Rivers, Threads, And Living Memory: Learning From The Getar
When knowledge transmission breaks—whether through buried rivers, displaced communities, or interrupted traditions—the knowledge continues through different channels and methods. Recent research reveals how Indigenous river epistemologies, hydrofeminist frameworks, and community-based restoration offer alternatives to systems that treat water, culture, and memory as problems to be managed rather than relationships to be maintained.
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Reading "Getar: Memory of a River" alongside cutting-edge scholarship on water and cultural repair, I've been exploring how living memory operates when its original conditions have been bureaucratically relocated. From Yerevan's buried river to feminist approaches in Bogotá's urban planning, patterns emerge around knowledge that refuses to stay buried.
Key Threads
Key questions this article explores:
How do bodies hold environmental knowledge that bureaucratic decisions can't erase?
What happens when Indigenous river epistemologies meet urban planning challenges?
How does "hydrofeminism" reframe our understanding of water as relational force?
What does it mean to repair cultural knowledge when transmission has been interrupted?
Water's Displaced Presence
The Getar flows through multiple realities simultaneously. Underground through Yerevan's infrastructure. On paper in municipal flood management records. Through contemporary Armenian literature. In residents' daily positioning relative to sound that's no longer there.
Recent research on buried urban rivers worldwide reveals patterns that urban planners rarely anticipate. When Seoul restored the Cheonggyecheon Stream—removing a highway to daylight the water beneath—they discovered something hydrologists now understand: underground rivers don't disappear, they reorganize their relationships with everything above them.
The book describes this as the river's "semantic and semiotic fabric"—how water creates meaning for people who live alongside it. Municipal authorities relocated the physical flow, but they couldn't relocate what residents call the river's "murmuring presence" in their routines. The meaning-making capacity of flowing water operates through relationships formed over decades that can't be administratively managed.
Sources:
Getar: Memory of a River - Tigran Amiryan (Editor), Cultural and Social Narratives Laboratory, Yerevan, 2023
Is the River Alive? - Robert Macfarlane
Urban Rivers: Rediscovering Hidden Gems in Cityscapes - Rivers Are Life, 2025
Indigenous River Futures
Cutting-edge research offers different frameworks for understanding these relationships. A 2025 study examines "river epistemologies, ontologies and urban futures" using Indigenous Filipino and Andean philosophies to reimagine how rivers function in cities. The work explores concepts like "Ayni"—balanced relationships through giving and receiving—as alternatives to viewing rivers as infrastructure problems.
This research contrasts Indigenous worldviews with modernist approaches that treat water as commodity rather than relational being. Where Western planning sees rivers as obstacles to development, Indigenous knowledge systems understand waterways as active participants in urban life, carrying information and relationships that extend far beyond physical flow.
The study suggests that Indigenous perspectives on "multiplicity of truths" and "relationality" could transform urban water management. Instead of single-solution engineering, cities could develop multiple ways of relating to rivers that honor their capacity to organize meaning, support community relationships, and maintain cultural knowledge across generations.
Sources:
Flowing Through Time: An Epistemological and Ontological Examination of River Futures within Urban Landscapes - Journal of Futures Studies, 2025
The Science in Indigenous Water Stories, Indigenous Women's Connection to Water - Wendy F. K'ah Skáahluwáa Todd, Arianna V. Northbird, and Chessaly E. Towne, Open Rivers Journal, 2023
Hydrofeminist Territories
Emerging scholarship in "hydrofeminism" provides language for understanding how water and cultural memory intersect. Researcher Astrida Neimanis describes "planetary wet-togetherness"—how all bodies connect through water, creating collective relationships that extend far beyond individual experience.
New hydrofeminist manifestos describe bodies as "wet collective bodies defined by how they link to other bodies, places, environments, technologies" through "porous condition [that] produces a planetary wet-togetherness, a commoning force that constitutes all bodies as collective hydro-subjects."
This framework explains why the Getar's burial creates such specific bodily disruption. Long-term residents developed nervous systems attuned to particular acoustic patterns, seasonal rhythms, humidity levels the river provided. When water gets channeled underground, it creates what researchers call "environmental disruption syndrome" in neighborhoods that organized around its presence—not just practically but physiologically.
Cities like Bogotá are pioneering feminist approaches to river restoration that prioritize community-based design acknowledging how different residents relate to water. Their 2022 Master Plan incorporates "urban fringe pacts" born from grassroots activism, enabling community-based design that honors water as relational force rather than infrastructure challenge.
Sources:
Hydrofeminist Thinking With Oceans: Political and Scholarly Possibilities - Tamara Shefer, Vivienne Bozalek, Nike Romano (Editors), Routledge, 2024
Hydrofeminism Manifesto - Vanessa Bosch
An Urban Rivers Renaissance? Stream Restoration and Green–Blue Infrastructure in Latin America - Urban Ecosystems, 2024
“The river was visible only through the veil of personal and family stories, constituting a fragment of social and architectural memory that we attended to on a daily basis to understand the identity of the city and its inhabitants—a deeply traumatized identity that has never been properly analyzed.”
What Rivers Hide
The Getar story reveals something unsettling about how rivers function in urban planning. Officials justified burying the river through "sanitary concerns" and "modernization needs," but residents describe it as deliberate erasure of something inconvenient for development priorities.
