Introduction
Mae Rum leads me up a winding path to a lookout over the Mekong River.Footnote 1 I am annoyed. She has promised to show me ‘a papaya as big as a person’, but this promised papaya has revealed itself to be a large papaya tree, and not an astronomically large fruit. The latter would have been much more impressive. Further, she has enlisted me to carry all the fruit she plucks on her trip, unceremoniously rolling the papaya down the hill towards my lagging feet to catch, pick up, and tuck under my arm. It is not yet noon, and I am sweating.
At the top of the hill, and the end of her garden, we reach a broad, flat lookout and peer out across the border, into Laos. ‘The army made this, out of their own generosity, so the villagers could have such a nice view.’ I have my doubts. I imagine that the army would have cared little for building lookouts for villagers, such as those in Ban Beuk, Mae Rum’s hometown in the far northeast of Thailand, to see the mist roll in off the Mekong River as Rum imagines; rather, this is a key artillery position overlooking the passage. But, for Rum, it is a gift; ‘It is development (man kheu phatthana Footnote 2),’ says Rum.
But for whom? To what end? In this article, I look at the notion of the ‘gift’ of development and the changes this idea has undergone, from an era where development was thought of as the result of the benevolence of charismatic leaders—from semi-divine kings to spirits that reign over particular reaches of the river—towards a ‘self-propelled’ movement into an uncertain world, one fraught with danger but with the potential for riches.
The gift of development
During the reign of Bhumibol Adulyadej, the royalist clip played before every film shown in theatres—and for which viewers were required to stand—epitomized this notion of development as a gift from a higher power. The camera swept over hydropower dams and lingered on the wonder on villagers’ faces when seeing electric lights flare into operation. While in the early 2000s the clips presented Isan villages displaced in time, as electrification had happened a generation or more ago in most Isan villages, it was during King Bhumibol’s reign in the 1980s that Ban Beuk’s roads were paved and electricity lines installed. Controversial tycoon Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra’s attention to the region, too, was framed as his generosity—a framing that may have served to speed his ousting at the hands of the military, with the accusation that he had sought to play the role of monarch. But recent developments have been more ambiguous. In the years since Bhumibol’s reign, the effects of these hydropower projects have come home to Mekong populations and, along with a military suppression of Thaksin’s elected government and the pro-Thaksin movement (a movement in which many in the village participated), led to a souring of the notion of Bangkok-led, royally mandated development among many.
Gifts, though, keep coming—unasked-for and, often, unwanted. New projects abound on the Mekong, both those based in Bangkok as well as in China. The Thai term kreng jai evocatively captures the feeling of unease upon receiving a too-generous gift—one wonders what unspoken expectations come along with such a gift.
But the logic of the gift from on high was not the only model of development on the river—another path to prosperity was a more independent, often precarious, ‘self-propelled’ notion,Footnote 3 one where the state retreats and allows a heady mix of private industry to emerge. For many of my interlocutors, the lure of migrant labour, especially in the wake of the collapse of the fisheries, became compelling—here, at least, was failure or success resting not on the generosity of one’s lord, but on a canny navigation of shifting currents.Footnote 4
The word ‘development’ carries with it a host of historical and political valences, especially in the Mekong watershed in Thailand—the Lao-speaking Northeast or ‘Isan’. Isan was, in the 1960s, a base for the Communist Party of Thailand, and development projects at the time were often done via the Thai state in tandem with American anti-communist forces,Footnote 5 which emphasized building ideological bulwarks against communism via a kind of trinity of development, Buddhism, and royalism. In recent years, another ethos of development has entered the region, via the Shinawatra regimes’ focus on transforming Isan residents into credit-fuelled, self-motivated, mobile entrepreneurs. Andrew Walker describes this new Isan force as ‘middle income peasants’, a decentralized but highly globally interconnected population with its own political ambitions—and new-found power.Footnote 6
‘Development’ in anthropological literature brings to mind the expansion of state control,Footnote 7 the expansion of capitalist interests,Footnote 8 and, especially on borders, new sources of productive friction.Footnote 9 Many authors have pointed out how such discourses amplify a system of dependence, vulnerability, or intensification of state or capital interests, and such critical approaches seek to find a solution to the inequalities of development in a larger-scale overturning of hierarchy.Footnote 10 But in these analyses, the route to its critique emerges as a Marxist question on the contradictions of capital and power. Thus my scepticism at Rum’s characterization of the ‘gift’. But to understand her and her fellow villagers’ perspective, we must see development as a gift; if development is done with royal/divine knowledge, as royalists see it, it is also done with benevolence. And, similarly, new forms of development have their risks and rewards: even if development in its ‘self-propelled’ form exposes villagers to the sharp edges of the market, it does so in the name of freedom.
