Expertise: Cultures and Technologies of Knowledge. Ithaca; London: Cornell University Press, 2018. xvi, 266 pp. (Graph, figures, B&W photos.) US$29.95, paper. ISBN 978-1-5017-3091-7.
Jerome Whitington’s Anthropogenic Rivers develops a rich and original set of insights on large-scale infrastructure projects, environmental controversy, knowledge and expertise, and the nature of uncertainty. Foucault, Deleuze, and Science and Technology Studies are brought to bear on the ontological problems of sustainability in Mekong hydropower.
The setting is the Southeast Asian country of Laos between 2001–2010, during which Whitington conducted ethnographic research on Laos’s development model of nature-based capitalism. Laos was just opening up its investment regime to foreign actors, mobilizing capital and expertise to develop the country’s rivers into hydroelectric resources. As an anthropologist, Whitington takes a deep dive under the surface of competing claims regarding hydropower’s (un)sustainability, at a time and place where neoliberal actors and models of environmental governance were articulating with a “post-socialist condition of Lao developmentalism” (39) in complex and unexpected ways.
The monograph is divided into five main chapters, and between each are interlude vignettes based on the author’s ethnographic fieldnotes. I am not sure if any of the chapters would work alone, as a sort of teaser for students. The entire text deserves a close reading as the arguments flow into one another.
The animating empirical tension in the book involves the competing claims of (un)sustainability between a dam developer in Laos (Theun-Hinboun Hydropower Project, THHP) and an anti-dam activist organization (Berkeley, CA-based International Rivers Network, IRN). The ongoing controversy over the dam’s social impacts led to an experimental collaboration between the two in 2004. An arms-length review panel, nominated by IRN, was invited by the company to conduct an audit of the company’s Environmental Management Division, including a range of corporate impact mitigation efforts in dozens of downstream Lao villages. Whitington’s analysis traces how it was that “Anglophone managers and activists came to have a predominant role in governing the ecological effects” (62) of a dam in the middle of rural Laos.
The overall result was what the author neatly calls a “sustainability enclave,” carved out of the Lao state’s “mode of concessionary rule that essentially delegated certain kinds of environmental governance to the sporadic and highly variable interests of diverse foreign actors” (63). The outcome was a novel, neoliberal-infused territorial power relation characterized by a “dialectic of sustainability contestation” (104). Both the company and the activists forwarded competing claims about the social and environmental impacts of the dam, in a context characterized by a paucity of established empirical evidence. The THHP did not seek to directly solve their impacts, but simply to manage them (121), while systematically obscuring their own causal liability (132). Riparian Lao villagers were forced to shoulder most of the risks, and were left to navigate through a situation marked by a “labyrinth of unknowns” (97).
The book introduces a fascinating cast of characters: from the hydropower company manager, who seems to have over-imbibed on the insights of the American corporate theorist Peter Drucker, to a fast-talking British environmental consultant engaged in a “Borgesian attempt to develop a spreadsheet calculating the total environmental cost of hydropower impacts from the ground up” (111). We meet the external monitoring team set up by the short-lived THPC-IRN collaboration, and to a lesser extent, some of the company’s Lao staff, and actual villagers trying to navigate the chaos on Laos’s new “late industrial rivers” (36).
I should disclose that I was in Vientiane at the same time, researching environmental governance issues. I met and interacted with both Whitington and many of the people who appear in this fascinating ethnography. The local ethnographic work and analysis in the book strike me as even-handed, and have been executed with significant skill and nuance. Indeed, there are real jewels in Whitington’s analysis, and sparkles of insight in the writing. The text is clearly based on a deep conceptual engagement with the work, which richly rewards the close reader.
This is not to say that Whitington’s ethnography of Mekong hydropower is not without some limits. Occasionally, I found the theory to be heavy-going (i.e., “Hence there is an implied double ontology at stake in which the historical ontology of the subject emerges in relation to the contingent historicity of a non-subjective reality” [156]). But such passages are few.
Secondly and more directly, while the book is styled as an “ethnography on the limits of expertise” (9), the Lao state tends to fade into the background. While one cannot study everything, the post-2010 period in Laos shows clear signs of a resurgent Lao state and bureaucracy, with greater infrastructural capacity to order and govern the lives of rural people. We can now start to see the limits of focusing on Western corporate managers and activists in organizing Lao resource governance into sustainability enclaves. Indeed, such an experiment has not been repeated in Laos since the ill-fated THHP-IRN collaboration. Today, Western neoliberal hydropower sector actors are marginalized, as the Lao state has decisively shifted towards regional investors, promising faster dam development projects with less fuss about “sustainability.” While this is clearer in hindsight, the issue does speak to the idea that Western scholars may have underestimated the enduring statist and socialist dimensions of Laos’s governing system, even as the Lao state has been strengthened through the new revenue streams made possible by Western-backed dam projects such as THHP.
These points aside, the book offers new ways of understanding both the destruction and the unexpected afterlives of the Mekong region’s anthropogenic rivers. The anthropological insights on this double relation can be carried beyond the specifics of the case and applied to other complex social-ecological systems—such as pollution or climate change—that are characterized by produced uncertainty and sharp political contests over authoritative expertise. In this sense, the author’s ultimate aim is to conceptualize and elaborate an “anthropology of late capitalist environments” (227). Based on the success of Anthropogenic Rivers, we should all hope that Jerome Whitington will continue with his innovative scholarship on this task.
Keith Barney
The Australian National University, Canberra