Disastrous Times: Beyond Environmental Crisis in Urbanizing Asia 2020022811, 9780812252705

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Cover
Disastrous Times
Title
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CONTENTS
Introduction. Disastrous Times: Beyond Environmental Crisis in Urbanizing Asia
Chapter 1. Breathing in Beijing: Governing Particles and People in Urban China
Chapter 2. Figuring (Out) the Sinking City: Tidal Floods and Urban Subsidence in Semarang, Indonesia
Chapter 3. Ambient Air: Kolkata’s Bicycle Politics and Postcarbon Futures
Chapter 4. Infrastructures of Feeling: The Sense and Governance of Disasters in Sri Lanka
Chapter 5. Lots of Smoke, but Where’s the Fire? Contested Causality and Shifting Blame in the Southeast Asian Haze Crisis
Chapter 6. Reimagining the Natures of State: The Rise of Fisheries Co-management in Vietnam
Chapter 7. The New, Accidental Gods: Engaging with the Spirits of Disaster in Bangkok
Chapter 8. The Unspectacular Spectacle of Low-Carbon Life: Climate Change and Self Governing in an Urban Community in China
Chapter 9. Drawing the Future: Urban Imaginaries After the 2011 Thai Floods
Chapter 10. Re-mooring: Rethinking Recovery and Resilience in the Anthropocene
List of Contributors
Index
Acknowledgments

Citation preview

Disastrous Times

CRITICAL STUDIES IN RISK AND DISASTER Kim Fortun and Scott Gabriel Knowles, Series Editors Critical Studies in Risk and Disaster explores how environmental, technological, and health risks are created, managed, and analyzed in different contexts. Global in scope and drawing on perspectives from multiple disciplines, volumes in the series examine the ways that planning, science, and technology are implicated in disasters. The series also engages public policy formation—including analysis of science, technology, and environmental policy as well as welfare, conflict resolution, and economic policy developments where relevant.

DISASTROUS TIMES Beyond Environmental Crisis in Urbanizing Asia

Edited by

Eli Elinoff and Tyson Vaughan

U N I V E R S I T Y O F P E N N S Y LVA N I A P R E S S PHIL ADELPHIA

Copyright © 2021 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112 www.upenn.edu/pennpress Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Elinoff, Eli, editor. | Vaughan, Tyson, editor. Title: Disastrous times : beyond environmental crisis in urbanizing Asia / edited by Eli Elinoff and Tyson Vaughan. Other titles: Critical studies in risk and disaster. Description: 1st edition. | Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2021] | Series: Critical studies in risk and disaster | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: LCCN 2020022811 | ISBN 978-0-8122-5270-5 (hardcover) Subjects: LCSH: Environmental disasters—Social aspects—Asia. | Environmental disasters—Government policy—Asia. | Urbanization—Environmental aspects— Asia. | Asia—Environmental conditions—21st century. Classification: LCC GE160.A78 D47 2021 | DDC 363.34/561095—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020022811p

CONTENTS

Introduction. Disastrous Times: Beyond Environmental Crisis in Urbanizing Asia Eli Elinoff and Tyson Vaughan

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Chapter 1. Breathing in Beijing: Governing Particles and People in Urban China Samuel Kay

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Chapter 2. Figuring (Out) the Sinking City: Tidal Floods and Urban Subsidence in Semarang, Indonesia Lukas Ley

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Chapter 3. Ambient Air: Kolkata’s Bicycle Politics and Postcarbon Futures Malini Sur

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Chapter 4. Infrastructures of Feeling: The Sense and Governance of Disasters in Sri Lanka Vivian Choi

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Chapter 5. Lots of Smoke, but Where’s the Fire? Contested Causality and Shifting Blame in the Southeast Asian Haze Crisis Jenny Elaine Goldstein Chapter 6. Reimagining the Natures of State: The Rise of Fisheries Co-management in Vietnam Edmund Joo Vin Oh

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121

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Contents

Chapter 7. The New, Accidental Gods: Engaging with the Spirits of Disaster in Bangkok Andrew Alan Johnson Chapter 8. The Unspectacular Spectacle of Low-Carbon Life: Climate Change and Self Governing in an Urban Community in China Nikolaj Blichfeldt

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Chapter 9. Drawing the Future: Urban Imaginaries After the 2011 Thai Floods Eli Elinoff

172

Chapter 10. Re-mooring: Rethinking Recovery and Resilience in the Anthropocene Tyson Vaughan

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List of Contributors

215

Index

217

Acknowledgments

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Introduction: Disastrous Times Beyond Environmental Crisis in Urbanizing Asia Eli Elinoff and Tyson Vaughan

Awakening In Semarang, Indonesia, ever-increasing high tides flood the city (Ley, this volume). This tidal flooding, called rob, not only shapes the city’s physical landscape but also defines its temporal landscape. Slow and rhythmic inundation stretches planners, activists, and especially poor residents to engage with infrastructures, politics, and ecologies, actively mobilizing themselves in order to deal with a new kind of tidal flooding that defies easy solutions. Existing technical solutions and political institutions fail to adequately address the multifarious effects of rob, so residents have become intimate with the city, its infrastructures, and its changing natures. While some residents hope for large-scale solutions to these problems, others attempt to create solutions on their own by gathering evidence, learning about their neighborhoods’ infrastructures, and trying to understand unpredictable riverbanks. In the absence of state solutions, coastal residents are increasingly knowledgeable about the complex human and nonhuman ecologies that compose the interface between the river and the sea. While experts struggle to gather adequate data to inform their plans, citizens raise their homes, pump out murky water, and wade ever deeper into unknown futures. And as they do, they wonder if the tidal floods that now mark their days will be the force that pushes them to relocate or if the city and its experts will do so first. A drained peat bog has been smoldering for weeks (Goldstein, this volume). The peat fire meanders underground for hundreds of meters, at last emerging suddenly and (seemingly) randomly in the form of thick, acrid smoke. As citizens point fingers at nearby corporate monocrop plantations

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and as bureaucrats blame small farmers, the fires continue unabated, releasing tons of gases and particulate matter into the atmosphere. Borne on the prevailing seasonal airflow, the smoke travels across the Strait of Malacca toward Singapore. The smoke obscures the city’s gleaming skyline, built via chains of finance and held in place by the same companies that produce palm oil from the Indonesian plantations. Nervous Singaporeans check their smartphones, keeping close tabs on the air quality in various parts of the city as they plan their days. Meanwhile, the Singaporean government blames Indonesian authorities for their inability to stop farmers from burning their fields. The trail from smoke to fire to haze follows an uncertain course that leads from massive interregional commerce to localized environmental change and then to air pollution, transboundary environmental crisis, sensory discomfort, scientific investigation, environmental outrage, haze alerts, and finally international negotiation. Fingers are pointed, blame is assigned, particulates accumulate in lungs, and injury is suffered. All the while the fires continue to smolder. In Thailand, architects design amphibious cities in the name of a cleaner and greener future defined by “living with flood.” In a small tsunami-struck community of northeastern Japan, a Shintō priestess charts a course for remooring her neighbors once again to tradition, to each other, and to nature. Across contemporary Asia, each day dawns with a new story about living in an era of profound environmental and sociotechnical change. Rapid transformations in the landscape and in social life produce new conflicts that are experienced at nearly every scale of life in the region. Environmental change is marked in square kilometers or micrometers, in cities or in households, and within national boundaries and beyond. These changes appear in the form of radical ruptures wrought both by spectacular catastrophes such as massive floods and tsunamis and by slow disasters (Knowles 2014) such as the widening epidemic of asthma (Fortun et al. 2013) and the grinding processes of land dispossession (Li 2014a, 2017). Each of these scales and phenomena reveal what it is to live in disastrous times. This book explores how people across Asia live, struggle, and make sense of the sorts of environmental ruptures, fast and slow, that now shape the region. The chapters ask how we might analyze this moment of rupture and risk. How do we think about disasters that seem to occur instantaneously but actually draw from deep historical roots and structure future trajectories? How are the burdens of such ruptures distributed? What kinds of sites, stories, analytical approaches, and theoretical tools might be used to help

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us understand these environmental changes and conflicts? What kinds of struggles—personal, ethical, political, and environmental—flow into and out of these changes? In what specific ways are human communities set adrift by the lashing waves of near-constant environmental upheaval? How do people navigate these dangerous waters? And how might they re-moor once the waters calm? Conceptually, we call attention to anthropogenic environmental transformations as they move across spatial and temporal scales. Of course, global environmental shifts such as climate change are linked to large-scale human practices such as industrialization, urbanization, and global capitalism. However, our chapters illustrate how understanding the intellectual, affective, ethical, political, and practical consequences of living in a moment of planetary change—or intervening in its course—requires engaging with the specific policies and human-scale actions that both shape and respond to such transformations at an everyday level. Coastal residents of routinely flooded Semarang, eco-conscious retirees in a Chinese suburb, and cyclists in polluted Kolkata each experience environmental risk and change in highly situated and specific ways, yet attending to their lived quotidian experiences enables us to make sense of the complex processes that are profoundly changing the planet. This volume argues that coming to grips with the stakes of living in these tumultuous times requires examining the ways that microscale quotidian practices and macroscale environmental changes mutually produce and influence each other (cf. Hecht 2018). We aim to open up new avenues for intervention and debate in the service of imagining alternative arrangements of humans and nature. By engaging cross-cutting scales and tempos and temporalities of disaster and risk in Asia, we aim to apprehend and reimagine environmental politics in this historic moment of epochal planetary change.

Situating Asia’s urban transition comprises the terrain for our analysis. Nowhere else more visibly and emphatically exemplifies the sociotechnical density, emergent knowledge production, and rapidity of contemporary environmental transformation than Asian cities and their hinterlands. The cities of East, South, and Southeast Asia are growing at meteoric rates, radically reordering the hinterlands around them (Jones and Douglass 2008). Sites such as those

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described in the above vignettes represent distinctive yet apt exemplars of the radical sorts of environmental change now taking place (Douglass 2000). In communities throughout this superregion, people are rearranging built and natural environments even as environments are rearranging people in countless locally specific ways. Rapidly changing Asian societies and booming Asian cities make visible the deepening entanglements of human activities and natural processes at all scales. Asia’s urban transition is both a consequence and a crucible of the Anthropocene (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000). The word “Anthropocene” (meaning “the age of humans”) is now a widely circulating term that refers to the contemporary geological epoch in which humans have become geophysically significant actors whose activities are leaving a permanently legible mark in the sedimentary record of the planet. The term is contested within both geology (whether or not it adequately reflects our current planetary geological epoch) and the social sciences (whether or not the term “anthropos” adequately reflects the highly uneven historical processes—chiefly colonialism, capitalism, and military domination—behind the contemporary environmental condition).1 Although we share many of the social scientific concerns about the doubly contentious term “Anthropocene,” we argue that the Anthropocene framing offers a critically important launching point for debating the increasingly volatile interrelationships between humans and their environments on a planetary scale. Yet as we describe below, stopping at the Anthropocene is not enough. The term offers limited conceptual purchase for understanding the uneven sociopolitical and economic forces behind our planet’s rapid transformation. “Anthropocene” also does little to attend to the multiple trajectories, histories, contestations, and scenes in which the planet is being acted upon and through. Despite the widespread discourse about environmental degradation in Asia as a space of investigation or a scene for considering ongoing efforts to live, act, debate, and make sense of environmental change, the region is often left out of the conversation altogether. As Amitav Ghosh points out with respect to strategies for responding to climate change, “The brute fact is that no strategy can work globally unless it works in Asia,” and yet, “the conditions that are peculiar to mainland Asia are often absent from the discussion” (2016, 90). Mark Hudson (2014) has argued that Asian studies (and perhaps area studies more broadly) might contribute to our understanding of environmental change in the Anthropocene by unveiling the region’s distinctive ideas of nature, considering its alternative histories of environmental extraction, and locating its discursive excursions toward sustainable

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futures. Yet as Tim Oakes (2017, 405) has noted, there is an endemic tension to such a project, highlighting how focusing on Asia per se requires thinking within and moving beyond area studies. Indeed, this tension is fundamental to our moment of planetary change: even as the planet is conceptualized as an interconnected ecological system, different historical trajectories and contemporary struggles matter more than ever. Here, the value of Asia as a research site—or, more precisely, an array of sites—is not that it serves as a comparison case to the presumed baseline of “the West” but rather that engaging with its distinct trajectories might chart our way toward a clearer understanding of our shared present condition and also perhaps toward better futures. In taking up this charge, we follow not only Hudson and Ghosh but also a long tradition of scholars such as Edward Said (1978), Yoshimi Takeuchi (2005), and Kuan-Hsing Chen (2010, 2012) in championing the study of Asian societies on their own terms. Considering environmental changes from within and across Asia provides a pivotal empirical perspective, while attending to Asian locales on their own terms is methodologically critical for understanding global environmental transformation. Asian urbanism does not reflect a singular “modernity” that is “finally” arriving in Asia; instead, urbanism in Asia enacts a diverse, entangled set of historical trajectories in multiple distinct sites across the region. This means that the lessons to be drawn from the galaxy of Asian experiences are not merely variations on a theme of modernity pioneered in the West. Studying their particular environmental and political struggles enables us to learn from their specific modes of knowing and engaging with risks and realities, ultimately offering new opportunities for thinking through global futures. Though each site explored in this book is culturally and historically distinct, collectively the sites share a great deal. As Prasenjit Duara (2014) points out, Asian “circulatory histories” both entail and exceed contemporary national boundaries. Many places have witnessed eras of ancient empires, revolved about the Middle Kingdom, and endured European colonialism, Japanese imperialism, and the Cold War. In the postwar postcolonial era more than a few have experimented with hybrid governing regimes of authoritarian capitalism, rushing headlong into their own hyperkinetic growth-driven form of late industrialism that continues to propel environmental change in the putative name of prosperity. From China to Indonesia to Thailand, one of the most striking shared characteristics of these societies is the astounding rate and scale of urban

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and industrial growth. Indeed, the effects of urbanization exceed the spatial boundaries that typically mark urban agglomerations as “the city.” Our volume follows scholars such as Cronon (1991), McGee (1991), Jones (1997), Brenner and Schmid (2014), and Miller and Douglass (2018) in considering the radical and often distant effects of urbanization. In Brenner and Schmid’s conception of “planetary urbanism,” urbanization assumes both “concentrated” and “extended” forms. Cities, in this view, are examples of concentrated urban spaces, but urban processes themselves are visible well beyond the boundaries of the city, remaking spaces considered rural and even wild. Brenner and Schmid argue that these extended forms of urbanization exemplify the kinds of forces and spaces that contemporary modes of capitalism produce. Cronon’s notion of “city and country” and Miller and Douglass’s concept of the “urban-rural matrix” echo this idea, as they both argue that spaces reformulate themselves in relation to one another. Thus, it is impossible to fully understand emerging urbanisms without considering the transformations occurring well beyond “the city.” Across Asia, the endemic contradictions of mass urban expansion and environmental change are being worked out on a daily basis as construction and urbanization quicken, increasingly partitioning hostile from putatively safe spaces even as many such divisions become ever more porous. Solutions beget problems, and promise begets risk (Beck 1992); sickness, pollution, and disaster are the devilish shadows of wealth, comfort, and convenience. Yet, the distribution of value and injury has been deeply unequal. As demographer Gavin Jones (1997) has argued, the fact that most residents of Southeast Asia are now engaged in some form of urban production has provoked new kinds of precarity, self-scrutiny, and political mobilization that challenge established norms of meaning making as people struggle to make sense of reordered spatial and social terrains (cf. Bunnell 2002; Thompson 2004; Elinoff 2012; Karis 2013; Gillen 2016). The closure of the land frontier across Southeast Asia produced new vulnerabilities and intense struggles over the environment as common pooled resources became defined by a variety of forms of tenure that promoted a range of new exclusions (Hall, Hirsch, and Li 2011; Li 2014b). In the process, the lives of residents have been reorganized around temporary and permanent migration and the production of new regimes of precarious labor such as those associated with the palm oil industry (Li 2017). As Asian populations grow and move, settling in ever-expanding urban areas exposed to more environmental hazards, the hazards themselves

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become more ruinous. Earth’s atmosphere and hydrosphere become hotter, less predictable, and more hostile, while industrial activities and technological development continually produce newer and ever more potent dangers. Infrastructures designed to manage urban metabolisms become taxed, transforming into sites of latent threat (Fortun 2014; see also Fortun 2001) and political struggle (Anand 2011; Simone 2017). Infrastructures are also reimagined as experiments to rethink human relations, such as reimagining nature as a means of flood mitigation (Jensen and Morita 2017; Morita 2015; see also Ley, this volume). In short, living in Asia increasingly means living with the surging risks of technogenic, natural, and compound disasters—risks that all too often are tied to one’s subject position in the social order—and constantly questioning, rethinking, and reimagining both the positive and negative possibilities inherent in technology. Indeed, Asian societies have borne the brunt of so-called environmental disasters in recent decades as measured in numbers of both disasters and victims (Miller and Douglass 2015, 2016; Douglass 2016). As the chapters in this volume show, many communities across Asia have become intimately familiar with risk and catastrophe. Even when not coping directly with an ongoing disaster’s impacts, many Asian communities are now engaged in some form of predisaster preparation or postdisaster recovery. Arguably, because disasters have become so frequent, there is no longer a meaningful distinction between the phases of the disaster cycle. At the same time, some actors invoke either the memory or the threat of catastrophe to justify their own agendas, projects, and policies. Housing relocation, floodwall construction, urban infrastructure development, and similar projects transform social relations, exacerbate inequalities, and generate fierce political struggles. Thus, both the lived and the represented experiences of disaster and disruption in urbanizing Asia are fundamentally normalized, routinized, and quotidian.

Disrupting The normalization of rupture across the region is provoking fresh and poignant debates about the interrelationships between humans, sociotechnical systems, and biophysical landscapes. Such discourses radically challenge governments, experts, and citizens alike, prompting them to imagine life anew in this time of disruption and transformation. Disasters spark debates and controversies as they reveal long-hidden fault lines in sociotechnical

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infrastructures and environments, making them potent analytical levers and fecund research sites as well as focal points of opportunity for political activism and intervention. Yet even as we demonstrate how critical pre- and postdisaster politics are, we resist the temptation to employ crisis as a generic hermeneutic for making sense of profound transformation. “Crisis talk” often presupposes a forensic approach to a particular problem; by rooting out the causes of a particular issue, it becomes possible to locate the moment of deviation from a particular, albeit mythical, norm (Roitman 2013). As Masco (2017, S73) puts it, “Crisis talk seeks to stabilize an institution, practice or reality rather than interrogate the historical conditions of possibility for that endangerment to occur. In our moment, crisis blocks thought by evoking the need for an emergency response to the potential loss of a status quo, emphasizing urgency and restoration over a review of first principles and historical ontologies.” Instead, our chapters aim to reconceptualize our thinking away from crisis toward specific local political struggles with the potential to yield futures more full of possibility than such crisis thinking might imply. Thus, we consider the region’s cascading environmental shifts not to reproduce crisis logics but instead to think against them. By engaging with scenes of rupture, both realized and imminent, from across Asia’s urban transition, we examine disasters at various scales, tempos, and rhythms in order to understand the ways that such events and processes become crucibles in which particular practices, norms, or forms of power are stabilized or disrupted. Doing so allows us to explore the multiple ways that the region’s actors are grappling with the problems of governing and living with environmental risk and disaster. Their approaches do not just draw from distinct historical roots but also draw out complex future trajectories. We are compelled by Donna Haraway’s mobilization of “trouble” as a practice and focal point in times of ecological devastation: “Our task is to make trouble, to stir up potent response to devastating events, as well as to settle the troubled waters and rebuild quiet places” (2016, 1). Our authors both make trouble and follow the trouble in their own sites. They do so by taking us into quotidian scenes where everyday struggles become opportunities to challenge inequitable power relations and reconfigure communal and individual relationships to the larger planet. Likewise, we characterize ecologies and infrastructures as contested sites in the making, contentious spaces that draw together economies, practices of dwelling, modes

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of governing, and practices of politics (Rademacher and Sivaramakrisnan 2013, 2017; see also Appel, Anand, and Gupta 2018). In contrast to the trope that Asia and its cities have become a kind of metonym for environmental crises and vulnerability (Bankoff 2001),2 this volume functions as its own “ecology of comparisons” (Choy 2011) that considers the varied forces driving environmental change in Asia and the variety of responses to the troubles that have ensued from the region’s mass urbanization. The chapters, both individually and when brought into relation with one another, show the ways in which a variety of actors across the region are deeply engaged with difficult questions about how to live on a changing planet. In this way, the book begins to unearth the roots of the forces driving such changes. Moreover, the chapters tell the stories of the intense struggles taking place within the region as both citizens and governments recalibrate their practices and imaginaries in relation to growing risks and deeply uncertain futures. Thus, we seek to disrupt simplistic portrayals of a region in crisis and attend closely to the ways in which disaster and Asian urbanism and their disruptive environmental effects have evoked new practices, struggles, and questions about knowing, governing, and living in a time of profound environmental transformation.

Knowing One of the most important contributions these chapters offer is in exploring the uncertain and unstable relationship between different and related ways of knowing and ways of governing environmental change. The Anthropocene raises epistemological and ontological questions that challenge dominant modes of knowing and engaging the world. Many authors in the collection note the importance of the senses (e.g., Choi, Johnson, Elinoff, and Blichfeldt), while others emphasize the ways that technoscientific modes of knowledge production may be no more efficacious than alternative ways of knowing (Vaughan, Kay, and Goldstein). The chapters demonstrate these turns in part and whole, showing how scholars might reinterpret anthropocenic data and also how the kinds of changes associated with the Anthropocene may, for example, privilege sense over science—or vice versa. Moreover, as numerous scholars (e.g., Morton 2013; Whitington 2013, 2016; Latour 2014) have pointed out, scientific ways of knowing often produce more

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complex frameworks of understanding rather than actually making the world more comprehensible. Scholars of science and technology have shown that “objective” technoscientific ways of engaging, understanding, and representing the world are no less entangled in political ecologies, no less rooted in particular cultural and historical contexts, and in many ways no less embodied, affective, or sensual than other ways of knowing (see, e.g., Collins 1985; Shapin and Schaffer 1985; Harding 1986; Latour and Woolgar 1986; Lynch 1993; Shapin 1994; Lock 2001; Warwick 2003; Mol 2002; Raj 2006; Daston and Galison 2007; Otsuki et al. 2019). Still, the authority of science is often invoked to underwrite “purely technical” (and thus putatively apolitical) state-sponsored programs of social and environmental governance—a mode of depoliticization that Li (2007) calls “rendering technical” (cf. Jasanoff 1998, 2003; Hilgartner 2000; Mitchell 2002; Oh, this volume; Elinoff, this volume). Nevertheless, as these chapters show, both sensory and scientific ways of knowing turn out to be crucial to questions about how to govern rapidly changing environments. In practice, they are imbricated, continuous, and mutually constitutive (Collins 1985; Latour and Woolgar 1986). Local, embodied approaches to apprehending the environment may prompt new scientific studies (Brown 1987, 1990); they may contribute directly or indirectly to scientific knowledge, as “citizen science,” local wisdom, and community knowledge offer grounds for emerging technoscientific and governmental practices (Agrawal 1995; White 1995; Epstein 1996; Vaughan 2014; Lewenstein 2016). Yet these diverse ways of knowing are neither politically equal nor epistemologically equivalent. Moreover, both scientific and sensory approaches to apprehending the changing environment often produce more, not less, contestation. Though the specifics of the cases described here and elsewhere may vary, the manifold uncertainties of these “anthropocenics” in this moment call upon scholars to consider the epistemological chains that provide justification for new governmental interventions, raising the questions of what knowledge counts in governance and in politics, how it is made to count, and for what purposes.3 Certain kinds of knowing and certain knowers become privileged, while other ways of acting and knowing are ignored or rendered unintelligible and thus unactionable, unable to govern or to be governed on their own terms.4 In this way, sense, science, and governance intertwine and unfold in complex and uncertain ways in the Anthropocene. Embodied senses are essential to the ways in which people identify and imagine environmental

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change. The senses condition the ways that people distinguish the normal from the abnormal. Moreover, sensual claims not only help people grasp these changes but often become the basis for broader sociopolitical projects. Our authors show that the relationships between ways of feeling, ways of knowing, and ways of acting are subtle, complex, and thoroughly political. Samuel Kay’s chapter takes us to Beijing, China, where knowledge about nanoparticulate air pollution is coproduced with the regime for urban atmospheric governance. In spite of the visible and bodily felt presence of PM2.5 pollution, the government long chose not to “see” or acknowledge it until forced to do so by considerations of the 2008 Summer Olympics and the potential for damaging international press. Since then, monitoring has expanded, first by alternative actors such as the U.S. embassy and then by the Chinese government itself. State narratives about pollution, Kay tells us, emphasize technoscientific knowledge, while consumer markets highlight self-responsibility through “virtuous consumption.” Thus, small-particle pollution becomes a problem for architects, developers, and designers who must construct buildings to adapt to the presence of these micro- and nanoscopic particles and for consumers who must make good choices about their own health. The result is the production of highly uneven engagements with pollution while also, as Kay points out, sorting people into categories of knowledgeable/adapting and ignorant/nonadapting citizens. These categories say more about the inequitable distribution of harm and injury through the atmosphere than they do about the behaviors of actual inhabitants. Moreover, they exclude an even larger number of citizens for whom adaptation is beyond reach. Here, sense, science, and law work together to redistribute injury and responsibility without disrupting the material or political contributors to small-particle air pollution. Lukas Ley shows how residents of Semarang, Indonesia, must relearn the local ecologies of that city for a new era of danger associated with sealevel rise and tidal flooding. Historically, Ley argues, flooding began with a major river normalization project in the 1990s that, alongside industrialization, transformed the catchment surface accelerating subsidence. Increasing sea levels and the effects of the sinking city have made tidal flooding, or rob, a major problem. In the midst of rising waters, residents have embarked on new projects of knowing their ecologies to understand the ways that riverbanks distribute water and risk. Residents have learned about where and how infrastructures are likely to fail and have attempted to devise collective solutions. Individually, many residents seek to shore

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up their own homes. These efforts reflect how the poor have begun to create and act on new ecological knowledge at an intimate scale. This process takes into account the complex and uncertain interactions between urban surfaces and tidal floods. Residents learn to read variations in the water level and determine the ways in which such variations will affect their local infrastructures. As Ley shows, these efforts to live within emerging and unpredictable conditions have inspired new kinds of knowledge production that links actors into new kinds of collective engagements with their changing environment. Both Kay and Ley demonstrate that apprehending the Anthropocene prompts questions about situated epistemologies and alternative ways of knowing. Who makes claims to knowledge about the changing world and how those claims are constructed and underwritten are questions upon which a great deal of political action hinges. As all of our authors show, sense, science, and governance are enchained in unstable and contentious relationships that often lead to the creation of new terms and modalities of governance and lay the grounds for new sorts of political contestations.

