Water and its Masters
Andrew Alan Johnson
The politics of the natural world – the phrase evokes a struggle over resources and rights. It calls for us to examine the unequal ways in which rivers are diverted, the iniquities of extraction, soil degradation, and class hierarchy. How do some communities get access to certain things, while others do not? Is water to be diverted to irrigation in rich rice-growing areas, or harnessed for hydropower? When floodwaters come, which communities are spared, and which ones are sacrificed?
These are political questions. Politics is where competing forces make demands and seek to ground such demands in assertions of legitimacy. But left unexamined here are those features of the world that fall out of calculation: What is a resource, and what does it mean to render something – e.g., a river – a resource to be used rather than a sovereign entity to be lived with?
Marisol de la Cadena and Mario Blaser (2019) write of “extractivism,” an orientation towards the natural world where resources exist to be utilized by humans, and where the only salient political question is how to best distribute them. But this presupposes a world where humans are the only agentive beings, the only ones with a will to decide what is to be done.
The losses experienced by communities faced with extraction – environmental degradation, pollution, climate change, species loss – also affect us at the sensory, the poetic, and the religious levels; they are losses that are often not factored into an ideology that holds progress to be moving forward in an endlessly upward line. A river that rises and falls seasonally: does this have value beyond the material benefits it may provide, beyond the irrigation the river gives to fields or the protein the flesh of its fish contains?
These are pressing issues on the Mekong River, where I have conducted my field research for just over a decade, and where the great flow of the river marks the border between Laos and Lao-speaking parts of Thailand. Here, the river is a potent symbol of both the division between two often antagonistic nation-states and, on a smaller scale, the unity between kin groups on either side. Here, too, the river is a constant presence in the minds and lives of those living on its banks: a harbor of benevolent or hostile supernatural entities, a source of coolness in the hot season, a place of escape and refuge, or simply a constant companion.
But, as Solveig Qu Suess emphasizes in her video work, the river is changing. As tensions between Laos and Thailand ease, and as each country through which the river flows seeks to mobilize its own potential for green energy, container shipping commerce, or other vehicles of development, the river has seen an explosion of hydropower. Some projects underway include massive state-run hydropower dams, the blasting of rapids midstream, and smaller dams constructed quickly with an eye towards fast profits for investors (see Eyler, 2019). These projects have proved tragic in many cases, from the collapse of the Xepian Xe Namnoy Dam in Laos (see Souvannaseng, 2024) to the destruction of fisheries, the irregular flow of water into the Tonle Sap Lake in Cambodia, and the decline of sediment in the Mekong Delta.
In contrast to such narratives of decline and destruction, progress – the movement of a line upwards - is what is promised by hydropower developers, both state and private. A video by CH Karncharg, the Thai “green energy” company managing the massive Xayaburi Dam across the Mekong’s flow, shows shirtless Laotian villagers sitting on dirt floors juxtaposed with professional engineers attending to spreadsheets. A narrator promises to “uplift” riparian dwellers, while simultaneously assuring profits to shareholders. This promise is emphasized by the appearance of Western-looking men in business suits (Johnson 2024).
Progress, as presented here, fits a certain model of development: Outdated livelihoods will be exchanged in favor of air-conditioned office jobs. Education is devised to eliminate the perceived backwardness of the past. In short, such a conception seeks to transform the natural world into a series of numbers: Hydropower is more lucrative than fishing, and flows expended in floodwaters can be made more productive in dams. Power and knowledge reside in the owners of these numbers, who have the authority to help their non-knowledgeable subjects, and, in the process, enrich themselves. With the triumph of the planner’s grid, profit, prosperity, and progress are all possible.
The suggestion, as the fishers with whom I worked offered, that the actualities of the river might differ from its representations on the planner’s grid present challenges to this conceptualization of knowledge in that they suggest potentials that have not made it into the figurative spreadsheet. Fishers’ claims that the river held spiritual potential were often dismissed as superstition by middle-class interlocutors; those involved in development in the region hinted to me that I, a Westerner, was seeking to prevent fishers from achieving a better, developed future. At the same time, middle-class environmental activists presented local orientations towards the river in ways that might be more palatable for an international audience.
For instance, according to legend, a certain deep pool in the Mekong’s flow near where I have conducted my field research is said to hold the supernatural Catfish King. This lord forbade fishing in his home at particular times of the year, when fish conduct a Buddhist retreat to underwater holy sites – temples and shrines made by catfish, for catfish. The world thus espoused is compelling in its suggestion of a kinship between animals and humans, of worlds of care in parallel, but today there is only an altar at the riverbank to mark it. As catches have declined, desperate fishers have braved the moratorium, and nets now hang in the pool, as they do elsewhere.
In recent years, many fishers have speculated that the moratorium is either an expression of meaningless superstition or, perhaps, a reasonable environmental measure if proven to be ecologically sound. The possibility of a politics that might treat fish as agentive beings (and, indeed, religious beings) has thus been dismissed, superseded either by an expression of a need to “uplift” fishers or a dismissal of the religious significance of the Catfish King to a fish stock management policy. In other words, an alternate world that recognizes a co-dwelling with the river has become numbers on either an economist’s or ecologist’s spreadsheet.
