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I consider how the ideas of the patchy Anthropocene forwarded by the editors of this special issue provide a way to do anthropology otherwise by reversing the relationship between the background and foreground in our studies. This switch allows me to bring to the fore the Brahmaputra-Jamuna River as both a hydrological entity and a geological event and the interrelations between these two as explored in geological writings. It helps grow the kinds of accounts that are appropriate to the complexity of the Anthropocene. At the same time I also pose that the inner structure of the imagination must change to be in step and similarly appropriate to our entangled and scaled-up present. The romantic geology of the early nineteenth century, particularly that of the German romantic Novalis, provides interesting experiments with commensurating humans to the geological. It does so by thinking the human as tending toward the nonhuman, thus possibly at play with the mountainous giants who shaped the earth’s topography in romantic imagination. I consider how gigantism may be explored as a dimension of human existence in the Anthropocene even as we consider the human in her particularity.

This is a tale of two thinkers across time and space who have been read together but in conventional ways as representing the meeting of the East and the West. I propose instead a different relationship between them, that of hidden relays and realizations, in which one who comes later receives and actualizes a potential in the writings of the one earlier but in implicit ways to avoid the political and theological pitfalls of his times. To draw out this line of transmission requires me to offer a different reading of a famous poem by the one who comes later than that usually proffered. The tale starts with the poet and philosopher Muhammad Iqbal visiting the Mosque of Cordoba during a sojourn at Spain in 1933 and writing a lyrical poem (ghazal) of the same name to mark the event. The poem, widely considered a great work, has been well plumbed for its formal qualities and for the themes with which Iqbal has long been associated, such as a new appreciation of the Muslims’ past and harkening to Muslims of the future. If we take into consideration that Iqbal was an avid reader of philosophy and poetry, with an attraction to German thought, then his engagement with the writings of the eighteenth-century thinker Goethe provides a way to rethink the Muslim present within the poem. It becomes a space of possibility for Muslims, historical ruins, and poetical verse, which is neither about bemoaning a lost caliphate nor anticipating Muslim becoming but about Muslim participation in nature as natural beings.

I consider how the ideas of the patchy Anthropocene forwarded by the editors of this special issue provide a way to do anthropology otherwise by reversing the relationship between the background and foreground in our studies. This switch allows me to bring to the fore the Brahmaputra-Jamuna River as both a hydrological entity and a geological event and the interrelations between these two as explored in geological writings. It helps grow the kinds of accounts that are appropriate to the complexity of the Anthropocene. At the same time I also pose that the inner structure of the imagination must change to be in step and similarly appropriate to our entangled and scaled-up present. The romantic geology of the early nineteenth century, particularly that of the German romantic Novalis, provides interesting experiments with commensurating humans to the geological. It does so by thinking the human as tending toward the nonhuman, thus possibly at play with the mountainous giants who shaped the earth’s topography in romantic imagination. I consider how gigantism may be explored as a dimension of human existence in the Anthropocene even as we consider the human in her particularity.

Since 2010, Khan has been mulling over the issue of how we experience climate change as a dimension of the everyday, and, more particularly, the question of whether people who live in the midst of tremendous physical dynamism and economic precariousness can discern the signal of climate change. In this paper, Khan presents three comments from Rochelle Tobias that show how they provide important vantages upon her evolving research. Khan engages Tobias's own work guided by her comments on her own.

Climate change is knowledge produced by running empirical data on weather through global simulation models. In contradistinction to the approach that studies how people come to be schooled to perceive climate change or produce their own accounts of change in an indigenous idiom, I show how knowledge of it is met by disbelief by Muslim farmers (chauras) living on eroding and accreting silt and sand islands (chars) within the Jamuna River in Bangladesh. Such disbelief is not unlike the denial that ordinarily greets news of climate change elsewhere. If one were to turn away from asking how people are taking up (or not) the issue of climate change, it is in smaller gestures of incorporating repugnant others, in this case dogs, that one sees reflections on divine creation qua creatureliness. And following such reflections on Creation through fables, narratives, and the everyday of the chauras, we see how Muslim cosmology and eschatology hold promise of ecological thought, providing an unexpectedly materialist perspective on our creaturely interconnectedness. They also provide an anticipatory register of climate change within chaura life through the intensification of suffering in the present, while allowing for disbelief in climate change as poisoned knowledge from the West.

