Mekong Dreaming: Life and Death Along a Changing River by Andrew Alan Johnson (review)

Abstract

T Mekong River, which divides Thailand and Laos, runs through six countries. Life along the river has changed drastically in recent years due to—among other factors—the construction of a dam in China that has led to fluctuations in water levels. Mekong Dreaming explores the conflicts and contradictions of living along a changing river, paying special attention to both the generative power of non-humans and the ways those living along the river confront the uncertainties that recent changes have generated. Drawing on fieldwork in the town of Ban Beuk (a pseudonym), Andrew Alan Johnson provides an insightful examination not just of how marginalized communities respond to the uncertainties of environmental change but also how the unknown can itself generate new possibilities. Located in Isan (the north-eastern, Lao-speaking part of Thailand), Ban Beuk is a fishing, border, and migrant town. Since the construction of the dam, the river has started to act “against nature” (1), as one of Johnson’s friends describes it. The future is uncertain as the changing river embodies two very different potentialities in people’s imagination: utopian and apocalyptic. For those living along its banks, the river has the potential to usher in prosperity as much as it is associated with the potential for environmental, economic, and political catastrophe. Johnson explores how human, nonhuman, and inhuman relations are affected by the infrastructural changes that have taken place in recent years—the inhuman here referring to “those beings whose subject position is uninhabitable or unlocatable” (7). In doing so, the author shows how humans and non-humans are entangled as well as how infrastructure itself can appear as an unknown, occult force. “From the vantage point of Ban Beuk, dams and spirits are