Date of Award

Fall 1-1-2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Anthropology

First Advisor

Sivaramakrishnan, Kalyanakrishnan

Abstract

How do people come to terms with the vast timescales of environmental losses and injustices today? This dissertation explores emerging moral contests and ethical navigations over lasting forms of environmental injury by focusing on the longstanding attempts to repair damaged landscapes across the Jinzu river basin in Toyama, Japan. In the aftermath of large-scale mining pollution and a resulting public health crisis, this region has experienced landmark state and corporate projects of remediating the toxified land and water since the 1970s, which still remain unfinished today over half a century later. Based on long-term ethnographic and historical research, this dissertation demonstrates how such prolonged efforts of repair expand what it takes to come to terms with environmental losses and injustices. By examining the experiences of protracted repair through the analytical lens of promises, I highlight how the damaged landscapes have become a site of new encounters among the affected residents, state and corporate actors, and the wider public. I show how these nascent relations have transformed what needs to be repaired, who has the obligation to engage in such work, and how to grapple with the injury that persists despite decades of reparative attempts. This work moves beyond conventional discussions of environmental crises, directing attention to the worlds that emerge from the promises people still make about damaged landscapes despite knowing the potential irreversibility of the violence underway.

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