What happens when such moral regimes shift? New labour regimes, as Chris Lyttleton describes, come with new regimes of desire—but also new crises.Footnote 11 These can extend beyond the economic and social towards the existential—Funahashi describes the speechlessness engendered by a shift in the ethos of labour in Finland and a disruption in the idea of the gift,Footnote 12 as labour moves from a regime in which one gives the gift of work to one where such a moral economy is stripped clean, and one must learn to motivate, promote, and stand up for oneself—gifts are wasteful expenditures of energy. Such a shift suggests a change in regimes of development, as Rum’s notion of the gifts of a kindly military and monarchy shifts to a world where profit is available everywhere—for those who can understand and navigate a changed world. But what emerges on the Mekong is no Finnish speechlessness; rather, as Peter Jackson eloquently describes for the case of Bangkok’s middle and elite classes,Footnote 13 new economies are infused with new religiosities.
The uncertain world
‘Too little water today’, fishermen often commented to me, or, simply, ‘lots of water’, noting the erratic ebbs that came suddenly, or, at other times, the dry-season pulses that had little connection either with rainfall or with fishermen’s memories of what the river should look like at this time of year. What they had to do with, rather, were electricity demands in far off Bangkok or China. Especially after the closure of the Jinghong Dam in China’s Yunnan province, fish catches had cratered, something not insignificant for a village in which fisheries provided some of the most stable livelihoods, especially for older men, who could no longer pursue migrant labour as their younger counterparts did. Multiple species of fish disappeared, including the enormous Mekong Giant Catfish—the pa beukFootnote 14—replaced by a hybrid species released as a means to ensure continual catches.
These dams are a part of the Belt and Road Initiative’s (BRI) efforts to reshape the fluctuating world of the Mekong into a controlled river mobilized for profit and sustainable hydropower—profit that heads to regional or national capitals. But such a vision carries with it unmentioned downstream effects, from ecological collapse to increased dangers to navigation—in short, an increasingly uncertain river.Footnote 15 Controversies grew especially heated in the wake of the collapse of the Xe Pien Xe Namnoy dam,Footnote 16 which shattered owing to poor construction and flooded several villages in Laos. But more than simply the threat of collapse, since the closure of the Xayaburi Dam in Laos, the Mekong has changed dramatically.Footnote 17 Now, its water runs clear, without the life-giving silt of prior times, and its flow is marked by record dry-season lows interspersed with dry-season floods raising the water two metres or more overnight. Its impact was a clear sign of the environmental change on the river, but also of the new world of development, marked not by hierarchy and obligation but uncertainty.
Jerome Whitington describes uncertainty as a key feature built into hydropower development.Footnote 18 Facing a lack of data on both the ecological as well as social factors surrounding Mekong dams, developers see uncertainty as a feature, not a bug, of new projects. However, those living in the shadow of such projects must deal with this uncertainty, and the detritus of being under the shadow of wealthy or influential others was an issue that many in Ban Beuk understood on an intimate level.
