What is a river? J. Scott’s reverberations toward a new theory of waterland

This article poses a simple but deceptive question – what is a river – and, equally, what is it not. It starts from an interrogation of James C. Scott’s In Praise of Floods: The Untamed River and the Life It Brings, and proceeds by recasting river research as a form of concept mediation between the social and the environmental sciences. This requires exposing inherited cognitive biases and the damage they have caused. The ensuing clarification of terms and categories then allows the crafting of interdisciplinary alternatives, such as the notion of moving saturated waterland, as a tool for thinking about rivers across disciplines. In an era of accelerating climate change, rethinking and retheorizing rivers is not an academic luxury but a political and ethical imperative for those seeking to understand rivers and their inhabitants.