ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Troubled waters: encounters between colonial and local hydro-knowledges in French Guiana

• In Event: Water Knowledge and Water Experts II

English Abstract

Guiana, meaning the “land of many waters,” owes its name to the dense network of rivers and wetlands that cut through the region’s hinterlands and coastal plains. Waterways, seasonal floods and tides shaped mobility patterns and livelihoods for pre-Columbian peoples and continue to do so for communities today. Archaeological remnants of raised-field agriculture along the coastal plain reveal sophisticated management of seasonal water fluctuations and demonstrate an early command of wetland reclamation techniques centuries before the arrival of Europeans. When French colonizers settled the territory, they avoided the coastal lowlands, considering them unhealthy and hostile. From the 18th¬ 20th centuries, administrators and hydraulic engineers from France pursued ambitious polderization projects, importing Dutch expertise while relying on enslaved and later immigrant labor. These projects reframed water as an adversary to be disciplined through “scientific” engineering, reinforcing racialized hierarchies of knowledge and legitimacy. In contrast, Indigenous peoples, enslaved Africans, Maroon communities, and Creole smallholders learned to inhabit these amphibious landscapes by attuning their daily activities with the tides, rainfall regimes, and riverine cycles. Daily life was linked to water’s movements and premised on coexistence rather than conquest. Drawing on archival records and an extensive literature review, this study traces the entangled trajectories of water expertise across the main historic communities of French Guiana from the pre-Columbian era to the present. It analyzes water expertise from a socio-racial perspective and traces how knowledge circulated between the metropole and its colony, shaped by economic, cultural, and power asymmetries. Ultimately, it invites reflection on the heritage of colonial hydro-expertise in contemporary French Guianese water management, where “scientific” and “political” narratives continue to depreciate non-Western water ontologies, perpetuating epistemic injustice in environmental governance and marginalizing relational, place-based understandings of aquatic worlds.

Author

• Marquisar Jean-Jacques