Here, then, is an intimate knowledge of gifts and what comes with them. On one level, the gift is elegantly wrapped—the BRI continues to emphasize prosperity and jobs, electrification, and the management of the river. As a Chinese article on the new Nam Ou hydropower project puts it: ‘The once-dark villages now have electricity around the clock, looking like a brand new world. At night light shines out of the windows of every household, and villagers can watch TV at home, and store fish in their freezers. They have switched to business from farming, and the village fair has become a bustling market.’Footnote 19 But such characterizations only tell one side of the story. Missing here is the uncertain world: the absent fisheries, the displacement, the outflow of criminal activity, and deregulation in areas thought to be beyond state control. Increased activity on the border, at least at Ban Beuk, has meant other consequences: methamphetamine—ya ba—was heavily trafficked across the border at Ban Beuk, although its popularity was greater among urban labourers and university students and not my interlocutors. Elsewhere, in special economic zones—some not far from Ban Beuk—the border provides an area of loosened labour laws, where the state partially withdraws its authority and private companies wield more power.Footnote 20 These, too, can include drug, human, and labour trafficking, call-centre and cryptocurrency scams, and casinos, creating the suspension of state authority and libidinal zones for Chinese, Thai, and Lao officials and businessmen.Footnote 21 They are the unspoken costs of larger projects.
What is to be gained here by looking at development not through the eyes of interested officials, but in conversation with those who see both the possibility and the hidden costs of the gift? It is my contention here that the discussion of development, seen from the banks of the Mekong, must take into consideration not only a political-economic question, but also the system of hierarchical obligation between authority Footnote figures 22 and their subjects—what elders (phi, elder sibling, social superior) owed to their youngers (nong),Footnote 23 and vice-versa. It raises questions about relations and exchange between categories of beings—spirits and humans, kings and commoners—and complicates sovereignties that extend beyond the human and towards the divine.
It is to the moral, religious, and ethical dimensions of development that I now turn—to the role of kings and spirits, mediums and nagas that govern the way that gifts flow through these changing environments and trajectories of development. I argue that, like the epidemic of speechlessness among Finnish white-collar workers that Funahashi describes, a shifting moral regime is also at hand on the Mekong, one that requires us to think through development as a question of religion and ethics as much as infrastructure and economy.Footnote 24
Masters of the waters
Just down the hill from Rum’s lookout, in a glade behind the temple, is where a lord (jao) holds court. This is not Bhumibol or his successor, Vajiralongkorn, but the master of a conical island midstream in the Mekong—a ghostly king, who descends to inhabit the body of a frail older woman whom I call Mae Oi. A long time after entering her trance, which involves dancing to the music of the khaen, a Laotian wind instrument made of bamboo, Oi departs, and the king takes over her body. He drinks whisky by the pint and smokes chilli-laced cigars, vices that, according to Oi, leave no trace upon her body when he exits.Footnote 25 But what he is really there to do is to answer questions from those in the village. How to handle a buffalo theft? Can he help a student get into a technical school? And, significantly, what to do about the dams on the Mekong?
The lords of places are a common feature in many parts of Southeast Asia, and especially in northern and northeastern Thailand and Laos.Footnote 26 Here, particular geographic features have animate beings living within them,Footnote 27 beings that claim the title of jao and exert a kind of hierarchical position vis-à-vis the animals and people in their domain. Here, I follow recent scholarshipFootnote 28 that points out such beings as a part of a social world,Footnote 29 arranged into nobles and commoners, phi and nong.Footnote 30 Following Julius Bautista, I treat such beings ‘as they are’,Footnote 31 as a part of the web of powers that villagers must navigate,Footnote 32 and which, like human lords, if correctly cultivated, promise a source of future prosperity.
What the jao don is, then, is a sovereign, a being that, like the neak ta of Cambodia, is ‘neither superstition nor supernatural, but foundational’, something that, via the exercise of charismatic power (barami), ‘shapes claims to kingship and territorial sovereignty’.Footnote 33 And like a king, he shares much with his human counterparts. He holds a certain sway over a population and geographic location. But these systems, too, are vulnerable to the waxing and waning of power. Lutz, for instance, describes the decline of a particular lord of a hill in Khmu parts of Laos.Footnote 34 Sert, the divine lord of the region, claimed a store of power based on a hidden stash of gold within a mountain declared off-limits to his subjects. Chinese development projects ignored this, and simply placed power lines directly across the mountain, demonstrating Sert’s withdrawal from his relations with humans (or his non-existence), and villagers were thus free to farm on its formerly forbidden flanks. His power thwarted, the lord departed or was no longer needed.
