affect the revival of other livelihoods? As these questions illustrate, when investigating the volatilities of water in their social and political contexts, we inevitably dealt with a lot of other materials, too, including sands, sediments, soils. In fact, it seemed more appropriate to understand these material dynamics as “amphibious”2, being constituted not of water and land together, but of phenomena that include the things that – when separated – become land and water. In one of our publications, we called this “life between land and water”.3
As part of this project, I conducted fieldwork with Inuvialuit and Ehdiitat Gwich’in people in the Mackenzie Delta, which is located between the Inuvialuit Settlement Region and Gwich’in Settlement Area in the northwest corner of what is today the Canadian Northwest Territories. The research was a collaboration with the Gwich’in Tribal Council’s Department of Culture and Heritage and the Aklavik Hunters and Trappers Committee. Together with my wife and toddler twins, I lived in the hamlet of Aklavik for nine months in 2017 and 2018, participating in settlement events and accompanying Aklavik people on their journeys through the delta. I was particularly interested in the ways the seasonal freezing and thawing of the delta resonated with people’s agendas and activities.
Many of the roughly 600 inhabitants of Aklavik travel often and extensively through the region, and so the states of matter are important: is the ground hard enough to support a vehicle? Is it liquid enough to allow boating? And how to move around when the watercourses are freezing up, but the ice not reliable yet? Or when lands and waters are beginning to thaw in spring? When I was invited to a workshop on the topic of “solid fluids”4 from a humanities and social sciences perspective, this resonated strongly with what I had learned in the Mackenzie Delta: the ground is neither just solid, nor mostly fluid, but a solid fluid that can behave more like a solid or more like a fluid depending on timing, tempo and intentions.
After the workshop, some participants published their papers in a special journal issue5 (which I can highly recommend), edited by the workshop convenors Tim Ingold and Cristián Simonetti. My contribution to the collection describes some of the mobility practices in the Mackenzie Delta – driving, boating, snowmobiling – and their relation to the deltaic solid fluids. I concentrate on wintertime trail-making and the construction of ice roads. Creating and maintaining snowmobile trails hinges on properties of water, snow and ice that are fluid in some contexts and solid in others, where freezing and thawing play important roles, but also the speed by which people travel and do things. I found that the relative tempo at which things happen plays an important role in experiencing something as more solid or more fluid.
Many processes have accelerated in the Mackenzie Delta, but this acceleration is not a radical departure from a supposed former, static world; for delta inhabitants, the world has always been dynamic and transforming. For example, Aklavik people know that the river ice breaks up every late spring, they are also aware that they can never know beforehand when and how exactly this happens.
When I thought about the Mackenzie delta in terms of solid fluids, I found that this term can facilitate a productive discussion not only around the things I learned during fieldwork, but also among Indigenous North American theorists, like Jessica Watts and Kim TallBear, and European theorists, like Henri Lefebvre and Michel Serres. Despite their different backgrounds, they seem to agree that the world is constituted by uncertain processes, not fixed things.