Power and the River Lords: Hydropower, Spirits, and Heroes on the Mekong

Abstract

The Mekong River is experiencing a crisis, with water flows and flood cycles rendered unstable owing to large-scale hydropower development in China and Laos. As communities face the radical decline of fisheries and unexpected floods and ebbs, residents and regional NGOs alike turn toward voices of moral authority and power to seek to mitigate these losses. But the kinds of authority sought out by fishers on the river are not the same as those identified by environmental groups; “spirit lords” and other divine figures enter into the conversation just as much as activists and lobbyists. In addition, these religious figures present multiple perspectives on how to live in a changed world and a model of resistance that challenges how we might see political power and its heroes.

“You know about that dam, the one in Sayaburi, in Laos? They say that when they build it, all the people here are going to suffer. People will lose their livelihoods. They will die. How can you help us?” This is a common question from fishermen along the stretch of the Mekong between Thailand and Laos. It is posed to virtually anyone—visiting Thai NGO workers, government officials, foreign anthropologists. In this case, the question is spoken into the ear of Mae Ooi, an older woman dressed in a bright floral-print shirt. Her eyes are tightly shut, and her face has a look of deep thought as she sits on a bamboo mat in the glade behind the Temple of the Catfish Pond. But the question wasn’t directed at her. Instead, it is posed to the being inhabiting her body—a divine spirit of an island midstream in the river, the “island king” (jao don). Today is the day of his propitiation, when villagers from the nearby towns construct an altar, bring in a man skilled at playing the trance-inducing khaen (bamboo saxophone), and kill a pig to make raw pork larb. On this day, once a year, the island king holds court, listening to the problems of his community. Typically, these were disputes between neighbors: a person had taken another farmer’s buffalo and claimed it as his own, or a wife wouldn’t stop arguing with her husband. But a new political issue between Bangkok and the hinterlands had arisen, a question about developers’ plans for the river and ways of life downstream.

“How can you help us?” is an appeal to power, to a hero. It is a call to return to old notions of ownership and lordship, embodied in the Thai-Lao term for the being inhabiting Mae Ooi’s body—the jao: owner, protector, king, custodian, master.¹ It is a question that places international development on an equal footing with supernatural lordship, bringing geopolitics into juxtaposition with ghosts and framing both as potential river lords; in short, it points to worlds outside the purview of planning.² It is a call from the dutiful subjects of an otherworldly jao. But the community is not entirely as it was. As fragmentations emerge in the wake of environmental change, and as conflicts arise within and between communities, what becomes known as “local knowledge” and the identity of the desired hero against a villainous, extractivist outside becomes blurred. Here emerges another voice.

Another spirit was active at the same time, one who mobilized a different set of the population. Phor Khaaw had been dealing with questions of international relations for years. He was a man of about sixty-something, like Mae Ooi, but with long dyed-black hair slicked back, impeccable white clothing despite living in a cave, and a string of Mahayana prayer beads.³ Phor Khaaw—or, rather, the black naga that was his tutelary spirit—had been dealing with questions of international relations for years. How might I evade the nearly ubiquitous scams preying on potential labor migrations? How might I secure a berry-picking contract in Sweden? How might I make sure that my spouse remains faithful in my absence? In response, the black naga offered sound advice for a fee of about three dollars (one hundred Thai baht).

Here are two kinds of heroes: a just lord tied to land and a canny patron adept in international linkages. I juxtapose these two figures in a site fraught with this search for heroes, Ban Beuk, a pseudonymous fishing town on the border between Thailand and Laos, where I conducted fieldwork from 2014 to 2019. While in Ban Beuk, I stayed with a fishing family on the Thai bank and conducted interviews and participant observation with this family, their neighbors, visitors from the opposite side, and others in the community, including Mae Ooi and Phor Khaaw. Foremost in the minds of many of those with whom I worked was the question of what forces would prove efficacious when the present seems so much in flux. As the water rose and fell with no discernible cause, as the quality of the water itself changed from muddy and red to clear and blue, and as unexplained phenomena (a rash of bubbles from a riverbank, a long slow line of sludge running downstream) proliferated, the question of the future and what heroes or villains would shape it loomed large.