Something similar is happening here. As notions of Bangkok-centred development like Rum’s become soured with the increase of negative downstream effects (literally and figuratively), villagers turn to these chthonic lords for aid. And, like with the Khmu, things do not go as planned. Here, too, is an indication of agency for all: state, village, international community, and divine beings.
Returning to the banks of the Mekong, Mae Oi’s island master (jao don) had agreed to intercede with a Laotian spirit lord to gain some benefit for his subjects. He raised an invisible handphone to his ear and called the ‘Laotian island master’ (jao don lao Footnote 35)—an entity new to all of us in the glade—to work out a deal. He argued with the Laotian river lord only to return with a dry statement, ‘this is what they need for their own development’ (jam pen pheua kan phatthana prathet). But the argument raised the dual nature of development: one truth for those in palaces and office buildings—or divine realms—and another with which local people simply have to deal. Here, the two river lords enact bureaucracy and the kinds of high-stakes negotiations carried out by nation-states, but in another realm. It is notable here that the workings of power do not distinguish between the divine and the national—each exists here as a source of potential.Footnote 36
The men with whom I was sitting erupted in a burst of mockery, causing the island master to backtrack. The master responded that he heard the men’s plight, and returned to his phone call. After some consultation (to which we could only hear one side given that the phone was a supernatural one), he responded that he could negotiate with the Lao river lord to provide a gap in the dam; a hole through which water could still pour. It seemed a compromise—Laos could have its electricity and the villagers could have their water.
But his audience was uninterested in such compromises. This call brought howls of outrage: a dam with a hole in it? ‘It will burst!’ A man whispered to me: ‘Do you really believe this? Some people say that she is just a crazy old lady.’Footnote 37 One migrant worker, heckling the river lord’s performance,Footnote 38 provoked Mae Oi into calling him out of the crowd and to the makeshift stage, where he was forced to pay respects lest he be struck down in a car accident. His respectful prostration was to be accompanied by a payment of a hundred baht,Footnote 39 money that the man borrowed from me. The money meant little to the migrant worker, rich by community standards, and his show of getting the money from me demonstrated to all that he did not need supernatural connections when he had an international one. One hundred baht, while a reasonable sum to Mae Oi, meant little to him. While performing his prostrations, he grinned at the rest of the men, and laughed as he sat down again next to me.
Here, then, is an appeal—a failed one—to royal authority in the name of development. It is not a decoupling of the supernatural from development itself. In contrast to the island master and his appeal to place-based authority is another: the Black Naga, to which I will turn shortly. But first, I must deal with the island master’s temporal counterpart—the king in Bangkok.
In an image from the mid-twentieth century, the Thai king Bhumibol Adulyadej, Rama IX, stands in a pale blazer in front of a tropical hillside. He is unassuming, but remote as he stands apart from the five men staring at him expectantly. He is young, with his black hair faintly receding and his eyeglasses perched resolutely on his nose as he stares down at a pile of charts and maps. Looking towards him are a collection of representative officials: two men in military dress, two in suits, and a last one in an engineer’s jumpsuit, all standing at attention. It is an old picture, with the blurry colourfulness of late 1960s film, but it is one that is immediately recognizable to nearly any Thai citizen. So too the power dynamics involved—here are the symbols of the Thai state: the doers, patiently awaiting the judgement of the thinker. The king, according to this and other images put forward by the monarchy, is not learning from the assembled team, rather, the king is ‘verifying’ what he already knows and informing the experts about it.Footnote 40
It is a common enough image, one of a number snapped from a handful of excursions that the Thai king made to the countryside, especially during the mid-twentieth century. Here is the king pointing again to a map while a general looks on, concerned. Here he is again with a map while an elderly villager looks over. On the back of the 1,000-baht banknote, here is the king, camera around his neck, looking over a hydropower project.