Governing A second theme of these chapters engages with the ways in which changing environments are entangled in projects of governing. As Edmund Oh puts it in his chapter on fisheries management in Vietnam, the Anthropocene “is as much about the changing nature of the state as it is about the changing state of nature.” Many of our authors demonstrate the complex relationship between the state and nature: sometimes changing natural environments provoke reformulations of state forms, while other times shifts in nature disrupt the state’s claims to legitimacy altogether. As these authors show, the places grappling with the Anthropocene are sites in which new political forms may emerge from contested histories and landscapes. The chapter by Jenny Goldstein examines how the geographies of Indonesia’s peatlands and political ecologies of palm oil plantations converge in the form of the region’s desperate smoke-haze crisis, which bedevils efforts to locate blame and hold powerful actors responsible. Her careful analytical work demonstrates how political economies and ecologies of injury and blame spill across national boundaries. As pollution moves, it raises new ethical and political questions that expose how difficult it can be to locate or

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enforce contested responsibility when terrains of harm exceed the sovereign space of the nation-state. As Goldstein reports, smoldering peat fires in Kalimantan, Indonesia, produce “haze” (particulate air pollution) that traverses borders, from rural hinterlands to urban centers and from nation to nation. Identifying responsible parties has proven extraordinarily difficult. First, the identities of those responsible for specific plots of land have been obscured by complex arrangements of land ownership and subleasing, elaborate structures of semilegal corporate organization, and pseudo-sanctioned practices of subcontracting. Thus, maps are complicated and deceptive. Second, because of the subterranean, slow-burning, and often far-traveling nature of peat fires, the origin of any visible fire is often uncertain if not unknowable. All these phenomena are both transboundary and, more pointedly, transterritorial. As Goldstein states, “because fires burn through land that has undergone massive ecological transformation due to international investment, the concept of transterritorial haze better attends to the complex geopolitical relations surrounding the political economy of agricultural development that ultimately enables haze-producing fires.” Borders do not contain environmental harm, but they influence its distribution by obscuring sites of injury and vectors of responsibility. The shifting environment exposes both the obduracy and the porosity of national boundaries. Harm travels through fluid and shifting atmospheres, rivers, forests, and ocean tides. States remain fundamental actors, but as environments change, where the responsibilities of one state end and those of another begin becomes a question for litigation, protest, and dispute. Similarly, Malini Sur’s chapter on contestations over air pollution and urban space demonstrates how Kolkata’s urban cycling community has become a rising political force in the city. Although the cycling community itself is riven by class differences—illustrated by those who use the cycle as a means of exercise versus those who rely on it as a means of livelihood— her chapter reveals how the question of governing the city’s air becomes a new site of politics that evokes questions related to both who is responsible for the pollution and how that pollution might be mitigated. Unexpectedly, her case reveals how city space and questions of speed and mobility come to challenge the solutions raised by the cycling community. Kolkata, a city in which the cycle has long held a prominent place on the road, now seeks to become a modern global city. At the same time that the municipal government has passed new laws banning the use of cycles in certain critical thoroughfares, the roads have become increasingly congested and the air

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increasingly difficult to breathe. The issues raised by cycling activists thus reflect the kinds of dilemmas posed as the city’s aspirations for global modernity make it increasingly unlivable and unbreathable. Vivian Choi’s chapter on tsunami recovery in Sri Lanka calls attention to the ways that sedimented histories of violence and disaster refract through indigenous modes of sensing environments (attunement to weather, animal behavior, and other natural phenomena), challenging official technical modes of knowing and communicating disaster and risk. Her chapter sensitizes us to what she calls “infrastructures of feeling,” fundamental to both the state’s obligations toward its citizens and citizens’ skepticism about a state they regard as violent and disingenuous. The Sri Lankan government’s moves to assert its sovereignty articulate through a reorganization of the relationship between people, land, and technology. Memories and threats of disaster underwrite this project. Yet Choi shows that such memories inevitably elide a history in which the state itself metes out harm through military conflict and through uneven responses to the plight of tsunami victims who continue to wait for assistance. In this way, these infrastructures of feeling are fundamental to emerging forms of statecraft that entail new human-nature and citizen-state relations. Edmund Oh’s exploration of Vietnamese programs for joint state and community “co-management” of fisheries and other natural resources demonstrates how emerging pressures surrounding these resources have inspired new hybrid modes of governance and new kinds of engagements between state and citizen. These new engagements pry open political possibilities that may contravene the political and economic premises of the socialist Vietnamese state. Official discourse obscures the political potential of co-management, framing it as a purely “technical” solution to problems of resource management. Yet as Oh shows, the pressures placed on fisheries are forcing the state to generate new solutions that might have transformative effects on Vietnamese political possibilities more generally. Encouragingly, Oh demonstrates how the difficult task of governing a changing environment opens up spaces of uncertainty through which local “policy entrepreneurs” are able to innovate solutions that address local environmental challenges while also planting the seeds of a new emancipatory politics. As these chapters illustrate, efforts by state apparatuses to reform nature reveal the tenuous political position of governing regimes and the constructed nature of states more generally. Shifts in modes of governing nature open fractures through which the limits of state power are revealed and new

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strategies and political subjectivities may emerge. The changing environmental conditions of the Anthropocene are likely to spur new challenges to governing regimes and to state formations more broadly. Thus, closer examination of natural resource management and postdisaster politics may reveal new spaces of political struggle and possibility, including new strategies for governance.

Living Nearly every chapter engages ethical questions raised in relationship with our changing environment as well as the ways that assignations of responsibility and possibilities of political action are strategically channeled and circumscribed. These analyses provoke questions about the location, scale, and scope of ethical action in our contemporary epoch. Does the Anthropocene call for a new kind of locally active but globally conscious anthropos? New kinds of communities? New ways of metabolizing resources and waste? The broad shifts associated with Asian urbanization are forcing people to react in ways big and small that speak not only to questions of what should be done but also about who we humans might become in the ensuing Anthropocene. Andrew Johnson and Nicolaj Blichfeldt explore different aspects of what it means to be human in an “age of humans.” Their chapters show that radical environmental change entails the transformation and translation of old ontologies onto new sites and spaces, the rethinking of personhood, and struggles over personal, communal, ethical, and political agency and responsibility. As Johnson demonstrates, urbanization in Thailand has instigated a collision between the material and the spiritual, the real and the phantasmic, the modern and the traditional. As Bangkok consumes ever more surrounding countryside, these collisions have given rise to proliferating “shrines to what once existed,” producing a kind of spectral palimpsest— a city that rests on the bones of what had been paved over. For the urban migrants from the provinces who find low-paying work in a variety of informal sectors, the asphalt cannot hide the (super)nature that lingers beneath and beyond. Indeed, for Johnson’s precarious informants, the city’s streets, highways, and telephone poles become spiritual landmarks in a new wild. This supernatural wilderness has not been tamed by modernity, capitalism, or urbanization but instead has unleashed with unpredictable and

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dangerous consequences what can only be ascertained, understood, and managed through animist practices. Meanwhile, Blichfeldt describes how in suburban Hangzhou, China, the residents of Dongping Lane have embarked on a campaign of community building through a kind of environmental activism under the rubric of “low-carbon life.” Blichfeldt describes mundane practices that are enacted and promulgated mainly by retirees, such as conserving electricity, reusing products creatively, and sorting and recycling refuse. Although these residents strive to become morally exemplary citizens of a model community, the spectacle of their campaign is rooted in the unspectacular nature of their practices, which are “consciously antiheroic and mundane,” as they want to demonstrate that environmental responsibility can be fulfilled through modest and easily achievable modifications in daily life activities. In short, their campaign is strategically designed to produce both the local (as “civilized” community) and the global (as climate change mitigation). On the other hand, in their aim to produce social harmony, these practices are politically anodyne. Although they mobilize notions of good citizenship in an attempt to become an exemplary community, these low-carbon projects remain sequestered from broader concerns such as the political economy of pollution in China. Instead, the projects emphasize daily life as a site of cultivating a form of ethical, communal, and apolitical personhood. Moreover, the “community” campaign enrolls only retirees, while the very young and those who actively engage in productive or reproductive work are not generally included. Blichfeldt’s analysis calls attention to the coproduction of the local and the global, the coproduction of community and moral citizenry, and the production of spectacle through the unspectacular.

Re-mooring The chapters by Eli Elinoff and Tyson Vaughan examine different ways that postdisaster communities endeavor to heal, rediscover, and redefine themselves and move forward into a better future. As is evident in Elinoff’s description of postflood Thailand, the city itself becomes a sign of a contemporary dilemma, a mutable space of possibilities, and an object of experimentation. At the heart of that dilemma is concrete, the fundament of Anthropocenic Asia. Elinoff’s chapter explores three differently imagined sociotechnical landscapes of postflood Thailand. Elinoff

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demonstrates how drawing becomes a fundamental technique for generating new imaginaries of future and contemporary Thailand. The first imaginary he describes is the Siam Cement Group’s “Drawing the Future” ad campaign and its vision of a seamless urban transition facilitated by proper deployment of expertise and “improved” materiality. The second is the Water/Brick architectural exhibition organized by the Association of Siamese Architects, which proposes a set of designs that reflect the ways humans should learn to live with floods rather than fight them. The final example is the massive flood mitigation project proposed by Thai state agents in the wake of the 2011 floods. Each vision operates at a different scale and implicates different kinds of political power, yet the visions also present different normative conceptualizations of the relationship between the built and natural environments and the people who live there. These drawings demonstrate the tenuous construction of Thai conceptions of the urban. They represent distinct contemporary visions of a future lived in the wake and anticipation of spectacular disaster. Tyson Vaughan’s description of postdisaster recovery in Japan emphasizes the complexity of coalitions that bring together experts and community members to rethink not just reconstruction but also their community’s broader relationships with nature and their own identity. He argues that community responses to disaster yield common sets of goals during recovery that do not necessarily align with typical state-underwritten objectives and methods (Wynne 1989; Erikson 1995; George 2001; Vaughan 2012, 2014, 2015; Murakami et al. 2014; cf. Choi, this volume). Because a community’s source of life and cultural identity (e.g., the sea) may also be a hazardous source of trauma, disasters can shatter cosmologies and lifeworlds, shocking communities into profound reassessment of their identity and of their relations to each other, to technology, and to nature (Erikson 1995; Albrecht 2005; Albrecht et al. 2007; Tidball et al. 2010). They become unmoored, questioning not only who they are individually and as a community but also who we all are as humans in a technologically mediated natural world. Drawing on language used by victims of the Minamata mercury poisoning disaster, Vaughan calls their approaches to recovery moyai-naoshi (re-mooring) to highlight the stakes of postdisaster scenarios. As he points out, re-mooring to community, to nature, and to tradition are all entangled in times of environmental disruption. He argues that re-mooring offers a guide for conducting more meaningful postdisaster recovery processes as well as a theoretical tool for thinking about the social negotiations necessary

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for living in an era when disruption becomes the new normal. In contrast to narrowly technical frameworks of “resilience,” re-mooring provides a model for sustaining the relationships that provide human communities with a deep sense of meaning in an ever-changing and dangerous world.

Toward a Quotidian Anthropocene These interventions raise the specter of something we call the Quotidian Anthropocene—a concept in which geological time and planetary scale collide with everyday life and local transformation. As provocative as it is, the framing of the Anthropocene risks being at once too large and too small: it is too large in the sense that it encompasses the entirety of the planet and assigns humans a key role in constructing a new geological epoch, and it is too small in the sense that given the almost incomprehensible time scale of Earth’s history, the Anthropocene itself is likely to become just a small blip in the geological record, a thin boundary layer of gray dust in future sedimentary strata. Untethered from the everyday, the geological scale risks overrunning our abilities to act, think, debate, and work toward collective engagements with our planet’s changing natures. The risks of the Anthropocene framing, then, are to overemphasize human agency or entirely defer human action. By returning to the quotidian, we break from conventional narratives of environmental crisis in Asia and turn to a more productive encounter with the sorts of political struggles, sociotechnical processes, ethical debates, and modes of knowledge production emerging out of this region in transformation (see Loftus 2012). Engaging with the stakes of these disastrous times requires moving beyond crisis stories toward analyses that reveal the richness of the region’s complex engagement with its changing environments. Indeed, as Otsuki et al. (2019, 8) point out, from the quotidian emerges possibilities for lives lived otherwise. The questions asked by our authors bring us back to the larger questions at hand, the ones that we find to be most pertinent at this critical moment in human history in which we are now debating whether humans have become critical geological actors and how that framing might affect future courses of action. Here, we find ourselves occupying the same epistemological space as our informants, pondering the same dilemmas. This is perhaps the most powerful gift and provocation of the Anthropocene: to encourage us to broaden the category of humanity as we begin to act, think, talk, disagree,

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imagine, and make the world anew. We do not take the Anthropocene as an inducement to double down on the project of anthropocentric modernization, such as engaging wantonly in further geo-engineering. Instead, we take the Anthropocene as the stimulus and the quotidian as the scale for a political engagement with the microrealities of living in, with, and through a time of planetary transformation. The quotidian is the scale of the human interconnection and cooperation that promises to heal the social and environmental wounds of the Anthropocene, to undo the injury produced over four centuries of rapacious colonialism and capitalism. Re-mooring, in its mutuality and radicality, acknowledges that there is much to think through and even more to debate if we anthropos are to collaborate mutually toward the remaking of a healthier planet. Thinking the Anthropocene through its most banal, everyday manifestations—within mundane everyday practices, subtle shifts in ontological perception, in debates over knowledge and struggles over space—emancipates us from the apocalypticism of crisis thinking and refocuses us on the question of the everyday politics of remaking the world (Swyngedouw 2010; Ghosh 2016; Latour 2017; see also Stengers 2011; Postero and Elinoff 2019). Whereas apocalyptic framing short-circuits both motivations for intervention and modes of intervening (because it posits an overwhelming, foregone conclusion of doom), the Quotidian Anthropocene reinvigorates possibilities for critical intervention by focusing on actionable scales, making achievable objectives conceivable, and opening up new spaces for debates. Thus, the quotidian resists the kind of political foreclosure that feels implicit in the concept of the Anthropocene. Perhaps ironically, the quotidian may be the only scale at which we are capable of making a real and just impact on the planetary.

Notes 1. Others have taken up this debate more vigorously than we do here (e.g., Chakrabarty 2009; Moore 2015, 2016; Whitington 2016; Haraway 2016; Latour 2017). We share the concerns of a number of authors but do not want to engage in the naming debate here. Instead, we bracket these discussions to engage more carefully with the scenes and spaces in which the changes associated with the Anthropocene get worked out on the ground. 2. A Google image search for the terms “environmental crisis” and “environmental disaster” offers an abundance of evidence for the ways in which Asian cities and industrial centers figure in common anglophone discourse about our contemporary environmental condition. Similar tropes were mobilized in the late twentieth century, tying the region to the

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ticking “population bomb.” Thanks to anthropologist Nayantara Sheoren Appleton for highlighting to us the way this environmentalist discourse has also suffused debates in India around population and contraception. 3. Jerome Whitington (2013) points out that uncertainty is itself often productive of new possibilities, especially in the production of new business opportunities related to climate change. This also recalls arguments about “the good Anthropocene” and human responsibility to engage in further management of environmental impact, leveraging the language of the Anthropocene to bolster efforts at geo-engineering (Revkin 2014; Szerszynski 2012). 4. This point reflects Jacques Rancière’s (1999) insight into the ways that the political is fundamentally aesthetic. Disrupting and transforming the political is thus a rupture rooted in the senses first, transforming noise into intelligible speech and illegitimate or invisible beings into legitimate subjects of politics. Compare Jasanoff (2003, 239): “Expert analytic frameworks create high entry barriers against legitimate positions that cannot express themselves in terms of the dominant discourse.” The question of what counts as knowledge and which knowers might be heard is inherently political (e.g., Postero and Elinoff 2019).

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CHAPTER 1

Breathing in Beijing Governing Particles and People in Urban China Samuel Kay

Something in the Air Something in Beijing’s air is slowly killing people. It is found in the haze of particulate matter that emerges daily from smokestacks, tailpipes, construction sites, ports, and countless other sources. The particles themselves harbor no ill intentions but are giving many of Beijing’s residents a range of cardiopulmonary diseases including asthma, lung cancer, and atherosclerosis. Although these particles do not recognize social status, class, or gender, the harm they inflict is nonetheless distributed unevenly across these and numerous other axes of difference. That is because Beijing’s adaptation landscape is highly uneven, resulting in perhaps hundreds of millions of years of life expectancy being denied to some and hoarded by others. Refusing to see Beijing’s air pollution as merely a technoscientific problem, this research seeks to unravel the web of production, profit, governance, consumption, individualization, and adaptation that leads to the accruing of uneven and unjust harms. Therefore, this chapter grapples with Michelle Murphy’s (2017, 497) provocation “How to give words that might refuse the hegemonic sense of what chemicals and life are, that might be adequate to confronting the ubiquitous condition of chemically altered living-being, a condition that is shared, but unevenly so, and which divides us as much as binds us, a condition that enacts and extends colonialism and racism into the intergenerational future?”

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Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Beijing between 2013 and 2016, this chapter examines how techniques of scientific knowledge production and dissemination—along with everyday practices of adaptation, maladaptation, and exclusion—coproduce a certain regime of urban atmospheric governance (cf. Jasanoff 2004). This chapter argues that the government’s focus on technoscientific solutions depoliticizes pollution and enables its uneven distribution across the city, gradually rendering this unevenness and the harm it causes as unremarkable and mundane (cf. Li 2007). This may be possible in part due to the spatiotemporal scale of air pollution. Simultaneously gargantuan and minuscule, air pollution is both too large and too small to be readily recognized and understood on the scale of a human body. The haze often covers hundreds of square kilometers or blows into the city from hundreds of kilometers away, but some key sites of its governance—human alveoli, for instance—are mere micrometers in diameter. Air pollution is further hidden due to ways in which technoscientific knowledge about it is created and to whom that knowledge is distributed. This especially includes what I call the state’s assertion of “atmospheric sovereignty” and the tight control over knowledge claims about the atmosphere that the maintenance of sovereignty entails. The pollution may shorten hundreds of millions of lives, but unlike Chernobyl and Bhopal, there is no spectacular, singular, and recognizable moment of disaster. But like both of those disasters, the full extent of air pollution’s damage cannot be immediately known but will steadily trickle into doctors’ offices for decades to come or go uncounted, unnamed, and unnoticed.1 The harm accumulates day by day, hinging on the mundane and easily overlooked decision of whether to wear a mask, open a window, or turn on a filter. Air pollution’s harm hinges on perception, access, complacency, complicity, and profit and exemplifies what Murphy (2008) calls a “chemical regime of living.” This is a disaster in slow motion, one that ebbs and flows and at some unidentifiable, unknowable point—like the Anthropocene itself—supplants whatever “normal” once was (cf. Erikson 1995; Ley, this volume). Beijing’s air pollution is palpable with every breath, but measuring it accurately requires advanced and expensive tools. Among the most harmful of the pollutants found in Beijing’s air is PM2.5 (particulate matter with a diameter of 2.5 µm or less), which can be composed of many different types of elements and compounds. It should be noted that even exposure to larger particles that are more easily filtered by the human body, such as PM100, can significantly reduce life expectancy. Human alveoli, the small sacs in our

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lungs that enable us to breathe, each have a diameter of about 200 µm. Therefore, the approximately seven hundred million alveoli in any given pair of human lungs provide scant defense against tiny airborne particulates. Exposure to these particles increases the risk of developing a range of cardiopulmonary diseases and likely leads to reduced life span (Kappos 2011). For the majority of people in Beijing, air pollution is a ubiquitous but mostly overlooked fact of life, a seemingly inescapable background condition still sometimes euphemistically called “fog” by weather forecasters. But for some, knowledge about air pollution and the “correct” set of behaviors for dealing with it is a signifier of competent urban citizenship. This knowledge gap exists alongside extremely uneven levels of exposure, with elites ensconced in specially filtered apartments, schools, and offices while everyone else breathes the carcinogenic soup. While the government has taken significant steps to reduce pollution levels, these gains may be reversible in times of economic downturn, and it may take years or decades to bring pollution within levels considered safe by the World Health Organization (Watts 2012; World Health Organization 2016; Zhang et al. 2016). In the interim, millions of people will be exposed to air pollution and will face shorter life expectancies and lower quality of life. Even if the skies were immediately and permanently blue, the consequences of exposure that has already happened will continue to manifest for decades.

Unjust Urban Air Urbanization is both a condition and a driver of the massive changes we are currently witnessing. Swyngedouw and Kaika (2014, 471) argue that “large scale or ‘planetary’ urbanization of all manner of natures is THE spatial form of capital accumulation with all sorts of intended and non-intended, but thoroughly unequal, outcomes.” What are these outcomes, and how do they manifest on the scale of day-to-day? Cities can be sites of economic opportunity, cultural amenities, and innovation but simultaneously also sites of social deprivation, economic inequality, and environmental degradation. Urban scholars have long sought to measure, describe, and explain these complexities within cities. Angelo and Wachsmuth (2015, 24) have called for an integrated approach that extends beyond a focus on the traditional city (what they call “methodological cityism”) to also address “the relationship between the city as an artifact and processes of urban transformation.” Such

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an approach is necessary for understanding the complex scale(s) of atmospheric pollution; pollutants emitted from one place will ultimately be inhaled at another, while profits from the pollution accrue elsewhere. An integrated approach can also reveal the complex relations between these scales of pollution, considering how economic growth, environmental degradation, and atmospheric governance unevenly manifest in law, laboratories, and lungs in Beijing. As more and more humans live in cities (55 percent of us as of 2020) and as urbanization has come to play an increasingly significant role in the lives of those far outside city boundaries—themselves enrolled in the massive mobilization and reconfiguration of resources necessary to sustain urban life—the field of urban political ecology has emerged to theorize and document urbanization as a socioecological process that produces uneven outcomes (Angelo and Wachsmuth 2015; Cook and Swyngedouw 2012; cf. Cronon 1991; Heynen, Kaika, and Swyngedouw 2006; Lawhon, Ernston, and Silver 2014). Documenting and rectifying the uneven distribution of risk and harm in society is also a mandate of the environmental justice movement, which in part seeks to understand “how and what gets distributed in the construction of a just society” (Schlosberg 2007, 13). The atmosphere has received comparatively less attention in urban political ecology literature than other subjects, such as water, soil, food, and infrastructure (Graham 2015). Graham calls on researchers to examine how air—vital to our very existence but easily overlooked and oversimplified—is unevenly manufactured, commodified, and even weaponized. My argument draws on concepts from both urban political ecology and environmental justice in tracing the emergence of Beijing’s regime of urban atmospheric governance, especially the role of public perception of risk (Harper 2004), the significance of the indoors (Biehler and Simon 2011), and class bias in the governance of air pollution (Véron 2006). The findings discussed in this study are based on landscape analysis, archival data, and about forty-five semistructured interviews with Beijing residents, real estate agents, air pollution researchers, and public health scholars collected between June and July 2013. With the assistance of a translator, I sought out residents for interviews in public and semipublic settings (parks, sidewalks, and stores) across the city so as to collect opinions from a rough cross section of residents. Interviews with researchers were set up in advance through phone or email or were arranged through personal contacts with collaborators. These interviews were carried out partially in

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English or in Chinese with the help of a translator. In addition, I conducted formal and informal interviews with informants while living in Beijing from August 2014 to July 2015. While the atmosphere is seemingly shared, exposure to and harm from atmospheric pollution accrue unevenly. Scholars have demonstrated various axes of difference in the uneven distribution of air pollution harms (Buzzelli and Jerrett 2004; Morello-Frosch, Pastor, and Sadd 2002; Pearce and Kingham 2008). It is especially important to note that this unevenness does not simply arise from different levels of air pollution exposure risk but also develops due to a constellation of other factors—such as socioeconomic stressors, race, ethnicity, and class—that influence the level of harm inflicted by exposure (Grineski et al. 2013; Su et al. 2011; Young et al. 2012). I argue that in Beijing, uneven adaptation is a major reason for the uneven distribution of air pollution harm. What leads to this uneven adaptation? Perception of risk is one factor, but in a way that contradicts previous studies in a North American context. Recognizing that social inequality is fundamental to health status, Harper (2004) examines the role of Houston, Texas, residents’ perceptions of risk in determining the public health effects of air pollution. Harper notes that more affluent residents, being more insulated from harm in general, perceive lower levels of risk from air pollution and thus will be less likely to call for societal change to decrease pollution levels. In Houston, this has led to health policy that focuses on cleaning up the household rather than the urban airshed. In contrast, in Beijing it is elites who seem to be most aware of (and take extreme measures to avoid) air pollution.2 Yet the policy outcome—a greater focus on individual adaptation than on societal change— follows the same pattern. The audience is simply different; while Houston policy makers pedantically tell poor and minority residents to clean up their houses, Beijing’s regime of urban atmospheric governance presents adaptation to middle- and upper-class residents as both a necessary stopgap while awaiting pollution reduction and an opportunity for luxury consumption (of real estate, cars, and pollution-fighting gadgets) largely aimed at improving air quality in enclosed spaces. Since humans spend more than 80 percent of their time indoors (Myers and Maynard 2005), enclosed spaces (the interior of a car, an apartment, an office, or a shopping mall) become key sites of adaptation through air filtration technologies. These technologies leave some people literally on the

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outside looking in. In Beijing, this stark unevenness in adaptation is a key aspect of urban atmospheric governance, brought about through techniques of exclusion and surveillance as well as the everyday habits of ordinary people. As I discuss below, knowledge production and dissemination play an important role in producing uneven adaptation to air pollution and therefore contributing to the uneven distribution of harm.

Air Pollution in China In Beijing and other Chinese cities, rapid urbanization has led to environmental and social problems of an unprecedented scale, including crippling smog akin to that experienced in the twentieth century by cities such as London and Los Angeles. Yet, Beijing has a number of unique qualities as a study site. As a first-tier Chinese city on the highly developed eastern coast, Beijing experienced economic development and industrialization earlier than most other Chinese cities. As China’s capital, the city also has a strong central government presence, many securitized sites of political importance, numerous corporate headquarters, a large floating migrant population, and a significant population of foreigners. These particular characteristics impact both the depth of the air pollution problem in Beijing and the regimes of atmospheric governance that have emerged to tame it. Urban air pollution is not new to Beijing, but recent years have seen a marked increase in pollution, especially levels of small particulate matter. The major sources of this pollution include factories, power stations, construction, vehicles, and household sources. As the number of factories in Beijing decreases and the number of vehicles on the road increases, small particles such as PM2.5 account for a greater portion of the total amount of pollution (Hao and Wang 2005). Small-particle pollutants such as PM2.5 can penetrate deeper into the body’s cardiovascular and respiratory systems than larger particles such as PM100. Exposure to small particles is associated with both short- and long-term health effects, including high mortality rates, asthma, diabetes, heart disease, infections, and lung cancer (Kappos 2011). A study in Shanghai found a significant increase in deaths caused by cardiopulmonary disease on days with higher levels of PM2.5 (Huang et al. 2009). In addition to short-term effects, studies have shown that long-term exposure to air pollution decreases life expectancy. Using data collected from 1991 to 2000, Chen et al. (2013, 12936) estimate that the five hundred million

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residents of northern China have collectively lost 2.5 billion life years due to increased levels of large suspended particles. Levels of even more harmful small particles have increased since the time period of this study. Until just a few years ago the Chinese government’s approach to air pollution was to vastly underreport its levels, explaining away the haze as harmless fog and vehemently denying the full extent of the problem. Until 2012 the government excluded certain pollutants, including PM2.5, from public reports. However, public awareness of PM2.5 has grown in the past few years, increasing notably when the U.S. embassy in Beijing began publishing its own air pollution readings on Twitter, drawing a flurry of diplomatic complaints. By then, the gap between middle-class/elite perceptions of the atmosphere and the state narrative had grown too large to simply deny the problem. At the same time, openly acknowledging the full extent of harm inflicted by pollution could threaten the legitimacy of party-state rule. The party has thus carefully calculated how much information to make available (and to whom), resulting in the current regime of urban atmospheric governance in which information is ostensibly freely available but adaptation is uneven. In 2012 the central government adopted new national air pollution standards in line with international norms, and by early 2013 environmental information—if not the air itself—became more transparent as municipal governments began to release real-time PM2.5 readings. In perhaps the biggest step to date toward clearing the air, major revisions to the Environmental Protection Law—what had not been revised since it was first adopted in 1989—took effect in January 2015. The revisions increase both reporting obligations and potential penalties for polluters in addition to making it easier for nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to sue polluters (with significant caveats). Although there are an increasing number of techniques of atmospheric governance in Beijing, their effects on both the pollution and the city’s residents are still unknown.