I attended several consultations with both Phor Khaaw and Mae Ooi, as an observer and with my own requests. The difference between the two river lords was stark: whereas Mae Ooi held communal meetings in a glade behind the temple (and private meetings in her own home), Phor Khaaw held court in the mouth of a Bronze Age copper mine. There was none of the khaen music here but rather the silence of late afternoon, with cool and often guano-scented breezes emanating from the mouth of the cave. The image here was not that of a Laotian king but of a reusi hermit, a Hindu-Buddhist holy man straight from the murals on the wall of the temple on whose grounds the cave stood.⁴

Marisol de la Cadena and Mario Blaser introduced the concept of the “uncommons”: a union between unlikely and often mutually unrecognized parties striving for a common goal—in their formulation, an end to neo-extractivism, a term that here refers to the large-scale and often destructive extraction of natural resources. Blaser stresses that such extractive efforts can be done in the name of the population or of capital alike; extractivism works on a logic of development and can be present in both socialist and capitalist regimes. Here, the uncommons is a helpful guide that brings diverse forces such as spirit cults into dialogue with NGOs and public policies, where individual actors might not agree on the fundamental basis of their collaborators’ metaphysics but can work together. The framework of the uncommons can show the oversights within these balances, where some (namely, marginalized populations) make (unasked-for) sacrifices so that others might benefit. But the question of heroism must be looked at from multiple levels here: what is the hero that an NGO might imagine, that various members in the community might imagine, or that the state might imagine? Here, too, is where the foreign anthropologist, NGO worker, and spirit overlap. But what kind of hero are these two island kings? They seem to offer two different strategies to exploitation: an assertion of sovereignty or an adaptation to the chaos of the changed world.⁵

Ban Beuk lies in Isan, the Lao-speaking part of Thailand and the poorest and most arid part of the country. Geographically, Isan is within the Mekong watershed, and Lao language and Mekong water align nearly perfectly—not surprising given that communities before rail and road organized themselves around water transportation. The Mekong itself forms the northern border of the region, flowing along the eastern edge before it disappears into Laos and eventually Cambodia.

The Middle Mekong is little touched by large-scale interventions, unlike the Mekong Delta. But this is changing now. Upstream, where the Mekong runs fast through the spur of the Himalayas, Chinese engineers have built a series of dams. Landlocked Laos sees the trade in hydropower, especially to Thailand, as a source of stable revenue toward party officials in Vientiane.

Chinese and Lao hydropower (and the Thai industries backing the latter), international monitoring agencies, environmentalist movements, and other stakeholders are all potential “lords” of the river. Each stakes their authority on particular justifications, casting heroes and villains, whether these are wise Indigenous people with inherent ecological knowledge, postcolonial states rightfully making use of their own patrimony, rapacious exploiters who care more for profit in the capital than for local producers, or uneducated villagers unwilling to adapt to a global economy. But such an ideological war neglects a viewpoint taken from local lives and with local understandings of stakes very different from those of states and development agencies. It is this perspective, and the question of what its heroes might look like, that I explore here.

In an era when national interests expand to harness resources thought of as national patrimony, the state emerges as the central figure in such conflicts.⁶ In this way, priorities such as the construction of new urban zones, the centralization of government, the spread of capitalization, and flashy new projects such as the Lao-China high-speed rail lines gain more prominence on the national stage than do concerns like fish migrations.⁷ This is especially salient as hydropower emerges as a contested ground between various departments and interest groups based in Bangkok, Vientiane, or Beijing and seeking to acquire bureaucratic power.⁸ In this process, the river remains largely forgotten as material and existing instead of as potential—potential energy, potential investment, and potential capital.⁹ The river is not a river, seen through these eyes—it is a resource.