Each image suggests a story. The king immediately sees the problem and suggests a solution. At times, the mild-mannered king grows impatient at the poor foresight of his bureaucrats. He does not need to learn. He cannot be wrong. He knows, because he feels the pain of his subjects, and he enacts rainmaking missions, bridges, temporary flood-relief dams (fai), opium replacement projects, arriving immediately at the scientifically correct path and seeing through the venality of public officials or environmentalists for opposing his plans (for instance, to construct a series of hydropower dams on the jubilee dates of his coronation).Footnote 41
This image of the Thai king, what Hewison terms the ‘total standard view’ of the monarchy,Footnote 42 as the mild-mannered but serious man sweating over maps in the tropical sun, recalls a monarch far from either the European-style dilletante royal that Bhumibol first presented himself as, or even the righteous Buddhist dhammaraja, who exists at a remove from worldly matters. Here is a man who sweats and works. His work is, clearly, development in its most technocratic sense. This ‘Developer King’Footnote 43 invents new rice aeration projects, enacts irrigation plans, and designs high-yield rice crops. His name graces the Bhumibol hydroelectric dam (built in 1958). He is the king of waters—indeed, David Blake cites Bhumibol’s water-management portfolio as central to the cultivation of his royal image.Footnote 44
Here is a blending: the divine and the mundane, and, in the media depicting the everyday lives of the royals under Bhumibol, the domestic—a dynamic familiar to post-industrial royal families far beyond Thailand. This blending of divinity and mundane expertise is central to the royalist perspective on development. Until the numbers of college graduates became too great and the king’s health too poor, each higher degree was handed personally from the monarch to a graduate (and in many cases even now is handed from a lesser royal), indicating that knowledge passes not from professor to student, but is a gift from monarch to subject. Knowledge here is a quality that is granted, that moves through the system of power—it is panya (wisdom), not the product of study and critical thought, but the result of a moral status;Footnote 45 thus the king, as the source of such gifts of knowledge, should have total knowledge. Recall the relationship between royalty and knowledge in an earlier period in Thai history. Upon the arrival of Europeans who sought to impress their knowledge of astronomy on Siam by introducing the idea of a round globe, the Thai then-king informed his advisers that these foreigners had said nothing new. Instead, the king berated his councillors for not listening to him each time he had previously told them that the world was round ‘like an orange’.Footnote 46 Knowledge is always in the royal domain, though bureaucrats, being human, fail to distribute it where it needs to go.
Here, there is fusion of the origins of knowledge—even technical knowledge—in worldly study and divine natures. ‘Divine’ here is to be taken—partially—literally. The king’s title, Rama, refers to the martial avatar of Vishnu, a deity that holds a powerful place in Theravada Buddhism and especially in Thai kingship. Palace officials are quick to note that the king is not actually a god (thep), rather, he is a supposed god (samuttithep). This ‘supposed’ quality, however, is often elided in public use. His wisdom is often presented as uncannily astute.Footnote 47 What he touches holds a magical quality—newspapers run stories of houses that burnt to the ground, leaving only a portrait of the monarch, amazingly untouched.Footnote 48 In descriptions of his rainmaking projects, the royal office is coy with its language: to one audience describing cloud seeding and to another invoking the king’s intercession with heavenly beings.Footnote 49 In 2011, in his final years, his daughter invoked an outflow of blood from the king’s colon as a reflection of how the king’s very body bled for his polity during catastrophic floods.Footnote 50
I wish to underline the similarities of the island master and the Thai king. Here, the land and infrastructure of the country, especially as relates to water, and the body and mind of the king are one and the same. Thongchai Winichakul describes in a similar way how the ‘geo-body’ of the nation became a metonym for the body of the monarch, with distant provinces like ‘the tips of fingers’ and Bangkok at its heart.Footnote 51 By inserting himself as an avatar not simply of Rama, the defeater of evil, but also a buddha-to-be and thus a font of wisdom of all sorts—scientific knowledge, prosperity, moral guidance, and religious acuity—Bhumibol fuses the nation and his own body. Moral conduct, nationalism, technological development, and divine providence become one and the same, with Thais possessing varying qualities of this knowledge in a unilinear scale, beginning with Thailand’s ‘underdeveloped hill tribes (chao khao)’ and leading to the palace.