Atmospheric Sovereignty and the “Discovery” of Pollution Chairman Mao Zedong, atop the rostrum in Tiananmen Square in 1949, proclaimed that he wanted one day to see a “forest of chimneys [smokestacks]” reaching to the horizon, transforming Beijing from a city of consumption to a city of production (Wang 2011, 86). Particulates were not

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always considered pollution. Smoke billowing from those smokestacks was once hailed as a sign of progress. In contrast, today’s Chinese leaders count the number of blue sky days as a sign of progress; blue sky days have become a metric nearly as important for advancement within the party as economic growth or security (Wang 2013). As Whitehead (2009, 2) notes, “In order to become pollution, contaminants have to work with the pressure dynamics, weather patterns, thermodynamic systems and chemical exchange functions of the atmosphere, and produce culturally, biologically and politically unacceptable/intolerable air conditions.” This change, while decades in the making, has been particularly pronounced over the past several years. Governance of the atmosphere spans across a wide range of scales. The atmosphere can be governed in ways that are huge and vertical, such as China’s recently enlarged Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) in the East China Sea, or on the scales of regions, cities, buildings, and lungs. For China, producing the atmosphere as a field of governance and pollution as an object of governance has required not only a discursive shift from “smoke means progress” to “smoke is the enemy” but also a massive amount of scientific knowledge production.3 The ADIZ, spanning hundreds of thousands of square kilometers, is governed with radar and fighter jets. Alveoli (with a diameter of about 200 µm) and the even smaller particulates that invade them are governed, at least in part, through scientific knowledge and discourse. While they are governed in different ways, both the ADIZ and alveoli are subject to “atmospheric sovereignty,” wherein the state asserts its role as the only legitimate arbiter of who or what can occupy, surveil, or make knowledge claims about the atmosphere. In China’s case, this applies both externally and internally to everything ranging from airplanes to weather and particulates. For example, atmospheric sovereignty is behind the actions of a Chinese naval vessel warning off an American military aircraft in contested airspace.4 Just as significantly, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) has repeatedly scolded the U.S. embassy for distributing data about pollution levels to the public via Twitter. A State Department cable released by Wikileaks revealed that in 2009, representatives from the MFA met with U.S. embassy officials to lodge complaints that the embassy’s Twitter feed was sowing “confusion” and risked causing “undesirable ‘social consequences’ among the Chinese public” (State Department 2009, para. 1). China’s own citizens are likewise discouraged from generating unsanctioned atmospheric knowledge. As of May 1, 2015, unauthorized individuals or entities who publish meteorological predictions (including, notably, forecasts

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for wind, dust, and haze) can be fined up to fifty thousand yuan (about eight thousand dollars) and held criminally responsible for any adverse effects of the predictions (Chinese Meteorological Administration 2015). The Chinese state’s scientific production of knowledge about Beijing’s atmosphere is a key step in making it a governable territory. Until recently, this was largely a process of governance through secrecy. As discussed above, small particulate levels were underreported, ignored, or euphemistically dismissed as “fog.” In 2012, the government’s publication of air pollution data opened up a new chapter in China as the government shifted from atmospheric governance through secrecy to what Whitehead (2009, 14) calls “government with science.” Writing about Britain, Whitehead (2009) argues that government with science not only contributes to a scientific ethos within the state but also reconfigures scientific networks of knowledge production in ways that reflect mentalities of government (cf. Ezrahi 1990; Jasanoff 2004). Something similar seems to be happening in China too. Beijing’s network of several dozen air quality sensors, operated by the Beijing Environmental Protection Bureau (EPB), forms the backbone of the Chinese government’s corpus of knowledge about Beijing’s atmosphere. Data from the monitoring stations are released in near real time on the Beijing EPB website and are aggregated in numerous apps that allow smartphone users to receive constant updates about air quality. Raw data giving the concentration of various pollutants in micrograms per cubic meter are aggregated to give an Air Quality Index (AQI) score between 0 and 500. Occasionally Beijing’s air quality goes “beyond index,” meaning above 500. The flood of scientific knowledge about the atmosphere produced by the Chinese state gives the impression of transparency, but in reality this knowledge reaches different groups unevenly (Kay, Zhao, and Sui 2015). Compared to atmospheric government through secrecy, government with science has enabled more widespread knowledge about pollution; however, that knowledge has been distributed unevenly.

Governing the Air Atmospheric governance is not merely a top-down affair; NGOs, companies, communities, and individuals reproduce societal norms through everyday activities. Atmospheric governance, then, is a state-led project that enrolls numerous actors (those who encourage, sell, or consume adaptation) while excluding others (those for whom adaptation is out of reach). While

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this makes citizen-subjects complicit in the reproduction of norms, it also implies a certain level of agency. If citizens reproduce norms, then they can also alter them. Scott and Barnett (2009) address how knowledge production and legitimation affect both public policy and citizen resistance. Using the case study of public debates over air pollution in Durban, South Africa, the authors argue that civic science has become an important tool for environmental movements to put their concerns on the public agenda. Scott and Barnett (2009) argue that the “hybrid knowledge” of civic science and “lay knowledge” present a formidable challenge to technoscientific narratives deployed by the capital and the state (Allen 2003; Fischer 2000; cf. Irwin 1995; Irwin and Wynne 1996; Jasanoff 2003). While environmentalists were relatively successful in their deployment of civic science in Durban, this has not been replicated in China. Instead, a formidable regime of government with science has dominated discourses about the urban atmosphere, wherein the state claims for itself the sole legitimate right to the production of knowledge about the atmosphere; this is accomplished through a robust network of censors working alongside a robust network of sensors. Whitehead’s 2009 volume State, Science and the Skies analyzes seven hundred years of British atmospheric governance and provides a historical account of how the British government and science coproduced a neoliberal regime of practices that allocates responsibility for dealing with air pollution to individuals in harm’s way. Whitehead describes how scientific knowledge production, with its focus on surveillance of the atmosphere and measurement of pollutants, combines with knowledge dissemination in the form of public exhibitions and awareness campaigns to “cultivate a sense of atmospheric self-responsibility” (2009, 72). The Chinese government has yet to engage in the same kind of public exhibitions of specific adaptation strategies. However, this kind of knowledge is reaching selected groups of people, especially through advertisements. Furthermore, companies in China have taken up some of the strategies described by Whitehead to sell adaptation technologies. Slowly but surely, this has the potential to shift blame from polluters to inhalers. As citizens become responsibilized by a flood of state-underwritten scientific data (cf. Fuller 2017), the moment of harm may be shifted from when pollutants leave the tailpipe to when they enter the windpipe of an individual who failed to take adequate steps to avoid exposure. Over the next several decades when elites suffer fewer health effects of pollution, they may congratulate themselves for their foresight.

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China’s brand of “government with science” privileges technological, entrepreneurial, and market-based solutions to environmental problems with the goal of also bringing about economic growth. Despite increasing environmental degradation, economic growth is still seen as more important than solving environmental problems, although Chinese leaders emphatically espouse the belief that this is not contradictory to socialist ideals (Wang 2013). This is underpinned by a dominant state narrative characterized by “ecological modernization” (Yeh 2009), “sustainable development,” and utopian visions of “eco-cities” (Hoffman 2009). Through the ecological modernization narrative, the Chinese state is seeking to respond to environmental problems in ways that protect party-state rule (cf. Blichfeldt, this volume). Environmental policies are used with the aim of maintaining social stability, even while perpetuating inequality. Ultimately, they are there to shore up the legitimacy of continued party-state rule (Wang 2013). This study argues that the government’s focus on technoscientific solutions depoliticizes pollution and enables its uneven distribution among Beijingers, gradually rendering this unevenness and the harm it causes as unremarkable and mundane (cf. Li 2007). The government is strategically opening up some space for civil society to challenge polluters. The revisions to China’s Environmental Protection Law, which took effect at the beginning of January 2015, if robustly enforced could make it more difficult for major polluters to continue to turn a profit while paying only token fines. Notably, after a judicial interpretation issued by the Supreme People’s Court on January 6, 2015, NGOs are more feasibly able to sue polluters for damages. It remains to be seen whether these lawsuits will make a major impact on enforcement of the environmental law. To qualify, NGOs must have at least five years of good standing with the government during which they have not “been subject to administrative or criminal penalties as a result of violating laws or administrative regulations” (Supreme People’s Court 2015, article 5). This caveat gives the government plenty of latitude to sideline groups that step too far out of line, even while potentially co-opting NGOs to assist with an enforcement role that local environmental authorities often lack the resources, stature, or will to carry out. As long as NGOs dutifully pursue polluters the government does not care to protect, their efforts will not be directed at the state itself. Only time will tell whether environmental groups will be empowered to aggressively pursue polluters in court or be stymied as part of a “let a hundred lawsuits bloom” campaign.5

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If NGOs face a backlash from legal action, it would not be the first time the government has shown ambivalence toward a robust environmental stand taken by civil society. Under the Dome, a documentary produced by celebrity CCTV journalist Chai Jing (2015), was initially tolerated and even tepidly praised by the government before eventually being removed from all Chinese online platforms and attacked in state media outlets.6 Filmed in front of a live audience, Ms. Chai opens with an emotional appeal, describing her concerns as a mother for her daughter’s health. She then introduces basic information about the sources, composition, and health effects of air pollution before discussing potential policy fixes (e.g., washing coal and wider adoption of natural gas for energy) and encouraging fellow citizens to take direct action (e.g., by pressuring neighborhood restaurants to install fume hoods or reporting vapor emissions from gas stations to local authorities.) Under the Dome quickly created a buzz among urban elites. Living in Beijing at the time the documentary was released, I witnessed many friends greet one another with an excited and hushed “have you seen it yet?” One acquaintance reported watching the documentary during a dinner date. Unwilling to pause it, the couple brought a laptop along for the taxi ride to the restaurant and finally watched the credits roll while waiting for their food. Under the Dome was posted online on February 28, 2015. By the time it was removed from Chinese websites at the (confidential) orders of the government a week later, it had been viewed three hundred million times. In the days immediately after the film’s release, it felt like the political status quo may have shifted; if so, it was apparently too much and too rapid for China’s leaders. Under the Dome suddenly became a lightning rod for criticism. Chai, who largely self-financed the production, was accused by state media of sensationalizing pollution, making erroneous scientific statements, and even conspiring with foreign forces to embarrass China. Was Under the Dome a victory for transparency or yet another opportunity for change quashed by China’s censorship apparatus? It is too early to say whether the documentary made a significantly lasting impact on China’s air pollution debate, but this episode demonstrates both the level of importance the state places on being able to control environmental narratives and the limitations it faces when doing so. By emphasizing the technoscientific aspects of air pollution and carefully managing who can and cannot make legitimate knowledge claims about the atmosphere (sometimes through censorship, sometimes through

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fines and/or imprisonment), the state has contributed to an uneven distribution of knowledge about air pollution’s harms and simultaneously rendered this unevenness mundane.

Uneven Adaptation Interviewer: Do you pay much attention to the Air Quality Index? Respondent: What? Interviewer: Air Quality Index, on TV shows or newspapers. Respondent: I’ve no idea and I’ve never been concerned for that. Interviewer: Oh, how do you feel when the air is badly polluted? Respondent: I feel difficulty in breathing. Interviewer: Would you take some measures to protect yourself at that time? Respondent: I would use heart medicine. Interviewer: Wouldn’t you wear a mask? Respondent: No. I feel uncomfortable with a mask. —Exchange with an elderly man in Beijing’s Temple of Sun Park, June 2013

Why do different groups in Beijing adapt to air pollution unevenly, and what does that have to do with the state? Chinese authorities have taken a “government with science” approach to air pollution, portraying it primarily in technical and quantifiable terms. At the same time, they have asserted their “atmospheric sovereignty” by strenuously defending their right to have the final say on which knowledge about the atmosphere is legitimate. This right is enshrined in the law (threatening nonsanctioned knowledge producers with punishment), defended by censors (who exercise their ability to limit access to knowledge claims such as those in Chai Jing’s Under the Dome), and tied together with a narrative of state control of the atmosphere that extends to the defense of airspace. In other words, the state is pushing a technoscientific narrative of the atmosphere—which is selectively legible— while simultaneously limiting, co-opting, or shutting off any other narratives about the atmosphere that might arise internally or externally. State narratives about pollution foreground technoscientific forms of knowledge, which are selectively legible. At the same time, advertisements for pollution-fighting masks, appliances, cars, and real estate portray

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atmospheric self-responsibility as a form of virtuous consumption. Together, these narratives contribute to highly uneven adaptation patterns among Beijing residents and correspondingly uneven exposures. They ensure that adaptation strategies for limiting exposure to PM2.5 are highly stratified along lines of class advantage. Living and working in a building equipped with filtration technology is the privilege of a minuscule portion of the urban population, staying home from work especially on days with bad air pollution is not an option that is open to most people, and some Beijing residents cannot even easily carve the cost of face masks out of their budget. To those who can easily adapt, being constantly mindful of pollution levels falls somewhere between a mild annoyance and a chance to signal virtuousness through engaging in the “proper” adaptation behaviors. To those for whom adaptation is harder or out of reach entirely, it is simply easier to avoid thinking about the problem. Who knows what the pollution level is (or seems to be)? Determining the pollution level at any given time might be accomplished by checking the AQI from a government or an unofficial source, taking a cursory glance out of a window, or feeling a tickle or sting in the eyes or throat. It might be noted after the fact, when entering a less polluted room and suddenly noticing the smell on one’s clothing. Many of the informants in this study mentioned that they judge the air quality based on visibility. On a clear day it is possible for them to see faraway buildings or even the mountains flanking Beijing. On a moderately polluted day, only much closer buildings would still be visible. However, on a heavily polluted day, it is impossible to see even the buildings just across the street. Of course, the visibility method can be ambiguous. Beijing’s winter months are also usually the most polluted due to the use of coal for heating. Winter in Beijing is usually dry and clear, so if the sky is gray it is likely due to pollution, not water droplets. Summer, by contrast, is often overcast, so it is not always easy to tell haze from fog. Even now, forecasts often euphemistically use “fog” to refer to particulate haze. Nighttime is another matter; darkness is more muffled gray than black. Lights behave differently, as if in dense fog. LCD billboards and lighted buildings take on a sentimental, fuzzy glow. If it were not poisonous, it might be beautiful. How much do Beijingers care (or not) about the pollution level? What actions do they take (or not) to avoid exposure? Meaningfully reducing exposure to air pollution is no easy undertaking. For those who walk or ride a bicycle, a mask is the only option to avoid pollutants when outdoors. Masks are uncomfortable, especially in the hot summer months. Carrying a mask

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can be tedious, and despite the best efforts of companies, masks are still not stylish. Moreover, many Beijingers doubt that wearing a mask would accomplish much. In an oft-repeated version of this sentiment, one woman in her thirties mentioned that she does not think masks work and therefore does not wear one herself but will nonetheless give one to her son (about eight years old) with asthma when she deems the air to be bad enough. Apart from their homes, most people have little control over the air quality in the buildings where they spend most of their time working, learning, shopping, and eating. Hardly anyone wears a mask indoors, even when sitting next to an open window. Air filters are becoming more affordable, but their use, while increasing, is still not widespread despite the continuous and concerted efforts of the companies that sell them. Among all respondents in this study, the few who do take consistent steps to limit their exposure to air pollution tend to be educated and relatively affluent. In addition to this small group of consistent adapters, a few “casual adapters” also occasionally wear a mask or try to avoid going outdoors on days they deem to be especially polluted. Only the consistent adapters wear masks specifically designed to filter PM2.5, ranging from disposable 3M masks available for about ten yuan (about $1.25) to reusable masks with replaceable filters imported from such places as Singapore, South Korea, and Japan, which cost significantly more. One step up on the adaptation ladder from mask wearing is having an air filter in one’s home and/or office. Imported filters can cost thousands of yuan. For instance, a middle-range model sufficient for clearing air in two rooms would cost about five thousand yuan (over eight hundred dollars), or about one-tenth of an average Beijing resident’s annual disposable income (Beijing Municipal Bureau of Statistics 2016). A domestic filtration market has rapidly emerged since 2013, with electronics manufacturer Xiaomi offering a basic filter capable of filtering air in one room for about six hundred renminbi, with replacement filters costing about two hundred renminbi. Startup SmartAir offers a more do-it-yourself kind of filter—basically a HEPA filter strapped to the front of a fan—for two hundred renminbi. This technology has the potential to make basic air filtration available to a much larger portion of the population. Beyond filtering one’s home or office, a yet even more extreme level of adaptation would be buying a Volvo, which in 2013 billed itself as the first car maker in China to offer PM2.5 filters for the cabin. To those of sufficient means, adaptation might also include sending one’s children to a school

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with a filtered-air dome over its athletic fields or renting office space in Galaxy SOHO, touted as the first private building in China to include built-in air filtration technology. These extreme adapters, who are relatively wealthy, encourage one another to carefully monitor both the outdoor AQI as well as the air quality in their own homes and offices, emphasizing the importance of avoiding exposure in order to maintain good health. Depending on individual circumstances, significantly reducing one’s exposure to air pollution would require a large expenditure of either effort or money. People without much time or money to spare often expressed a sort of resignation to exposure, as one woman elaborated that it is useless to check the AQI “because you can’t do anything . . . [because] air is everywhere.”7 For those who cannot afford the effort or expense of adaptation, it is easier not to think too hard about losing Y years of life expectancy for every T amount of time living in polluted conditions. In contrast, those who are able to afford adaptation consume clean air as a luxury. Their adaptation is part health choice and part conspicuous consumption. If and when the health disparities between adapters and nonadapters becomes clear and widely known, the adapters will be able to congratulate themselves for their foresight. The state’s emphasis on the technoscientific aspects of the problem renders it selectively legible, while advertising for adaptation products furthers a narrative of atmospheric self-responsibility that can be achieved through consumption. These narratives fundamentally exclude anyone for whom adaptation is out of reach. Under this regime of atmospheric governance, years of life and death are distributed unevenly according primarily to wealth yet seemingly as a result of individual choices.

Conclusion What is more quotidian than breathing? We do it about twenty-three thousand times every day without having to think about it. But we are living at a time when human activity—especially urbanization—has reconfigured the air that finds its way into our lungs. In another place or at another time, Beijing’s air pollution might lead to the near-universal application of extreme adaptation measures among its residents. Instead, it has been rendered mundane by a particular regime of urban atmospheric governance. Beijingers have pollution fatigue. The air pollution emergency (if it is an emergency) has been going on for so long and in such slow motion that with the possible

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exception of a few spectacularly polluted days, it no longer feels like an emergency. It is simply the way things are. For most people, engaging in either adaptation or nonadaptation while driven by uneven state-scientific knowledge production and dissemination has become simply a matter of course. This has led to an uneven distribution of life and death, health and risk, that in some ways is a microcosm for the emergence of the Anthropocene. The technologies of atmospheric governance are highly complex and, like pollutants themselves, often difficult to discern. Formidable networks of sensors and censors create and manage knowledge about the atmosphere. As Cochrane writes, “the very complexity of the process seems to make it unknowable and somehow unchallengeable, yet the need to find a way of developing a popular politics of the atmosphere has perhaps never been more apparent” (qtd. in Coe et al. 2012, 1059). I have demonstrated that Beijing’s atmospheric governance is not simply an inevitable top-down policy that operates evenly across the social field but is also reproduced by everyday thoughts, discourses, and (in)actions differently across gradients of wealth and privilege. If this regime of urban atmospheric governance can be made more knowable, perhaps it can be challenged by those it excludes. More than that, however, this examination of governing practices alerts us to the complex scales of time and space at which the Anthropocene operates. Particles are visible both as haze obscuring the skyline and through the lens of a microscope. Particles can become evident in various regimes of scientific governance (e.g., as numbers on a smartphone screen) but suddenly disappear from sight when they enter the lungs of certain members of the population. We are reminded that something as grand as the Anthropocene conceals unevenness at the scale of the everyday—too easily lost in complexity, too easily obscured by “government with science”—and that the stakes are no less than life and death.

Notes 1. Chernobyl—and possibly Bhopal—also continued to claim victims years and decades later. 2. Some of Beijing’s most affluent and influential residents have at times become leading advocates for societial-level action to reduce pollution levels but have been stymied by the government. Two significant examples include Pan Shiyi, a real estate developer, and Chai Jing, a wealthy and famous journalist. Mr. Pan was an early social media crusader for bringing awareness to PM2.5 at a time when it was largely ignored by the government. While his

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activism may have been partly profit-motivated (Kay, Zhao, and Sui 2015), he played a key role in bringing attention to PM2.5. However, he was invited by the party to “drink tea” and instructed to tone down his social media campaign. Ms. Chai’s 2014 documentary Under the Dome calls for greater pollution controls and was likewise removed from the Chinese Internet about a week after its release. 3. Greenhouse gases may be driving climate change, but their discovery as pollution is far from universal. In the United States, for instance, efforts by the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate CO2 as pollution have met with resistance from lawmakers as well as challenges in the courts, which so far have upheld its authority to do so. 4. In May 2015, a Chinese naval vessel warned a US P8-A Poseidon aircraft in international airspace claimed by China as an exclusive zone: “Foreign military aircraft. This is Chinese navy. You are approaching our military alert zone. Leave immediately” (Denyer 2015). 5. In 1956, the Chinese Communist Party encouraged citizens to freely voice criticisms of the party in what has come to be known as the Hundred Flowers Campaign. After a short period of openness, many of those who spoke out became victims of a harsh crackdown. 6. Newly installed environmental protection minister Chen Jining (previously president of Tsinghua University) told the media that he had sent filmmaker Chai Jing a text message thanking her for focusing attention on the environment. While apparently shedding a more stark light on air pollution than the government was comfortable with, Under the Dome does not make particularly radical claims. It seems to validate the mainstream state-endorsed narrative that pollution is an inevitable trade-off for quick development, and some sections could easily be mistaken for a natural gas infomercial. 7. Interview, June 27, 2013. Interviews were conducted in confidentiality, and the names of interviewees are withheld by mutual agreement.

References Allen, Barbara. 2003. Uneasy Alchemy: Citizens and Experts in Louisiana’s Chemical Corridor Disputes. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Angelo, Hillary, and David Wachsmuth. 2015. “Urbanizing Urban Political Ecology: A Critique of Methodological Cityism.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 39, no. 1: 16–27. Beijing Municipal Bureau of Statistics. 2016. “Basic Living Conditions of Whole Households.” http://www.bjstats.gov.cn/English/MR /IE/201802/t20180201_392019.html. Biehler, Dawn, and Gregory Simon. 2011. “The Great Indoors: Research Frontiers on Indoor Environments as Active Political-ecological Spaces.” Progress in Human Geography 35, no. 2: 172–92. Buzzelli, Michael, and Michael Jerrett. 2004. “Racial Gradients of Ambient Air Pollution Exposure in Hamilton, Canada.” Environment and Planning A 36, no. 10: 1855–76. Chai, Jing. 2015. Under the Dome. YouTube, March 1, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= T6X2uwlQGQM. Chen, Yuyu, Avraham Ebenstein, Michael Greenstone, and Hongbin Li. 2013. “Evidence on the Impact of Sustained Exposure to Air Pollution on Life Expectancy from China’s Huia River Policy.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 110, no. 32: 12936–41.

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Chinese Meteorological Administration. 2015. “Chinese Meteorological Administrative Order Number 26.” http://www.cma.gov.cn/2011xwzx /2011xqxxw/2011xqxyw/201503 /t20150313_276488.html. Coe, Neil M., Allan Cochrane, Samuel Randalls, John Thornes, Peter Adey, and Mark Whitehead. 2012. “’State, Science and the Skies: Governmentalities of the British Atmosphere,’ by Mark Whitehead (2009): A Critical Review.” Geoforum 43, no. 6: 1057–64. Cook, Ian R., and Erik Swyngedouw. 2012. “Cities, Social Cohesion and the Environment: Towards a Future Research Agenda.” Urban Studies 49, no. 9: 1959–79. Cronon, William. 1991. Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. New York: Norton. Denyer, Simon. 2015. “Chinese Warnings to US Plane Hint of Rising Stakes over Disputed Islands.” Washington Post, May 21, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia _pacific /chinese-warnings-to-us-plane-hint-of-rising-stakes-over-disputed-islands/2015/05/21 /381fffd6 -8671-420b-b863-57d092ccac2d _story.html. Ezrahi, Yaron. 1990. The Descent of Icarus: Science and the Transformation of Contemporary Democracy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Erikson, Kai T. 1995. A New Species of Trouble: The Human Experience of Modern Disasters. New York:Norton. Fischer, Frank. 2000. Citizens, Experts, and the Environment: The Politics of Local Knowledge. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Fuller, Sara. 2017. “Configuring Climate Responsibility in the City: Carbon Footprints and Climate Justice in Hong Kong.” Area 49, no. 4: 519–25. Graham, Stephen. 2015. “Life Support: The Political Ecology of Urban Air.” City: Analysis of Urban Trends, Culture, Theory, Policy, Action 19, nos. 2–3: 192–215. Grineski, Sara, Timothy Collins, Jayajit Chakraborty, and Yolanda McDonald. 2013. “Environmental Health Injustice: Exposure to Air Toxics and Children’s Respiratory Hospital Admissions in El Paso, Texas.” Professional Geographer 65, no. 1: 37–41. Hao, Jiming, and Litao Wang. 2005. “Improving Urban Air Quality in China: Beijing Case Study.” Journal of the Air and Waste Management Association 55, no. 9: 1298–305. Harper, Janice. 2004. “Breathless in Houston: A Political Ecology of Health Approach to Understanding Environmental Health Concerns.” Medical Anthropology 23, no. 4: 295–326. Heynen, Nik, Maria Kaika, and Erik Swynegdouw. 2006. “Urban Political Ecology: Politicizing the Production of Urban Natures.” In In the Nature of Cities: Urban Political Ecology and the Politics of Urban Metabolism, ed. Nik Heynen, Maria Kaika, and Erik Swyngedouw, 1–19. London and New York: Routledge. Hoffman, Lisa. 2009. “Governmental Rationalities of Environmental City-Building in Contemporary China.” In China’s Governmentalities: Governing Change, Changing Government, ed. Elaine Jeffreys, 107–24. London and New York: Routledge. Huang, Wei, Jianguo Tan, Haidong Kan, Ni Zhao, Weimin Song, Guixiang Song, Guohai Chen, et al. 2009. “Visibility, Air Quality and Daily Mortality in Shanghai, China.” Science of the Total Environment 407, no. 10: 3295–300. Irwin, Alan. 1995. Citizen Science: A Study of People, Expertise and Sustainable Development. London: Routledge. Irwin, Alan, and Brian Wynne. 1996. Misunderstanding Science? The Public Reconstruction of Science and Technology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jasanoff, Sheila. 2003. “Technologies of Humility: Citizen Participation in Governing Science.” Minerva: A Review of Science, Learning and Policy 41, no. 3: 223–44.

