Durham: Duke University Press, 2020. xi, 195 pp. (B&W photos.) US$26.00, paper. ISBN 9781478010821.
This is a thought-provoking anthropology book that portrays human and non-human relations in the context of how non-human actors—especially dams, fish, Mekong ecological systems, and other non-human actors (Naga, Garuda, and animism)—are forces in Mekong villagers’ shared world. The main argument of the book centres on humans and nonhumans, which author Andrew Johnson calls “potency,” or active participation in socioecological relationships. As Johnson puts it, “the ecological, economic, and cultural shifts that confront my interlocutors present moments where new vistas onto reality present themselves. New realms of the unknown and unnamed present themselves, and there is potency—apocalyptic and messianic—in the distant, fantastic and weird” (19).
Johnson conducted his fieldwork in a remote village located along the Mekong bank in the northeastern region of Thailand the author calls Ban Beuk village (a pseudonym). The village was affected by what Johnson refers to as the distance force, the Jinghong Dam located in China. Johnson postulates that dam construction, macroeconomic transformation, and the sense of marginality perceived by Isan people (the Northeasterners) have reshaped the relationships between humans, non-human actors, and material life (migration for a better life). He also constructed his argument from the political ecology approach to nature-society relations. Throughout the book, he lucidly links the upstream impacts of hydropower and Thailand’s economic transformation on microeconomics, identity, and the culture of Mekong people.
The book has six chapters, first examining non-human actors (“Through a Glass Darkly”), then river beings (“Naga and Garuda” and “River Beings”), followed by “Dwelling Under Distant Suns”), “The River Grew Tired of Us,” and finally, “Human and Inhuman Worlds.” Johnson directly presents the social and ecological dimensions of nature-society relations. From Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton University Press, 2021) and Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory and its role in understanding the implementation of information technology developments in healthcare, the book examines how Ban Beuk villagers’ dreams and their material life have been produced through their interactions with nonhumans. It also shows how villagers have been contaminated by their encounters with water and fish as non-human others before and after the Jinghong Dam was constructed. The dam transformed the Mekong’s diverse ecological systems and impacted downstream villagers’ bodies, as well as their supernatural beliefs—including their views on kings, Gods, Buddhism, spirits, and the soul—as well as their cultural values.
The changes in the Mekong River were prime concerns for villagers. Hence, the book presents a prominent discourse of human-environment relationships and related issues following the dam’s construction, especially the vulnerabilities as perceived by the villagers, such as the loss of indigenous fishing knowledge (including fishing gear), the decline of riverbank gardens and fishing plots, food security (fermented fish sauce), and fishing income.
Johnson’s study helps us understand the multidimensional nature of the Mekong River—its ecological rupture as well as its economic and cultural importance. He illuminates that as a distant source of power, the dam has created real consequences downstream, impacting the network of both living and non-living materials and spirits (27). As he puts it, “the rapid rise and fall of the river gave little time for this [the natural growth of plants along the Mekong bank]. The buds were smothered before they had chance to grow, and fruit never appeared. The network is in flux, and relations are uncertain” (69).
The power of the patrimony of the Thai state in support of dam construction, including the Xayaburi Dam, overrode the concerns of civil organizations and environmental groups. As a result, villagers have been living in a “blasted landscape” (Tsing’s phrase), and in Johnson’s words, “the absent thing” (27). The rupture of the Mekong’s ecology has created uncertainty and change to downstream life: “hydropower projects create uncertain ecological and economic environments” (8). One can see clearly from Mon and Lert’s experience that “the river is no longer predictable” and that the dams are being built not like “carefully arranged puzzle pieces, but rather a distracted child’s LEGO tower…without a clear vision of what will come and made up of things from entirely different sets” (41).
Additionally, Johnson raises questions about how the impacts of dam construction influenced, complicated, and shifted fishing livelihoods and the dreams of the Mekong villagers. He clearly sees socioecological relations in the lives of the people along the Mekong River that are produced by both human and non-human actors. From villagers’ viewpoint, fish as non-human actors are in trouble. Johnson quotes a villager named Pong: “They [branches of the trees] are confused [ngong] like the fish are confused, like the Lord of the Fish [jao pa beuk] is confused, like we are confused. They [the fish] are here [in the water] but we don’t know how to get to them. The water is changed” (69).
This book contributes to the study of the co-production of nature and society that is a field of political ecology. The author’s argument is relevant to scholarly debates on ontological uncertainty and the co-production of socionature, which have become the most recent political ecological approaches for examining socioecological relations. Johnson places Mekong ecology and its changing roles within political ecological debates. While dam construction was decided by the government far away from the local communities, its forces are indeed powerful. Hence, Johnson’s argument on the uncertainty created by hydropower contributes to the anthropology of uncertainty as he reveals how living with uncertainty within the context of the changes in the Mekong River are unpredictable occurrences that risk the villagers’ presence and future. The villagers have tried to mitigate, deal with, and manage uncertainty and risk through cultural factors, which reflects their sense of security and insurance.
By applying Bourdieu’s notion of habitus, I think that villagers in Ban Beuk used dreams, Buddhism, animism, and Naga belief as symbolics in negotiating unequal power relations. Notwithstanding, the book did not address the status of powerful actors, including the Thai, Chinese, and Lao governments. Also, though this book actively engages a social science-based framework, it seemed to me that it does not seriously address human agency and non-human actors in the social and political movements around hydropower issues prevailing in the Mekong region.
Kanokwan Manorom
Ubon Ratchathani University, Ubon Ratchathani