For royalists, such as Fa, whom I interviewed at the Chaipattana (Victory of Development) Foundation, an NGO founded by Bhumibol in 1988, reconciling the divine nature of the monarchy with Thailand’s development (focused on the United States and Japan as exemplars) was inexorably tied in with the figure of the monarch. Struggling with a translation for the Thai term barami,Footnote 52 which Fa held to be central to Bhumibol’s ability to develop the Thai nation, she dismissed my suggestion of ‘charisma’. ‘Bad people can have charisma. Dictators.’ Fa suggested ‘greatness’ instead, but was still dissatisfied with this attempt to capture an English equivalent for barami: the personal magnetism, wisdom, religious power, and righteousness of the monarch. Om, another royalist, responded to a slightly cutting remark I had made about Bhumibol being the wealthiest monarch in the world in a country with abject poverty, with the retort: ‘and to think, he uses all that money to help the Thai people!’. Monarchy, nationalism, benevolence, and divine grace are all, at least for these two people, tied. As a dam retains and releases water to those downstream, development belongs to the king, and it is through his grace that the nation receives it. The comparison seems strange until one realizes that most major hydropower projects are held the names of the royal family.
The terms for development are multiple—there is phatthana, which implies a physical development, and charoen, which indicates something more spiritual, something linked to Buddhist enlightenment. One might distinguish between development and prosperity—the terms are close enough that ‘this country has phatthana, but not yet charoen’Footnote 53 is both understandable as a critique but also close enough to be a joke—there is development, but no prosperity. The terms are used religiously in ways that extend beyond Bhumibol’s dynasty, though no less towards similar sources of royal power. When I conducted field research in Chiang Mai in 2006–2007 there were several groups of spirit mediums channelling the authority of gods from other ages (yuk), with names such as the ‘group for development (phatthana)’, whose aims were to fuel development by contacting Hindu spirits (thewadda).Footnote 54 Further, kho hai charoen (‘may you develop/prosper’) was a common part of a blessing bestowed by these supernatural lords upon their supplicants. Development is a power that stems from outside, and trickles in via the arbitration of prestigious, barami-possessing mediators.Footnote 55 Or at least it should.
But such is a model of development as a gift, as something handed down from an elder to a subordinate. What, then, about new paradigms of development on the river, those that emphasize increased agency in a more precarious world?
Glitches in the floating world
The Belt and Road Initiative promises development from a different ‘elder’—an international, China-centred community. But this is not simply royalism redux—instead, BRI initiatives include hydropower far upstream, out of the reach of the Thai monarchy, and in places that do not bear the names of the royal family and their attendant regimes of barami, but rather Chinese place-names: Nuozhadu, Jinghong, Manwan. Special economic zones along the river, too, capitalize upon mobility, providing new sources of migrant work. Claudio Sopranzetti, describing the lives of motorcycle taxi drivers in Bangkok, emphasizes the attraction of these new forms of capitalismFootnote 56—one’s prospects may be less certain, but one’s failure or success (so the imagination goes) depends on one’s own skill and luck, not on one’s origins.Footnote 57
And, like the island master, new religious forms emerge to mirror these new pathways towards development. An older medium—a man, dressed in the style of Khmer ascetic in contrast to Mae Oi’s Laotian-style mediumship—had set up practice in the mouth of a cave overlooking the river. He spoke Central Thai as well as the local dialect, and wore stark white clothing and a string of Mahayana (Chinese-style Buddhism) prayer beads around his neck.
