ABSTRACT
Grounded in ethnographic and genealogical research, my goal was to examine the twin problems addressed by the Pushkar Project, lake pollution (water quality) and lake sedimentation (water quantity). Two decades of ethnographic engagement with this area provided the close-up lens through which the lake pollution was reframed by me as a cultural problem and not just a technological one. This localized perspective also considered how decentralized initiatives, based on locally relevant religious concepts and legal precedents, could produce the cultural changes necessary for sustainable solutions and community-based management strategies. The genealogical research, based on historical accounts of a discontinuous and contradictory past (Foucault 1984), allowed the focus to shift to a regional level and called into question reductive and linear narratives of desertifi cation as the causal factor of lake sedimentation. This wide-angle perspective also disrupted the silence on the critical but invisible issue of groundwater.
