Author ORCID Identifier
Phyo Su San: https://orcid.org/0009-0003-0656-531X
Maya Kóvskaya: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1144-6270
DOI
10.65844/2549-4333.1260
Abstract
This article advances the concept of multispecies mutualistic resilience to analyze how human and more-than-human communities in Myanmar's Irrawaddy Delta navigate ecological rupture under conditions of extractive infrastructure and climate crisis. Drawing on ethnographic research in the Ywar Thit village tract, including life-story and semi-structured interviews, digital ethnography, and analysis of vernacular cultural texts, we examine how deltaic communities attune to kaing grasses (Saccharum spontaneum) as land-making agents and vernacular indexical signs of alluvial transformation, and the Irrawaddy River as a living semiosic and material force. Rather than treating resilience as a return to prior equilibrium or as a property of bounded social-ecological systems, we argue that resilience emerges through situated, improvisational relations among ecosystem people, kaing, alluvial islands, and the Irrawaddy River. Centering kaing allows us to show how vernacular riverine knowledges work as semiotic scaffolding: a durable yet adaptive set of sign-relations linking sonic semioscapes, sediment, current, memory, and action, through which communities interpret the river's iconic and indexical cues and coordinate responses to ecological rupture. We treat kaing as a semiosic agent and the Irrawaddy as a living semiosic force, showing how their reciprocal material-semiotic relations, from grass rooting and sediment stabilization to currents, sonic alarms, and erosion, scaffold attuned multispecies improvisation. To clarify how attunement structures resilience, we introduce two analytic concepts: resonance fields, where co-constructed semiosic and semiotic cues scaffold reciprocal adaptation through attunement, and dissonance fields, where infrastructural or epistemic rupture breaks those scaffolds and generates precarity. Bridging multispecies and more-than-human ecological ethnography, ecosemiotics, and environmental humanities, we show how deltaic communities, guided by vernacular epistemologies and ecological co-agency, navigate slow violence and capitalogenic degradation not through mastery but through relational world-making, revealing how lifeways persist through signs, scaffolds, shared rhythms, and improvisational collaboration, even amid intensifying climatic and infrastructural threats.
Recommended Citation
San, P., & Kóvskaya, M. (2026). Multispecies Mutualistic Resilience: Riverine Lifeworlds Along the Irrawaddy River. Forest and Society, 10(1), 406-431. https://doi.org/10.65844/2549-4333.1260 Available at: https://scholarhub.unhas.ac.id/fs/vol10/iss1/22
Pages
406-431
Received Date
31 August 2025
Accepted Date
9 November 2025