The Black Naga—the name of the man’s possessing spirit—promised to assist his devotees along these new paths to prosperity. He took clients from villages up and down the riverbank, promising labour contracts in exchange for a cut (in addition to traditional offerings, such as pork heads).Footnote 58 His practice parallels new ways of being in a new economy, as capital and rhizomatic connections between individuals and labour circuits matter more than shows of local devotion. Here, too, we see the enchantments of the market and, if not a guarantee, at least assistance in navigating their fraught waters.Footnote 59
For Lauren Berlant infrastructure is ‘the lifeworld of structure’;Footnote 60 it is what makes structure take hold. Factory farms, highways, refrigerated trucks, and supermarkets allow for a certain kind of industrial agriculture and consumption to take place. Berlant’s definition is broad enough to include ideologies as well—families, for instance, enable and normalize certain things. Development discourse, similarly, arranges the proper channels for newness to manifest—change is given via an unquestioned authority towards locals who should feel appreciative. But what we can see here is that development is always beyond, always within the realm of the foreign, mediated by those with the power to exist in two worlds and safely move newness from the outside to the local, whether they are kings, spirit mediums, or engineers. Berlant’s infrastructure is, when working, static: a place like Ban Beuk is developing, not yet developed. It will never develop; even were it to look like Bangkok, Bangkok would have pulled ahead and the process would continue. It is constantly moving towards Bangkok, towards Singapore, or other loci of developmentalist dreams, but can never pull abreast (or much less ahead); its residents are objects, not subjects—they are acted upon, not actors. In this scenario, development acquires an air of the sacred, a becoming. Development is structure before the structure, the imagining into being of a thing before it is put in place, a gift from above. It is inevitable, and one should be grateful.
In this, the BRI echoes the map in the king’s hand, but substitutes a rising China for the monarchy, without the attendant structure of gifts and grace. A centralized power desires a particular way of being, one that will allow a new infrastructure to become. Rather than seeing resources such as the Mekong as national patrimony, or the consequence of local chthonic power, to be guided by a royal hand (be it Bhumibol’s or the island master’s), the BRI and Black Naga alike present the Mekong as a current in an ever-changing circuit of potential, navigated by individuals. But the infrastructure that it brings carries with it sour notes—labour scams, pollution, and, of course, the downstream effects of hydropower.
Berlant discusses glitches in infrastructure; moments when new futures are imaginable. The failures of development on the Mekong seem to be just such a glitch—development does not lead to prosperity for the community, but to its atomization and scattering. It is a new glitch—recall Mae Rum’s rosy assessment of development projects from the 1980s as gifts from a central authority towards a grateful periphery.
To take Berlant’s notion of the gift, and Funahashi’s speechlessness in the face of the gift’s failures, as development is one imaginary towards prosperity—in Thai terms, if phatthana anticipates charoen—development’s failures proffer not an alternate imaginary but open the field of possibility wider. Development as a freely given gift may not exist, but development itself is still there for the seizing.
But in this self-propelled world, all recognize that China will do what China wishes—changes will come whether or not they are desired. With a new, rootless, self-propelled notion of personal development along the lines of individual desire, many fishermen had already ceased going to the island master’s shrine; most that I knew favoured the shrine of the Black Naga. Instead of hedging around impossible demands to end the forward motion of development, the Black Naga’s medium promised villagers that they could profit despite development’s detritus. They could secure labour contracts, harvest hybrid fish after the pure strain fish perished—in other words, reshape themselves even as the world has been reshaped around them. On the Mekong, then, reactions to the glitches in development take multiple forms.
For one, the initial reaction to glitches is to deny their existence, an approach especially evident in authoritarian Laos. Whitington notes how construction companies intentionally or unintentionally intimidate those who speak out.Footnote 61 After an NGO aired a video critical of dam projects and featuring a villager complaining about the decline in fish, Lao Communist Party officials and dam developers identified the recalcitrant villager and went to his home. Faced with such a delegation, the villager recanted his protest and claimed to have been misrepresented—a claim that was taken by the foreign development agencies as a sufficient exercise of community consultation. Glitches, in other words, do not exist. It is the jealous, imperialist, foreign powers that imply glitches.
