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<p>The Aral “catastrophe” has resulted from ongoing diversion of water flowing into the Aral Sea for irrigation, largely cotton, primarily from the 1960s until present. Shifting geographic focus south to the Amu Darya delta, this paper asks how feminist approaches to data and “shadow places” reshape understandings of the Aral Sea region’s transformation. Interweaving the partial perspectives of ethnographic, geophysical, and remote sensing data through feminist mixed methods, I quantify flows of water into the delta from the 1930s to present, map out resulting temporal variability and spatial discontinuity of water, and probe the consequences for humans, fish, salt, and gardens. Bringing feminist political ecology into nascent conversations about more-than-human waterscapes, deltas, and wetlands, I argue that water and agricultural policies have “shadowed” the delta and increased local stress and precarity while benefiting global markets and consumers of cotton. I suggest that the greatest risk for residents is not toxic dust, as presented in hegemonic discourse, but ongoing violence of water allocation policies that continue to remake the landscape and affect residents’ ways of life, livelihoods, and nutrition.</p>

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Off the map and in the shadow: water, salt, fish and gardens in the Amu Darya Delta in Uzbekistan

  • 期刊论文

  • 发表日期：

    2026年6月19日

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  • Katherine F. Shields

摘要

The Aral “catastrophe” has resulted from ongoing diversion of water flowing into the Aral Sea for irrigation, largely cotton, primarily from the 1960s until present. Shifting geographic focus south to the Amu Darya delta, this paper asks how feminist approaches to data and “shadow places” reshape understandings of the Aral Sea region’s transformation. Interweaving the partial perspectives of ethnographic, geophysical, and remote sensing data through feminist mixed methods, I quantify flows of water into the delta from the 1930s to present, map out resulting temporal variability and spatial discontinuity of water, and probe the consequences for humans, fish, salt, and gardens. Bringing feminist political ecology into nascent conversations about more-than-human waterscapes, deltas, and wetlands, I argue that water and agricultural policies have “shadowed” the delta and increased local stress and precarity while benefiting global markets and consumers of cotton. I suggest that the greatest risk for residents is not toxic dust, as presented in hegemonic discourse, but ongoing violence of water allocation policies that continue to remake the landscape and affect residents’ ways of life, livelihoods, and nutrition.