Rising sea levels that threaten Vietnam's northern and southern rice deltas, the extinction of endangered species, pollution from industrial agriculture and mining—the people of Vietnam must face these and many other urgent environmental problems. One approach to these issues is to ask who, or what, has been to blame? Earlier literature tended to put forward largely environmentally determined explanations that singled out specific groups for opprobrium. First the French, then the Japanese, next the Americans, and finally the Communists—all carried their share of the responsibility.
The three books under review here challenge these moves by collectively developing an image of stochastic interactions between society and nature that occur at three scales: the nation, the region, and the subregion. As with a digital map, these books zoom in ever closer to the ground in order to bring into focus the indeterministic factors driving environmental and social change. Without such complementary conceptions of nature and society, scholars have struggled to come up with the right questions about responsibility. The nuanced notions articulated by these books furnish potential ways forward.
Geoffrey Gunn's Rice Wars in Colonial Vietnam paints a panoramic overview of the people, places, and events associated with the “Great Famine” that devastated the Red River Delta in 1944 and 1945. Rather than narrowly focus on the famine itself, Gunn broadens his gaze by placing “French colonial policies and actions affecting rice production and distribution alongside demographic, social, and ecological understandings crucial to the management of agrarian crisis” (p. 2). In tandem with this investigation, Gunn seeks “to trace the origins of Vietnamese anti colonialism in both its intellectual and mass dimensions” and to link the Great Famine to the Viet Minh's unexpected rise to power at the end of World War II (p. 2). Moreover, Gunn views his project as “a truth commission-style investigation that precisely seeks to uncover a number of thinly veiled truths that could possibly stimulate even further research, not only on war and memory issues related to the famine but also in the field of famine prevention” (p. 230).
Of the three books, Rice Wars most explicitly addresses the question of blame for suffering, which rests at the heart of Gunn's attempt “to identify the rural roots of insurrection in colonial Indochina” (p. 6). He poses two hypotheses about why peasants revolted: first, there was “an activist peasant riding with the new market forces unleashed by colonialism as with the rise of a cash economy”; and second, there was “a reactive risk-averse and defensive peasantry, victim of the new market forces and an intrusive colonial state making new and unreasonable claims on livelihoods” (p. 7). These hypotheses bring to mind the Samuel Popkins–James Scott debate of the 1970s, with Gunn arguing that peasants were both rational and moral, driven at times by material concerns, at others by ideological concerns, and at times by both simultaneously.
In his exploration of the causes of the famine, Gunn effectively employs the insights of economists such as Amartya Sen, who have argued against the “food-availability-decline” theory (p. 230). Following these economists, Gunn adopts an “entitlement” perspective, namely that famines are not caused by an absolute lack of food but by its unequal distribution (p. 230). In order to support this contention, he centers his investigation on “three key chapter-episodes”: the Nghe-Tinh rebellion of 1931–32, the near famine of 1937 in northern Annam, and the Great Famine/August Revolution of 1945 (p. 7). He argues that only in the final of the three cases did uneven distribution of food due to the particular conditions of World War II result in mass starvation. Gunn leavens these detailed chapters with five additional ones that provide compelling explanatory context on Vietnamese agriculture and anticolonial resistance, World War II, and the August Revolution. To tell his story, Gunn employs a wealth of primary documents from collections housed across the world, with an effective use of sources from the colonial archives housed in Aix-en-Provence, France.
Of particular relevance for my review is the final chapter on the famine itself. This chapter looks at human and environment relationships during an event that “elapsed in scale all human tragedies of the modern period in Vietnam” (p. 229). Gunn's analysis effectively treats rice as a multivalent factor and “a metaphor for war or, more accurately, struggles or contestations besetting a range of actors” (p. 3). While showing that in the minds of many French and Vietnamese, Malthusian factors (too many people, too little land) caused the famine, Gunn argues that mass starvation was not a natural disaster. In this way, Rice Wars is in conversation with other famine studies and offers a measured consideration of the many factors leading to death.