And here is where the construction of “local knowledge” in the Thai idiom (phumipanya thong-thin) differs from “local knowledge” in Tania Li’s sense.¹⁰ In the Thai idiom of phumipanya, local knowledge refers to wisdom handed down about how to interact with or manage natural resources, often with a more holistic approach than taken by those advocating for development. Yos Santasombat, for instance, refers to local practices that mandate a moratorium on fishing at certain times of the year, framed as fish retreating for the Buddhist rainy season but “really” about permitting fish to hibernate.¹¹ The notion seems self-evident—the term hibernation in Thai plays on the Buddhist monks’ yearly retreat (phansa). For Yos, and for other academics with whom I spoke, the phansa of the fish is metaphorical. But the kinds of knowledge discussed by the fishermen with whom I worked were vastly different. Phansa, for instance, was a literal Buddhist retreat, complete with shrines in deep pools and a convocation with naga spirits. Here is another world, one where fish have their own duties toward their watery lord.

And here, too, emerge different heroes. Kru Tee, a Mekong activist widely lauded as a campaigner against the blasting of rapids further upstream from Ban Beuk, epitomizes a certain kind of hero who appeals to global environmentalist movements.¹² He is wizened but spry, dressed in local garb, and communicates well to foreign sources, framing his work within the language of human rights and ecology. As de la Cadena and Blaser note, these goals are not incommensurable—NGO workers seeking to replicate Kru Tee’s work in the area emphasized both his political struggle and the capacity for nagas and island kings to effect change. Local knowledge, in other words, involves social relationships with the river, not simply wise management.

But how different are Kru Tee and the island king? What to make of an appeal to Mae Ooi, to divine authority rather than to an environmentalist NGO for help? Who becomes read as a hero in international public space, and to whom those directly affected turn for help, raises difficult questions: If we read Indigenous opposition as only relevant when it coincides with our own way of seeing—a charismatic, scientifically literate local political activist, rather than a supernatural entity—what do we miss? And what does it mean that this call to a hero in a local idiom—a call to an island king—goes denied? What, in other words, does it mean to have a jao as a hero?

A Shifting Portrait

Before 2000, the Mekong flowed a muddy red. In the dry season, its bed looked like a scrub forest, with boulders topped with bushes—bushes that bore red fruit that fish would distribute. In September and October, the river would flood, its waters leaping in some places up nine meters. The scrub forest turned into a vast open plain of water. As these waters receded, that thick red silt would be deposited along the banks, leaving a rich layer of sediment for the dry season’s crop.

But the river is not just water, rocks, and trees. The world of fish expands and contracts with the monsoon pulse; the very boundaries of an aquatic world move (unlike, significantly, property lines drawn on maps). As former riverbank farms are submerged, all that leftover detritus, plant matter, insect larvae, and other material enters this underwater realm. The rise of flood water opens places of refuge, where certain kinds of catfish lay their eggs in small streams inaccessible by predatory fish in other seasons. The red water, now deep and thick, gives fish room to move away from fishing spots but also, significantly, hides the nets placed there to trap them.

Land and water exist in a particular kind of tension.¹³ As water rises, land shrinks, and vice versa. Buffalo and dogs comb the riverbank in the water’s ebb, and catfish and carp explore the same terrain in a different month. Over this shifting terrain is a system of sovereignty: those buffalo and dogs have owners, jao, though human masters and not kingly ones. Each shares a notion of sovereignty over a notably uncontrollable material, water.

Sovereignty on the river is more complicated than maps would have it. On a property map, lines of ownership extend from the public highway down to the river’s edge, itself a line on a map: here is water, here is land. Here is Pong’s land, here is Lert’s. Here is Laos, here is Thailand. The water itself is a gray area. At the docks, Lao and Thai ferrymen would half jokingly, half seriously comment that the Mekong belonged to Laos, every drop, and that Thais were only permitted on the river from a sense of benevolent fraternity.

