A Community of Flood Memories: Living with(in) the Riverine Landscape in Ayutthaya

Abstract

Situated within the more-than-representational turn in cultural geography, I reconsider flood memories as practices of remembering. Memory is reconfigured as part of everyday life, and at the nexus of the individual and collective realms. With ethnographic walking as the primary methodology, I argue that a community of flood memories emerges as the lived landscape becomes an active archive of the 2011 flood. Through this, the riverine rhythms are re-centered in the everyday routines of the community. This active archive is also oriented towards the future. Memories of the 2011 flood are strategically utilized to alter relationships, home and workplaces. Furthermore, a moralistic expectation of how people should behave during future floods is being perpetuated through exhibitions and storytelling. In light of the continuous failure of large-scale `flood protection? structures, these seemingly prosaic alterations to the lived landscape may be the key to live with floods in Ayutthaya, in the future.