Inspired by the forceful emergence of youth activism around climate change in 2019 and the body of scholarship on youth political involvement, we evaluate youths’ claims to being political in the international climate governance process. To do this, we survey documentation of youth activity around the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), so we can gauge the extent of youth participation. We produce analyses of four sets of records: mainstream newspapers, UNFCCC programming, independent media outlets and youth NGO websites. We find that, while youth are participating more, existing forms of documentation are inadequate. We suggest that genre writing can capture lost voices in politics, and that standard documentation remains critically important to recording youth political participation.

Through the essays in this volume, we see how the failure of the state becomes a moment to ruminate on the artificiality of this most modern construct, the failure of nationalism, an opportunity to dream of alternative modes of association, and the failure of sovereignty to consider the threats and possibilities of the realm of foreignness within the nation-state as within the self. The ambition of this volume is not only to complicate standing representations of Pakistan. It is take Pakistan out of the status of exceptionalism that its multiple crises have endowed upon it. By now, many scholars have written of how exile, migrancy, refugeedom, and other modes of displacement constitute modern subjectivities. The arguments made in the book say that Pakistan is no stranger to this condition of human immigrancy and therefore, can be pressed into service in helping us to understand our present condition.

Taking my cue from two novels, Mohammad Hanif's A Case of Exploding Mangos and Zia Haider Rahman's In the Light of What We Know , I posit that their respective senses of living in Pakistan or being from Bangladesh capture a shared intuition of not knowing enough to know oneself or one's place in the world. In this review, I ask, Can we speak of an inheritance of the colonial imperative to know when the need is not to know and rule others, but to know and rule oneself? Can we speak of an overturning or transfiguring of the colonial imperative to revise the central question for new nation-states to be, \"Who are we, who have done all this\"? Or, is that question too quickly dispossessed of agency and made to serve development goals and utilitarian ends? And if so, how are claims to self-knowledge asserted in the face of a constant arrogation of agency?

The protagonist of Intizar Hussain's novel Tazkira (1987) is a hapless muhajir, or refugee, in Lahore, Pakistan in the period shortly after the 1947 Partition of India, which witnessed the pell-mell transfer of Hindus and Sikhs to India and Muslims to Pakistan. He writes that while others were busy seizing abandoned sites in which to live, he was unable to feel at home anywhere. To compound his sense of dislocation, bu amma, his elderly companion, complains bitterly that she misses the sound of the azan, the call to prayer, in the first house they rent in an outlying area of Lahore, as yet forested and relatively un-peopled. Bu amma recollects how the call used to punctuate her days in her haveli, or mansion, in a busy neighborhood back in India. Without it, her days stretch out ahead of her, running uneventfully one into the other. How is it possible, she wonders, that one could be in this place created for Muslims and not hear the azan? In their next house, bu amma quickly realizes what it means to live in the shadow of a mosque. It was once a barkat (blessing), she grumbles, that has been turned into a curse by that satanic instrument (shaitani ala), the loudspeaker. The protagonist describes bu amma's efforts to shut out the sounds from the mosque that now invade her thoughts, shred her concentration, and make her efforts to say her prayers a daily battle. They eventually have to leave this house as well.

Through the essays in this volume, we see how the failure of the state becomes a moment to ruminate on the artificiality of this most modern construct, the failure of nationalism, an opportunity to dream of alternative modes of association, and the failure of sovereignty to consider the threats and possibilities of the realm of foreignness within the nation-state as within the self. The ambition of this volume is not only to complicate standing representations of Pakistan. It is take Pakistan out of the status of exceptionalism that its multiple crises have endowed upon it. By now, many scholars have written of how exile, migrancy, refugeedom, and other modes of displacement constitute modern subjectivities. The arguments made in the book say that Pakistan is no stranger to this condition of human immigrancy and therefore, can be pressed into service in helping us to understand our present condition.