Or, alternately, as the Black Naga suggests, glitches are moments of opportunity. Watching the water from the Thai bank, a young man, born in the village but now working in Bangkok, expressed his take: ‘[Fishing] is an old way of life. We don’t want to do what our grandparents did. This is development.’ In other words, unprofitable (in terms of income) activities should naturally pass away in favour of those that yield (monetary) profits, identifiable and taxable by the state. Glitches may happen, but they are the sign of a past way of being that must necessarily give way.
Finally, the beleaguered island master presents another response to a glitch: a restoration fantasy in which a compromise can be reached between two gift-giving sources of barami.Footnote 62 The dam must be built, but perhaps a kingly kindness could create a hole in the dam. The harsh edges of development can be shaved off and made less painful. One’s way of life might simply be injured, and not destroyed. The fishermen’s reaction to this—mockery—made clear their take, though others in the medium’s audience were more sanguine about it.
Conclusion
I turn finally to Lert, a shrimp fisherman whose house clung to the ever-fluctuating riverbank, and which was flooded after a release of water from Jinghong. Lert’s reaction was simply to wait.Footnote 63 The river was unpredictable, and ultimately unprofitable, and he had lost faith in the island master and the Black Naga alike—the dam continued despite the island master, and labour connections promised by the Black Naga were replete with corruption and scams. Nor was he able to see his livelihood as something that should pass by in the wake of progress. An alternate future, for Lert, was unimaginable, but necessary. Better, then, to wait for the unanticipated, for the yet-to-come.
Nils Bubandt, in The Empty Seashell,Footnote 64 describes the crisis that modernity brings to eastern Indonesia. Rather than giving surety and comfort to a town plagued with witchcraft, modernity instead opens the door for more uncertainty. As it decomposes traditional ways of knowing, modernity and Christianity expand the world of witchcraft—the world of the unknown. An unspeakable future opens—one echoing the unspeakable future that Lert waits for (see Funahashi on speechlessnessFootnote 65).
Indeed, this is the counterside to both models of development. If development is the desire for infrastructure, the motivating force, then a directionless waiting for something else seems the only alternative. Lert’s acquaintance, Mon, in a town down the road, had been dragged from his home by soldiers for opposing a gold mine in the village, and Lert did not have Mon’s family connections that might ensure that he would be, as Mon was, released the following morning. He had also become disillusioned about working abroad after being scammed of several tens-of-thousands of dollars by a labour recruiter, so he saw little point in seeking to profit from a changed world. Rather, he sought to wait until the world itself changed, until a new future became thinkable again.
I have chosen to look at a small town on the river, and a relatively unremarkable one. This is a deliberate choice. Groups based in Chiang Khong, such as the Chiang Kong Conservation Group headed by Niwat Roykaew, or smaller groups based in Nong Khai have received public attention and acclaim, and mobilized popular support against projects like the BRI-associated blasting of rapids between China and Laos. But, while activists occasionally visit Ban Beuk (some in town had ties with a Nong Khai-based group), what these actually mean for the lives of fishermen is less clear. There is a world of difference between a public figure with a global audience and a fisherman seeking to simply make do with a changed world.
Here, I have charted the cargo cult of development, one that is articulated in quasi-religious terms, and which has become central to how development is understood on the river. Development, here, is not infrastructure itself but a desire for it, the reaching towards a new future that must, following the crypto-colonial,Footnote 66 royalist logic that has pervaded Thailand for the past few centuries, be filtered from above. But clearly something is changing here. Along with more widespread questioning of monarchical authority comes a questioning of larger projects. Bangkok, and the Thai royalty, were always, according to my interlocutors, ‘far away’, but they are no longer. Now, outside forces are obvious to all in the changing Mekong flow, in the clearness and emptiness of its waters. The outside forces that benevolent authorities claimed to be able to mitigate have impacted on the land to the point that the very way the world works has shifted. Development no longer remains a vague aspiration—it is here, and as it manifests, it gives birth to an uncertain world.
Competing interests
The author declares none.
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