Indeed, the flag of Laos itself depicts the blue wash of the Mekong in the center, flanked on either side by red, indicating the ethnic Lao blood on either side of the river. Thais, often invoking the authority of Google Maps, would place the boundary in the center of the river, at the deep channel marker. In practicality, the river was used by both, disregarding the international boundary. Indeed, during my stay in Ban Beuk it took some convincing to get out of social invitations on the Lao bank, as my protestations that I did not hold a Lao visa were simply waved away: “They don’t care! My cousin is a policeman in Laos! He’ll intervene if someone has a problem [with you].”

Further, there is another system of sovereignty that exists in the river. Luang mong (lit. “tricks of the eyes”), the gill nets that are invisible in red water, are owned just as land property is owned, bought, sold, inherited, and leased. These are hydrological features defined by how they move. An eddy (wern), for instance, might be delineated by its swirl. If Pong, the wealthiest fisherman in Ban Beuk, owns the fishing rights to hang his nets in one particular eddy, the eddy’s location is determined by how the water moves on that particular day. So long as the boulders remain in place, that eddy will reappear, even if it vanishes in the rainy season. Where the water is swirling at a given point in time, there is Pong’s property, even if that swirl expands or contracts a day later. But only as long as the boulders remain in place; recall the Chinese plans to blast rapids along the Mekong’s flow to open channels for shipping.

Fishing this river requires a knowledge of the river’s hydrology and how it intersects with the animal world. When the water is low, fish hide under boulders and can be caught with a dip net. Chasing fish to a dead end in an eddy allows one to use a throw net. At times, these are techniques ordained by religious knowledge; the catfish king of the Golden Pool forbids fishermen to hang nets in his pool in times of low water, just when the catfish would be most vulnerable. The wilder spirits might require a fisherman to give proper offerings or observe proper behavior before attempting to catch fish in their land.¹⁴

In addition, certain places on the river had other beings. Mae Ooi’s tutelary spirit lived on a conical island midstream; a benevolent guardian spirit (thaevadda) lived in a long slow eddy; a cruel rapids held a vengeful, angry spirit; the lord of the divine catfish lived in the Golden Pool near the temple; Phor Khaaw’s cave held his black naga, as did other caves on the river. Each of these were objects of veneration or at least respect. Some, like the island king, were kindly and regularly met with villagers. Others, like the naga, were sometimes dangerous but had at times come into the village in human form in centuries past, marrying local women and listening to Buddhist sermons. Each of these were potential heroes, potential aids to humans and nonhumans seeking to navigate the changed river.

Island Kings and River Lords

Mae Ooi and Phor Khaaw are each spirit mediums, figures that are a feature of Thai-Lao lives, a part of a world that links divine and human jao. Mediumship, although popularly characterized as a rural, lower-class feature, exists across all strata of society.¹⁵ But it does not do so at all times in the same way. Mediumship is a blend between, as Benjamin Baumann puts it, “modes of being” and “modes of knowing” that fuse Hindu-Buddhist and animist worlds as a means of playing with ambiguity.¹⁶ Rosalind Morris and Peter Jackson, in very different ways, emphasize the relationship that the medium has with modernity, as spirits become the vehicle through which modern worlds are enunciated and understood.¹⁷

Claiming that “there exist” supernatural beings in the river is a complicated thing to say, ambiguity and uncertainty being central to claims to local belief.¹⁸ As with any system of local belief, whether something exists in a place is up to interpretation. Some in town believed that the Lord of the Golden Pool existed, others did not. Some saw nagas with their own eyes; they were sometimes scoffed at by others. Whenever we claim local knowledge, Indigenous knowledge, or the like, as Yos does, we need to remember that what that knowledge is varies by the teller, varies by the time that it is told, and varies by the listener.¹⁹ Indeed, these are features, not faults, in Indigenous ways of seeing the world. The search for a hero is a technique to be tried and tested, not an adherence to a codex of wisdom. The world is constantly being made; it is modernity that seeks to fix it into place.

