How might “thinking like an aquifer” help challenge the conjoined crises of ecologies, democracies and hermeneutics that define the contemporary? To explore this question, this lecture offers an experimental ethnographic account of aquifer depletion on the U.S. Great Plains. Combining visual and textual imagery, it charts how depletion accretes over generations to become a porous threshold of belonging indistinguishable from partisan and epistemic divides. In doing so, it offers a wider reflection on the ways auto-ethnography of settler legacies may illuminate anti-essentialist approaches to the social worlds emerging along frontiers of destruction and change.

Lucas Bessire is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Oklahoma whose work addresses extraction, power, and genre. He is the author of Behold the Black Caiman: A Chronicle of Ayoreo Life (University of Chicago Press, 2014) and creator of the Ayoreo Video Project (2017). He is currently a Fellow at the Radcliffe Insitute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.  During his time at Radcliffe, Bessire is completing an auto-ethnographic account of aquifer depletion on the High Plains. The book project charts how people inhabit the imminent ends of groundwater in order to reflect more broadly on the defining conundrums of our political present and the potential of ethnography to cross divides.

Bessire is the recipient of various awards and fellowships, including from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Institute for Advanced Study, the National Science Foundation, the Reed Foundation, the Society for Cultural Anthropology, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. He earned a certificate in documentary filmmaking and a PhD in anthropology from New York University.

Sponsored by the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, and the Earth and Oceanographic Science, Environmental Studies, and Latin American Studies Programs.