Who has the power to decide how the natural world is managed? In the context of China, Suess presents a link between good governance and water management in Chinese idioms – a good ruler was one who managed water well. Indeed, a statement from the Chinese Ministry of Water Resources on the retention of waters upstream assured foreign governments that hydropower on the Mekong was storing and releasing floodwaters “properly” and “appropriately” (Siow, 2021). Yet, note the contradictions and ironies – the manager of the water is far removed from its banks, and the yearly fluctuations and variations in the water’s course are, somehow, neither proper nor appropriate. Again, the planner’s grid creates the river, and the river’s own deviations from expectations render it “improper,” a threat to both the progress narrative and the political authority derived from it.
There are those who can project their reality onto the world, and those whose vision does not play into the projection. In today’s economic conditions, however, development has become increasingly dislocated from those who are affected by it. As Antonia Hernández shows in her work, neoliberal finance constructs a world in which locating who is making decisions and who is affected is increasingly difficult – the calculations of investors located far off in Canada make decisions that directly impact the lives of Chilean farmers. Similarly, in Suess’s piece, individuals must divine the action of distant dam controllers via incremental changes in the water or cryptic revelations from travelers. The potent actors in this world are not embedded in the locality, but are distant, and their motives and methods often inscrutable.
Juxtapose this profit-driven grid with the actualities of the river, and the ways of knowing the river embodied by those living on its banks. For the fishers with whom I lived and worked, the river was a constant presence – a place where their children played (and where they, as children, swam), a topic of conversation, a constant murmur in the background, where one could moor one’s boat on an island midstream and sit amidst the flow during the cool of the day with a friend. And, at times, the river was a source of dreams. In these dreams, fluvial spirits – the naga, for example, or the Catfish King – often sent messages to fishers, guiding them to sources of prosperity: promising catches or things less tangible. Shrines to these spirits dot the riverbank, recognizing that the river’s flow extends – at least for those who pause to make offerings or honk when passing by – beyond the scope and scale of the human.
Spirits are not passive. Rather, they seek out their constituents as they make promises or threats: fish catches, lottery numbers, car accidents, love affairs, and the like. According to local memory, spirits might even take human form and marry into the community, blending the bloodlines of the community with the essence of the river. There is an element of seduction (Ingold, 2000), appeal, and even trickery (Willerslev, 2012) to human-spirit interactions that creates a means through which individuals might access those sources of power otherwise denied to them.
Here, I turn to the Andes, and the work of Marisol De la Cadena (2015), who writes of the “owners of the will.” These are those beings whose will is able to be turned into reality – those whose plans actually bear fruit. As on the Mekong, it is not only those in political power who are “owners of the will.” In addition, tirakuna, mountains themselves, hold sway over local Quechua villagers. What this indicates is not an atavistic holdover of Inca ritual beliefs, but a recognition that the animate forces of the universe are far more complicated than an economist’s spreadsheet would indicate, that humans, especially those rendered less powerful by their situatedness vis-à-vis the state or capital, exist within a much larger network of complex and unequal relations. This network is one that humans must live with, not manage – a lesson increasingly becoming apparent.
But, as with the river spirits, there are ways that one can interact with such beings. Just as with a state official or landowner, one can cajole, charm, bribe, or appeal to such an owner of the will. However, in a world governed by distant decisions and distant finance, where decisions are made based upon a calculus of resources and benefits, such influence wanes.
The challenge that Suess and Hernández engage with – and which resonates with my own fieldwork – is that as owners of the will – those that enact change – grow increasingly distant and disparate, dealing with them involves new improvised methods: finding new sources of information about their actions, or speaking to members of other disparate networks facing similar issues (environmental movements, for instance).
Each of these methods also involves an improvisation in perceiving and existing with water. Water may be a resource subject to extraction and exploitation, as the planner tells us, but it is also a source of connection, a place of memory, a home to other and alternate owners of the will. What is often lost sight of is the sense of embeddedness in the world—a notion that highlights that humans’ obligations toward nature, water in this case, extend through their capabilities and potentials as a single node in a broader network of connections.
Literature
Blaser, M., & De la Cadena, M. (2019). The uncommons: An introduction. Anthropologica, 59(1), 185–193.
De la Cadena, M. (2015). Earth beings: Ecologies of practice across Andean worlds. Duke University Press.
Eyler, B. (2019). Last days of the mighty Mekong. Zed Books.
Ingold, T. (2000). The Perception of the environment: Essays of livelihood, dwelling and skill. Routledge.
Johnson, A. A. (2024). Hidden flows: Hydropower and the rhythms of development on the Mekong. Pacific Affairs 97(2), 391-409.
Johnson, A. A. (2020). Mekong dreaming: life and death along a changing river. Duke University Press.
Siow, M. (2021, August 11). China denies Mekong River water levels fell due to flow restrictions from Jinghong hydropower dam. South China Morning Post. https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/health-environment/article/3144718/china-denies-mekong-river-water-levels-fell-due-flow
Souvannaseng, P. (2024). Fast finance and the political economy of catastrophic dam collapse in Lao PDR: The case of Xe Pian-Xe Namnoy. Pacific Affairs 97(2), 261-283.
Willerslev, R. (2012). Laughing at the spirits in North Siberia: Is animism being taken too seriously? e-flux 36. https://www.e-flux.com/journal/36/61261/laughing-at-the-spirits-in-north-siberia-is-animism-being-taken-too-seriously/
Andrew Alan Johnson is an Associate Professor in the Department of Social Anthropology at Stockholm University. His work concerns water, popular religion, and urbanism in Southeast Asia. He is the author of Ghosts of the New City (University of Hawaii Press, 2014) and Mekong Dreaming (Duke University Press, 2020), and is the senior historian for Sid Meier's Civilization VII at Firaxis Games.