In a stirring attempt to understand the muddiness of late industrial environments, Jerome Whitington, the author of Anthropogenic Rivers, investigates the enigma that is Lao hydropower development and its complex ecological relations constituted by the condition of uncertainty. The book provides a rare ethnography of the social spaces where environmental knowledge and problems are produced, negotiated and managed.
The opening pages of Anthropogenic Rivers introduce readers to a typical exchange between an environmental consultant and two hydropower company project managers. The conversation reveals the gulf between the desire for authoritative knowledge and the management of underdetermined, unpredictable realities of riparian ecologies. Through the vignette, the overall argument of the book becomes discernible. Anthropogenic rivers are rivers transformed by infrastructures of knowledge, practical technique, and regulatory control, which in turn, crucially ‘transform people's lives in ways that demand experimentation on new capacities for living’ (p. 19). Re-imagining the complex assemblage of actors and relationships that constitute the sociality of hydropower development in Laos as a ‘sustainability enclave’ (p. 36), Whitington brings to focus the power relations among government officials, hydropower dam developers, transnational activists, environmental consultants and local villagers through five substantial chapters, each highlighting particular relations and motivations that both produce and respond to uncertainty.
The Theun-Hinboun Hydropower project, completed in 1998, serves as the subject around which disparate knowledges and expertise orbit and converge. Chapter 1 traces how anthropogenic rivers ‘operate as an imaginative and seductive potential in Laos’ postsocialist political affairs’ (p. 35), drawing on the country's history of marginalisation. Chapters 2 and 3 take readers into the relational worlds of the transnational activists and project managers, respectively. Whereas activists produce uncertainty by problematising hydropower's authoritative expertise and forcing developers and financiers to respond to the uncertainties of life along Lao rivers (p. 75), project managers play key roles in managing uncertainty by speaking to different interests and performing relationships, joint efforts and sustainable projects in villages. Chapters 4 and 5 look closely at the relationships and motivations of the environmental consultants, the project's technical staff and local villagers. Altogether, the chapters reveal that the knowledge and expertise, produced from and through assessments and village projects, are often negotiated and tempered by empathy and power relations. In negotiating uncertainty, managers, consultants and others in the sustainability enclave become ‘riparian creatures’ (p. 9).
Anthropogenic Rivers offers rich insights into the motivations and negotiations that take place behind the closed doors of project offices and in villagers’ homes. Much of the popular understandings of hydropower development in Laos comes from reports by NGOs and environmental consultants. These are often seen as deconstructing and creating fissures in authoritative truth claims of dam developers and government officials. By seeking to understand how these documents materialise, Whitington skilfully fleshes out the uncertainties that constitute these truth claims. In much the same way, his interactions with project managers and local villagers present them as relatable figures, often (re)acting to conditions of uncertainty—those future opportunities and threats unknown (p. 227).
The precarious nature of anthropogenic rivers, similar to other late industrial environments, introduces new ecological situations for those living with rivers. Whitington's inclusion of neologisms like the risky rice paddy (naa siang in Lao) is a novel and welcome example of the emerging ecologies produced by the Theun-Hinboun Dam (pp. 205–7). This, along with the cultivation of unproductive plots of land and the collection of non-timber forest products during the wet season (when villagers usually cultivate rice), provide readers with an opportunity to understand how people respond to uncertainty despite not knowing fully what the future of their actions hold. A view of these intimate spaces is rare in attempts to understand hydropower dam impacts. Whitington's ability to bring these to the foreground speaks his commitment to the marginal.
While there are ethnographies considering the positions and outlooks of the project's managers and environmental consultants, and local villagers to an extent, in this book, an ethnography of Lao state officials and the principle purchaser of Lao electricity, the Electricity Generating Authority of Thailand (EGAT), remains unexpectedly missing. For Whitington, these actors do play a critical role in the sustainability enclave and he does point out that the book moves from ‘context-poor to context-rich’ chapters, but does not elaborate on the reasons for the poverty (p. 26). It may be that such sensitive spaces of interaction eluded him because of his positionality or that accessibility to, and ethnography of, the project spaces near the dam site proved more fruitful than spaces beyond.
Whitington's engagement with theories of the Anthopos are effective in framing his questions of uncertainty in late industrial environments. At times, such lengthy theoretical engagements were overwhelming and distracting from the larger flowing narrative. Still, Anthropogenic Rivers has a wealth of valuable insights beneficial for anthropologists, geographers, and others interested in the role and value of knowledge in the production of uncertainty.
There is much to appreciate about this book. Following the collapse of one of the saddle dams of the Xe-Pian Xe-Namnoy Hydroelectric Power Project in July 2018, one of the potential threats of any dam became reality. Almost five years later, local villagers still struggle to live with new, emerging ecological realities. Neither company nor government expertise could guarantee that another such disaster would not occur again. Still, all parties move tenuously forward into a future underdetermined, acting on potential opportunities and threats. More than a lesson about how rivers become anthropogenic or how humans become riparian creatures, Anthropogenic Rivers provides a framework for understanding how humanity and nature co-constitute each other through fraught power relations, in the production of uncertainty.
