Mekong Dreaming: Life and Death Along a Changing River

The Mekong River has undergone vast infrastructural changes in recent years, including the construction of dams across its main stream. These projects, along with the introduction of new fish species, changing political fortunes, and international migrant labor, have all made a profound impact upon the lives of those residing on the great river. It also impacts how they dream. In Mekong Dreaming, Andrew Alan Johnson explores the changing relationship between the river and the residents of Ban Beuk, a village on the Thailand-Laos border, by focusing on the effect that construction has had on human and inhuman elements of the villagers' world. Johnson shows how inhabitants come to terms with the profound impact that remote, intangible, and yet powerful forces-from global markets and remote bureaucrats to ghosts, spirits, and gods-have on their livelihoods. Through dreams, migration, new religious practices, and new ways of dwelling on a changed river, inhabitants struggle to understand and affect the distant, the inassimilable, and the occult, which offer both sources of power and potential disaster.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments  ix Introduction.  Through a Glass, Darkly  1 1. Naga and Garuda  29 2. River Beings  69 3. Dwelling under Distant Suns  104 4. The River Grew Tired of Us  130 5. Human and Inhuman Worlds  161 Notes  171 Bibliography  179 Index  193

About the Author :
Andrew Alan Johnson is a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of Ghosts of the New City: Spirits, Urbanity, and the Ruins of Progress in Chiang Mai.

Review :
“Mekong Dreaming is both an exemplary work of ethnography and a timely and important intervention in contemporary debates in anthropological theory. Focusing on northeast Thailand and the effects of dam construction on the Mekong among local fishing and farming communities, this book's original contribution consists in its foregrounding of uncertainty and unknowability in the lived experience of non-western cosmologies.” - Stuart J. McLean, coeditor of (Crumpled Paper Boat: Experiments in Ethnographic Writing) “Andrew Alan Johnson's lucid and richly detailed ethnography of the Thai-Lao border shows how the inchoate and the unknowable can be apprehended through genuinely empirical research. In this masterful analysis, Johnson shows how a marginalized population grapples with the intensified environmental uncertainties generated by modern technology and political upheaval by deploying a cosmological vision that enfolds piety, potentiality, and materiality in a tangled experiential frame.” - Michael Herzfeld, author of (Siege of the Spirits: Community and Polity in Bangkok) "The book is clearly written, presenting a compelling narrative of daily life and also delving into complex topics without drowning in academic jargon. As such it is accessible for both students and experts. . . . The power of Johnson’s approach is that rather than simply casting uncertainty as a negative, he explores the ways in which uncertainty-the power of 'maybe'-can act as a potency rather than simply something to be worked around." - Erin B. Taylor (Anthropology Book Forum) “Mekong Dreaming is a lovely, fluent ethnography of a river and its political ecology, focusing on the people on one bank of the Mekong where it forms a border between Thailand and Laos…. Johnson’s style is crisp and engaging and his dealings with recent theory are all concrete and pointed…. Johnson has produced political ethnography of a high order.” - Leo Coleman (PoLAR Online) “This accessible anthropological work, Mekong Dreaming, demonstrates how infrastructural projects-in this case, hydropower dams on the Mekong-interrupt and reconfigure the social life of the river and relations of those whose fate has long been intertwined with its currents.” - Dominique Dillabough-Lefebvre (LSE Review of Books) “Johnson’s argument is complex, deftly interweaving fields as diverse as environmental anthropology, migration studies, Thai animism and mediumship, border studies, and more. The resulting ethnography is illuminating and compelling.” - Mary Beth Mills (Journal of Anthropological Research) “Johnson’s writing is a pleasure: eclectic, erudite and sometimes eccentric.... He handles weighty concepts lightly, and doesn’t let unwieldy terminology upset the flow of the very reader-friendly text. He comes across as a committed, skilled and very human fieldworker.” - Ashley Carruthers (Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology) “[Mekong Dreaming] will be a useful text in anthropology courses. I highly recommend this book as it...provides new and important insights.” - Ian G. Baird (Sojourn) “[Mekong Dreaming] provides crucial insights into the interconnectedness between daily life, environment, and religious experiences.” - Grzegorz Fraszczak (Religious Studies Review) “Johnson’s Mekong Dreaming is part of a growing trend to experiment with what a speculative realist anthropological analysis might look like. . . . Like the best works of writing, the theoretical outlook is reflected in both the style and structure of the book. Johnson takes us on a dream-like journey of life along an unstable river that has grown out of sync.” - Judith Bovensiepen (Anthropological Quarterly) "This is a thought-provoking anthropology book. . . . This book contributes to the study of the co-production of nature and society that is a field of political ecology. The author’s argument is relevant to scholarly debates on ontological uncertainty and the co-production of socionature, which have become the most recent political ecological approaches for examining socioecological relations." - Kanokwan Manorom (Pacific Affairs)