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———, ed. 2004. States of Knowledge: The Co-production of Science and the Social Order. London and New York: Routledge. Kappos, Andreas. 2011. “Urban Airborne Particulate Matter.” In Urban Airborne Particulate Matter: Origin, Chemistry, Fate and Health Impacts, ed. Fathi Zereini and Clare L. S. Wiseman, 527–51. Heidelberg: Springer. Kay, Samuel, Bo Zhao, and Daniel Z. Sui. 2015. “Can Social Media Clear the Air? A Case Study of the Air Pollution Problem in Beijing.” Professional Geographer 67, no. 3: 351–63. Lawhon, Mary, Henrik Ernstson, and Jonathan Silver. 2014. “Provincializing Urban Political Ecology: Towards a Situated UPE through African Urbanism.” Antipode 46, no. 2: 497–516. Li, Tania Murray. 2007. The Will to Improve: Governmentality, Development, and the Practice of Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Morello-Frosch, Rachel, Manuel Pastor, and James Sadd. 2002. “Environmental Justice and Southern California’s ‘Riskscape’: The Distribution of Air Toxics Exposures and Health Risks among Diverse Communities.” Urban Affairs Review 36, no. 4: 551–78. Murphy, Michelle. 2008. “Chemical Regimes of Living.” Environmental History 13, no. 4: 695–703. ———. 2017. “Afterlife and Decolonial Chemical Relations.” Cultural Anthropology 32, no. 4: 494–503. Myers, I., and R. L. Maynard. 2005. “Polluted Air: Outdoors and Indoors.” Occupational Medicine 55, no. 6: 432–38. Pearce, Jamie, and Simon Kingham. 2008. “Environmental Inequalities in New Zealand: A National Study of Air Pollution and Environmental Justice.” Geoforum 39, no. 2: 980–93. Schlosberg, David. 2007. Defining Environmental Justice: Theories, Movements, and Nature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Scott, Dianne, and Clive Barnett. 2009. “Something in the Air: Civic Science and Contentious Environmental Politics in Post-Apartheid South Africa.” Geoforum 40, no. 3: 373–82. State Department. 2009. “Embassy Air Quality Tweets Said to ‘Confuse’ Chinese.” WikiLeaks, http://wikileaks.org /cable/2009/07/09BEIJING1945.html. Su, Jason, Michael Jerrett, Audrey de Nazelle, and Jennifer Wolch. 2011. “Does Exposure to Air Pollution in Urban Parks Have Socioeconomic, Racial or Ethnic Gradients?” Environmental Research 111, no. 3: 319–28. Supreme People’s Court. 2015. “Guānyú shěnlı h huánjìng mínshì gōngyì sùsòng ànjiàn shìyòng f ah lǜ ruògān wèntí de jiěshì” [Interpretation on Several Issues Regarding the Application of Law in Public Interest Environmental Civil Litigation]. http://www .chinacourt.org /law/detail/2015/01/id/148058.shtml. Swyngedouw, Erik, and Maria Kaika. 2014. “Urban Political Ecology: Great Promises, Deadlock . . . and New Beginnings?” Documents d’Analisi Geografica 30, no. 3: 459–81. Véron, René. 2006. “Remaking Urban Environments: The Political Ecology of Air Pollution in Delhi.” Environment and Planning A 38, no. 11: 2093–109. Wang, Alex. 2013. “The Search for Sustainable Legitimacy: Environmental Law and Bureaucracy in China.” Harvard Environmental Law Review 37, no. 2: 356–440. Wang, Jun. 2011. Beijing Record: A Physical and Political History of Planning Modern Beijing. Singapore: World Scientific.

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Watts, Jonathan. 2012. “China’s City Dwellers to Breathe Unhealthy Air ‘for Another 20–30 Years’.” Guardian, January 3, http://www.guardian.co.uk /environment/2012/jan/03 /china-unhealthy-air-pollution. Whitehead, Mark. 2009. State, Science and the Skies: Governmentalities of the British Atmosphere. Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell. World Health Organization. 2016. “Ambient Air Pollution: A Global Assessment of Exposure and Burden of Disease.” https://www.who.int/phe/publications/air-pollution-global -assessment/en/. Yeh, Emily. 2009. “Greening Western China: A Critical View.” Geoforum 40, no. 5: 884–94. Young, Gary, Mary Fox, Michael Trush, Norma Kanarek, Thomas Glass, and Frank Curriero. 2012. “Differential Exposure to Hazardous Air Pollution in the United States: A Multilevel Analysis of Urbanization and Neighborhood Socioeconomic Deprivation.” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 9, no. 6: 2204–25. Zhang, H., S. Wang, J. Hao, X. Wang, S. Wang, F. Chai, and M. Li. 2016. “Air Pollution and Control Action in Beijing.” Journal of Cleaner Production 112: 1519–27.

CHAPTER 2

Figuring (Out) the Sinking City Tidal Floods and Urban Subsidence in Semarang, Indonesia Lukas Ley

Surfacing Surfaces High tides have become a daily concern for many residents of Javanese coastal cities, such as Jakarta, Semarang, and Pekalongan.1 At high tide, the swelling ocean can overwhelm drainage infrastructure and flood houses, roads, and public transport systems. Some areas remain submerged if they permanently lie below sea level. Regular inundation of vast swaths of urban land has led international observers to speculate whether Indonesia’s capital, Jakarta, will in fact “end up underwater” (Kimmelman 2017). In Semarang, a bustling port city with a population of 1.7 million, high tides (air pasang) often cause rob, the local term for tidal flooding.2 Rob is an undesirable type of surplus water ideally absent from inhabited urban territory (Ley 2018a). In recent years, however, containing rob has proven particularly difficult and unnerving for both the government and coastal communities (Ley 2018b).3 Infrastructural adaptation, such as street raising and river damming, periodically provides relief from rob but ultimately fails to keep waters at bay. Controlling tidal water from intruding and pooling (genangan rob) in the poor neighborhoods of the north, such as Kaligawe, seems to be a sheer impossible undertaking. Getting rid of rob is a Sisyphean task, because large tracts of inhabited land lie below sea level and are mired in an unstoppable process of sinking: heavy buildup and groundwater extraction produce staggering rates of land subsidence. The north is currently sinking at rates between

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five and fifteen centimeters per year. The coastal communities Tambak Lorok and Tambak Rejo, together home to about fifteen thousand people, as well as northern areas of the low-income neighborhoods Kemijen and Tanjung Mas, located farther inland, struggle with chronic tidal flooding. In this chapter, I portray the disaster of rob from the perspective of coastal residents to demonstrate how their infrastructural labor aims at extending the life spans of kampung infrastructure. In the process, they create new surfaces that shape the contours of disaster. Repeated informal acts of stacking up, lifting, and repairing modulate rob as well as the “state effect” of public infrastructure. In this process, I argue, surfaces—pavement and house floors as critical material surfaces for urban life, the water surface of rivers as their levels climb during high tide, and the marred surfaces of bridges and riverbanks as material bellwethers of infrastructural breakdown—strongly matter. When I first read Larkin’s seminal article on infrastructure, I strongly agreed with his assertion that the political effects of infrastructural world-making projects “cannot be simply read off from their surfaces” (Larkin 2013, 334). As anthropologists, we indeed need to engage with the full range of feelings that infrastructures introduce and sustain. As Larkin points out, the city’s built environment forms us as subjects by shaping our imagination and mobilizing a wide range of feelings, such as desire, pride, and frustration (Larkin 2013, 333). In Semarang, I witnessed firsthand how state-provided drainage technologies, such as dikes and pumps, could engender feelings of aspiration and purpose.4 However, in the case of rob, when tides swallow whole buildings, bridges, and homes, a double reversal occurs: first, the promise of infrastructure turns into the fallacy and unreliability of the built environment. Second, urban politics can become readily visible to the onlooker, just from looking at surfaces. Reading the surface—of water infrastructure, rivers, and roads—can turn into a political gesture in Semarang’s current age of rob. This chapter takes inspiration from this double reversal of infrastructure to think through the politics of surfaces as a new conceptual engagement with the ecological, biophysical, and political processes that shape the landscape of the kampung.

Slowing Down Disaster Last year on a humid November day, I visited the fisher village of Tambak Rejo with a member of the youth organization Karang Taruna. The month

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had been particularly dry, and everybody was expecting the seasonal monsoon rains to start any day. But the overcast sky shed not a single raindrop as we spoke with several local rob victims. One single mother, Nura, showed us rashes on feet and legs that resulted from daily exposure to floodwater. Upon inspecting her home, we saw that all rooms were submerged. “It’s been like that for weeks,” Nura said. To get from one room to the next, she and her teenage son had to wade through ankle-high brownish liquid. She saw no benefit in buying balms for her lesions, as the water was unlikely to disappear anytime soon. Instead of seeking relief from itch and pain, she decided to wait out the flood and save the money. Behind the family’s house, which bordered on the East Flood Canal, the government had begun storing giant heaps of concrete tetrapods, a comparably cheap type of breakwater armor to protect the coastline. In fact, Semarang’s government has undertaken several major infrastructural projects to prevent flooding in coastal communities. A recently implemented yet still incomplete polder system in North Kemijen is supposed to protect communities located on the banks of the Banger River from tidal floods. Residents of harbor communities complain that they are frontline victims of the polder’s dam: according to them, in the past the stream had absorbed tidal influx. Now, the seawater had nowhere else to go. For them, politicians’ conundrum of where the water will go (see Kusno 2018) is a rhetorical question. It will inevitably end up in their streets. The scale of Semarang’s antiflooding projects makes it easy to overlook the important and innovative infrastructural and social acts of residents to deal with rob. Nura has been living in Tambak Rejo, on the edge of the sea, since 1983. Yet for residents such as Nura, rob becomes especially ruinous not only when infrastructures fail to do their job but also when they work just fine. In Semarang—a complex and uneven landscape composed of old and new—private and public water infrastructure, contradictory preventive mechanisms, and governmental (in)action modulate and accommodate the temporality of disaster. As such, the phenomenon of rob not only points to the social production of disaster and vulnerability in Asia (Bankoff 2003). Rob also raises important questions about the role of infrastructure in delaying and relaying disaster. As such, a study of rob necessitates attention to the social perception of infrastructure’s interaction with water and residents’ strategies to figure out and shape this erratic landscape. Unlike events conventionally understood as disastrous or catastrophic,5 rob occurs slowly and almost rhythmically. It doesn’t lead to the sudden

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collapse of social systems or disrupt cultural sequences (Narotzky and Besnier 2014). Strangely, rob is the repetitive coming and going of water that gnaws at people’s determination and forces them to adapt, necessitating taxing repairs and demanding constant attention to increasingly precarious infrastructures. Notably, the recurrent event of rob produces a sense of entrapment as entrenched poverty and political marginalization prevent significant changes. The north is Semarang’s poorest region, featuring the city’s highest concentration of poor households (Muktiali 2018). In addition, the area is often shunned as a slum area (daerah kumuh) by the government and media. Needless to say, the interplay of precarious living and political marginalization makes coastal residents especially vulnerable to flooding. The case of Nura raises the question of what is worse, exposure to floodwater or the state’s response to it. Residents who were evicted in the wake of river normalization came within inches of displacement by the ocean for decades, only to become displaced by public programs. As Scheper-Hughes (2005) has argued with regard to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, social responses to disasters may amplify disastrous effects. In the absence of large-scale state interventions, the prevention of rob to a great extent lies with residents. Analyzing rob events at the scale of the everyday helps appreciate the ways in which people cope with the effects of water infrastructure. The social responses to rob are manifold and include renovating, repairing, and enduring (Ley 2018b; see also Povinelli 2011). Responses try to slow down or defer the inevitable by outrunning the rate of land subsidence. While coping strategies include long-term plans, such as lining up public improvement programs and house renovations, the quotidian is the starting point for an actionable knowledge of local urban ecologies. Scoping infrastructural mechanisms and arrangements as well as flows of water on a daily basis allows residents to anticipate potential infrastructural failures, breakages, or shortage of pumps. As the pathways of rob become traceable and predictable through talk and media reports of breaches and collapses of riverbanks, a specific knowledge of rob seems possible. Being in the know allows people to make small daily adjustments and hedge long-term risks. As such, gaining an understanding of rob requires knowing the trends of urban development: When will the government repair riverbanks? When will the pumps be installed? Building on AbdouMaliq Simone’s (2013; Simone and Pieterse 2017) work on Jakarta’s urban assemblages, I argue that in Semarang, coping with disaster is not just a question of knowing the speed

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of land subsidence, the height of tides, or the course of water. People also have to position themselves in creative ways to discernible logics of infrastructural arrangements and come up with new formats that allow them to shape hydraulic—that is, urban—realities. While these practices may look inconsequential, some of these formats prevail and last for some time, creating brief moments of reprieve that could be considered instances of infrastructural commoning. As Simone (2013, 243) argues, Jakarta’s poor “figure themselves out by figuring out arrangements of materials, by designing what is available to them in formats and positions that enable them to take different vantage points.” In Semarang, the coastal poor need to constantly figure out the workings of drainage infrastructure as it interacts with water and land subsidence. For them, figuring out the sinking city is largely a question of knowing what exists between coastal residents and the forces of nature. They inhabit drainage infrastructure. Simone pays particular attention to how urbanites monitor infrastructural “betweens” in order to find ways to shape and harness these situations, as they may provide “points of reference, connection, and anchorage.” In the last section of this chapter, I discuss why activists accept the impossibility of attributing blame for rob. Suspending the search for the real perpetrator of rob, they seek to gain a solid understanding of infrastructural operations. Intimate knowledge about infrastructural arrangements not only influences when seawater becomes disastrous, but which sections of the government can be lobbied for funds and support. I understand this cunning acceptance as a way of escaping the everyday entrapment of rob by homing in on the paradoxical workings of infrastructure. Communitybased development schemes have long framed the kampung inhabitant as holder of local environmental knowledge. In Indonesia, citizens use this framing productively to access state funds for local urban renewal projects. I show how the mysterious character of rob allows people to cast themselves as legitimate recipients of infrastructural renewal programs, which seemed unthinkable prior to the ongoing era of rob.

Extending the Life Spans of Kampung Infrastructure Concern over rob was widespread when I started fieldwork in 2014. Interpretations of tidewater as corrosive and interruptive for the whole city already formed a “common undercurrent,” to quote Veronica Strang (2005,

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97). On the one hand, the era of rob was represented as an infrastructural crisis that threatened to befall the city’s downstream neighborhoods. Even affluent areas inhabited and frequented by Semarang’s middle class and elite, such as the city’s heritage neighborhood Kota Lama (see Yapp 2018), were at risk of flooding. Semarang’s central train station, Stasiun Tawang, was regularly flooded between 2006 and 2007. The media frequently reported massive interruptions of traffic and economic activity due to rob. For example, the daily Kompas reported in 2017 that rob had brought business to a complete halt (lumpuh total) at Semarang’s largest bus terminal, Terboyo. On the other hand, the phenomenon of rob was commonly attributed to Semarang’s coastal neighborhoods, as they were the first to stand in the way of the rising tide and the quickest to sink. One could say that the more egalitarian rob threatened to become, the more aptly it provoked public anxieties about social difference. As such, containing but not altogether ending rob confirmed the dominant imaginary of a socially and culturally stratified city and reinscribed the image of the degraded and dangerous nature of the north. In contrast, many older residents of poor northern neighborhoods were nostalgic about the past. The local activist Adin (whose work I describe in more detail in the last section) once reminisced about the Kemijen he grew up in when we went for a stroll along the Banger River. When Adin was young, many fishponds as well as mangrove forests (hutanan) separated his neighborhood and the ocean. He explained how these “natural” (alami) structures protected the settlements from strong waves at high tide. Uncontrolled settling and building on Semarang’s wetlands upset this balance, according to Adin. Tidal flooding to him was the logical consequence of a human-driven conversion of wetlands into urban and above all industrial space. Adin considered flooding as nature’s way of reclaiming human-made land. The more people lived in places out of synch with natural processes such as tidal rhythms and seasons, the more people were in harm’s way. Residents of the north intimately know what it feels to stand in water’s way. In North Semarang, many residents like to joke that “we own our houses, but we pay a rent to nature” (sewa pada alam). The joke refers to the financial toll that rob takes on them. Nature is portrayed as a profit-minded landlord whose appetite for rent leaves a noticeable dent in residents’ finances. The joke also expresses a certain awareness that ownership does not equal autonomy (from nature’s moods). Finally, the joke takes the government out of locals’ experience of flooding. As will become clear, this is not

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an accidental omission signaling a naturalist way of thinking but rather a cheeky swing at the city government. In fact, although the municipality mobilizes important funds each year to elevate streets in the downstream area and maintains drainage infrastructure, most residents still have to regularly raise their houses at their own cost. They have to save up money, pool incomes with family members, or take out loans to stem the added financial burden. Seen like this, the fact that residents consider themselves tenants of nature says a lot about the state of public infrastructure in the north. In 2015, residents of Kemijen readily acknowledged the presence of rob in everyday life. Most of them were aware that their homes had been built on former wetland and have been living with rob for many years. One resident told me that floodwater was not only an annoyance and a risk but also a source of profit. He said that rob could bring rezeki—a local term for fortune and livelihood. I was surprised to hear this. How could flooding be lucrative? Nils Bubandt (2017) has described the spiritual pursuit of rezeki on the expectorations of Surabaya’s mud volcano that displaced around 40,000 people in 2006. While catastrophic for some, the relentless upsurge of nature possessed a lure for others. In Kemijen, people did not look to gain spiritual powers from rob. Rather, floods coemerged with a lucrative infrastructural maintenance business that promised additional revenue for those who could lend money, oversee technical fixes, or broker deals with the government. In the north, rob is a taxing and untiring presence but also provides opportunities for entrepreneurs and communities to become involved in the preservation of the kampung. Crucially, rob requires acts to extend the life span of communal infrastructure, in particular roads, gutters, and riverbanks. Regularly, large loads of soil are deposited in northern neighborhoods affected by rob. This infill, called tanah uruk, is used to level up streets (residents also use tanah uruk to increase the foundations of their houses). Road infilling is usually carried out by private firms, since the government has to subcontract construction work in an effort to curb corruption. Before decentralization, the government was still carrying out construction work through its own companies. Chiefs and local figures profited handsomely from improvement projects. It is common knowledge in Kemijen that when the government wanted to carry out roadworks, local strongmen and chiefs were routinely cut in. When land subsidence became an issue for the majority of northern kampungs, flooding thus meant rezeki for those involved in the business of uruk, or keeping the neighborhood above sea level.

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Government interventions aimed at raising streets are commonly called peninggian (elevation). Street raising follows a well-known dramaturgy. One day, several truckloads of the main construction material—brown or black dirt—get dumped near the site that the city government deemed eligible for raising after brief reviews of the situation. Then, these piles just sit there for some days. Few people know in advance when the real work begins, that is, when the labor teams along with construction tools arrive. Only some residents know when the government approves residential requests to raise a particular section of a kampung road. Even less transparent is the process of releasing funds, tendering, and assigning tasks. Sometimes roadworks were the reason of social conflict, as one resident told me. Some residents might complain about the opaque process of peninggian, accusing a local chief of deal making. As such, tanah uruk, as a vital construction material, reshaped not only the material landscape of the kampung but also the political itself (Elinoff, Sur, and Yeoh 2017). After twenty years of community service, the self-appointed chief of one riverside Kemijen neighborhood was replaced by Arief, a factory worker and father of three in his fifties. Residents were fed up with the former chief’s self-serving attitude and desired an honest leader. As such, they reaffirmed a trope that, according to Newberry (2008, 243), is central to life in the city kampung. She argues that kampung life “is tied up with the sense that kampung are the site of traditional forms of cooperation, consensus, and neighbourliness.” Arief’s term inaugurated a more cooperative way of living with rob. This process, as I will show, was accompanied by processes of figuring out the neighborhood’s infrastructural composition and the government’s hydraulic politics. The residential unit Rukun Warga (RW) that Arief presided over was often affected by rob. His reputation of being a law-abiding citizen and a devout Muslim as well as his firsthand knowledge of rob made him an ideal leader at a time when Kemijen was arguably witnessing the peak of rob. Instead of waiting for government-sponsored improvement works, Arief advocated disciplined self-help and residential caring. Before heading off to and after work in a factory in Demak, he monitored the river’s water levels. In addition, he cleaned the open sewage system every morning with a hand sieve. He and a tech-savvy neighbor also gathered evidence of rob. The neighbor regularly took photos of the river and the nearby bridge during tidal peaks and then posted them on Facebook, his posts often generating substantial discussion. After documenting the regularity and height of flooding, Arief and his team successfully

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applied for a private grant to equip the community with a self-run water pump (pompanisasi). After some time, they noticed that this style of self-responsible risk mitigation lessened selfish adaptive measures through peninggian while also rekindling a spirit of community in line with national discourses of “good” kampung life (Bowen 1986). The neighborhood ended up becoming a poster child of bottom-up development in the north. Between 2014 and 2015, I regularly attended neighborhood meetings and came to know almost all members of the neighborhood council. In October 2018, I was warmly welcomed and invited to another meeting. I learned that Arief was still overseeing the neighborhood’s efforts to mitigate the risk of rob. His first project—the small-scale hydraulic system—was updated in 2018, when the team was able to add a filter intended to clean domestic wastewater before being dumped into the river. Arief’s efforts to rally people behind pompanisasi and keep the neighborhood clean paid off at the end of 2018, when Arief was officially reconfirmed as local chief (Ketua RW). When I visited Arief and his family in 2018, the living room of their house had been recently renovated thanks to a small pro-poor grant from the city government. Being his usual self—always industrious—he was finishing off a paint job on his porch before joining me for tea in the living room. Quite literally, his neighborhood had managed to figure out the infrastructure “between” them and the river, or the source of flooding, thereby creating a space for political maneuver. This form of place making as a practice of figuring also promoted a new social identity of the riverside community.

The Nature of the “State” Most residents of Kemijen place the emergence of rob in the 1990s, when the government concluded important drainage infrastructure works that aimed at standardizing the shape and flow of East Semarang’s Banger River according to national regulations. These “river normalization” works articulated the government’s fantasy of controlling water flow throughout the city and continuing reclamation of coastal land for industrial purposes. However, industrialization strongly reduced catchment surface and accelerated land subsidence. Now residents hope that the government will fix the broken hydrological system, above all riverbanks. As I explained above, in view of increasingly unpredictable flood risks and unreliable state interventions in the form of road improvement, people

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consider raising their houses at their own expense a necessary preventive act. However, house renovations have to be coordinated with public floodprevention measures. All know that the best chance of staying ahead is a combination of timely riverbank repair, street raising, and private adaptation measures. The state of coastal “nature,” entangling residents in relationships of rent, thus raises questions about the nature of the state. Here, residents do significant conceptual work that requires figuring out the timing, range, and reliability of river infrastructure improvement. In the absence of enough data and reports and in view of a largely absentee state, some residents have focused their attention on river infrastructure; for example, the talut (embankment) represents a recent artifact of state-led water governance that was introduced to Kemijen in the context of the river normalization works mentioned above (Ley 2018a). Riverbanks were meant to give shape to national regulations aiming to homogenize and control river-society interactions. Today they form an integral part of kampung life, as concrete structures enclose the Banger River all the way from its lowland artificial spring to the littoral. Residents observe both the variations in water level and its infrastructural bounds. While river walls were supposed to prevent flooding by fixing water in place, they are now seen as a major cause of flooding and are variously called out for bocor (seeping) or ambrol (collapsing) by local communities. While they are supposed to be standardized, riverbanks are far from egalitarian. Rather, riverbanks along the Banger River vary in height and construction type. Riverbanks can thus be understood as complicated artifacts that heterogeneously layer material, labor, and time. Instead of consistently fixing water in place, riverbanks can become discriminatory actants that distribute water pressure and height in uneven ways. As such, riverbanks harbor risk, which, according to Howe et al. (2016), is an integral effect of infrastructure. They argue that while infrastructures are supposed to mitigate risk, they also foment danger. In many places, East Semarang’s erratic riverbanks thus occasion close observation and acts of maintenance. Understanding riverbanks as unreliable and flexible means that space and time matter when this “bare infrastructure meets and conjoins with the organic, the ecological, and the hydrological” (Howe et al. 2016, 557). Every few meters, the talut is interrupted by a water gate that can be manually opened and shut by residents. Communities in Kemijen that engage in pompanisasi (local hydrological schemes) also operate these water gates. They have effectively devised hydrological niches that complement public water infrastructure. For example, they close the gates (which are

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often broken) with makeshift mechanisms at dusk and open them in the morning, when they judge the tide sufficiently low. As soon as the gutter fills up and threatens to spill water, residents further resort to diesel pumps to dispose of drainage water into the canal.6 This labor is conducted by communities that have emerged around a common concern: the unpredictability of state drainage infrastructure. Riverbank maintenance shows that communities actively entangle themselves in emerging urban ecologies. Rademacher (2011, 16) refers to urban ecologies as the result of “biophysical constraints and social imaginings that converge on a given landscape.” She further conceptualizes ecology as a set of experience and action. The regular experience of rob through seepage and collapse as described in the case of the talut and the emergence of pumping communities demonstrate ecologies falling apart as well as in the making. New conceptual engagement with these structures in the form of figuring out materials and environments produces social niches and collaborative caretaking. This process of making urban ecology affords new possibilities of dealing with the state. But not everybody is able to draw out and call out the complicated links between infrastructural failure, biophysical change, and public improvement projects. It is thus worth asking more generally what kind of subject emerges to take up crucial roles in community protection, as infrastructures both “mitigate and magnify precarity” (Howe et al. 2016, 555). The next section sketches this kind of subject against the background of democratization processes in Indonesia.