Despite its excellent historical contextualization, Rice Wars sheds little new light on the question of who caused the 1944–45 famine. Following Japanese activist-scholars and French propaganda, Gunn lays the blame for the famine most squarely on the shoulders of the Japanese military. There is much evidence to support this interpretation, and Japanese requisitions of rice and rice lands contributed to the food shortage (p. 155). His own numbers suggest, however, that sufficient levels of rice existed even after Japanese requisitions to feed the Red River Delta's population (pp. 147, 248). He could have pushed his entitlement argument even further by looking at the exact distribution of rice at the provincial, household, and individual level. Perhaps data necessary for such fine-grained analysis, such as daily market prices and demographic distribution of mortality, did not survive the war (or never existed). But without it, we cannot say with confidence why the price of rice rose as a result of French famine relief policies during World War II and not during the Nghe-Tinh rebellion of 1931–32 (p. 237). Only when we have answers to such basic questions might we be able to figure out why specific individuals could not afford to buy rice.
The second book under review here, David Biggs's Quagmire, reconsiders blame by narrowing its gaze from the national scale down to the main branches and byways of the Mekong Delta. In his impressively researched and well-written book, Biggs examines the attempts of “several generations of mapmakers, engineers, soldiers, scientists, farmers, and revolutionaries … to bring the abstract designs of nation-building into reality amid the buzzing, moving surfaces that surrounded them” (p. 8). Biggs's book examines the lives of Vietnamese, French, and Americans who have floated along the delta's surfaces and the nation-building projects that have sunk beneath its tides, thus bringing into focus more dynamic and contingent interactions between society and nature.
Quagmire’s six chapters—”Water's Edge,” “Water Grid,” “Hydroagricultural Crisis,” “Balkanization,” “Modernization,” and “American War”—move the reader forward through time from the 1800s to the present (discussed in an epilogue). Throughout these chapters, Biggs seamlessly integrates fine-grained accounts of river hydraulics with better-known histories in order to give new significance to these pasts. Biggs explains how water flowed, how these flows evolved as canals were created and destroyed, and how different meanings were assigned to these flows. Quagmire builds on earlier work by scholars such as Pierre Brocheux by examining the “continuities and overlaps between pre-colonial, colonial, and postcolonial era of nation-building” in the delta (p. 10). With its focus on nation-building projects in the Mekong Delta, Biggs's story presents a narrative of lessons learned (and not) that is on its surface rather familiar. But he has plenty of surprises in store for his readers, placing the region in global narratives by showing how those in the past have imagined transnational connections. He cites, for example, the famous southern writer Son Nam, who compared the southward movement of Vietnamese (called nam tien) to the westward expansion of the United States (p. 11).
At its roots, Biggs's book is about how the delta's flowing waters and shifting soils both sustained and inhibited nation-building projects. In particular, he examines “how the activities and politics of nation-building were connected to the historically and environmentally complex places where they occurred” (p. 5). This framing enables Quagmire to posit a more nuanced view of blame than Gunn's book, illustrating how place has mattered in the outcome of political projects. Whereas Gunn devotes few pages to discussing the rice deltas' underlying environments, Biggs argues that Vietnam's history cannot simply be inscribed “across an invisible national map that ignores its variable, complex terrains” (p. 7). Biggs further problematizes responsibility for failed nation-building projects by demonstrating how the delta's inhabitants (in addition to its ecology) undermined state authority and reappropriated potential national spaces for their own uses. People often lived their lives independent of the dictates of Nguyen imperialists, French colonialists, American advisors, and Vietnamese socialists, even as these people acted (consciously or not) within grids of state and national power and influence.
Quagmire’s first chapter shows how locals and the state shared responsibility for the shaping of the delta through a case study of points where water converged and slower flow velocities resulted in silt deposits. While frustrated French engineers called these points dos d’âne, or dead points, those involved in interregional commerce called these nodes giap nuoc, or water borders, and viewed them as essential meeting places (p. 32). In order to solve the silting problem and meet the goals of the French colonial state, French engineers designed flushing basins (p. 40). In response, local farmers cut through dams so as to recreate giap nuoc, a cat-and-mouse game visible even to contemporary observers (p. 41).