Phor Khaaw and Mae Ooi epitomize two different kinds of mediumship in the region. Mae Ooi bears a resemblance to Morris’s medium interlocutor, and the classic picture of a nang thiam—a post-menopausal woman whose tutelary spirits manifested after a long period of illness. In contrast, Phor Khaaw, with his Hindu and Mahayana accoutrements, recalls a more international ecumene and, with his sunglasses and attention to labor contracts, a modern one.

Each claimed to be masters of the waters: Mae Ooi with her island king and Phor Khaaw with his black naga. Their followers did not mix; Khaaw’s devotees were more well-off and male, and Ooi’s devotees were largely female, although all attended the respective mediums’ holy days. Devotees of each followed closely news of the spirits’ efficacy. A rare giant catfish caught following Phor Khaaw’s prophecy was widely cited as a marker of his legitimacy (bolstered by the fish’s appearance just before a delegation visited from Bangkok), and Mae Ooi’s “failure” to stop the Xayaburi dam was another topic of conversation.

We can see a difference in Phor Khaaw’s and Mae Ooi’s dealings with river beings; the former seeks to give additional aid in securing the resources and largess of the dying river, whereas the latter deals with the river as an agent, albeit one whose power has waned. But even in the latter instance, the old island kings reveal a secret: they, too, have come to see the river as a means to an end.

Harnessing the Mekong

The Mekong in the past few years has turned blue and clear. This is not a positive for river dwellers. This blue water was the result of the Xayaburi dam, which halts the flow of silt from the river in dam reservoirs, so the silt that would normally be carried downstream accumulates. Xayaburi was certainly not the first dam to be placed in the Mekong basin; Thai and Chinese projects had been in place since the 1960s in the region. But its impact—along with upstream dams across the main stream of the river in China—was sudden, and dramatic. Clear water allows fish to see nets and avoid them. It allows light to penetrate and promotes the growth of algae that clogs nets, thus rendering net fishing doubly useless. Without a supply of fresh silt, riverbank gardens fail and the current undercuts banks and collapses them.

When the Xayaburi hydropower gates shut two years ago, the river dropped to the lowest point ever recorded. While they might escape nets, fish existed in this confined, strained world without access to spawning or feeding grounds. When power demands rise, or when the reservoirs reach a certain point, or, indeed, for undisclosed reasons, the Chinese and Lao controllers open floodgates, sending sudden surges that pulse down the river without warning or cycle. Further, Chinese and Lao attempts to make the river navigable to cargo ships involved blasting boulders midstream, changing the way that the river flowed and making the current faster and less suitable for silt deposits, fish habitat, and all the other things that make a river a river. This strategy has been widely critiqued as favoring economic development over consideration of ecological concerns.²⁰ But more to the point, as the Mekong watershed becomes caught between a network of what Carl Middleton and Jeremy Allouche term “powersheds,” new relations come into being not only between states but also between humans and the river.²¹

For those in Ban Beuk, these surges appeared simply out of nowhere. This is not to say that people did not know where the water came from; everyone was fully aware of the dams and their impact. But Chinese dam controllers do not announce when water is to be released, and although activists in the region sought to post releases on Facebook, not all fishermen were able to see or respond to these announcements in time. Nets laid in anticipation of low water are swept away. Bushes atop midstream boulders are immersed and exposed in quick succession. Fishermen brought in drastically fewer fish than in years past, and the industry simply fell apart, with fishermen reporting about 30 percent of previous yields. Many cited the expense of repairing or replacing nets damaged or lost in these unexpected floods and simply stopped trying.