Komayu: The Ebb and Flow of the Urban Grass Roots As early as 2000, a handful of Kemijen residents formed an interest group called Komayu (Komunitas Karang Sayu) to address problems of their neighborhood, one of them being rob. As members put it to me, the reason for creating Komayu was a shared “desire to change Kemijen.”7 Broadly speaking, the group was concerned with economic improvement of the area. Still, Komayu’s attempts to discern the local and social causes of impoverishment and formulate improvement programs focused on neighborhood or kampung infrastructure and in particular drainage. In 2014, Komayu had succeeded in becoming an interlocutor of the government. However, when I revisited Kemijen in 2018, the group had largely suspended its advocacy work and was now focusing on preventing incidents of domestic violence in

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Kemijen. Some old members said that Komayu had been laid to rest. Importantly, large areas of Kemijen were dry (kering) by now, as rob stopped after the implementation of a Dutch-designed polder system. Being unable to harness the specter of rob, Komayu has shifted its positionality. As such, the ebb and flow of Komayu demonstrates that rob enabled a bottom-up style of disaster prevention that, however, did not outlast the immediate threat. In 2015, Komayu had a chief coordinator and consisted of a variable number of nominated members who worked as Komayu’s delegates in various kampungs of the subdistrict. Since its formal foundation, the forum had cooperated with several national and international nongovernmental organizations. Komayu’s operating budget mainly derived from project-related grants from larger humanitarian organizations. Komayu has been gaining influence for residents to participate in decisions about how and where infrastructural programs get implemented. How did Komayu gain this influence? As I will show below, Komayu has exploited widespread uncertainty about the causes of rob. To construct local credibility, it has based its claims on a place-based experience of infrastructure and its interactions with river and ocean water. As such, Komayu pioneered an environmental sensibility that allows communities to criticize government plans and make budgeting suggestions. Well-known local full-time Komayu member Adin helped organize a “folkloric” festival in Kemijen each year from 2006 to 2009. According to Adin, these events aimed at putting the organization “on the radar” of the public and the government—to boost its ability to partner with government agencies. Komayu wanted the government to see that the communities along Banger River were able to organize successful events. Wahyu, another member, said that the government eventually took notice. He imagined the surprise felt by government representatives: “Oh, look at that, even the stinky Banger river can do it.” According to Adin, attracting aid programs was the fruit of their continued engagement with their degraded riverine environment. Twice they celebrated a ruwatan (a traditional Javanese cleansing ritual) by the river to bring about positive change. Adin emphasized that the ritual was aimed at attracting public attention to communicate the area’s “readiness” for improvement to the government. The ceremonial aspect merely represented a cultural “package” (digemas budaya). In fact, Komayu had to put extreme care into how its message to the public was communicated. The group’s critique had to be subtle, which required an early involvement of the government in their activities. Komayu

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rejected more openly political means, such as protesting and demonstrating. In fact, Komayu had to actively distance itself from residents who embraced violent protest. In addition, the group had to constantly demonstrate alertness, correctness, and readiness to counter the dominant narrative depicting coastal residents as stubborn and lazy. For example, Wahyu sometimes complained that there were residents who “just don’t care.”8 Other members underlined how violent the area had been in the past. Instead of raising the specter of violence, Komayu had to be careful to choose a different politics. Members feared that the government would blame them for troublemaking, which would result in curtailed or withdrawn support. Instead of civil affront, they decided not to bother the municipality, which in the past had legitimated the absence of development projects by pointing to “elements” in Kemijen that allegedly planned to sabotage public works. If the area had been haunted by violence in the past, its contemporary curse was flooding. Involving the government early on eliminated or at least reduced suspicion. Group members recalled, however, that a few years earlier they had become the object of a police investigation for organizing rapat gelap (dark meetings). As a direct result of the investigation, they started operating as a dispersed network. For example, in 2015 Komayu cooperated with a local advocacy organization whose activities are financed with international donor money. Wahyu stated that “you need a lot of friends if you want to take on the government. Your arguments need a foundation.”9 By demonstrating visibility and staying connected across the political spectrum, the group today seems to avoid being “criminalized.” I recall a routine Komayu meeting I attended where Wahyu was surrounded by his many allies. Introducing the group’s members, he looked confidently into the round: “Mas Toto is head of PMPN (a government-initiated poverty alleviation program operating on a World Bank loan), Pak Tanto is head of KSB (disaster-preparedness group) and RW (neighborhood association).”10 The list continued. All members had some civil function in the subdistrict. This is evidence of Komayu’s ability to insert members into numerous sites of local governance. Here, they can influence budget dispersion or monitor the implementation of infrastructural programs. As a result, the group can currently request financial support for infrastructural improvement either through a provincial bottom-up development program called Musrenbang or by directly submitting improvement proposals to the municipal parliament. After Wahyu’s introduction of the members, Adin smiled and added that their work resembled a constant “gnawing” on the government: “like mice!”11

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As a result of this nuanced approach, Komayu’s members have been able to speak to the issue of rob without having recourse to nature-blaming. Instead, they problematize uneven accessibility to reliable drainage infrastructure, lack of transparency, and corruption. To do so, they had to turn their place of residence into a culturally drenched “endangered environment.” Festivals and ceremonies aimed at raising awareness of environmental issues while successfully staging their desire for increased self-determination. Positively transforming Kemijen’s precarious ecology is a delicate process in itself. Claims have to be packaged and dressed in the cloak of local authentic culture instead of giving the impression of oppositional politics. I see Komayu as a forum for dealing with the tricky questions of social responsibility that the Anthropocene poses everywhere. In a political climate that makes it particularly difficult to assign blame to the state, one potential move is to avoid this question altogether. Let me provide a last ethnographic vignette to illustrate the work of Komayu. In 2014, the group sent members to participate in a “social audit” that took place in a downtown restaurant. At this meeting, the members discussed the draft of Semarang’s regional drainage regulation (peraturan daerah drainase) as well as ongoing antiflooding measures with representatives of the three municipal government bodies that carried them out: Semarang’s water agency (Pengelolaan Sumber Daya Air, PSDA), environmental agency (Badan Lingkungan Hidup), and planning agency (Bappeda). Impressively, the members had managed to meet face-to-face with key decision makers, the people responsible for planning antiflooding measures and implementing them. At the meeting, budgeting and transparency in infrastructure provision were salient topics. The conversation was strictly about empirical facts. The general mood was light. Only at points did the present activists submit evidence of minor miscalculations and fraud: Why had renovations of this stretch of road not been completed as described in the publicly accessible construction contract? What was this ominous, expensive insurance in another contract that had never been purchased? However, these pushes for justification and rectification were not accompanied by outrage, and no offense was taken on the government’s part. Instead of arraigning the government, the activists chose to let the facts speak. For example, one activist, a young resident of the rob-prone area, spoke about a tanggul (riverbank) that the PSDA had recently put in place. Apparently, a stingy private contractor had put a lot of sand in the concrete mixture. Then, the activist pulled out a plastic bag and spectacularly dropped its

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entire content on the meeting table. Small pieces of concrete burst into even smaller pieces. The man went on to demonstrate the extreme porosity of the material by pulverizing it between his fingers and throwing the remainder in a dramatic gesture on the table. Everybody broke out in laughter. In fact, the officials had no choice but to indulge the well-staged comedy of state incompetency. And yet, after three hours of auditing, which produced many hitherto veiled facts about budget mismanagement and certain programs’ shortcomings, Adin said to the PSDA representative, “Please don’t think that we residents are against the government. We want to work together.” When Komayu emerged, there was no civil organization in Kemijen that represented the subdistrict’s residents. The group noticed that residents’ relationship with the river could be read as political apathy or immaturity by the government. Komayu therefore aspired to create a dialogue with state representatives about the potential human causes of floods. The group managed to isolate shoddy infrastructure and slack local governance as additional causes of flooding. As such, the kind of flood governance imagined by activists and expressed in the “social audit” involved a new cooperation between elements of local society and the state. In this dialogue, infrastructure could represent “both promise and its failure at the same time” (Larkin 2013, 334). Through the advocacy work of Komayu, tidal flooding was partially demystified, namely by revealing the biophysical materiality of infrastructure when it interacts with tidal water. Komayu was able to shift attention to the poor quality of the concrete used by the government. The “gnawing” on the government coincided with, if not triggered, a new way of perceiving materiality in everyday encounters with rob in Kemijen. Komayu, then, is fostering a new sensibility toward drainage infrastructure as materially and politically constituted. As such, drainage infrastructure itself was suddenly able to generate “complicated emotional investments that induce a range of sometimes counterintuitive responses and distinct, if ephemeral sensibilities” (Larkin 2013, 334). In 2018 when we met again, Wahyu received me in his new home located close to Kemijen’s subdistrict office. The house was not only strategically located but also at bay from tidal floods. Its height meant that Wahyu’s family would not have to worry about sinking for some years. Although a recently implemented polder system had suspended tidal flooding in this area of Kemijen, land subsidence continued. Wahyu now focused on his main job as store manager at a local business. I learned from him that Komayu had become largely inactive in coordinating infrastructural maintenance, despite

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some areas still being affected by flooding. Rumors circulated that someone within Komayu had embezzled project money for personal purposes. As a result, the network had temporarily dispersed. Focused on the issue of flooding, the new situation of flood safety meant that Komayu lacked a reason to trouble the government. Something tells me that when the polder stops working for the majority and rob returns to Kemijen, the network will once again spring into action.

Conclusion: Living with Chronic Disaster Whitington (2013, 311) has drawn attention to “conceptual work with flooding, futurity and urban ecological specificity” in the face of climate change. He wonders whether Thais can create a meaningful relation to a world of unpredictable weather. He reveals that fixing infrastructure can amount to “claims of viability” that counteract the state’s narratives of urban improvement. I consider daily engagements with rob as such important conceptual work, with the difference that Indonesians strive to create a meaningful relation with infrastructure and the state. Attending to the everyday struggles of those whose lives are entangled in precarious infrastructures and their interplay with environmental shifts, we begin to understand emergent politics and social arrangements that are characteristic for the flooding disaster in Indonesian cities. It is general uncertainty—about the regularity, amplitude, and origins of rob, about the present and future of coastal communities—that forces urban residents to feel the pulse of nature. However, due to the inconsistent materiality and heterogeneous temporality of river infrastructure, the coastal ecology presents itself as a precarious artifact haunted by ghosts and monsters (Tsing 2017) that exhort rent and energy from residents. The state is not absent in relationships with this coastal ecology but is purposefully factored out in its representations. It is safe to assume that Semarang represents a harbinger of what is to come in many other places. Semarang’s coastal neighborhoods show in concrete terms what it means for cities and their inhabitants when the ocean begins to reclaim urban terrain. I have tried to describe this expansive and extended process in this chapter by tracing the infrastructural and political context of rob as it unfolds in poor neighborhoods. While the state is trying to prevent flooding at the scale of the urban, these efforts push poor residents into a precarious relationship with “nature.” Attention to water

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levels and the materiality of riverbanks can become leverage in negotiations with local politicians and state workers and grounds for political conflict. However, claims on the state are as tenuous as the shifting ground on which residents’ sinking houses are built. Kemijen’s running joke “paying rent to nature” is a poetic way of describing years of living in a precarious relationship with a rapidly deteriorating environment. A perspective on the quotidian shows that it is the poor and criminalized who pay a particularly high toll in these disastrous times. The term “rob,” with its elusive etymological and material contours, seems strangely apt for this moment. The ghostly character of rob owes in part to the previous existence of a lush swamp that was destroyed and repressed by colonial encroachment and city planning (Mràzek 2001; Ley 2018a). Now, anthropogenic climate change is turning the tide on modernity’s artifacts, rendering infrastructure useless. Importantly, this is happening throughout Java and Indonesia: rob affects major coastal cities such as Jakarta, Pekalongan, and Surabaya. As such, the case of Indonesia demonstrates that as modern infrastructures are nearing their expiry date (become ineffective), some subjects find themselves in harm’s way without having recourse to substantive rights (Holston 1999). But instead of folding, coastal inhabitants try to forge a new relationship with nature and the state—a strategy that allows the offsetting of eviction plans while outpacing the rising waters for some time. In early 2019 I received news from my friend, the community worker, that Nura had eventually been relocated in the wake of the normalization of the East Flood Canal.12

Notes 1. Rob has also been blamed for flooding in cities outside Java, such as Denpasar and Makassar. 2. The term “rob” now surfaces in presentations, debates, and media reports all over Indonesia. Arguably, the term originated from Central Java. 3. I conducted ethnographic fieldwork for this chapter between 2014 and 2015 and in late 2018. 4. This political dimension of infrastructure—in particular, its promise of modernity and civilization—is quite relevant for analyses of Indonesia. Mràzek (2002) masterfully described how infrastructure was to turn the unruly Dutch Indies into a smooth surface that allowed for unbridled travel of Western subjects and principles; Barker (2005) conveyed the strong sense of solidarity between Indonesian engineers whose shared goal was modernizing the nation; and Newberry (2018, 206) recently conceptualized both the sociality and the

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material essence of the kampung as “essential forms of infrastructure, weaving together state directives and local community values.” 5. For recent studies on the social and cultural aspects of disaster in Indonesia, see Schlehe (2010) and van Voorst (2014). Kim Fortun is among those anthropologists who have begun to consider “slow disasters,” similar to historians and sociologists, as demonstrated by the 2015 American Historical Association “Disasters Fast and Slow” panel. This panel featured work by Gabrielle Hecht, Scott Frickel, Scott G. Knowles, Alison Kenner, Patrick Roberts, and Lori Peek. 6. These communities are another example of a governance regime “in becoming.” They comprise mostly poor residents who succeeded in soliciting external funds in order to buy water pumps. Costs for diesel and maintenance are covered by iuran (communal tax) administrated by the neighborhood head. Those who are unable to pay can contribute in the form of labor (see also Kinanti 2014). 7. Wahyu (pseudonym used), interview with the author, April 20, 2015, Semarang, Indonesia. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid. 11. Adin (pseudonym used), interview with the author, April 20, 2015, Semarang, Indonesia. 12. Since Nura’s family lived on land that was illegal, they received a meager 1.5 million rupiah (about US$100) as compensation for the loss of their home.

References Bankoff, Greg. 2003. “Constructing Vulnerability: The Historical, Natural and Social Generation of Flooding in Metropolitan Manila.” Disasters 27, no. 3: 224–38. Barker, Joshua. 2005. “Engineers and Political Dreams: Indonesia in the Satellite Age.” Current Anthropology 46, no. 5: 703–27. Bowen, John R. 1986. “On the Political Construction of Tradition: Gotong Royong in Indonesia.” Journal of Asian Studies 45, no. 3: 545–61. Bubandt, Nils. 2017. “Haunted Geologies. Spirits, Stones, and the Necropolitics of the Anthropocene.” In Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, ed. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Elinoff, Eli, Malini Sur, and Brenda S. A. Yeoh. 2017. “Constructing Asia: An Introduction.” CITY 21, no. 5: 580–86. Holston, James, ed. 1999. Cities and Citizenship. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Howe, Cymene, et al. 2016. “Paradoxical Infrastructures: Ruins, Retrofit, and Risk.” Science, Technology, & Human Values 41, no. 3: 547–65. Kimmelman, Michael. 2017. “Jakarta Is Sinking So Fast, It Could End Up Underwater.” New York Times, December 21, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/12/21/world/asia /jakarta-sinking-climate.html. Kinanti, Melodi. 2014. “Tinjauan Efektivitas Adaptasi Masyarakat Terhadap Banjir dan Rob di Kelurahan Kemijen dan Panggung Lor, Kota Semarang.” MA thesis, Diponegoro University.

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Kusno, Abidin. 2018. “Where Will the Water Go?” Indonesia 105, no. 1: 19–51. Larkin, David Brian. 2013. “The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure.” Annual Review of Anthropology 42: 327–43. Ley, Lukas. 2018a. “Discipline and Drain: River Normalization and Semarang’s Fight against Tidal Flooding.” Indonesia, no. 105: 53–75. ———. 2018b. “On the Margins of the Hydrosocial: Quasi-Events along a Stagnant River.” Geoforum, April. doi 10.1016/j.geoforum.2018.03.010. Mràzek, Rudolf. 2001. Engineers of Happy Land: Technology and Nationalism in a Colony. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Muktiali, M. 2018. “Policy Analysis of Poverty Alleviation in Semarang City Using Spatial and Sectoral Approach.” IOP Conference Series: Earth and Environmental Science 123: n.p. Narotzky, Susana, and Niko Besnier. 2014. “Crisis, Value, and Hope: Rethinking the Economy: An Introduction to Supplement 9.” Current Anthropology 55 (suppl. 9): S4–S16. Newberry, Jan. 2008. “Double Spaced: Abstract Labour in Urban Kampung.” Anthropologica 50, no. 2: 241–53. ———. 2018. “A Kampung Corner: Infrastructure, Affect, Informality.” Indonesia 105, no. 1: 191–206. Povinelli, Elizabeth A. 2011. Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Rademacher, Anne. 2011. Reigning the River: Urban Ecologies and Political Transformation in Kathmandu. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. 2005. “Katrina: The Disaster and Its doubles.” Anthropology Today 21, no. 6: 2–4. Schlehe, Judith. 2010. “Anthropology of Religion: Disasters and the Representations of Tradition and Modernity.” Religion 40, no. 2: 112–20. Simone, AbdouMaliq. 2013. “Cities of Uncertainty: Jakarta, the Urban Majority, and Inventive Political Technologies.” Theory, Culture, and Society 30, nos. 7–8: 243–63. Simone, A. M., and E. A. Pieterse. 2017. New Urban Worlds: Inhabiting Dissonant Times. Cambridge, UK: Polity. Strang, Veronica. 2005. “Common Senses: Water, Sensory Experience and the Generation of Meaning.” Journal of Material Culture 10, no. 1: 92–120. Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt, ed. 2017. Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. van Voorst, Roanne S. 2014. “Get Ready for the Flood! Risk-Handling Styles in Jakarta.” PhD diss., Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research. Whitington, Jerome. 2013. “Fingerprint, Bellwether, Model Event: Climate Change as Speculative Anthropology.” Anthropological Theory 13, no. 4: 308–28. Yapp, Lauren. 2018. “Colonial Pasts, Future Cities: Urban Heritage Advocacy in PostAuthoritarian Indonesia.” PhD diss., Stanford University.

CHAPTER 3

Ambient Air Kolkata’s Bicycle Politics and Postcarbon Futures Malini Sur

Polluted Air On November 1, 2018, Kolkata registered its cleanest air in recent years. A cyclone had miraculously cleared the city of its air pollutants. With the clarity of the ambient air, Kolkata’s emergent high-rise skyline appeared prominently in news reports about the air quality. The clean air did not last long. By the end of the month, Kolkata’s air quality had dipped dramatically. One day after the Hindu festivals of Kali Puja and Diwali, when city dwellers reveled in lighting fireworks on the streets, the city registered the worst air in metropolitan India. The Air Quality Index (AQI) reported a value of 500, the highest mark under the hazardous category. As smog continued to envelop the city, Kolkata beat most national AQI readings even compared to Delhi, India’s most polluted city (India Today Web Desk 2018). City dwellers wore masks to cope with this disaster; masks may be common in other Asian cities but are rare in Kolkata. A year later on the eve of the festival of lights just outside the Victoria Memorial—a site where air quality is regularly measured and an iconic landmark along a green zone known as the Maidan—the nongovernmental organization (NGO) Clean Air Kolkata mobilized bicycling activists, politicians, and the public at large. Clean Air Kolkata sought to generate awareness for an alternative festival with no firecrackers for a pollution-free

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city. Cyclists rode festively lit bicycles through the city and posed for photographs outside the Victoria Memorial. The Victoria Memorial was constructed in the early twentieth century to honor the memory of English queen Victoria. The site is not just a picturesque backdrop to all of the environmental action surrounding air pollution: the memorial symbolizes Kolkata’s colonial imprints, which include the bicycle itself. The city’s first bicycles arrived as British imports in the late nineteenth century (Arnold 2013). On weekdays, however, the roads that lead from the Victoria Memorial to the central business and commercial zones are off limits for the city’s bicyclists, including the cargo cyclists who slowly ply the busy streets transporting goods ranging from milk to waste recycling products. Traffic police have classified bicycles as a trafficimpeding slow-moving transport, and the city administration irregularly and unevenly prohibits cycling on sixty-two key roads. Cargo cyclists and daily-wage laborers, who depend on bicycles to make a living, assert that they need to contend not only with the cars, buses, and lorries that congest roads and pollute the city’s air but also with the police who injudiciously fine them. At the same time, citizens’ groups and NGOs are demanding that authorities recognize the bicycle’s central role in mitigating climate change and curbing air pollution. The everyday dilemmas of daily-wage cyclists and the issues raised by cycling activists underscore how the city’s aspirations for a global modernity are at once making it increasingly polluted and unbreathable while also pushing the bicycle forward as a pathway toward an alternative future. These struggles reveal the ways in which the bicycle and those who ride it seek to ameliorate urban development and air pollution while confronting an ossified urban government.

Air Politics In considering these scenes, we might ask what political topographies air pollution creates. How do bicyclists in large postcolonial cities experience, navigate, and mobilize the air for their livelihoods and enact environmental and political change? What can the diversity of their experiences and mobilizations tell us about life during environmental crisis? How does cycle politics seek to move Kolkata beyond such crisis? In seeking to answer these questions, I argue that air politics—the various registers through which air is mobilized, imagined, and experienced—are intrinsically terrestrial in

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nature. That is, air transforms into a rallying point to forge a sense of environmental care that the city’s bicyclists embody and mobilize through their quotidian struggles for road space and collective environmental actions. By contributing to the terrestrial flows of people and things that are pollutionfree, they render the city’s air breathable. Ethnographic attention to degraded air raises the possibility of postcarbon imaginaries in the age of the Anthropocene and also highlights the inherent tensions within the city’s diverse bicycling community. These tensions mark the uneasy relationship between the migrant cyclists who use the bicycle as an indispensable means of making a living and the activist cyclists who spread the image of bicycling as a means of achieving healthier living, greener cities, and mitigating climate change. Air mitigates the diverse ways in which the city’s cyclists—Bengalis and migrants from the neighboring states of Odisha and Bihar—inhabit the city as distinct political actors. The former group of cyclists was composed of diverse university-educated professionals across the middle and lower-middle classes, and the latter was composed of daily wage laborers whose cycling contributes to the city’s thriving informal economy. I show how in their battles for road space, they come to differentially mobilize air and articulate their experiences of air pollution. The uneven relationships among Kolkata’s bicyclists reflect how the inherent inequalities that surround the city’s airspace structure the kinds of politics these actors engage in. Indeed, people’s dependence on bicycles for different reasons—from only livelihoods to environmental care and political aspirations—reshapes struggles over urban space and air. In the pages that follow, I show how urban cyclists experience struggles on congested roads for their livelihoods in degraded air and with their own bodies. At the start of the twenty-first century, Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer (2000) identified the growing impact of human activities on Earth and the atmosphere. The increasing legibility of the human impact on geologies, atmospheres, and ocean life, among others, highlights the centrality of the human as a driver of ecological change. In response to the increasing legibility of anthropogenic natures, they argued that the current geological epoch should be referred to as the “Anthropocene” (17–18). Their engagement with the Anthropocene aimed to inspire a sense of shared humanity and collective responsibility. The term “Anthropocene” was quickly taken up in a variety of public registers. However, as its critics revisited the relationship between nature and capital, they were quick to note that the discourses on this new geological epoch collapsed humanity into a singular undifferentiated mass of collective

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agents and in the process abstracted nature and scarcity from questions of capital, class, and empire (Moore 2017). Jason Moore (2017) has offered the “Capitalocene” as a counternarration, theorizing capitalism’s disastrous role in reorganizing nature, rooted in world ecologies. While these distinctions seem at first glance historical in nature, the divisions within Kolkata’s cycling communities suggest that capital continues to shape not only the experiences of environmental change for different kinds of citizens but also the kinds of potential coalitions they create. As I show below, the aspirations of local and migrant cyclists are fundamental to understanding how claims to road space and clean air produce different sets of aspirations and demands. The actions of Kolkata’s cycling advocates and daily-wage cyclists are far more than just another scale at which the struggle over urban air and mobility plays out. In fact, cycling politics sits alongside the politics of air to reveal the terrain in which the climate change crisis gets created and recreated in everyday life. Foregrounding what Stephen Graham describes as the “politics of the materiality of urban air” is especially critical in the context of rapid urbanization and global climate change (2015, 195). Air is a productive starting point for rethinking the politics of urban space that pushes bicycling beyond its confinement as a subject of urban transport, planning, or health studies into larger questions related to the politics of climate change (Pucher, Dill, and Handy 2010; Dill 2009; Buehler and Dill 2016; Tiwari 2002; Jaiswal et al. 2006). Air also forces scholars to consider the ways airspace may compose new, if yet unrealized, publics. By paying close ethnographic attention to the quotidian lives of Kolkata’s daily-wage cyclists and collective actions of Kolkata’s cycling activists who represent political parties, citizen’s platforms, and NGOs, I argue that the city’s seemingly emergent pollution crisis has much deeper roots in the unevenness of colonialism and postcolonial electoral democracy. Everyday struggles for road space, legitimacy, and the ability to breathe thus demonstrate how histories continue to structure both the quotidian experience of environmental change and the kinds of politics such experiences produce. As Elinoff and Vaughan have foregrounded in the introduction to this volume, coming to terms with the stakes of living in the Anthropocene and the rapid shifts in environmental changes in Asian cities requires an interrogation of how everyday practices and macroscale environmental changes shape one another. By placing the spectacular and the quotidian in one analytic frame and attending to diverse histories of city making, they make a compelling argument about the importance of locating the ways power is generated,

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contested, and felt by urban communities as they struggle to make sense of a changing planet. This chapter reveals how history shapes not only the contemporary topographies of environmental harm but also the kinds of political struggles that emerge to remediate and act upon new environmental futures. The lives of Kolkata’s cyclists speak to the complex politics of an Anthropocene, past, present and future, in India and beyond.

