Review of "Mekong Dreaming: Life and Death along a Changing River"

Red shirts, yellow shirts, radicalised schoolchildren staging anime-themed protests against the King, Chinese dams causing deadly fluctuations in the level of the Mekong: welcome to contemporary Thailand. Andrew Alan Johnson explores the way this moment of crisis is lived by ordinary rural people by immersing us in the new Mekong, with its newly unstable hydrology, newly uncertain biota, and volatile economy (162), producing a portrait of riverine life that is in equal parts beautiful and disquieting. His ethnography is set principally in Ban Beuk, a pseudonymous town in Isan, situated at a point where the Mekong forms the border between Thailand and Laos. Ban Beuk sends male labour migrants to Bangkok and overseas, and women to the city to do sex work or overseas as marriage migrants. Older people, returned migrants themselves, survive on fishing, cultivation, income from occasional tourists and various other schemes. The delinking of the hydrology of the river from the cycle of the monsoon and its accompanying rituals by dams upstream is the latest round in a series of disembeddings that the town has undergone. These have extended its networks to distant places and introduced a proliferation of new actors on whom it is reliant, but over whom it has little control: factories in Bangkok, farms in Israel, spouses in Europe; and now Chinese dam controllers, fish scientists in Chiang Mai and a hybrid giant catfish.