This is also a story of families. Fishermen in Ban Beuk were normally men over forty. Under traditional Isaan matrilocality, young men traveled across the region doing various kinds of labor until they met someone and moved in with her family.²² While women managed the sale of farm goods and fish, men learned their labor from their fathers-in-law. As Isan’s economy grew more integrated globally and nationally in the 1990s, this wandering labor acquired an international character, and most men in the town traveled abroad for work either to Bangkok, Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, or elsewhere.²³ In their absence, women often continued their studies and gained positions in local government institutions such as the town hall, schools, hospitals, and so on. Thus Isan is one place where women’s income and educational level are higher than men’s, though the often informal character of men’s labor complicates these statistics. Upon their return, men would use their savings—if they had any—to build a house, buy farmland, invest in cash crops such as coffee or rubber, and, of course, buy fishing grounds.

In recent years, this model has been complicated by the rise in women in the international labor circuit, so young people of both genders often work abroad for a time. Marriage migration, too, has had a large impact on the region, with many women marrying foreign spouses, mostly from elsewhere in Asia but occasionally from Europe.²⁴ However, after the age of around forty, when the physical demands of international manual labor become too much, couples return to these roles: those women who did not find employment in the public sphere or who married abroad worked in the market selling the catches that men on the river brought in. In my fieldwork, I never met a man selling fish or a woman catching them.

In this way, the collapse of fishing is a gendered collapse. Coming as it did with the decline in rubber prices, the hit to Mekong fisheries complicated this productive system. While women who had remained behind and gotten salaried bureaucratic positions in the local government maintained their jobs, men simply had nothing to do.²⁵ Indeed, while much of my fieldwork involved fishing, much more of it involved sitting on plastic chairs in the market square drinking from morning until dusk, waiting for the world to change back.

To return to the question posed to Mae Oi: in this time when the natural world collapses around us, how can you help us?

To be caught in the sway of invisible forces is something common to experiences of power in Southeast Asia, as is the appeal toward hierarchy—toward a jao—for relief.²⁶ Political models of the mandala state—the political model based on center-oriented states that claim cosmological as well as political power—posited a fractal politics wherein smaller political groupings mirrored larger states in a competition over prestige rather than territory.²⁷ A mandala expanded via the projection of power, often via claims to charismatic power, barami, on behalf of kings and guardian spirits.²⁸ Security was one promise, but also rain or a healthy or productive year.

This notion of being subject to distant powers generates both freedom and alienation. In Isan, one feels the influence of multiple distant powers at once. Bangkok exerts a force, as does China. The promise that the Thai state made toward its hinterland during the Cold War was one of development, but the promises of development have fallen flat. As recent Isan-centered political movements have shown, rural Thais, including in Ban Beuk, call into question these promises of development, which seem so often to bear fruit in Bangkok and leave out the hinterlands.²⁹

Naturally, the logic of the borderless mandala clashes with a model that argues that the nation-state should be absolute until the point that one reaches the border (indeed, as Franck Billé shows, borders are often areas of heightened attention in such regimes).³⁰ But while Thailand today is certainly a nation-state in this sense, elements of the mandala remain as those far from the centers of power adopt a more skeptical orientation toward the promises and propaganda of the center.³¹

Mon, one fisherman, organized groups of villagers against such a Bangkok-centric approach. He advocated for early-warning systems on Facebook alerting villagers of events downstream. He revealed to the other villagers plans for a gold mine behind the Monastery of the Golden Pool, and the dangers of mercury poisoning in gold refining associated with such mines. For this, he was pulled from his home in the middle of the night by soldiers and threatened with disappearance if he should continue his opposition. I see his actions as heroic, but some of my interlocutors saw these as foolish; what good is a hero who lacks the power to cause a change?