Bicycling in Kolkata The bicycle has historically held a prominent place in Kolkata. Bicycles, imported to colonial Calcutta (now Kolkata) from England in the nineteenth century, initially served as a vehicle of elite recreation and later as a means of labor circulation. In his comprehensive archival reading of everyday technologies in India, David Arnold (2013) has noted the persistence of bicycles from their arrival to the start of their local manufacturing in 1930s Calcutta. Thinking within this historical context, he foregrounds how bicycles were woven into debates surrounding technology as labor displacement, sources of nationalist self-reliance, and scientific improvement in British and early postcolonial India. In postcolonial India, bicycle manufacturing continued as the working classes and the low castes adopted the vehicle as a means of everyday mobility (Arnold 2013). In the twentieth century, Indian bicycle manufacturing and distribution expanded around the prospects of modernity and mobility. In contrast, in the twenty-first century the bicycle carries with it both stigma and hope. On the one hand, it is marked as a lower-class vehicle of mobility that many in the car-owning middle classes and elite circles shun. On the other, the bicycle carries a range of new hopes for improving the quality of life of citizens, cities, and the planet. This century’s urban environmental crisis has resuscitated the image of bicycles, repositioning them as vehicles that diminish urban congestion, improve the health of citizens, mitigate air pollution, and lower carbon emissions globally. Given this dichotomy, it is both surprising and not that since 2008, Kolkata has been gradually marginalizing cyclists through the application of traffic regulations that classify bicycles as a slow-moving form of transport. The city police prohibited the use of bicycles on 62 major roads. In 2012 when the Kolkata police jurisdiction was extended to the city’s peripheries, bicycles were banned from 174 roads. A year later, 112 roads were reopened with

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an amendment in the traffic regulations. However, the roads where cycling remained prohibited included the central and arterial roads on which dailywage cyclists relied to travel to work and make a living. Instead of regarding bicycles as a necessary component of a green future, let alone historically important component of the urban economy, the city’s administrators have increasingly classified bicycles as traffic impediments and safety hazards. In this context, cycling activists have emerged to assert the rights of cyclists, claiming that restricting urban cycling delegitimizes the roles that bicycles play in urban economies and in reducing air pollution. Furthermore, they argue that the penalties imposed by the traffic police are uneven, and the restrictions are not always clearly defined. For instance, bicycles can no longer inch toward the left of the road to make way for speeding buses and cars because parked cars claim additional road space, taking up roadsides and pavements. In the absence of designated parking zones, penalizing cyclists and not penalizing cars parked on roads explicitly favors motorized traffic (Sur 2017b). Kolkata’s transition into an emergent global metropolis from an old crumbling city provides the context for the city’s bicycle politics. The new political leadership that took power in 2011, led by the All India Trinamool Congress, marked a change from thirty-four years of communist rule. Trinamool intends to lend the city a global edge (Sur 2017a). The state of West Bengal, of which Kolkata is the capital, has invested in urban infrastructures such as roads, flyovers, bridges, and an expanding metro rail network. While these confer an aura of new urbanity on the old metropolis, the changes are undergirded by and produce new rhythms. Kolkata is comparable with other Asian postcolonial cities for not only its wide range of transport, dense road network, narrowing pedestrian passageways, and increasingly traffic congestion but also the constant reregulation of traffic in the face of crumbling infrastructures such as bridges. Bicycles cannot operate on the new urban infrastructures except those that extend to the once rural and now increasingly urbanizing peripheries that symbolically allow provisions for bicycling lanes.

Clean Air On January 27, 2019, environmentalists, cycling activists, educators, and university and high school students convened in Harish Park near the residence of Mamata Banerjee, the chief minister of West Bengal, to participate in the

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Figure 3.1. A 2015 bicycle rally in Kolkata organized by the Kolkata Cycle Samaj. Photo by author.

city’s annual bicycle march. The Kolkata Cycle Samaj, a citizens group, has been holding this event as a response to the increasing constraints on bicycling in Kolkata and to foreground the important role that bicycles play to mitigate air pollution (Figure 3.1). The rally coordinated with another initiative called Kolkata Clean Air. Along with the cyclists, there was a large group of concerned citizens, young students, and professionals wearing light-blue masks with slogans pasted on them who marched through the city calling attention to the air pollution. These events represented students, concerned citizens, environmentalists, and cyclizing activists. Daily-wage laboring cyclists, who need to forgo a day’s pay to attend these events, were conspicuously absent. Despite their absence, these events reminded fellow city dwellers of how the bicycle was being rendered invisible on Kolkata’s roads. Cycling activism brings discussions about the city’s devastating air pollution closer to the ground. Sitting in her office, Ekta Kothari Jaju, chief executive officer of the environmental NGO SWITCH ON, countered the official understanding of bicycles as slow traffic, explaining to me why bicycle mobility was essential to keep the “city breathing.” Mobilizing the language of medical science, she called my attention to the alarming rise of

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lung cancer and asthma in children living in the city. Her concerns were not misplaced and were supported by studies that demonstrated the adverse effects of air pollution on children.1 To combat air pollution in ways that offered transport solutions on the ground, SWITCH ON had conducted a speed survey of fourteen major city thoroughfares. The results of this survey indicated that high numbers of privately owned cars and motor vehicles actually slowed the speed of traffic, increasing the amount of air pollution in the process. In instances when there were far fewer private vehicles than cycles and other nonmotorized transport, traffic moved at twenty kilometers per hour, whereas in locations where private vehicles made up approximately 40 percent of the total vehicle count, the average speed was in the range of seven to fifteen kilometers per hour (SWITCH ON n.d.). Jaju and her colleagues had calculated the carbon ratios in the city to provide evidence that cycling had saved Kolkata 8.5 million tons of carbon emissions as well as 3.5 million liters of fuel per year. Jaju illuminated how she and other activists had sought an audience with various urban planning and regulatory authorities to make sense of the traffic restrictions and prohibitions. She emphasized that the Kolkata traffic police had conveniently switched from enforcing the Traffic Regulations Act to the Motor Vehicle Act, partly in response to signature campaigns and a public interest litigation that she had cofiled. By doing so, the police had abdicated their role in implementing this act, which passed to an ambiguous regulatory authority. This shift ensured that environmental activists were not able to pinpoint the accountability for the prohibition of cycles to a singular state department. The founding members of the Kolkata Cycle Samaj regularly quoted the World Health Organization’s statistics to foreground the scale of the air pollution disaster in Indian cities. They concurred with Jaju, arguing that city dwellers needed to rethink how the urban traffic and transport policies that unequally governed access to road space were in effect further damaging the city’s air. Over the years, the publicity materials that these organizations have used to further their cause have mobilized the aesthetics of color to affirm their green politics. The slogan “every turn of the wheel is a revolution” defined SWITCH ON’s intentionally green-colored poster, which showed a person holding a bicycle above his head (Figure 3.2). Widely circulated over social media, the poster urged that since the city’s roads were a nuisance and were unsafe and inefficient, it was time to create “people friendly, efficient, sustainable and equitable street designs with a priority for public

Figure 3.2. A poster issued by SWITCH ON and partners to call for action against the ban on bicycles in Kolkata. Reproduced with permission from SWITCH ON.

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transport.” Just before the annual citywide cycling event, the Cycle Samaj’s posters, pasted widely on urban walls and public places, displayed chalked route maps of the rally surrounded by demands that bicycles should be allowed to ply on all city streets and that the city administration should provide for bike lanes and parking stands. They also urged city administrators to take measures to control air pollution. Mobilizing scientific discourses, the poster held that discussions on air were meaningful only in relationship to providing equitable road space and instituting laws that restricted and controlled motorized transport rather than fining environmentally friendly bicyclists. Ironically, the ethics of environmental care related to making the city pollution-free disregarded the predicament of daily-wage cargo cyclists who move slowly and laboriously and are forced to expose their bodies to air pollution to make the city environmentally sustainable.

Street Battles Mornings make evident how daily-wage laborers in Kolkata rely on bicycles. Bicycles deliver essential goods and services throughout the city. At the break of dawn, vendors collect large volumes of newspapers from a busy intersection on Hazra Road, pile them onto their bicycles, and distribute them throughout the morning. Kolkata’s vendor cyclists skillfully balance vegetable sacks, fish containers, milk cans, and cooking gas cylinders—often weighing more than 150 kilograms—on their bicycles. Grocery shop–owning and grocery-delivering cyclists in the Jadu Babu Bazar, one of the city’s oldest and busiest marketplaces, have also desired to claim a stake in Kolkata’s municipal politics since 2012. Affiliated with the communist Socialist Unity Centre of India (SUCI) political party, this group of cyclists gradually started using the traffic prohibition on cycling as a way to mobilize an electorate. They came to function in an in-between space as a political platform in opposition to the present Trinamool Congress government and a quasi trade union seeking to protect the interests of daily-wage cyclists. Like them, their supporters relied on bicycles to earn their livelihoods. Suddenly the bicycle—dressed in political slogans and placards—became prominent in locations where those groups mobilized people for action and support. For this group, road closures and the harassment of bicyclists came to represent only one in a series of failures of the current state government. These

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events represented fiascos in urban governance on a range of issues, from rising air pollution to sexual crimes against women. The SUCI condemned increasing police atrocities and informal fines, urging the crowds to join a long march to the office of Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee. They invited the public to join their efforts for procession that would surround Banerjee and hold her captive until she relented to their demands. As they mobilized the bicycle to represent their concerns about the city as wage-laboring cyclists and small-scale businessmen as well as to advance their political careers, this vehicle of everyday mobility came to symbolize political power and a propoor orientation. It is precisely with this objective in mind that Banerjee had earlier announced her government’s Sobooj Sathi (Green Companion) initiative, a free bicycle distribution program for school students implemented by the state. This project aimed at reducing the dropout rates of students in grades nine through twelve in government schools by giving students bicycles to ride to school. Just as Banerjee’s government has cleverly used a sense of green, environmentally friendly symbolism to advance her political goals by distributing bicycles to garner support for her party, her opponents also desired to use the bicycle as a source of political gain. Between 2014 and 2016, I attended several public meetings on Hazra Road. The narratives that the protestors sought to mobilize stood in opposition to the metanarrative of state failure and oppression that the members of the SUCI sought to make public. For instance, Kanhaiya, a vendor cyclist who was a migrant from the neighboring state of Bihar, stood on stage and lectured on revolution in his rehearsed speech. Yet he soon disrupted the clear narrative of oppositional politics that the organizers of the protest had carefully scripted for the occasion. Kanhaiya’s speech progressed to assert Banerjee as an example of exemplary leadership. Oblivious to the specific political platform supported by those who had given him the opportunity to speak and in whose meetings and protests he had participated earlier, he explained in Hindi why all cyclists needed to learn from the chief minister, who rose to political prominence by protesting, not giving up the fight, and undertaking sheer hard work. In addition, he proactively requested his fellow cyclists to disobey the city laws, negotiate with traffic officers for passage, and occasionally lie and negotiate deals of civility and respect such as everyday salutes instead of paying fines or bribing police officers. Along with the crowd that had gathered, I listened to him in the busy thoroughfare in the midst of vehicular fumes. The organizers sat on stage flustered and on edge as his speech progressed but unable to do anything to change his

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message. Realizing that this was his only chance to make a mark in front of a crowd, Kanhaiya had totally forgotten about the goals and agenda of the political platform he was asked to represent. The small crowd of supporters who had gathered clapped after his speech concluded. During our conversations in the nearby Jadu Babu Bazar where he worked, Kanhaiya had described his reasons for becoming a vendor cyclist in Kolkata. When he realized that his chances of acquiring a stable government job in the state of Bihar had failed despite his best efforts, he migrated to Kolkata in search of a job. Prospective employers suspected his school certificates from Bihar to be fake; these did not get him very far in an unknown city. Soon, he realized that he would not find formal employment even as an office boy in Kolkata. He started working as a daily-wage laborer in the city’s markets. His life in Kolkata, like the lives of other migrant workers, and his negotiation of the city’s road spaces occupied a different register than his Bengali colleagues who sought to make him a key political actor to establish their stake on the city’s roads as well its politics. Another migrant from the neighboring state of Odisha, Prahlad, a plumber by profession, always reminded me about the distinctions between him and local cyclists. Every morning he pedaled with other Oriya plumbers into the same busy thoroughfare where Kanhaiya worked to attract contractors and brokers. They stationed their bicycles by the side of the road and squatted on the pavement waiting for wage work. If the city’s uneven roads impeded Prahlad’s speed, he was additionally careful not to be in the way of buses and cars as well as local cyclists. He asserted that in cases of fights and road rage, the migrant occupied a distinct moral hierarchy compared to the local Bengali cyclist. No matter how well balanced and cautious migrants were and how insignificant their mistakes, they lost road fights with locals. Prahlad attributed this to his inability to cast his vote in the city. He explained that it was more pragmatic for him to look out for other cyclists and motorists than for locals to look out for him. “The distinction is clear. I may have worked here for many years and this bicycle may be mine, but the road is not mine, since I don’t vote here,” he said. By stepping aside in conflicts over road rights, Prahlad conveyed his willingness to abide by the rules of electoral democracy that related to place making in ways that filtered down to the informal regulation of access to roads among the city’s cyclists. Although both Kanhaiya’s and Prahlad’s bicycles were similar to those used by city cyclists who had similar professions, their claims to the roads were vastly different.

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The narratives of migrant cyclists in northern Kolkata’s milk markets offered yet another way of understanding the city’s road politics. Manoj is one of this market’s senior and most trusted Bihari vendor cyclists. In addition to delivering large consignments of perishable cream on time, shopkeepers trust him to bring back large sums of money after sales. Manoj elaborated how he negotiated Kolkata’s traffic police. When caught for plying on streets that had a restriction notice, Manoj smilingly claimed, he simply dropped his bicycle along with his heavy goods on the road, creating a traffic jam. This action caused police officers to nervously rush to him. Manoj explained that police officers’ immediate aim was to remove his vehicle from blocking the road, but they were ill-equipped to lift the heavy bicycles. Such confusing and anxious moments enabled Manoj to not only lift his bicycle with the help of a fellow cargo cyclist but also get away, clearing the road for other vehicles. Despite Kanhaiya’s and Manoj’s optimistic narrations of informal negotiations with the police, workers like them who depend on cycling to make a daily wage are in a precarious position on the city’s roads. Traffic restrictions on bicycles shrink the legitimate space available for cycling, compelling cyclists to slow down and inch closer to sidewalks and footpaths, and even when they do so, they are at the mercy of speeding buses and taxis and the whims of police officers.

The Science of Air In the previous sections I have underscored the different ways Kolkata’s cyclists have politically mobilized the bicycle to make a claim to the city, demonstrating how different imaginaries of the environment, labor, and class play out through the cycle and the constraints facing cyclists, especially the wage laborers who rely on them for work. In this section, I elaborate on how cycling activists have harnessed scientific discourses to support their claims to clean air and discuss the bodily experiences of cyclists’ relationship with polluted air. As an elementary aspect of urban life, people’s experiences of air—and the uneven distribution of polluted air—not only impinges on how people inhabit cities (e.g., Kay, this volume) but also in this instance becomes a site of collective resistance. In my discussions with the cycling activists in Kolkata, the alarming effects of dhoyasha (smog) loomed large. Scientific reports such as the State of Global Air (Health Effects Institute 2019) established air pollution was the third-biggest cause of deaths in India

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next to diabetes and high blood pressure. Peter Adey (2013) has historicized the unequal urban forms of air, arguing that the material and affective relations that animate air shape people’s experience of the city. I am especially drawn to his astute formulations on the atmospheres of difference that characterize megacities. Adey asserts that such variances determine who belongs to the city and who does not. By casting ethnographic attention on how cycling activists scientifically mobilize air and how they differentially experience air when using their breath and bodies to navigate the city, we may read issues of inequities in the urban Anthropocene across scales of scientific discourses that harness environmental care and people’s relationships to their bodies in the context of air pollution. The cycling advocacy of SWITCH ON and the Kolkata Cycle Samaj are underpinned by discourses of environmental sustainability. In 2010 SWITCH ON advertised the “first ever sustainability summit” in Kolkata, bringing together experts, policy makers, and youths to create a road map for sustainable and equitable development. The speakers at this event, including experts in climate change, asserted that fossil energy was a disaster for life on this planet. The event harnessed scientific discourses on energy conservation from electricity to transport in an attempt to move toward more sustainable forms of energy. In 2019, the Kolkata Cycle Samaj spearheaded a public event and policy forum on the environment and urban bicycling. The group made a concerted effort to establish the scientific foundations of bicycling by drawing on the disciplines of oncology, physiology, occupational ergonomics, and psychology to provide evidence for the connection between cognition and cycling; that is, cycling is good for mental health. Eminent medical professionals presented robust scientific evidence on the ill effects on air pollution on the human body and the mind and outlined the benefits of cycling to combat cellular, muscular, and cognitive atrophy. The audience, comprising more than 150 cyclists across education and age group, was especially captivated by a senior professor and psychologist who delivered a passionate lecture outlining the cognitive benefits of cycling, moving between the regularity of physical actions that make bicycles move and the accompanying pleasures of cycling and then mapping each of these actions into transformations observed in the brain. A small crowd gathered around her after the lecture, inspired and convinced by her talk. There was a general feeling in the audience that as cyclists, they were harbingers of social

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change. For the Cycle Samaj, the large presence of a scientific community who endorsed and legitimized their role as a collective platform also established their pivotal role in caring for the environment. In intentionally harnessing the language of science to talk about bodily and mental transformations, the Cycle Samaj felt that this public platform came to entrench and recognize the important function that cyclists play in mitigating the ill effects of air pollution. Yet even as cycling advocates mobilize claims to clean air, they and other daily-wage cyclists risk the maximum possible exposure to air pollution, wheeling though degraded air and smog every day. The city’s atmospheric challenges highlight how struggles over municipal politics, everyday battles over roads, and philosophical concerns about pollution all converge within the bodies of cyclists. For Manoj, the Bihari migrant cyclist who negotiated tricky situations with the traffic police, hawa badal (weather change), or the conventional change of seasons that causes him illness came to have other connotations. Instead of seasonal changes, the city’s air keeps changing constantly, he emphatically stated. He lives in a shop within a congested market in the city’s heavily polluted northern zones and wheels his bicycle and goods through the air pollution. Although he did not elaborate on how difficult it was for him to cycle in the pollution, he held that in recent years, the predictable seasonal weather changes had given way to unannounced changes in the city’s climate. I asked him what was it about this hawa badal that made him drastically ill. Things change, he responded. “Like everything, the air that we breathe in the city rapidly changes.” When the air became unbearable and he felt ill because of it, he physically removed himself from the city’s polluted air by traveling back to his village in Bihar. There he stayed with his wife and their children, whom he was educating in private schools that taught English. He emphasized that he had stayed in the village breathing in fresh air until he felt he had regained his health as well as waiting for Kolkata’s bad air to clear. Once he felt better, he returned to Kolkata and resumed work. Earlier, Manoj told me how he had suddenly arrived in Kolkata from a village in Bihar. It was an uncalculated youthful decision to board a train without knowing its final destination. Upon reaching Kolkata, he followed a huge crowd from the railway station, not knowing where he would finally find a place to eat and sleep. He arrived in the city’s milk-vending district, where he met other migrants from Bihar, and since then the city has been

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his home. He resides in the same sweet shop where he works, sleeping on a wooden bench every evening and keeping his few clothes on a small shelf. Rather than attributing his ill health to his strenuous life as a cargo cyclist who cycles long distances and breathes polluted air, he argues that the city’s changing air is the cause of his health impairment. Even without relating his ideas of well-being and illness to air pollution, Majoj foregrounded the importance of the city’s air, its ability to both sustain his life and impair it. Even for Shamik Sarkar, a geologist and founding member of the Kolkata Cycle Samaj with whom I discussed questions of degraded air in great detail, air was a rapidly changing substance. I asked him if he felt a sense of irony in advocating that cyclists laboriously navigate through a polluted city, arguing that cyclists in the city would be more prone to breathing polluted air than commuters in cars—even as the cyclists were the most important actors making the city less polluted. In his response, Shamik initially insisted that because of the speed in which bicyclists traveled within the city, the regularity of their breath, and their overall good health due to cycling, they were less affected by the city’s air. His life was undoubtedly very different from Manoj’s, and he made a case for the body’s autonomy in response to degraded air. Given his training as a scientist, he called my attention to the city’s localities that had fewer trees, more construction projects, and small industries. We discussed how cycling through these zones would have an adverse effect on the body. He argued that in these inner localities of the city, people would experience air pollution in ways distinct from vehicular pollution. Our conversation progressed from the air pollution charts that I was poring over away from the city’s roads, where he regularly encouraged people to bicycle, to the city’s inner localities that were polluted with dense air from construction sites. Yet, what it means to breathe, live, and ride through a polluted city still proved elusive. We only agreed that the human body had the ability to express a deep sense of autonomy even in response to air pollution.

The Lungs of the City In the winter of 2019 as Kolkata’s AQI rose once again to alarming levels, Shamik, his cycling colleagues, and I fell ill. They did because, as Shamik said, the air was too impure to cycle in. I did because of my exposure to vehicular and other fumes while conducting fieldwork with the city’s cargo

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cyclists. Air pollution challenges the very conditions that have defined the bicycle’s persistence as a cheap and viable transport, its capacity to consume little urban road space, and its occasional use to disrupt motor traffic speed on road confrontations. Air provokes us to rethink how cycling in Asia’s polluted cities raises potent questions about the interface between everyday mobility, planetary environmental change, and urban politics. In other words, bicycles are far more than mere transport, tools of empowerment, leisure activities, or health yardsticks. Concerns about atmospheric pollution make bicycles an emissary of postcarbon politics. Urban cycling gathers the possibilities of postcarbon futures in India’s highly polluted cities. Kolkata’s cyclists indicate why we can no longer study urban air and road space in isolated fragments. In this chapter, I have shown how Kolkata’s recent traffic restrictions have impeded informal labor’s long history of dependence on bicycles to circulate goods and small capital. These restrictions provided the context for environmentalists and cycling activists to reinvigorate the use of the bicycle as eco-friendly urban transport. Cycling advocates have used the bicycle as a means of creating new political coalitions aimed at remaking the city. They have done so by rethinking speed and the air even as they are exposed to air pollution in their daily lives. The environmental care that revolves around bicycling politics invokes claims to equitable and ambient airspace in ways that compose a new set of mobilizations. In this sense, they argue that the everyday use of bicycles in large Indian cities is foundational to the imagination of our urban footprint in a global climate of atmospheric pollution. Yet, the rising AQIs in Kolkata remind us that “the lungs of the city” have not grown in capacity; instead, its degraded air-body has become increasingly dense and clogged with particles large and small.

Notes I thank Eli Elinoff, Tyson Vaughan, George Jose, and the anonymous reviewer for their valuable suggestions. I am indebted to the Kolkata cyclists for their time and generosity. Fellowship grants from the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, and Western Sydney University’s DVC’s Women’s Fellowship made possible extensive fieldwork. 1. See World Health Organization (2018). In 2019, a study on India’s environment revealed that air pollution was responsible for 12.5 percent of all deaths in India. Over one hundred thousand children under the age of five die on account of air pollution (Centre for Science and Environment 2019).

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References Adey, Peter. 2013. “Air/Atmospheres of the Megacity.” Theory, Culture & Society 30, nos. 7–8: 291–308. Arnold, David. 2013. Everyday Technology: Machines and the Making of India’s Modernity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Buehler, Ralph, and Jennifer Dill. 2016. “Bikeway Networks: A Review of Effects on Cycling.” Transport Reviews 36: 9–27. Centre for Science and Environment. 2019. “Air Pollution Kills an Average of 8.5 out of Every 10,000 Children in India before They Turn Five.” Press release, https://www.cseindia.org /air-pollution-kills-an-average-8-5-out-of-every-10 - 000 -children-in-india-9460. Crutzen, Paul J., and Eugene F. Stoermer. 2000. “The Anthropocene.” Global Change News 1, no. 41: 17–18. Dill, Jennifer. 2009. “Bicycling for Transportation and Health: The Role of Infrastructure.” Journal of Public Health Policy 30, no. 1: S95–S110. Graham, Stephen. 2015. “Life Support: The Political Ecology of Urban Air.” City 19: 2–3, 192–215. Health Effects Institute. 2019. State of Global Air 2019. www.stateofglobalair.org. India Today Web Desk. 2018. “Kolkata’s Air Quality Index Worse Than Delhi: How Did It Become the Most Polluted City in India?” India Today, November 19, https://www .indiatoday.in /education -today/gk- current-affairs /story/kolkata -most-polluted - city -india-1391583-2018-11-19. Jaiswal, Anuj, Vishal Nigam, Vineet Jain, Sudhir Kapoor, and B. K. Dhao. 2006. “Bicycle and Cycle Rickshaw Injury in Suburban India.” International Journal of Care of the Injured 37: 423–27. Moore, Jason W. 2017. “The Capitalocene, Part I: On the Nature and Origins of Our Ecological Crisis.” Journal of Peasant Studies 44, no. 3: 594–630. Pucher, John, Jennifer Dill, and Susan Handy. 2010. “Infrastructure, Programs, and Policies to Increase Bicycling: An International Review.” Preventive Medicine 14, no. 3: S106–S125. Sur, Malini. 2017a. “The Blue Urban: Colouring and Constructing Kolkata.” City 21, no. 5: 597–606. ———. 2017b. “In Kolkata, Citizens Defy Police Attempts to Squeeze Bicycles Off Roads.” Scroll.in, https://scroll.in/article/828176/in-kolkata-citizens-resist-police-attempts-to -squeeze-bicycles-off-the-road. SWITCH ON. n.d. “Study: Cycles-NMT Essential for Kolkata.” http://switchon.org.in /projects-2/transport/research/study-cycles-nmt-essential-for-kolkata/. Tiwari, Geetam. 2002. “Urban Transport Priorities: Meeting the Challenge of SocioEconomic Diversity in Cities, a Case Study of Delhi, India.” Cities 19, no. 2: 95–103. World Health Organization. 2018. “Air Pollution and Child Health: Prescribing Clean Air; Summary.” https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/275545/WHO-CED-PHE -18.01-eng.pdf ?ua=1.

