Cornell University Press Anthropogenic Rivers: The Production of Uncertainty in Lao Hydropower (Expertise: Cultures and Technologies of Knowledge)

In the 2000s, Laos was treated as a model country for the efficacy of privatized, "sustainable" hydropower projects as viable options for World Bank-led development. By viewing hydropower as a process that creates ecologically uncertain environments, Jerome Whitington reveals how new forms of managerial care have emerged in the context of a privatized dam project successfully targeted by transnational activists. Based on ethnographic work inside the hydropower company, as well as with Laotians affected by the dam, he investigates how managers, technicians and consultants grapple with unfamiliar environmental obligations through new infrastructural configurations, locally-inscribed ethical practices, and forms of flexible experimentation informed by American management theory. Far from the authoritative expertise that characterized classical modernist hydropower, sustainable development in Laos has been characterized by a shift from the risk politics of the 1990s to an ontological politics in which the institutional conditions of infrastructure investment are pervasively undermined by sophisticated ‘hactivism.’ Whitington demonstrates how late industrial environments are infused with uncertainty inherent in the anthropogenic ecologies themselves. Whereas ‘anthropogenic’ usually describes human-induced environmental change, it can also show how new capacities for being human are generated when people live in ecologies shot through with uncertainty. Implementing what Foucault called a "historical ontology of ourselves," Anthropogenic Rivers formulates a new materialist critique of the dirty ecologies of late industrialism by pinpointing the opportunistic, ambitious and speculative ontology of capitalist natures. Review "I would and will teach Anthropogenic Rivers in courses on water, infrastructure and development. Jerome Whitington has written a fascinating book that will make quite a splash." Author: Andrew Johnson, Princeton University, and author of Ghosts of the New City "Jerome Whitington's book deserves a wide-ranging readership, from those interested in expertise and epistemology or in transnational neoliberalism, to those who care about environmental politics and ecologies." Author: Michelle Murphy, University of Toronto, and author of Economization of Life "Anthropogenic Rivers brings us into the speculative terrain of activists, hydrological experts, farmers, and fishermen as they negotiated about possible futures. Unexpected alliances emerged in Laos, as antidam activists began collaborating with a major hydropower facility. This carefully crafted ethnography considers the imaginative dimension of these collaborations. Rather than a polarizing account of a conflict, Whitington gently probes the risks, potentials, and uncertainties of a major engineering project." Author: Eben Kirksey, Deakin University, and author of Emergent Ecologies "A 'new paradigm' of run-of-the-river hydroelectric dams less socioecologically disruptive than the large dams that generated peasant protest movements in India and Thailand, followed by a high profile experiment of activists and the power company collaborating to mitigate damage done, provide a rich canvas on which Whitington draws fine portraits of multiple actors attempting to implement the best of development and management nostrums. Contrasting Cold War comprehensive, 'evidence-based', planning with today's 'results-based' rapid interventions with 'good enough' knowledge revised as mistakes and failures manifest, Whitington zeros in on the performative social skills of charismatic leadership, finely tuned report writing, and constant motivation with feel-good metrics of minor accomplishments, fragilely trying to instill new subjectivities if not better lives." Author: Michael M.J. Fischer, author of Anthropology in the Meantime About the Author Jerome Whitington is Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at New York Univers