Luisa Cortesi - K. Sivaramakrishnan Reflection

Luisa Cortesi
Erasmus University Rotterdam

Such a tremendous gift you made us, Shivi, Kasturi, Sunil, to have us here today. It is true, David, it feels like a wedding. But one where, upon arrival, you realize you love your family more than you thought.  

As I am so happy to be amongst you all, I refuse to talk about my own research, with which I have bored far too many people far too often. But I would not be able to keep to 5 minutes if I tried to share even a fraction of my memories, so I will just pick one or two.

In fact, I will start from the time when, after three plus years of research on floods in Bihar, and a baby, I met Shivi in the India International Centre in New Delhi, and he told me, “Luisa, I came to bring you back”. Such a sweet, gentle, caring, authoritative way to shepherd the lost sheep back to the barn.  

This is Shivi: a kind, thoughtful, generous soul who made us feel special and cared for in the nasty world of academia. If it is true that some of my colleagues are in therapy because of their relationship with their advisor, I should thank Shivi for some massive savings.  

For now, let me thank him for one, specific, lesson of academic and general value. To do so, I would like to talk about the time when, later, just after I had my second kid, Shivi scheduled me for a meeting at 3:12 in the afternoon.

Twelve minutes after three. Not 3:10, not 3:15, but three twelve. I remember vividly that, upon receiving that email, I paused. That level of precision isn’t casual. Three twelve is not an appointment, I thought, it is a diagnosis-cum-treatment, a peer-review correction on lateness. Although because “lateness” sounds like a flaw in character, a moral failing, perhaps I’d say, an “occasional time-management imprecision”.  

A few days ago, at the thought of returning among you all, the memory of the 3.12 brought a smile to my face.  

And it made me do what a scholar does. Trained to unpack the commonsensical, I sat down, and turned to Shivi’s writing, looking for the 3.12 within it.  

3.12 was, I now believe, a lesson in rigor, accuracy, and precision. In Shivi’s writings I also found the reassurance that his teaching was not to be read behaviorally, but methodologically.  

In fact, I will today venture to suggest that, for Shivi, meticulous rigor is not simply a habit of life, but an analytical strategy. Shivi’s meticulousness is so exceptional that it was key for his ability to break the mold.  

On the topic of the environment, for example, this method of accuracy enabled the relinquishing of large-scale systems approaches to human ecology and history

in favor of greater attention to micro-processes.  

It made it possible to identify linearity and even ideological determinism in the most commonsensical environmental histories, for example those discussing colonialism as a watershed moment in histories of resource degradation.  

It made visible how the very category of "environment" is regularly constructed through diverse cultures of governance, and how it rests on the naturalization of sociocultural features as icons of indigenous conservation by environmental movements that depoliticized these features in order to turn them into potent political symbols.

The environment, then, emerges from the contradictory nature of the colonial discourse, through the varied descriptions of landscape and the strategies for controlling it generated by the politics of establishing empire and the resulting hierarchized sociology of tribal primitivity.  

And it came into “existence because many scholars identified it with "nature," and detached it from the world of agrarian relations, effectively imaging it as something that exists separately from humans."  

Rigor is not rigidity. Indeed, it excludes it. This analytical meticulousness fostered a stronger emphasis on complexity and in turn made it possible to recognize microvariations that changed previous depictions of older civilizations' environmental relations and impacts. It also revealed the stochastic effects of local ecological factors within social conflicts, events, and culture writ-large.  

On the conceptual side, this meticulous unpacking is also the ground on which Shivi managed to show the dichotomous or otherwise lacking approach by some of his illustrious interlocutors, such as Hegel, Locke, Hobbes, Habermas, Marx, Foucault, Guha, Cronon, Chatterji.  

To conclude, I want to situate the value of accuracy, precision, and rigor within the context of Shivi’s dual training in the social and environmental sciences. For environmental scientists, as many of us in this room, the margin of error cannot exceed the unit of measurement; otherwise, precision becomes merely cosmetic. In such cases, the measurement itself calls for recalibration to bring the margin of error into alignment.

Which brings me back to the pedagogical significance of 3.12. I had opened time.gov, synced directly to NIST’s atomic clock and corrected for network delay. FYI, Shivi reached the meeting at 3, 11 minutes, 57 seconds, 45 milliseconds.    

Accuracy, precision, rigor, as well kindness, care, gentleness, are humble teachings, neither asserted nor proclaimed, but conveyed through example. The example of a timestamp.