CHAPTER 4

Infrastructures of Feeling The Sense and Governance of Disasters in Sri Lanka Vivian Choi

Other Disaster Infrastructures On December 26, 2004, a massive undersea megathrust earthquake of 9.1 on the Richter scale—the third-strongest earthquake in recorded seismological history—occurred off the coast of Sumatra, Indonesia. The Sumatra-Andaman earthquake also had the longest faulting duration ever observed, between 8.3 and 10 minutes, and even caused the entire Earth to vibrate as much as 1 centimeter (approximately 0.4 inches) (Lay et al. 2005, 1131). The earthquake triggered several devastating tsunamis along many landmasses bordering the Indian Ocean, in total killing an estimated 230,000 people (Telford and Cosgrave 2007, 1) across fourteen countries. Indonesia was the hardest hit with over 160,000 deaths, followed by Sri Lanka with over 35,000 people either dead or missing and 500,000 displaced (United States Geological Survey 2004). Over three-quarters of Sri Lanka’s shoreline was affected, mostly the eastern and southern coasts, ushering in an unprecedented amount of foreign aid sometimes referred to as the “second tsunami” and the “golden wave” (Gamburd 2013; Hasbullah and Korf 2009). Following the deaths and destruction of the “2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami” or “Boxing Day Tsunami” in Sri Lanka, the same joke (below) in varying versions apparently made the rounds across the island:

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The phone rings at a government office in Colombo, Sri Lanka’s capital city. An administrator picks up: “Hello?” “Yes, this is the international earthquake monitoring center. We wanted to inform you that a ‘t-tsunami’ will be arriving in approximately two hours.” “A T. Sunami? Yes yes, we’ll make the necessary arrangements to receive T. Sunami.” Following up on the phone call, the administrator sends a car to the airport to pick up a person named Mr. T. Sunami. The car waits for some time. But alas, it seems a Mr. T. Sunami is not coming, at least not by plane. By then, the t-tsunami had already arrived—as everyone knew—by sea. While living in Sri Lanka between 2008 and 2009, the time period of focus in this chapter, I heard the joke from a wide spectrum of folks: my host family, my van driver, and my friend who worked for a district-level disaster management office in Sri Lanka. Each time, much laughter followed its telling. It was a joke that rang of self-deprecation, highlighting the lack of awareness of many people in Sri Lanka about that fateful December day in 2004. This joke also echoes what is now considered to be an egregious act of negligence on the part of those manning the Seismic Monitoring Centre at the University of Peradeniya who were not at their desks (December 26, 2004 was a public holiday in Sri Lanka) to receive intimation of an impending tsunami from the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii. In different iterations the joke also directed critique toward the government: sometimes the name of the government official in the joke was substituted by the name of the prime minister or some other politician considered incompetent. Whatever the version, whether it was an inept politician or a bungling administrator, the aim of the joke was to take a jab at those in power. Immediately after the tsunami, President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga and the government of Sri Lanka, having never dealt with a natural disaster of this scale, were chided locally and internationally for their slow and disorganized response. The tsunami ushered in new institutionalized disaster practices, infrastructures, and legal frameworks around disasters and disaster management. In February 2005 the Sri Lankan government formed the Parliamentary Committee on Natural Disasters, whose mandate was to assess Sri Lanka’s level of preparedness toward such

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unexpected catastrophes and minimize “damages from natural disasters.” The culmination of this committee was Disaster Management Act No. 13, which “provides for a framework for disaster risk management in Sri Lanka and addresses disaster management (DM) holistically, leading to a policy shift from response-based mechanisms to a proactive approach toward DRM [disaster risk management]” (Sri Lankan Parliament Select Committee2005, 11). This proactive risk management approach was also presented in the committee’s “Towards a Safer Sri Lanka: Road Map for Disaster Risk Management,” in which risk and vulnerability assessments were designated as key to creating a state of preparedness for whatever type of disaster may come. This shift toward preparedness as opposed to responsiveness was overseen by the national Disaster Management Center undertaking the express “mission to create a culture of safety to reduce the vulnerability of the population to natural hazardous events in the future” (Sri Lankan Parliament Select Committee 2005, 10). While specialized disaster agencies were already established in Sri Lanka before the tsunami, there was no legal framework for disaster management and thus no holistic mechanism by which to coordinate it. Given this, the Disaster Management Center was established to fill this institutional gap. Under the framework of disaster risk management, disaster risks are not limited to natural disasters but also include potentially devastating phenomena such as health pandemics, terrorist attacks, industrial hazards, and civil strife (Parliament of the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka 2005). The nature of disaster risk management, tasked with cultivating preparedness rather than responsiveness, elicits new infrastructural projects and practices. In Sri Lanka, this led to the creation of nationalized warning systems and disaster drills and simulations and the implementation of tsunami no-build buffer zones. As Andrew Lakoff and Stephen Collier (2010) have pointed out, the impetus of such programs and institutionalized collaborations is to invoke a continual state of readiness that serves to ensure the security of state territory. It is not a matter of if a disaster strikes; it is a matter of when (Lakoff 2008). The tsunami opened up new power mechanisms to develop new infrastructures for disaster management and securitization through the projects and technologies of what I have referred to elsewhere as “disaster nationalism” (Choi 2015; Choi forthcoming). That is, the proactive and preemptive disaster management logic articulated well with the state of emergency that had been already in place in Sri Lanka for two decades and the draconian

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1979 Prevention of Terrorism Act. When the tsunami struck Sri Lanka’s shorelines, the country had already been mired in a decades-long civil war in which the Sri Lankan government had been battling the militant separatist group Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). Terrorism had long been a concern of the Sri Lankan government even before the war began in 1983, as evidenced by the implementation in 1979 of the Prevention of Terrorism Act (which was made permanent in 1982) and its efforts to put down two other less well-known militant insurgencies in the past.1 In addition, a state of emergency had been in effect off and on in the two decades preceding the tsunami. Given the Sri Lankan government’s well-established use of constitutional power and force, the implementation of new technologies of disaster preparedness from the construction of new buffer and border zones and national disaster early-warning systems also served as opportunities to securitize the Sri Lankan nation. As I will explain further in this chapter, Sri Lanka’s tsunami reconstruction paralleled a ramped-up vigorous Sri Lankan military offensive against the LTTE and a new turn in the civil war.2 In concert with the broader aims of this volume to disrupt “crisis talk” (Elinoff and Vaughan, this volume), the social and political context of Sri Lanka demands an examination of the tsunami as both an unprecedented event that at once ruptured and profoundly changed the lives of many people on the island and an ongoing disaster, inextricably implicated in the enduring violence of another disaster—the civil war—and the chronic disasters of virulent nationalisms in Sri Lanka. In this chapter, then, rather than give explicit attention to the impacts and successes and/or failures of newly implemented disaster technologies and physical infrastructures, as tends to be the case in studies of infrastructure (Larkin 2013), I focus on sensory and affective infrastructures that serve as the everyday scaffolding for negotiating life amid and after disasters in Sri Lanka. This is not to say that affective infrastructural formation is separate from material and physical infrastructures (which I have written about elsewhere; see Choi 2015); rather, it is to recognize these other infrastructural relations that are less ostensibly material and technological but just as essential to life. Infrastructures are relational and ecological, consisting of different values, tools, actions, and environments from which they are inseparable (Star 1999; see also Pritchard 2010). As technologies of state power, infrastructures give shape to abstracts notions of development and progress, providing goods, services, and access to citizens yet in always differentiated and hierarchical ways. As objects of ethnographic study, care, and concern,

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infrastructures such as roads (Harvey and Knox 2015; Karak 2016), water pipelines (Anand 2012), and electrical meters (von Schnitzler 2013) tell us much about power relations and their negotiations. Ever provisional, infrastructural projects demonstrate both the promise and failure of technological prowess and developmental fantasy (Khan 2006) as they encounter unexpected environments and obstacles (Carse 2012; Starosielski 2015) that can even lead to a resistance of “infrastructuralization” (Ballestero 2019). In short, it is “infrastructure’s capaciousness . . . that we can use . . . to think across radically different scales—from planetary epochs to the most intimate acts of individuals, families, and communities” (Appel, Anand, and Gupta 2018, 20). Here, then, I move to affect, which, as Joseph Masco writes, becomes a kind of infrastructure for the security state, eliciting collective intensities of feeling to produce new kinds of subjectivities, ethical commitments, and notions of personal and political sacrifice (Masco 2014). The structuring of a collective national sentiment has long been a technology of state power (Anderson 1983; Berlant 1991; Masco 2014; Chatterjee 1994; Moten 2002). Indeed, the public manipulation of feelings and emotions can be powerful, creating investment in political projects and shaping issues of national concern and insecurity (Berlant 2010) or the grounds for new political possibilities (Knox 2017). Infrastructures therefore are not just objects or physical things but are also the establishment of stable social relations (Elyachar 2010) and “modes of provisioning and articulation” (Simone 2004, 407). I am thus invested in understanding “infrastructures of feeling,” a term used by Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Clayton Rosati (see Paglen 2006, 32), which are constituted by the ways our social emotions are developed, felt, and communicated in particular tangible, material conditions. Building off of Raymond Williams’s “structures of feeling,” social (infra)structures shape experiences but cannot necessarily be reduced to them. “Infrastructures of feeling” in the sense that I use it points to the types of feelings cultivated over the longue duree in response to decades of social and political instability and duress (Stewart 2007), not necessarily conditioned by the state. Rather, sensory awareness of the environment can be seen as an ever-provisional adjustment that provides an affective platform for enduring the aftermath of disasters in areas where another natural disaster looms.3 In a place where the unruly violence of the state has also been matched by the unruliness of nature, the conditioning of life in this way is articulated in different registers: humor, superstition, attentive to animal behaviors. In this way, I redirect attention

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away from infrastructures of disaster management with a focus on the impending disaster event and illustrate that it is not just the event that looms in the social and emotional histories and memories of many people living in tsunami- and war-affected areas in Sri Lanka. It is precisely these layered histories that lend to the formation of affective infrastructures, where state violence, war, death, and natural disaster commingle and instability of the infrastructures of the Sri Lankan state are apparent. I prefer “infrastructures of feeling” rather than popular notions of “resilience” or “community capacity” (Cons 2018; Neocleous 2013), not because these are not apt descriptors of the people and communities in Sri Lanka rather, these terms place the onus of reconstruction and life building on disaster-affected communities and away from the structures and institutions that have made life so difficult in Sri Lanka in the first place. As in the selfdeprecating joke illustrated above, among the disaster-affected communities of people with whom I lived and worked, infrastructures of feeling are also responses to the ongoing failure of national infrastructures and state technologies. Moreover, this chapter argues that attending to such infrastructures alerts us to the ways in which changing environments and the threats they pose manifest themselves in the textures of everyday context. Infrastructures of feeling channel rage, conduce and upset state projects, expose anxieties, mobilize political and social organization, and render contradictions visible or obscure them. In short, the chapter intends to show how everyday infrastructures of feelings are mobilized in response to changing natures and the institutionalized responses to those changing natures. To do so, the chapter focuses on the experiences of living with new disaster management infrastructures implemented in the wake of the tsunami. The result of securitizing the Sri Lanka nation from disaster—whether natural or human-made—was ever more insecurity. While the joke mentioned at the beginning of this chapter suggests that irony and self-deprecation were not lost among Sri Lankans, it also created a moment and space of critique against the institutions and politicians that had seemingly failed. As Douglas (1968) pointed out, jokes have much to offer, especially expressive of the social situations in which they occur. As plays on forms, jokes “attack sense and hierarchy. . . . If it [a joke] devalues social structure, perhaps it celebrates something else instead. It could be saying something about the value of individuals as against the value of the social relations in which they are organised. Or it could be saying something about different levels of social structure” (370).

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Humor serves as an emergent affective infrastructure that has become part of the afterlife of disaster in Sri Lanka. In the following section I provide a brief historical and contextual background to illustrate the depths of war-related insecurity and its connection with the tsunami. Given the long history of violence, poverty, and general social and political instability in Sri Lanka, there exists a profound distrust in state-built infrastructures. In the absence or violent presence of military forces there emerges other affective infrastructures: infrastructures of feeling.

War Infrastructures Before the tsunami grabbed the world’s headlines, Sri Lanka was perhaps best known for being engaged in what was then Asia’s longest-running civil war. In July 1983 riots broke out in many cities in Sri Lanka. That month is also generally cited as the beginning of the war. Most of the rioting, looting, and killing was targeted at Tamils, a minority ethnic group in Sri Lanka, perpetrated mostly by the majority ethnic group, the Sinhalese. Much of the disorder and violence of July 1983 was state-sponsored: police, if not partaking in violent acts themselves, stood by and watched as it unfolded in front of them (Jeganathan 2000; Manor 1984). Before 1983, however, tensions between Tamils and the government of Sri Lanka had been mounting. Beginning from postindependence and through the 1970s, a period of intense Sinhalization took place, including changing the national language to Sinhala and implementing education quotas in the university system. Tamils recognized this increased marginalization and racism in Sri Lankan politics and began to consider the notion of an independent state of Tamil Eelam, which included the northern and eastern parts of the island. Although some Tamil organizations, such as the Tamil United Liberation Front, were committed to a nonviolent political resolution, a group of young militant Tamil men who called themselves the Tamil New Tigers began to commit acts of robbery and violence toward Sinhalese police officers. The notion of an independent Eelam and the growing power of the Tigers roused enough suspicion within the Sinhala-dominated government to create the draconian 1979 Prevention of Terrorism Act, which granted the state exceptional police powers (Tambiah 1986; Welikala 2008) and is still in place today. After 1983, the war was characterized by waves and lulls of violence and several failed attempts to come to a peace accord or resolution. The Tamil

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New Tigers, led by Villupillai Prabhakaran, eventually became the LTTE, killing off other Tamil political parties and claiming to be the sole representative of all Tamils in Sri Lanka. Over the years, both the government of Sri Lanka and the LTTE have committed many atrocities, but the LTTE especially was recognized as a ruthless, amoral organization that forcibly recruited child-soldiers and was also credited with the invention of suicide bombing, earning “terrorist” status in over thirty-two countries (Bhattercharji 2009). In 2002, the most hopeful moment for a peaceful negotiation arrived when the LTTE and the Sri Lankan government signed a cease-fire agreement mediated by the Norwegian government, and there were temporary abatements in security and safety checkpoints throughout the island. However, the relative break in fighting did not last long, for relations began to sour between the two warring parties again. In March 2004 under the leadership of General Karuna Amman, the eastern bloc of the LTTE broke away, leaving only the Tiger’s northern territorial stronghold intact. Tensions heated up between the Tigers and the Sri Lankan government as 2004 progressed, and then in December the tsunami struck the nation’s already embattled shorelines. In the eastern coastal region of Sri Lanka, the A-4 highway runs along the coastline of Sri Lanka. Headed north on the left side, rice-paddy fields stretch seemingly forever into the interior of the island. The eastern province is the agricultural heartland of Sri Lanka. On the right side are homes, temples, police stations, and post offices dotting the landscape—life and living. Beyond those homes and buildings is the deep azure of the Indian Ocean, lapping at the embittered shoreline of what has been referred to as Sri Lanka’s “crucible of conflict” (McGilvray 2008; see also Spencer et al. 2015). The east, once included in the LTTE’s geographically imagined ethnic homeland, was the stage for many war atrocities committed by both the government and the LTTE. Away from the hustle and bustle of main town areas where horns exhaust and noisy motors bombard the senses, the interior roads separating and nestled between different villages are often quiet. The rustling of palm trees, the sounds of children playing, and, sometimes the call to prayer could punctuate the otherwise hot stillness that I came to know during my fieldwork in a small municipal town on the east coast. Some of the stillness, I realized, came from the sometimes prohibitively hot sun. If possible, many, including myself, tried to avoid those hottest hours in the afternoon. It was a little unnerving, this stillness, for I knew that what it belied was a more brutal, tumultuous history. Sandwiched

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between the main road and the never-ending sea are homes, villages, communities, shops, temples, and mosques. This part of the eastern coast is the most densely populated region of Sri Lanka, which factored into its being the most devastated part of the island when the tsunami hit and would further become a hindrance when the government implemented its no-build buffer zone. During the war period, there were checkpoints prominent along the A-4 highway armed by the military or the Special Task Force (STF), a special branch of the police with military-like powers. When I was living there between 2008 and 2009, late at night the streets were relatively deserted and quiet. Close to the shoreline, there was an eerie sense of history disturbed: exposed broken foundations have been slowly overgrown with plants and brush, and upturned wells remained lodged crookedly in the sand. Palmyra trees that had been decapitated by the tsunami line the makeshift road, running parallel to the coastline. Following the tsunami, this road was rebuilt using the rubble from demolished homes. At the junction of A-11 and A4, named Karaitivu Junction, sits the Sri Lankan Army and STF base.4 On the A-4 between two municipalities stood a military checkpoint; though the checkpoint is now gone, at the time it served as a another physical reminder of the possibility of disaster. Military and paramilitary presence was nothing new to many living in the eastern province. Much of the brutality and fighting between the LTTE and the Sri Lankan forces could be characterized as retaliations. During the interviews, the 1990s were recalled as the “bad times” by those who were old enough to remember. For the majority of them, 1990 marked some of the worst brutality of the war in the eastern part of Sri Lanka. Similar to what occurred in the waning moments of the war in the north, civilians became pawns and suffered tragic consequences. In 1990, Eelam War II commenced due to several violent exchanges between the LTTE and the Sri Lankan Army and police. It seemed that the LTTE had been promised by the government that after the Indian peacekeeping forces left, about four thousand to five thousand Tamils (according to the LTTE’s preference) would be regularized into the police, the army, or both (University Teachers for Human Rights 1990a, 1990b). The government seemed to stall on this promise, and the Tigers took matters into their own hands. On June 8, 1990, the Tigers shot at a military convoy in Vavuniya, killing a corporal and wounding seventeen soldiers. In the east, three hundred LTTE soldiers surrounded the Batticaloa police station, ordering the police to surrender. On June 11, the LTTE also

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ordered police stations in the east to surrender by 2:30 p.m., including the municipality where I researched. It appears that in that town there was more of a struggle. According to a report (University Teachers for Human Rights 1990b), the LTTE had attacked an army convoy returning to the area with provisions, killing eleven soldiers. Apart from this, eight policemen were also killed during another rebel attack at a police station. Two LTTE rebels were killed, and seventeen others were wounded. The remaining policemen in town who surrendered were apparently rounded up, driven to an undisclosed location, and shot and killed. These events in June 1990 mark the resumption of fighting between the government and the LTTE—the phase known as Eelam War II (1990–1995). It was also during this phase that the LTTE expelled all Muslims living in Jaffna. By June 21, 1990, the resumption of the war resulted in the rounding up of young Tamil men. In Kalmunai, over 250 young Tamil males were tied, shot, and burned by Sri Lankan police. Additionally, around 3,000 were detained at the Kalmunai kachcheri (government office); some of them were women, 3 of whom were reportedly raped by government forces. One hundred of these detainees were taken to Ampara (a town composed mostly of Sinhalese) by government forces, who then went on to attack an LTTE camp at Kanchankudichcharu. To date there is still no information explaining the demise of all the detainees taken to Ampara. It is theorized that they were used as human shields. During the same night 75 of the Kalmunai kachcheri detainees were shot and killed, while the rest were apparently released. Many shops in Kalmunai were burned with dead bodies inside. Skulls were found in front of Wesley College, the local high school. By the end of August, the list of missing persons compiled by local citizen groups counted 5,000 for Kalmunai alone (University Teachers for Human Rights 1990a). It is hard to imagine that the bustling town as well as shops and markets in Kalmunai were once burned, filled with dead bodies, or otherwise vacant. One man who worked as a grama niladhari (a village-level government official) during that time told me he had been asked to identify dead bodies, but the task proved too difficult for him because so many of them were headless. Floating in the ocean tinged red with blood, he recalled, were still many other headless corpses. Others who tacked back and forth between different areas in Kalmunai and neighboring towns seeking safety told me they would return to their homes and found them burned out or the walls riddled with bullets and gates streaked with blood.

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Between 2008 and 2009—the year President Mahinda Rajapakse declared as the “year for war”—I came to recognize how the Disaster Management Center of Sri Lanka’s “Roadmap for a Safer Sri Lanka” was being paved on an increasingly militant and volatile context of war. From kidnappings to bombings, both the government and the LTTE perpetrated terror and destruction during the nearly three decades of civil war. Though the eastern province was finally “freed” from the “clutches” of the LTTE by the government in 2007 and 2009 following the end of the war, the situation on the surface was calmer and less volatile, though signs of ongoing securitization remained visible. In the months following the end of the war, the state of emergency was still in place, and the STF continued to monitor roadblocks and checkpoints.5 They also conducted neighborhood and house checks to ensure that random strangers—potential terrorists—were not taking refuge in the area. STF officers were a part of the fabric of sociality in the east; they could be seen roaming the streets and taking tea at local tea stalls. The commanding officer of the STF in the East told me, “The war is over, but terror is there.” The eastern province was still a “vulnerable” area, necessitating an increase of troops and military presence to “secure the situation.” Danger and vulnerability could be characterized as many things: the lurking Tamil Tiger, a long history of violence, and the ongoing militarization of the eastern coast. Given the history of the conflict and the ongoing presence of military infrastructure and technologies in Sri Lanka, life had long been insecure. The presence of the past impacts the trust that people living in war- and tsunami-affected communities placed on new national disaster warning systems and infrastructures (Choi 2015). Here, then, are other ways in which awareness has been conditioned, the ways that affective infrastructures have been honed in eastern Sri Lanka.

Infrastructures of Feeling In the wildlife preserve of Yala National Park, located on the southeastern coast of the island, aside from the deaths of two water buffalo, there appeared to be no other animal casualties of the tsunami. People were surprised to find moreover that not even a single elephant had perished. Curiosity arose: Could animals detect danger? As Mott (2005) asked in the title of his article published in National Geographic, “Did Animals Sense the Tsunami Was Coming?”

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Indeed, some scientists claim that animals, such as elephants, are more sensitive to change happening in the environment. Some creatures, for instance, may be able to hear infrasound—low-frequency sounds produced by natural phenomena, including earthquakes, volcanoes, and storms that are inaudible to human ear—giving animals such as elephants enough time to react and flee for safety. Another explanation may lie in animals’ sensitivities to electromagnetic field variations. Much is disputed over the science involved in these claims. After the tsunami in Sri Lanka, scientists examined the movements of tagged elephants and detected that they were indeed moving but in the patterns they normally would have. In the 1970s the United States Geological Survey also attempted to study animal behavior but concluded that animals reacted to so many things, such as being hungry, defending their territories, mating, and predators, that it was too difficult to have a controlled study to get an advanced warning signal. Regardless of the science, however, these endeavors to study animal behavior indicate an attempt to make sense of animals sensing natural disasters. Through my fieldwork, I discovered that people were acutely aware of the weather and shifts in weather patterns.6 In particular, since the tsunami they especially took notice of high winds and gray clouds. Additionally, friends informed me that birds were a good indicator of danger. Something was “off” they said if it was quiet outside and you could not hear any birds chirping. Relatedly, they also believed that if all birds were to all fly away in one direction, it was undoubtedly away from something—something possibly dangerous. It was usually the weather, though, that seemed to remind people of the tsunami and also stirred up apprehension. On dark gray and cloudy days, most people remained inside, kept their children inside, and certainly did not go near the ocean. On windy days even fishermen would stay home, worried not just worried about their own safety at sea but also about their loved ones at home. These relations between my friends and interlocuters and their environment highlight the ways specific sensory information about the environment became a structure of everyday life. In April 2009 when I was still in Sri Lanka conducting my fieldwork, we experienced an earthquake, which was reported as a minor earth tremor that registered about 4.0 on the Richter scale. There were no injuries, although some minor damage to homes was reported. My friend, who was also a district-level coordinator in the government’s disaster management office, told me that while he rode his motorbike to work that day, he noticed that the sky was cloudy and dark gray, similar to the day of the tsunami.

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While he was riding, he admitted to me that he was wondering if something might happen, that he felt something could happen—and in fact something did happen: the earthquake. Brother John explained to me that several days before the tsunami, he had been sleeping outside under his cool veranda because of the hot weather. He awoke, frightened, in the middle of the night to two very poisonouslooking green viper snakes climbing up a tree in his yard. He claimed that he had rarely seen those snakes if ever. Two days later the tsunami struck Sri Lankan coastlines. Although he had not realized it at that time, Brother John told me that the snakes had been a warning. He believed that the snakes were moving out of the ground and inland, away from the water, because they had already sensed the danger of the earthquake that would induce crushing tsunami waves. One afternoon I noticed that my host family’s son, Anthony, and his father were pouring powdered DDT into small holes in the sandy front yard, out of which ants were crawling in a seemingly endless stream. The father joked that maybe the ants meant that a tsunami or an earthquake was coming. After all, it did not seem too far-fetched to imagine that ants could sense the earth’s vibrations (see, e.g., Kirschvink 2000). Later that evening while watching television, we all perked up as we heard the wind howl outside. Preeti, my host mother, laughed it off and said with a wink, “Cyclone?!” While we had a good chuckle, these jokes were made perhaps to lighten a general feeling of unease. In the next few days, the longest solar eclipse of the twenty-first century was happening. While scientists and other excited observers clamored around different parts of Asia for this unusual event, local and international astrologers had also been dispensing their own warnings. The local Hindu astrologer relayed some of these predictions, which ranged from the beginning of another world war to catastrophic natural disasters. These predictions were printed in the local newspapers, and rumors swirled about another tsunami, another earthquake, so much so that even the Sri Lankan government could not ignore the hype. A tsunami evacuation drill scheduled to happen in a few weeks was moved forward by the national Disaster Management Center to allay the coastal populations (see Choi 2015). Schools were shut down. We were all a little bit on edge, our senses all a bit heightened, our attention piqued to any little noise or shift in weather or any bit of news. Though the eclipse unfolded without any major tragedies in Sri Lanka, many people stayed at home and indoors. Moreover, Hindus anyway believe that it is inauspicious and dangerous to be outside during a solar

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eclipse. These tensions and feelings, I believe, reflect a broader affective scaffolding of life after disasters, such as war and tsunamis, in Sri Lanka. These infrastructures of feeling have been an emotional and social infrastructure long in the making that continues to characterize everyday life. I conclude this chapter with another bit of humor, a political cartoon published in one of Sri Lanka’s largest English-language newspapers, the Daily Mirror, on April 12, 2012, almost eight years after the tsunami and nearly three years after the “end” of the war. The cartoon depicts two men, each running in opposite directions. Panicked, each looks over his shoulder in the opposite direction. One yells, “Tsunami!!!” The other yells, “White Van!!!” The cartoon reiterates what the popular independent news blog Groundviews: Journalism for Citizens reported in an article titled “Horrible Rise of Disappearances in Sri Lanka Continues Unabated” (Watchdog 2012). The article states that in the first six months of 2012, a total of fifty-six abductions had been reported in the Sri Lankan media. In some of these cases the Sri Lankan government’s involvement has also been confirmed. As my research assistant told me, “We the Sri Lankans are used to have a fear always. Civil war, tsunami, white van, [and] now the Grease man.7 Very hard to feel free. . . . There are too many reasons [to fear] about [the] Grease man. But all reasons are linked with [the] Government. What to do! This is our luck and this is our part.” The cartoon was created following a tsunami scare that had occurred just the day before. An earthquake of magnitude 8.6 struck off the coast of Aceh, inducing a sense of panic and a series of tsunami warnings for countries in the Indian Ocean region. In Sri Lanka, an official warning was issued too late by the Meteorology Department; it was issued after the time the tsunami would have hit Sri Lanka’s shorelines. Even still, as my friends and other news outlets proposed, many, including other government agencies, had heard somehow of the possible tsunamigenic earthquake and had begun evacuations before the official warning. Electricity was cut, coastal train lines were halted, and military personnel walked through villages warning people. As one report evaluated, however, “it is doubtful whether the government can claim credit for that awareness” (Samarajiva 2012). This lack of coordinated response was interesting given that the Disaster Management Center had just moved into its new “high-tech premises” in Colombo. If state infrastructures of disaster management and war attempt to orchestrate a public sentiment (Berlant 2010; see also Masco 2008) around the possibility of disaster, for the people I knew living in the eastern Sri Lanka, the experience of war-related violence and fear had already established a

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certain awareness of danger. This is an infrastructure of awareness manifest in practices of readiness and expectations that danger could erupt, either from the police, the Sri Lankan military, or the LTTE and now, after the tsunami, from natural disaster. For them, their environment, their social milieu, was already one in which “living” was characterized by this sense of danger. Laxmi described it simply: “We are always alert.”8

Notes 1. Often overlooked due to the attention given to the civil war between the LTTE and the government, these two insurgencies in 1971 and 1987–1989 were spearheaded by the Marxist group Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna, a group of educated and underemployed Sinhalese youths fomenting economic revolution. Though the government was able to put down both insurgencies, the latter was worse, resulting in approximately 45,000–60,000 deaths. Both Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna and the state engaged in frightening and violent acts of terror, including mass killings and kidnappings. 2. In addition, the breaking off of the eastern faction of the LTTE in March 2004 cast a major blow to the territorial power of the LTTE, contributing to the government’s power and motivation to end the war. Nonetheless, this does not suggest that had the tsunami not happened, the war would not have ended. Rather, I suggest that the tsunami further motivated the government, which already was determined to root out the LTTE. 3. I was inspired to think of affective infrastructures first by AbdouMaliq Simone (2004), who asks us to reconceptualize infrastructures as more than just physical “things” such as systems and networks of highways, pipes, wires, or cables. He considers people as infrastructure, which is to recognize that people’s “modes of provisioning and articulation are viewed as making the city productive, reproducing it, and positioning its residents, territories, and resources in specific ensembles where the energies of individuals can be most efficiently deployed and accounted for” (407). According to him, African cities are incessantly flexible, mobile, and provisional, depending on the ability of residents to engage complex combinations of objects, spaces, persons, and practices. These “conjunctions” become an infrastructure, a platform for reproducing city life. Extending Simone’s idea, then, is to think of the actions and sensibilities that reproduce life in Sri Lanka where radical instability has been the rule rather than the exception. I also think these platforms for living with Raymond Williams’s (1977) now classic term “structures of feeling,” further pushing us to examine the realm of experience. While this term has been used extensively, especially by literary critics, I consider a few crucial points offered by the term that shed light on the practicalities of life making in Sri Lanka. According to Williams, recognizing structures of feeling means briefly “that we are concerned with meanings and values as they are actively lived and felt, and the relations. We are talking about characteristic elements of impulse, restraint, and tone; specifically affective elements of consciousness and relationships” (132). Williams was invested in the process of the structure of feeling and its articulation, as what is experienced and felt, in relation to and as part of social

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reality. A structure of feeling gives significance to a range of social experiences and affects, “which cannot without loss be reduced to belief-systems, institutions, or explicit general relationships, though it may include all these as lived and experienced” (133). That is, while social structures certainly shape experiences, they cannot be reduced to them. 4. The STF is a branch of the police force in Sri Lanka that retains special powers during an official state of emergency. The STF has been allowed to maintain its authority because the country had been in a state of emergency off and on since independence. The state of emergency was finally lifted in 2011, two years after the end of the war. The Prevention of Terrorism Act, however, is still firmly in place. 5. The checkpoints were eventually removed. Currently, while there are no more checkpoints, new army points have been built and resurrected in these former war- and tsunamiaffected areas. 6. Fan (2011) recounts that during China’s Cultural Revolution, the government developed earthquake prediction programs of “mass science” or “the people’s science” in which laypeople’s everyday observations of animal behavior (as one example) were collected and analyzed by scientists. 7. In 2011, the grease man was an elusive and scary figure. He was said to be covered in black grease, making him difficult to be identified and captured. He violently targeted women, wreaked havoc across the nation, and kept people holed up in their homes. A flurry of explanations and speculations were made as to who the grease man really was. For a thorough analysis of the range of possible explanations, see Venugopal (2014). 8. Interview by author, May 14, 2009, Sri Lanka.