The village is suffering. An appeal goes out to authority. But where does this authority lie? What is at stake in seeking out a local activist, a well-connected government official, or a spirit? The answer here is not so clear-cut. What Mon lacked was power, power that, in the Thai idiom, is nested within multiple hierarchies, each with its own system of authority. Thanet Aphornsuvan, for instance, writes about kinship in the Thai case as being embedded in one such system of nested hierarchies.³² A person is suspended between elders (phi) and juniors (nong), with obligations to respect those above, but also to receive aid from them. Freedom, being cut off from these ties, is abhorrent, as it means that one is truly alone in the world—this is Thanet’s point, that the discourse of freedom, so central to Thai claims to independence from colonial powers, always meant the authority of the central state and monarch and not the individual freedom of their subjects.

Guido Sprenger and Kaj Århem point out that these hierarchical systems go beyond the human.³³ In southeast Asian animist systems, spirits are often the phi³⁴ to whom one appeals for support and aid.³⁵ Some phi one might respect by simply staying out of their way, but of those that one invites in, that one throws a party for, like the island king, one can make demands.

Bangkok, in this case, cannot help; it is operating at cross-purposes here. The primary target for the Xayaburi dam is the Electricity Generating Authority of Thailand (EGAT), and the high court recently threw out a suit levied by villagers from affected provinces, including Ban Beuk’s, claiming that, while villagers were affected by the dam, they were not affected by the financial agreement that gave birth to the dam (and, further, that they had no right to sue the state).

Power, electrical as well as political, is concentrated in Bangkok, and the city’s shopping malls individually consume more electricity than entire provinces. Seen as a guardian spirit, Bangkok has proven to be more pob (a cannibal spirit who eats its victims’ liver) than jao (a kindly lord), greedily eating up the largesse that it steals from the provinces. It is a familiar patron; everyone in Ban Beuk has a story of a greedy parent, a lascivious uncle, a boss who “eats” a bit of the profit (graft, in Thai, operates on the metaphor of kin, “eating”). Bangkok is a patron, but a bad one. Even the fame of the Isan-oriented Thaksin Shinawatra regime has soured in recent years. For many who took to the streets following the military coup that ousted Thaksin, Thaksin’s repeated self-aggrandizing and seeming lack of care for his supporters proved him to be of the same ilk as other Bangkokian leaders, though his Phuea Thai Party remains popular in the region.³⁶

Here, then, are heroes hamstrung by power networks, by politics, by ulterior motives. But the island king, too, found his power limited. I return now for a final time to Mae Ooi’s glade.

“It isn’t my jurisdiction,” responded Mae Ooi. “I have to ask the island king in Laos.” She raised her hand to her ear: “Hello! One two three hello? Do you hear me? Mmm, Laos is responding.” Murmurs went through the men I was sitting with. They had recently returned from their own migrant labor trips and were already deeply skeptical. “One two three? Is that the Lao lord’s phone number?” asked one. “You have to call the international calling code first!” responded another. The medium was becoming high entertainment, at least among these former migrant workers. After a consultation in which the medium spoke with her unseen and unheard interlocutor, she returned to us. “They say they need this for their own development,” she replied.

The men’s skepticism rested on the medium’s powerlessness. Here was not a path toward survival, as the black naga promised, but more of the same. She simply could not do anything. Further, she just responded in the language of bureaucratic stonewalling: “It is needed for national development.”

Others along the Mekong were more adept at the language of control. Another medium promised to send diarrhea to the dam controller. Some promised a returning of Lao ethnic control over the river. “I think [the dams are] good,” said one fisherman’s son, visiting from the regional capital in Udon Thani. “It’s development. It’s progress. It’s the way that the world has to be.” But in a world in which development was king, the world was not disenchanted.³⁷ Instead, new religious figures entered the fray.

In addition, new heroes like Phor Khaaw, especially surrounding the cult of the naga, have been booming in recent years, embracing the wild economy of the region.³⁸ At the shrine at Kham Chanote (“golden property deed”) forest, a royal naga couple has been handing out promises of prosperity, money, and work contracts to a generation pursuing wage labor and abandoning the idea of returning to their natal village. While others spoke of the Thai king’s inability to travel to certain provinces because of local lords’ dislike of having two kings in the same realm, others built giant metal statues with the Thai number “nine” upon the death of the Thai king Rama IX.³⁹ In short, a language of cash-oriented spirits emerged in the wake of the destruction of what went before.

