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Society for Cultural Anthropology
Oral Presentation Session
Lucas Bessire
Associate Professor
University of Oklahoma
What is the intimate language of aquifer loss? And how can it help us take responsibility for our political present? To explore these questions, the talk offers an experimental ethnographic narrative of aquifer depletion on the U.S. Great Plains, home to five generations of the author's family. Combining visual and textual imagery, it asks how depletion comes to pose as an "interior frontier," inseparable from anxieties of belonging and exclusion in imperiled homelands. In doing so, it reflects more broadly on the legacies of destruction that haunt our present, and the potentials of auto-ethnography as a way to approximate them.