Shady plantations: Theorizing coastal shelter in Tamil Nadu

This article explores practices of protection played out in a coastal plantation in a village in Tamil Nadu. I argue that these practices are articulations of different but coexisting theorizations of shelter, and that the plantation can be seen as that which emerges at the intersections between these, as they are realized in social encounters. This calls for a view of theory and analysis as generative of objects in the world, rather than applied to them from some fictitious elsewhere or posterity. Exploring the plantation and the shelter it offers as an intertwinement and simultaneity of practice and analysis, data and theory, I discuss anthropological knowledge-making as a truly lateral endeavour that engages in describing and cultivating a shared capacity for world-making, the challenge then being to find the right story of sameness and difference, without ascribing fixity and inevitability to our objects of knowledge.