There is arguably no other critical ecological issue facing mainland Southeast Asia today than the over-damming of the Mekong River and its tributaries, which threatens the livelihoods of populations across the six countries through which it passes. The immense technological impact that such anthropogenic modifications have had on fluvial ecosystems has produced an important corpus of work that reconsiders hydropower generation as a solution to poverty alleviation and global climate change in the age of the Anthropocene. Jerome Whitington's ethnography of commercial sustainability practices enacted by a public-private hydropower company in late socialist Laos, dubbed the “battery” of the region, is a welcome addition to this growing body of literature. In Anthropogenic Rivers, he argues for attention to the “ontological politics of uncertainty,” rather than the more usual focus on risk assessment and prediction, as a means to better understand the managerial logics, ethics, and epistemologies of sustainability that inform the self-regulation of environmental performance under conditions of “late industrialism.”
In many ways, Anthropogenic Rivers resonates with earlier, now classic ethnographies of development work, with its focus on the limits of expert knowledge and technological interventions by mostly male, Anglophone actors who hold dissimilar views—also from Laotian officials—on hydro-utopian projects to reverse underdevelopment and promote economic growth. In this case, however, the desire to improve is value driven by stakeholders who constitute an envisaged “multilateral environmentalism” (p. 63) informed by competing economic interests, political possibilities, and power asymmetries. Whitington's long-term ethnographic research on the Theun-Hinboun Dam, a public-private partnership and “sustainability experiment,” takes a unique approach to its object of study: the environmental reforms that the power company carried out in response to a rights-based, activist campaign that exposed the dam's socioecological impacts after construction.
The result is a richly detailed ethnography of collaborative practice and the oft futile negotiations that unfolded among hydropower management, environmental scientists, and transnational activists who unmasked the project's systemic vulnerabilities. In advocating for an ontological approach to political ecological action, Whitington shows how futile attempts to improve environmental performance—and, by extension, villagers’ lives—introduced an American-style form of flexible managerialism to advance best practices of sustainability. Over the course of the book, Whitington shows how this well-intended approach to environmental reform inadvertently created more chaos and instability than certainty, leading to a crisis of expertise. The uncertainty produced by capitalist actors, Whitington concludes, emerges as a productive methodology for assessing the limits of expert knowledge and its objects that “form a hierarchical structural condition” (p. 151).
Anthropogenic Rivers consists of five ethnographic chapters, along with a comprehensive introduction and conclusion on the unpredictability of technological interventions in “late industrial ecologies.” Chapters are interspersed with short narrative interludes that provide broader context for some of the main Anglophone actors in the book, in addition to a deeper theoretical reflection on uncertainty that might have been more fitting for the conclusion. It is in the last interlude—curiously, on a Hmong village seemingly outside the area of impact—that we get a glimpse of the challenges that Whitington faced when conducting research with Laotians.
Chapter 1 provides readers with a wider political economic context for understanding the heterogeneous terrain of the “neoliberal” Theun-Hinboun hydropower project and its ecological harm to human and nonhuman life. For the (still communist) Lao technocratic state, dams have proved an essential feature of its “postsocialist developmentalism” and vision of modernization to overcome global isolation, even as the landlocked country exports most of its energy to feed demand elsewhere. Anti-dam activism as a form of “technical entrepreneurialism” is the focus of chapter 2. Here Whitington traces the diverse political, spatial, and knowledge-based strategies that activists used to bring attention to the scale of human and ecological devastation that befell some of the country's most vulnerable riverine populations.
The design and implementation of an environmental action plan to remedy damage and promote longer-term sustainability form the basis of chapters 3 and 4. In chapter 3, the ethos of performance-based, image-driven management, as goodwill social practice in response to activist demands, is shown to obscure accountability and produce deliberate uncertainty that fueled suspicions of “greenwashing” (p. 142). Chapter 4 shifts from the logics of neoliberal managerialism to the ethics of professionalism, to a team of consultants charged with both the assessment of sustainability efforts and the “engineering” of technical reports (p. 154) that produced improvisational, knowledge-based recommendations to improve the efficacy of mitigation.
Finally, in chapter 5, the anthropogenic river comes to life. Here, the story turns to the people affected by hydropower development, those villagers who have not been the beneficiaries of state-led modernization nor the company's livelihood interventions that promoted entrepreneurialism. This chapter best renders ethnographically the human and ecological costs of the dam-induced erosion and water-level fluctuations detailed in the book, as well as villagers’ ambivalence about the knowledge and planning thrust upon them.
Anthropogenic Rivers makes a compelling intervention in scholarship on urban infrastructure and the anthropology of expertise by highlighting the contingent uncertainties of technologically driven development. It will appeal to a wide academic readership interested in science and technology studies, environmental anthropology, and transnational knowledge economies. I adopted it for an upper-division course on the anthropology of Southeast Asia and found that the text inspired students to think more deeply about the relationship between techno-ecological change and social inequalities, and how infrastructure increasingly serves the interests of capital rather than the public good.
While impressive in its scope of theorization, the book might have benefited from the inclusion of additional Lao voices, also as experts, and earlier in the text. As an “ethnography of white men in Asia” (p. 109), the narrative likewise felt dated at times. The global players in Lao's hydropower industry have radically changed as a result of China's massive infrastructural investments over the past decade as part of its Belt and Road Initiative. This geopolitical “ascent of Asia” might have been briefly acknowledged if not contextualized in a short postscript.
Lastly, I would like to have seen a deeper discussion of how Laos constitutes a “late industrial” (late industrializing?) environment—a term commonly used by scholars to identify deteriorating infrastructure in industrialized economies, rather than the construction of new infrastructure in impoverished and “underdeveloped” countries like Laos—the most heavily bombed nation in the world. This violent history adds another complex layer to the ontological politics of uncertainty and the ability of the Lao population to achieve social and environmental justice.
