Imposing Worlds: Ontological Marginalization and Reclamation through Irrigation Infrastructure in Rajapur, Nepal

In this article, I examine the Rajapur Irrigation Project (RIP), a large-scale infrastructure project to “modernize” a farmer-managed irrigation system in Nepal, as a political encounter between two ontologies or what Blaser called “ways of worlding”: Tharu farmers’ fluid practices of living with the Karnali River and engineers’ methods of structurally training waterways. In tracing how the logic and world-making practices of the RIP overwrote the place-based ontologies of local farmers through the concrete structures it enacted and left behind, I introduce ontological marginalization as a political process that can occur when one situated understanding of what the world is and how it should be (re)made is imposed on another through structural interventions. I demonstrate infrastructure’s power to enforce certain ontologies while marginalizing others, and I also explore how people reassert agency and world-making practices through acts of ontological reclamation in the aftermath of interventions. Ultimately, this article contributes to emergent discussions on infrastructure and its ontological impacts within geography by developing the dual concepts of ontological marginalization and reclamation as ways for scholars to better account for the political implications of infrastructure on diverse ways of worlding.