Research by Caroline Fidan Tyler Doenmez on Canadian rivers examines how waterways become sites where Indigenous people disappear. Her work on rivers in Thunder Bay documents how "dead Indigenous people have been pulled from their depths" while "others are thought to still be in the water." These patterns reveal how rivers function as places where societies bury what they don't want to acknowledge.
Water carries what we try to forget. When societies decide certain knowledge, certain people, certain ways of being are inconvenient, rivers become repositories for that forgetting. The woman's insomnia becomes significant—her body remembers what the city tried to erase. Her nervous system refuses to adapt to acoustic absence, maintaining relationship with knowledge municipal authorities declared obsolete.
Sources:
Resonant Rivers: Water, Indigenous Relationality, and Other Futures - Caroline Fidan Tyler Doenmez, Open Rivers Journal, 2020
Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women & Girls - Urban Indian Health Institute, 2024
Repairing Broken Transmission
The challenge becomes: how do we work with cultural knowledge when its transmission has been interrupted? The woman listening for absent water faces the same situation as anyone trying to reconnect with traditional practices after historical disruption. The knowledge persists but requires different methods of access.
Recent work on "cultural knowledge repair" suggests that gaps in transmission can become spaces for creative adaptation. When original contexts become unavailable, the knowledge doesn't disappear—it becomes invitation to develop new relationships with what persists. The woman wanting to hear water might build a fountain. Someone seeking traditional knowledge might learn techniques that honor essential principles while adapting to current conditions.
The man in the Getar book who wants to build a fountain outside his apartment window demonstrates this approach. He's not trying to recreate the river but restore functional relationship with acoustic patterns his daily rhythms require. His body holds knowledge about what water sounds like moving freely, and he's developing new practices for accessing that knowledge when municipal priorities have reorganized water's presence.
This suggests that living memory operates through creative adaptation that honors what's essential while developing new methods for maintaining relationship with knowledge that continues beneath official narratives. Whether working with buried rivers or disrupted traditions, we're learning to practice with inheritance that comes altered but not destroyed.
Sources:
Getar: Memory of a River - Tigran Amiryan (Editor), Cultural and Social Narratives Laboratory, Yerevan, 2023
A Feminist Political Ecology Approach to Better Manage Land, Water and Forests - CGIAR Gender Impact Platform, 2024
Woven Wisdom
Truth worth holding onto:
Environmental Disruption Syndrome: Bodies remember environmental relationships that minds forget. Nervous systems encode acoustic patterns, seasonal rhythms, and sensory information that persist even when original conditions are bureaucratically relocated.
Cultural Repair: Gaps in knowledge transmission become spaces for creative adaptation. When traditional practices face historical disruption, the essential knowledge doesn't disappear but requires new methods of access and relationship.
Hydrofeminist Understanding: All bodies connect through water in ways that create collective relationships extending beyond individual experience. Urban planning affects these connections in ways that current policy frameworks rarely acknowledge.
River Epistemologies: Indigenous knowledge systems offer alternatives to treating rivers as infrastructure problems, understanding waterways as active participants in urban life that carry information and relationships across generations.
Memory Toolkit
Environmental Listening Practice: Spend time in places where water has been buried or redirected. Notice what your body expects to hear that's no longer there. Document these acoustic absences as forms of embodied knowledge that persist despite infrastructure changes.
Knowledge Gap Mapping: Identify a traditional practice or cultural knowledge in your heritage that has experienced transmission disruption. Research what persists, what's been lost, and what creative adaptations might honor essential principles while working with current conditions.
Hydrofeminist City Walk: Move through your urban environment paying attention to water's hidden presence—storm drains, buried streams, redirected flows. Notice how your body responds to different acoustic environments and water relationships. Consider how feminist approaches might transform urban water planning.
River Future Visioning: Using Indigenous concepts like "Ayni" (balanced giving and receiving), imagine how your city's relationship with waterways could change. What would river management look like if waterways were understood as relational beings rather than infrastructure challenges?
Working with living memory reveals something fundamental about how knowledge persists across disruption. The woman's insomnia for absent water demonstrates the same principle as Indigenous communities maintaining river relationships despite colonial displacement, or hydrofeminist scholars developing new languages for water connection despite academic systems that fragment knowledge into separate disciplines.
These aren't isolated phenomena but expressions of a deeper pattern: knowledge finds ways to continue when its original transmission channels are blocked. Bodies remember acoustic patterns that municipal planning erased. Communities preserve relational understanding of waterways that bureaucratic systems tried to reduce to infrastructure. Researchers develop frameworks that honor what conventional approaches dismiss.
The Getar flows beneath Yerevan whether officials acknowledge it or not. Indigenous river epistemologies offer alternatives to extractive planning whether institutions adopt them or not. Hydrofeminist understanding reveals water's connective capacity whether policy frameworks recognize it or not. Living memory operates through creative adaptation rather than preservation, finding new channels while maintaining essential relationships.
Our task becomes learning to support these adaptations - whether that's the sound of underground water seeking acoustic expression through fountains, traditional knowledge finding contemporary applications, or feminist approaches transforming urban planning from the margins inward. Knowledge that refuses to stay buried requires practices that honor both what persists and what must be newly created.
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