Potency
Around twenty years ago, people who lived by the river in northern Thailand’s Chiang Khong district noticed that the water level was not stable anymore. When there was no rain, the water level rose. When there was rain, the river remained dry. In the villages, people did not know what caused these changes, nor were they notified of any change to expect.
Unlike most weeks, the women who collect riverweed in the early mornings by the border of Laos tell us that they have been able to pick it for several days in a row. The waters have been more stable since it is Chinese New Year. Upstream, economic activities have lulled and the dam gates have not been opened. The specter of the dam can be felt by those who sense the river closely. Chiang Khong, which sits in the very northwestern tip of the country, is the first location in Thailand to feel the effects of the dams upstream. The river informs people downstream that its pulse has changed. The collective of women riverweed harvesters speak to the scale of the Chinese economy, but from an intimate and up-close perspective.
The scale of the global economy is literally a sensorial experience. While harvesting weeds out of the river, harvesters can actually feel the difference in economic activity upstream in China. They can feel when there is an economic pause.
Today, measuring the water has become a site of epistemic contestation and claim-making. Interregional organizations such as the Mekong River Commission mediate datasets collected from the entire river to facilitate their use in state-supported projects. At the same time, measurements of the Mekong’s water’s depth are regularly being recorded by local environmentalists from the Chiang Khong Conservation Group, situated on the Thai-Lao border along the banks of the Mekong. The school organizes itself across a network of villages who share concerns over the river’s increasingly erratic pulse and form their own information distribution networks and knowledge archives.
