Periferral Notes from the Brahmaputra

A few days ago we found ourselves moored on the waters of the river Brahmaputra in Guwahati. We were in Guwahati, enjoying the excellent hospitality of Periferry - - an ensemble of artists, practitioners and designers, consisting of the Desire Machine Collective (Mriganka Madhukaillya and Sonal Jain) and others, provisionally located on a ferry boat moored leased from the Inland Water Transport Department of the State of Assam on the banks of the Brahmaputra river.


The event that we were participating in - 'Unspeakably More' - (http://northeastwestsouth.net/taxonomy/term/490) was a three day round of intensive conversations aimed at moving towards a lexicon for contemporary curation and art practice initiated by the n.e.w.s collective in collaboration with the Periferry people.

Reflecting on our sojourn on this magnificient river is a good occasion to ask what effect a setting can have on the nature and quality of the conversations and interactions that occur within it?

The Brahmaputra, which begins as the Tsangbo near Mount Kailash in Tibet, makes its way through the high Tibetan plateau, crosses into North Eastern India and then flows through Assam before making its way through Bangladesh into the Bay of Bengal. It is one of the largest, most spectacular rivers in the world, often more than 10 Kilometres wide. Sometimes, being afloat on a barge, with Islands about you, the occasional flash of a riverine dolphin in the water, a boundless sky above and hills on the horizon, can help you travel wider distances in your thought. You can realize that the concepts and words we use to navigate our lives and practices are actually borne by many currents that meet and diverge like mighty rivers. The Brahmaputra's flow does not respect the arbitrary divisions and boundaries between nations and cultures, it carries with it the rocks and the snowmelt of the Himalayas, and the tidal bore, the counter-current that flows powerfully upstream from the sea, brings with it the warmer waters from the far south. This meeting of waters subverts the partitioned ways in which we are accustomed to think about space and time. Space gets expanded, and time, the time of a shared conversation swells like a river in spate, when the distracted rhythms of our busy and landlocked lives are held in temporary abeyance.


Floating on the Brahmaputra, debating the relationships between precision and ambiguity, talking about rivers and languages, proximity and distance, we were reminded of an earlier instance in our work of thinking about navigation. A few years ago we wrote a note on the difference between 'dead' and (what we called) 'live reckoning' for a text called 'Pacific Parables'. It came back to us in the engine room of the boat on the Brahmaputra like a tidal bore from a distant sea finding its way into the upper reaches of a mighty river.

'Dead and Live Reckoning' (from Pacific Parables)


"...We forget that Cartography is as variable a practice as any. There are maps and then there are maps, and there are different kinds of map making. Modern maritime navigational charts, based on latitude and longitude, determine a principle of navigation known as 'Dead Reckoning'. Dead Reckoning, in our limited understanding, is the method by which the position of a moving body is deduced in advance by taking fixes from previously known positions and then reading them against calculations with variables such as speed, direction, wind speed, tide patterns and currents. Prior to GPS, most navigators had to rely on dead reckoning, with a little help from a compass, an astrolabe, star charts, chronometers and longitude tables. Dead Reckoning models itself on the dynamics of the relationship between a moving object and a notionally inert surface.

We say most, but should qualify it immediately, because for most of human history, the largest water body in the world was navigated using a different system of reckoning. The Pacific Island cultures, who were probably the most prolific seafarers that the history of humanity has known, actually used the opposite navigational principle. Reckoning was taken on the basis of a metaphorical assumption of the still navigator interfacing with a world that courses towards or away from him or her. Thus, it is not the sailor that approaches an island, but the island that advances towards, and then past the sailor. Meanwhile, the stars remain constant, thus marking general orientation. The course is set by the stars, and the world; a living, dynamic entity flows past under the navigator's gaze. For terminological convenience alone, one could call this method, 'Live Reckoning'. The relationship between dead and live reckoning is a study in the encounter of two knowledge systems, two practices and ethoi of information. The difference between them ultimately lay in how much gunpowder they had backing them. One had lots, the other, none. The ships that used 'dead reckoning' carried cannons and muskets; the canoes of the live reckoners were armed with arrows and spears. The knowledge system with guns won the day. Pacific Island navigation systems remain as relics, occasionally resuscitated by an anthropologist or a sailing enthusiast.

Today, we who are practitioners of information, artisans of knowledge, often forget that our practices are also guaranteed by sophisticated weapons, not only of the lethal kind. Modernity's edge is ultimately a matter of ammunition. What safeguards should we institute to ensure that our encounters with the few remaining knowledge, information and communication systems different from our own do not result in their extinction? How can the business of reckoning continue to remain alive?..."