Between the Mood and the Juice: The Pleasures of Conversing with Rochelle Tobias

For a decade now, since 2010, I have been mulling over the issue of how we experience climate change as a dimension of the everyday. More particularly, my question has been whether people who live in the midst of tremendous physical dynamism and economic precariousness can discern the signal of climate change? My interlocutors are those who dwell on changeable chars or silt islands in the middle of the tremendous Brahmaputra River that runs through Bangladesh into the Bay of Bengal, Indian Ocean.

Rochelle Tobias, my colleague and friend at Johns Hopkins University, has heard me speak on this topic from the beginning of my interest in it and along the way she has made many helpful comments to me. In this paper, I present three such comments to show how they provide important vantages upon my evolving research. I engage Tobias's own work guided by her comments on mine. This engagement helps me draw out the importance of attending to forms and their relations by which people abide in nature.

I extend her insights to reading a piece of writing by Saymon Zakaria, a folklorist who hails from the part of Bangladesh where my field site is located, in which he captures a local informant's joyful, grammatical deconstruction of the Bengali days of the week, months of the year and seasons. Through their playful dialogue we see the extent to which mood, a poor translation of the concept of bhab, which is completely human-centric, is nonetheless entirely intermixed with juice, yet another poor translation, this time of the concept of rosh, the life bearing-element within all living things, and together, extol "Allah Muakkul" or "God is perfect." These insights on forms and relations, and mood and juice, help me to elaborate my discomfort with recent writings that advocate unmediated access and the immediacy of nature to recast human-nature relations.

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Early in my work on lives lived with the river, involving the urgent breaking down and moving of houses as the river stole up on them, it was Tobias who introduced me to W. G. Sebald's On the Natural History of Destruction (2004). For Sebald, Germans getting on with their lives in the aftermath of the massive destruction of their cities at the end of World War II was not an image of resoluteness but of self-deception. This insight encouraged me to not rush to extol the resilience of char interlocutors, but to look more closely at how destruction registered with them. I began to look to see whether my char friends' gestures, inchoate expressions, forgetting, fumbling before lurching forward did not provide a natural history of riverine destruction. The intention was not to naturalize char dwellers, as if they were extensions of the landscape in which they lived, but rather to show how the land-river dynamic was immanent to their mode of being and expressing.

In 2015, Tobias and I attended the United Nations' annual Conference of Parties (COP) where the historic Paris Agreement was signed. The global treaty was met with excitement that now finally the international community of nation-states would deliver on its promise of mitigating climate change. In the midst of this gigantic meeting of people, no fewer than 40,000, Tobias remarked to me, "no one here is advocating for nature." And indeed, if one looked at all the different constituents represented at the COP—nation-states, workers, civil society, God—each had their advocates, except for nature. Nature, if by that we merely mean the physical environment, was dispersed as so many disparate elements, such as oceans, forests and trace gases, and given value only with respect to their usefulness or harmfulness to humans.

In "Ecology and Egology: Husserl and Rilke on the Natural World" (2017), Tobias gives us a picture of nature that goes beyond staid conceptions of the physical environment. In the short essay, Tobias writes that for the philosopher Husserl, the world, which I take to be isomorphic with nature, existed but was neither in itself nor only given [End Page...