Despite the enormous size and economic and scientific significance of the Tsangpo-Brahmaputra River, questions of where and what it was generated successive waves of dispute from the mid-eighteenth to early twentieth centuries. Geographical discovery in the eastern Himalayan borderlands neither entailed the application of fixed theories and techniques, nor resulted from consistent flows of information along established channels. Europeans instead understood the region’s rivers in many different ways, influenced by sporadic deluges of data, competing forms of expertise, shifting imperatives of colonial political economy, unsettling encounters with various bodies of water, and heterogeneous Asian knowledge structures. Informants, infrastructures, and cosmologies of often-overlooked communities at imperial margins fundamentally reshaped European knowledge. Under these conditions, practitioners of spatial sciences came to thrive on the proliferation of models and objects of discovery rather than seeking definitive closure.

尽管雅鲁藏布江规模巨大，具有经济和科学意义，但从十八世纪中叶到二十世纪初，关于它的来源和用途的问题却引发了一系列的争论。喜马拉雅东部边境地区的地理发现既不需要应用固定的理论和技术，也不是信息沿着既定渠道持续流动的结果。相反，欧洲人以多种不同的方式了解该地区的河流，受到零星的数据洪流、相互竞争的专业知识形式、殖民政治经济不断变化的要求、与各种水体的令人不安的遭遇以及异质的亚洲知识结构的影响。帝国边缘经常被忽视的社区的线人、基础设施和宇宙观从根本上重塑了欧洲的知识。在这些条件下，空间科学的实践者依靠模型和发现对象的扩散而蓬勃发展，而不是寻求最终的终结。