Biggs thinks with objects, and one delightful aspect of Quagmire is the many surprising connections that this thought process offers. For example, the reader sees technology's role in reshaping the delta environment, from Jules Verne-esque dredges to small Kohler-made engines (may ko-le) that also served as irrigation pumps (pp. 44, 200–1, 207). Biggs finds these things at local museums and in the writings of Vietnamese such as Nguyen Hien Le. Furthermore, he laudably adopts the perspective of someone in the bow of a three-sided boat (ghe tam ban) with an outboard motor putt-putting in the background, the vantage point from which the majority of people have viewed the delta. Conversations with peasants show the ambiguity of postcolonial memories as pragmatic farmers recall the often better management techniques employed during the French period (p. 55).
As with many other Mekong Delta narratives, Quagmire does not spend much time on non-Vietnamese communities in the region. Almost all of the responsibility for past environmental change in Biggs's narrative lies with the Vietnamese. Given the vitality of the Khmer, the Cham, and other groups in the delta, readers may want more explicit treatment of their histories and their contributions to reforming relations between nature and society. This is where the third book zooms in.
Philip Taylor's The Khmer Lands of Vietnam offers a theoretically rich, deeply researched study of seven ecological subregions of the Khmer communities of southern Vietnam. In Khmer, this region is called Kampuchea Krom, or Lower Cambodia, a term with multiple referents that include both the physical geography of the Mekong Delta and a geohistory of a formerly expansive homeland. Drawing from over a decade of fieldwork, Taylor examines the role that narrative has played in how Khmer have experienced and shaped their natural and social surroundings in order “to understand how Khmers live in this environmental context and construe their place within it” (p. 5).
The book's seven chapters cover the coastal dune belt, the coastal river-dune complex, freshwater rivers, saltwater rivers, flooded mountains, oceanside mountains, and the northeast uplands. For Taylor, each of these subregions constitutes a theoretically significant social and geographical unit, “more extensive in scale than the village, yet far smaller and more intimate than the nation” (p. 13). This structure enables him “to better identify historical continuities and disjunctures and to grasp the locally sensitive nature of Khmer historical consciousness” (p. 13). It also reflects his contention that “all stories told within this region are imbued with an acute sense of historical depth … [that] is emphatically nonlinear” (p. 161). His narrative, too, flows and ebbs like a tidal oscillation.
Taylor's book offers compelling reasons why the Vietnamese nationalist framework employed in Biggs's book, which generally views the Khmer “as ecologically marginal,” is limiting. Taylor “tests the contention that Khmers have been overwhelmed by, excluded from, or resistant to history, by situating Khmers within the environmental history of their region, both as protagonists and narrators of that history” (p. 5). He argues that while nation-building projects may have made a larger impact on the environment, communities such as the Khmer Krom have played their part. In addition, his research suggests that successful responses to environmental crises may depend on such communities.
As with Quagmire, The Khmer Lands of Vietnam makes wonderful use of environmental puzzles to advance its narrative. For example, in chapter 1, Taylor wonders how the coastal dunes belt, “this alternately inundated and arid region has been able to sustain such a large Khmer population. The answer lies,” he continues, “with … the phno … elevated ridges of coarse sandy soil” (p. 33). Taylor includes helpful sketches that show the salient ecological features of phno, pointing out that these ridges are not merely topological features but occupy higher ground in the Khmer mental universe as well. Taylor concludes the first chapter by showing how the phno are the key to untangling a range of paradoxes about the Khmer community in the coastal dune belt (p. 66).
Because I learned so much from Taylor, I wish that he had more explicitly compared the Khmer Krom with other ethnic minorities in Vietnam and elsewhere, something that he is well-positioned to do given his previous study of the Mekong Delta's Muslim Cham. For example, I would have liked to learn what Taylor thinks about how nature gives rise to, and impedes, national integration and community strength elsewhere across the globe. Developing such a theoretical framework would have invited an even wider audience to enjoy his fascinating study.
I would assign all three of these books (at least selected chapters) in advanced undergraduate and graduate courses, as they offer a good basis for discussion about the benefits and costs of various representations of nature. Gunn gives us a political economy approach that casts the individual as largely at the mercy of social forces; Biggs shows us a nature composed of documents, science, and the state in which ecology, local inhabitants, and nation-builders share responsibility for environmental change; and Taylor presents us with a nature formed out of oral accounts, religion, and non-state actors who collectively contribute to the shaping of the delta. While these books do not give us the answers to who and what is to blame for complex environmental problems, they do point us toward the right questions.