This is nothing particular to Ban Beuk. Peter Jackson analyzes the synergy between new capitalist forms, modernity, and new forms of spirituality within Thai religion.⁴⁰ Far from being an atavistic holdover of premodernity, new religious forms appeal alongside new capitalist forms; yet these are not, for Jackson, simple echoes of the market. Rather, they are ways to reenchant the marketplace; and far from the religious field acquiring the logics of the market, here the market acquires the logics of prestige and charisma, of fortune and blessing. The search for heroes remains constant, even if their character changes.

Conclusion

What has emerged in Ban Beuk is a change in the grammar of power in the region. Heroes are no longer embedded in place; rather, like migrant laborers’ wages, power moves freely through the realm, and the quest for heroes seems only successful when it is linked to this ability to adapt. But what was efficacious was a source of ambiguity; there is no single cultural text that one can label before and after. Was the black naga real? People disagreed. Was there a ghostly naga now haunting a riverbank, collapsed in the new movement of the water? People disagreed. Was the Thai king able to offer the prosperity that he promised? People disagreed. Did the Fish King retain lordship over the river? Did Mae Ooi’s spirit? People disagreed. There is no one ontology of power on the river; rather, there are multiple visions, stemming from multiple entanglements, multiple propositions, and multiple heroes and villains.

These stem, too, from a shift in social relationships along the river. As fisheries and their associated groups—older men and women working in fish markets—decline, power moves to networks that reach far beyond the community and beyond the horizon of perception of those within it. Here is a new era, one of uncertainty, where new heroes are sought. It is a time of nihilism, as ecological, economic, gendered, and ontological worlds collapse, but, as Jackson points out, also a time of spiritual pragmatism. Mladen Dolar argues that in the decline of the religious realm, those libidinal forces that were once contained there erupt into the everyday, thus explaining the bourgeoisie’s obsession with magic and haunting.⁴¹ Perhaps. But here the perspective is not that of Freud’s bourgeoisie in salons and psychotherapy sessions but of a subaltern people facing an existential crisis. What emerges is not political solidarity but a quest for the contours of power that have changed.⁴²

Here is where the language of heroes and villains becomes complicated. One could easily see a villainous state seeking to harness the power of the river for gain. Certainly heavy-handed tactics like threatening those opposing the dam with disappearance lend themselves to villainy. But do I expect Mon to conform to a hero in my own idiom? Without a nesting in hierarchy, without powerful and well-placed allies, how can he? And, on a personal note, how much of Mon’s willingness to take me in and work with me is embedded in his own desire for such a hero, a foreigner connected with international university systems?

What is revealed is the persistence of a need for a hero with power, and the decline of those river lords who speak for the river as an agentive partner, rather than as a means to its prosperity. Even those agentive beings (literally) embedded within its flow, as both Mae Ooi’s island king and Phor Khaaw’s naga show, must also struggle with the forces that shape the world. It remains to be seen what structure of power emerges in the wake of the great river’s collapse, and whether or not the logic of the centralized, extractivist nation wins out over local concerns. Thus far, this seems to be the case. But one can, as Mon does, always hope. And opening the door to hope and help involves asking all perceived powers the question: how can you help us?

Acknowledgments

I am indebted first and foremost to the people (and more-than-people) of the community in which I conducted my fieldwork, who offered me a place to stay and hours of conversation, food, and drink. Liana Chua and Viola Schreer were also gracious and inspirational in their comments on the oral and written versions of this paper. At home, I am indebted to Kate Jaroensuk, Robert and Jean Johnson, and Lucy Koistinen.

Notes

References