References Anand, Nikhil. 2012. “Pressure: The Politechnics of Water Supply in Mumbai.” Cultural Anthropology 26, no. 4: 542–64. Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. New York: Verso. Appel, Hannah, Nikhil Anand, and Akhil Gupta. 2018. “Introduction: Temporality, Politics, and the Promise of Infrastructure.” In The Promise of Infrastructure, ed. Hannah Appel, Nikhail Anand, and Akhil Gupta, 1–40. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ballestero, Andrea. 2019. “The Underground as Infrastructure? Water, Figure/Ground Reversals, and Dissolution in Sardinal.” In Environment, Infrastructure and Life in the Anthropocene, ed. Kregg Hetherington, 17–44. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Berlant, Lauren. 1991. The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2010. “The Epistemology of State Emotion.” In Dissent in Dangerous Times, ed. Austin Sarat, 46–78. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Bhattacharji, Preeti. 2009. “Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (aka Tamil Tigers) (Sri Lanka, Separatists).” Council on Foreign Relations, May 20, https://www.cfr.org /backgrounder /liberation-tigers-tamil-eelam-aka-tamil-tigers-sri-lanka-separatists. Carse, Ashley. 2012. “Nature as Infrastructure: Making and Managing the Panama Watershed.” Social Studies of Science 42, no. 2: 539–63.

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Chatterjee, Partha. 1994. The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Choi, Vivian. 2015. “Anticipatory States: Tsunami, War, and Insecurity in Sri Lanka.” Cultural Anthropology 30, no. 2: 286–309. ———. Forthcoming. Disaster Nationalism: Tsunami and Civil War in Sri Lanka. Cons, Jason. 2018. “Staging Climate Security: Resilience and Heterodystopia in the Bangladesh Borderlands.” Cultural Anthropology 33, no. 2: 266–94. Douglas, Mary. 1968. “The Social Control of Cognition: Some Factors in Joke Perception.” Man 3, no. 3: 361–76. Elyachar, Julia. 2010. “Phatic Labor, Infrastructure, and the Question of Empowerment in Cairo.” American Ethnologist 37: 452–64. Fan, Fa-Ti. 2012. “Collective Monitoring, Collective Defense: Science, Earthquakes, and Politics in Communist China.” Science in Context 25, no. 1: 127–54. Gamburd, Michele. 2013. The Golden Wave: Culture and Politics after Sri Lanka’s Tsunami Disaster. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press. Harvey, Penelope and Knox, Hannah. 2015. Roads: An Anthropology of Infrastructure and Expertise. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Hasbullah, S. H., and B. Korf. 2009. “Muslim Geographies and the Politics of Purification in Sri Lanka ‘after’ the Tsunami.” Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 30: 248–64. Jeganathan, Pradeep. 2000. “On the Anticipation of Violence: Modernity and Identity in Southern Sri Lanka.” In Anthropology, Development, and Modernities, ed. Alberto Arce and Norman Long, 112–25. New York: Routledge. Karak, Madhuri. 2016. “Choosing Paths, Not Roads.” Engagement, https://aesengagement .wordpress.com/2016/05/24/choosing-paths-not-roads/. Khan, Naveeda. 2006. “Flaws in the Flow: Roads and Their Modernity in Pakistan.” Social Text 24.4 (89): 87–113. Kirschvink, Joseph L. 2000. “Earthquake Prediction by Animals: Evolution and Sensory Perception.” Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America 90, no. 2: 312–23. Knox, Hannah. 2017. “Affective Infrastructures and the Political Imagination.” Public Culture 29, no. 2: 363–84. Lakoff, Andrew. 2008. “The Generic Biothreat, or, How We Became Unprepared.” Cultural Anthropology 23, no. 3: 399–428. Lakoff, Andrew, and Stephen J. Collier. 2010. Biosecurity Interventions: Global Health & Security in Question. New York: Columbia University Press. Larkin, Brian. 2013. “The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure.” Annual Review of Anthropology 42: 327–43. Lay, Thorne, Hiroo Kanamori, Charles J. Ammon, Meredith Nettles, Steven N. Ward, Richard C. Aster, Susan L. Beck, et al. 2005. “The Great Sumatra-Andaman Earthquake of 26 December 2004.” Science 308, no. 5725: 1127–33. Manor, James, ed. 1984. Sri Lanka in Change and Crisis. London: Croom Helm. Masco, Joseph. 2008. “’Survival Is Your Business’: Engineering Ruins and Affect in Nuclear America.” Cultural Anthropology 23, no. 2: 361–98. ———. 2014. The Theater of Operations: National Security Affect from the Cold War to the War on Terror. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. McGilvray, Dennis B. 2008. Crucible of Conflict: Tamil and Muslim Society on the East Coast of Sri Lanka. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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Ministry of Disaster Management. 2005. Towards a Safer Sri Lanka: A Road Map for Disaster Risk Management. Colombo: Disaster Management Centre. Moten, Fred. 2002. “The New International of Decent Feelings.” Social Text 20, no. 3: 189–99. Mott, Maryann. 2005. “Did Animals Sense Tsunami was Coming?” National Geographic, January 4, http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/01/0104 _050104 _tsunami _animals.html. Neoleous, Mark. 2013. “Resisting Resilience.” Radical Philosophy 178 (March–April), https:// www.radicalphilosophy.com/commentary/resisting-resilience. Paglen, Trevor. 2006. “Experimental Geography: From Cultural Production to the Production of Space.” In Experimental Geography: Radical Approaches to Landscape, Cartography, and Urbanism, ed. Nato Thompson and Independent Curators National, 27–34. Brooklyn: Melville House. Parliament of the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka. 2005. Sri Lanka Disaster Management Act, No. 13 of 2005. 13 May 2005. Pritchard, Sara B. 2010. Confluence: The Nature of Technology and the Remaking of the Rhone. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Samarajiva, Rohan. 2012. “Sri Lanka Tsunami Risk Reduction in the Age of Twitter.” LBO, April 12, http://www.lankabusinessonline.com/sri-lanka-tsunami-risk-reduction-in-the -age-of-twitter/. Simone, AbdouMaliq. 2004. “People as Infrastructure: Intersecting Fragments in Johannesburg.” Public Culture 16, no. 3: 407–29. Spencer, Jonathan, Jonathan Goodhand, Shahul Hasbullah, Bart Klem, Benedikt Korf, and Kalinga Tudor de Silva. 2015. Checkpoint, Temple, Church, and Mosque: A Collaborative Ethnography of War and Peace. Colombo, Sri Lanka: Social Scientists’ Association. Sri Lankan Parliament Select Committee. 2005. Final Report of the Sri Lankan Parliament Select Committee on Disasters. May 2005, https://www.parliament.lk /uploads/comreports /1476092317082517.pdf. Star, Susan Leigh. 1999. “The Ethnography of Infrastructure.” American Behavioral Scientist 43, no. 3: 377–91. Starosielski, Nicole. 2015. The Undersea Network. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Stewart, Kathleen. 2007. Ordinary Affects. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Tambiah, Stanley Jeyaraj. 1986. Sri Lanka: Ethnic Fratricide and the Dismantling of Democracy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Telford, John, and John Cosgrave. 2007. “The International Humanitarian System and the 2004 Indian Ocean Earthquake and Tsunamis.” Disasters 31, no. 1: 1–28 United States Geological Service. 2004. “Significant Earthquake Archive.” http://earthquake .usgs.gov/earthquakes/eqinthenews/2004/us2004slav/#news. University Teachers for Human Rights. 1990a. “August: A Bloody Stalemate.” Report No. 5, Chapter 9, “The East: Looking Back.” http://www.uthr.org /Reports/Report5/chapter9 .htm. ———. 1990b. The War of June 1990. Jaffna: University Teachers for Human Rights. Venugopal, Rajesh. 2014. “Demonic Violence and Moral Panic in Post-War Sri Lanka: Explaining the Grease Devils.” Journal of Asian Studies 36, no. 4: 670–90. von Schnitzler, Antina. 2013. “Traveling Technologies: Infrastructure, Ethical Regimes and the Materiality of Politics in South Africa.” Cultural Anthropology 28, no. 4: 670–93.

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Watchdog. 2012. “Horrible Rise of Disappearances in Post-War Sri Lanka Continues Unabated.” Groundviews, April 5, http://groundviews.org /2012/04/05/horrible-rise-of-dis appearances-in-post-war-sri-lanka-continues-unabated/. Welikala, Asanga. 2008. A State of Permanent Crisis: Constitutional Government, Fundamental Rights and States of Emergency in Sri Lanka. Colombo, Sri Lanka: Centre for Policy Alternatives. Williams, Raymond. 1977. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

CHAPTER 5

Lots of Smoke, but Where’s the Fire? Contested Causality and Shifting Blame in the Southeast Asian Haze Crisis Jenny Elaine Goldstein

Fires and the Southeast Asian Haze Crisis Subterranean peat fires have become a peculiar feature of Southeast Asia’s socioecological landscape in the Anthropocene: they occur only if a peat swamp is drained for agribusiness development, and they spread uncontrollably and can smolder—sometimes barely detectable—for months. While forest fire smoke was once largely confined to rural areas, noxious haze from fires in Indonesia’s peatlands across Sumatra and Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo) now frequently reaches Singapore, the Malay Peninsula, and beyond. Unlike fires in nonpeatland forests, fires in peatlands burn through the soil itself and release greenhouse gases and unhealthy particulate matter across the region, which is the primary cause of regional air pollution. The haze has sparked international tension over who and what is to blame for the pollution and who should be held responsible for managing these fires. Though the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and many national officials have called for fire bans and legislation to mitigate the haze, the origins, causes, and trajectories of Indonesia’s peat fires remain murky. Historically, forest fires in Indonesia were blamed on quotidian practices of smallholder farmers such as small-scale land clearing, cooking over open fires, and tossing cigarette butts. Yet as the peat fires have become more frequent and their consequences farther reaching, these localized causal

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explanations no longer seem adequate. This chapter analyzes the structure of blame for the transterritorial haze and shows how the political economy of agricultural development in Southeast Asia and the biophysical materiality of peat fires complicate efforts to determine precise causes of the fires. Geological materials are increasingly recast as problematic in the Anthropocene (Johnson et al. 2014). The fine particulate matter comprising Southeast Asian haze is one example, as it is biogeochemically transformed from stable surface material—peat soil and forest vegetation—to an unruly, transboundary airborne hazard through coproduced social-biophysical processes (Lave et al. 2014). As this occurs, states, corporations, and individual actors fight to assign blame for the fires while relieving themselves of responsibility. From a territorial perspective, fires in rural Indonesia are disproportionately the locational source of haze that periodically blankets parts of Southeast Asia. Though fire has been a feature of some tropical forest landscapes for hundreds of years (Dennis et al. 2005), haze crises have only begun occurring with regular frequency for the past several decades. The largest recorded haze crisis was in 1997 and 1998, when massive peat and forest fires sent plumes of particulates from Sumatra and Kalimantan in Indonesia across Southeast Asia. The fires were estimated to have covered three million square kilometers1 and affected over seventy million people, leading Brunei Darussalam, Malaysia, and Singapore to declare states of emergency (Frankenberg, McKee, and Thomas 2005; Nguitrahool 2011). Since then there have been at least half a dozen similar episodes of varying intensity, alarming scientists and sickening residents across Southeast Asia. Though the largest haze events occur during prolonged drought years associated with El Niño events, such as in 1997–1998 and late 2015, the 2013 haze occurred in the absence of regional climate anomalies (Gaveau et al. 2014). Fire frequency and intensity are almost certain to increase as climate change induces irregular weather patterns, including prolonged drought. Urban and rural inhabitants of Southeast Asia now experience poor air quality as a frequent and common unnatural disaster rather than the uncommon natural disaster it was once assumed to be. Southeast Asian haze can largely be traced to burning peatlands in Sumatra and also in Kalimantan, on the Indonesian side of the island of Borneo. Indonesia has approximately 50 percent of the world’s tropical peatlands, which store vast amounts of carbon in waterlogged soils. Kalimantan and eastern Sumatra have some of the country’s deepest peat soils, reaching over twenty meters in depth in some areas. When these soils are drained

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for large-scale monocrop agriculture, they become dry and flammable. Between 1997 and 2006 the highest average fire emissions, including particulate matter and gases, were measured in the peatlands of Central Kalimantan and in Riau and Jambi Provinces in eastern Sumatra (Frankenberg, McKee, and Thomas 2005; Marlier et al. 2012). These provinces also have among the highest concentrations of plantation agriculture production in Indonesia for oil palm and pulpwood. Forest and peat fires release a cocktail of aerosols, ozone, carbon dioxide, and particulate matter. While greenhouse gases enter the atmosphere and are dispersed globally, particulates concentrate in the air closer to Earth’s surface and have immediate effects on human health, economic activity, and local ecosystem function. Over the past two decades, two dominant explanations surrounding blame for the haze have emerged. These are reflected in the ways that Southeast Asian states have responded to poor air quality. One discourse, perpetuated by government and media in Singapore, Malaysia, and other ASEAN countries, centers blame on Indonesia as a nation-state for activities that occur within its sovereign territory. While the fires themselves do burn on and through Indonesian land, such an explanation ignores Singapore and Malaysia’s role in creating the conditions for the fires through transnational investment in Indonesia’s plantation sector. The other discourse assigns blame to either communities or companies for illegally using fire to clear land. This reflects a simplified understanding of the materiality of the fires themselves and of the broader ecological change across Indonesia’s peatlands, where many fires originate. In this chapter, I show that these explanations draw on overly simplistic notions of causality that emphasize linking remotely detected hot spots with their ignition sources, thereby blaming actors already assumed to be responsible for setting specific fires. Such explanations also reveal the limits of remote spatial mapping technology on which policy makers, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and companies increasingly rely to determine fire causality. Though the direction of blame varies, the actors most likely to be named culprits are landless rural inhabitants, careless local elites, farmers acting in retaliation against large companies, or corporations mismanaging their agricultural plantation land. I argue that these causal explanations perpetuated by the media, government officials, NGOs, and local land users do not align with the biophysical materiality of the fires that contribute to the haze or with the broader political-economic dynamics that enable the fires. While quotidian rural practices are implicated in far-reaching haze crises that

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threaten to become the new normal in Southeast Asia, the uncertainty and complexity surrounding the causes of Southeast Asian haze reinforce the challenges of governing multiscalar socioecological problems in an era of volatile climatic change.

Spatializing Air Pollution Air pollution is often cited in social science literature as an externality of industrial processes or other forms of urban-based development at relatively small scales (Bickerstaff and Walker 2003; Véron 2006; Whitehead 2009). Scholars are right to point out that the heterogeneous dispersal of air pollutants and their effects unfold unevenly across local populations. But a comprehensive analysis of the haze reveals messy urban-rural connections that are more complicated than air pollution produced by urban industry. Southeast Asian haze is similarly defined in relation to urban centers, as it only becomes defined as a transboundary haze crisis once the fires’ particulate matter escapes rural areas, crosses international borders, and infiltrates cities such as Singapore and Kuala Lumpur. Haze specifically refers to airborne particulate matter, which obscures visibility both close to the burn site and wherever the wind-circulating plume carries it. The term “transboundary haze crisis” is euphemistic, indicating a vague dispersal of particulate matter without a clearly defined origin (Forsyth 2014; Hameiri and Jones 2015; Varkkey 2013).2 The Transboundary Haze Pollution Bill passed by Singapore in 2014 defines haze as occurring when “over a continuous period of 24 hours the air quality in any part of Singapore deteriorates” and if during those twenty-four or more hours satellite imagery and meteorological information show smoke plumes moving in the direction of Singapore (“Transboundary Haze Pollution Bill” 2014, 10). While this definition does not necessarily help pinpoint precise origins of the haze, it sets up the conditions for claims that center blame on activities occurring on Indonesian land. Though urban and rural populations alike are exposed to poor air quality during a haze episode, residents of Singapore, with indoor air filtration systems and enclosed public transportation, are exposed to far less particulate matter than Indonesia’s rural inhabitants, who live much of their lives outdoors. So, while Southeast Asian haze blankets the region in one sense, its consequences for health are unequal within and across communities, cities, and countries.

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Though commonly referred to as “transboundary” air pollution, I suggest that the haze be considered transterritorial as well. While boundaries suggest the possibility of inclusion or exclusion along geopolitical lines, airborne particulate matter refuses to be kept in or out “up there.” Transterritoriality, meanwhile, draws attention to the fact that Southeast Asian haze originates in the land itself. Unlike a watershed or a forest, it is difficult to define a precise boundary around an airshed, as air and the molecules it contains—both innocuous and noxious—exist at multiple scales simultaneously. Embedded in a complex of what Murphy calls “molecular relations” (2008, 696), the particulates infiltrate bodies at an alveolar level, as the finest particulates penetrate human lungs, while simultaneously being caught up in a broader political economy of transnational capital and landscapes, spreading laterally across political boundaries and vertically from surface to stratosphere. These dynamic atmospheric processes—including regional haze and planetary climate change—also challenge notions of territory as a fixed political object or static land form. As Mahony (2014, 120) argues toward this end, “climate change as a global risk issue poses distinct challenges to the territorial logic of the modern nation-state” (see also Jasanoff 2010). Work by Bergmann (2013) on the dispersal of carbon emissions shows that while emissions are typically associated with the nation-states in which they are generated, a spatialized analysis can link emissions with their places of associated consumption and capital accumulation. By linking emissions to capital accumulation, he argues, carbon accounting can better account for differences in trade, development, and technological change. This relational accounting shows that much of the world’s carbon emissions, such as those produced by China, are in fact associated with capital accumulation in the United States. The molecular relations of the fires’ particulate matter similarly provoke new challenges to scale and territory in assessing the origin of environmental problems and thus assigning blame. Such an analysis may also better articulate how atmospheric processes in an era of dynamic climate change are connected to both regional politicaleconomic development and quotidian practices across rural Asia. Spatially unpacking haze’s causality locates the fires in a broader scalar framework than attributing them to a single ignition location and source. The haze is not neatly localized, nor is it a fully global phenomenon, such as carbon emissions dispersed throughout the planetary atmosphere. Linking fires to national territory as a means to blame Indonesia for the haze therefore

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becomes problematic if territory is thought of as not just land within the boundaries of a nation-state but also as a means for achieving political and economic goals through land-based practices (Elden 2013). Because fires burn through land that has undergone massive ecological transformation due to international investment, the concept of transterritorial haze better attends to the complex geopolitical relations surrounding the political economy of agricultural development that ultimately enables haze-producing fires. It also reveals the ways in which mundane, everyday practices on the land respond to and disrupt that political economy.

Communities of Fire? Haze, as a reoccurring macrolevel environmental disaster, has renewed attention to the quotidian practices of rural forest and peatland inhabitants in Indonesia. Intentionally burning vegetation within managed landscapes, often associated with shifting cultivation (also called swidden) agriculture, has been a common practice among rural smallholders in Sumatra and Kalimantan for centuries (Aiken 2004; Dennis et al. 2005). Though few smallholders in Sumatra and Kalimantan still cultivate crops within a traditionally nomadic swidden system because of increasing pressure on land for monocrop production (van Vliet et al. 2012), fire remains a necessary tool for smallholder agriculture across parts of Indonesia. It is an inexpensive and effective way to clear dense brush while supplying ash fertilizer to acidic and nutrient-poor soils. Additionally, in the absence of clear land tenure and formal land titles, many smallholders maintain the practice of burning land to demonstrate ownership, as burning indicates that the land is in use. Every smallholder I interviewed in Central Kalimantan Province who said they still use fire in their fields emphasized their use of controlled burning, something they have been practicing for generations.3 One Dayak farmer explained that he follows customary indigenous practices when he burns his land, including only setting a fire before the start of the rainy season and always in the later part of the day when temperatures have decreased. He checks for wind direction, digs fire buffers around his field, and readies buckets of water in case flames threaten to spread. Another farmer, when asked if there are “big fires” in his area, the type that produces a lot of smoke, told me that there are frequently big fires, but they are not particularly dangerous unless they threaten his crops. Similar smallholders, he said, will

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sleep in their fields (often several kilometers away from their permanent residence) to ensure that neighboring fires do not reach their land. Blaming smallholders for these swidden—or “slash-and-burn” as it is often demeaningly called—land-clearing practices is an inadequate explanation for the conflagrations, however, given that fires have gotten larger and more frequent only in recent decades as large-scale plantation agriculture has expanded dramatically. Some scholars have hypothesized that farmers might set fire to plantation land as retaliation against land grabbing or illegal land occupation by other actors (Harwell 2000; Sizer et al. 2014). One Indonesian fire researcher explained that companies sometimes pay local farmers to set fires in concession land so the company can benefit from land clearing but still point fingers at local farmers.4 Discourses that center blame on rural communities writ large also overlook the heterogeneity across groups of smallholders, migrant workers, and landless peasants. Smallholders with established landholdings, for instance, are quick to blame landless workers who have to travel deeper into the forest to cobble together livelihoods from small-scale gold mining, fishing, and logging. Tossing cigarette butts into the forest is one commonly but erroneously cited culprit.5 “Communities who work [in the forest] aren’t careful with fire. They use cookstoves, they throw out cigarettes . . . [and] because the dry season is long, just tossing a cigarette can start a fire,” explained one smallholder with several hectares of his own to farm.6 Pointing fingers at these forest inhabitants for fire ignition and, by extension, for the regional haze is problematic, however, in the context of structural economic change that has forced many former smallholders from their land in search of other income opportunities. Implicating smallholders for regional air pollution as a result of their “pyromaniac” agricultural practices also overlooks an important underlying issue: Indonesian farmers are no longer free to use fire, because forest landscapes in Sumatra and Kalimantan have undergone massive ecological transformation. Large-scale plantation agriculture has contributed to millions of hectares of deforestation and peatland drainage, both of which lay the environmental groundwork for haze. Within a radically transformed forest landscape—in which peatlands are no longer waterlogged and forest canopies are no longer standing—mundane actions such as clearing fields and lighting cookstoves have higher stakes. Yet many of the political mechanisms used to prevent fires, such as a national no-burn law passed after the severe 2015 conflagrations, increase financial burden on smallholders, as

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they are forced to switch to pesticides or chemical fertilizers. The law also renders a traditional resource management tool illegal, forcing farmers to choose whether to obey the law or maintain their fields (Kull 2002).

The Peculiarity of Peat Fires Scientific knowledge of fire and haze, particularly of peat fires, challenges certain normative discourses that render specific actors culpable for fire ignition. Much of the policy response to the fires and haze has relied on simplistic notions of fire ignition and causality, advancing policies and legal mechanisms that target either large plantation companies with evidence of fire in their land concessions or ignorant and/or vengeful local farmers. In unpacking blame for haze, my aim is not to absolve the range of actors involved but instead to show that the ways in which the haze is conceptualized do not always reflect the complexity of the biophysical matter or the political-economic dynamics within which the fires are enabled. In this section, I outline the crucial differences between tropical forest fires and peat fires in relation to particulate drift and describe how detecting peat fire remotely is challenging, making it difficult for both local land users and research scientists equipped with spatial mapping technology to determine the point of ignition. I also show how the technologies predominantly used to detect peat fire do not necessarily clarify connections between the location of Indonesia’s rural fires and the haze that settles in urban Singapore and Malaysia, further complicating efforts to assign blame. Peat soil becomes flammable if peatlands are drained through hydrological manipulation, as is necessary for large-scale agricultural cultivation. Though intact peat swamp forests are submerged in water under historically normal conditions and thus have little risk of catching on fire, if the peatlands’ water table is sufficiently low, the peat soil can smolder unabated, emitting white smoke but few visible flames. Along with carbon dioxide, burning peat releases large amounts of particulate matter and aerosols suspended in the white smoke, which is prone to drift far from the fire’s origin. These smoldering peat fires produce larger amounts of greenhouse gases and particulate matter than flaming wood fires.7 From a firefighting perspective, a fire is usually considered extinguished if it is no longer producing visible flames. But subterranean flameless peat fires can only be extinguished by prolonged, deeply penetrating rain that sufficiently raises

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the subsurface water table. Firefighting efforts meanwhile focus on putting out flames threatening houses or infrastructure but do little to dampen the slow-moving, low-temperature fires that lurk in the soil itself. This latter type of fire can also burn without alarming rural inhabitants living nearby, who might not regard isolated smoke rising from the ground as dangerous, since burning piles of rubbish and cut grasses is a common practice throughout Indonesia. While it has become clear to research scientists that there is a relationship between surface fires, which burn through vegetation, and subsurface peat fires, which burn through the soil, much remains unknown about how surface fires can ignite subsurface fires or vice versa.8 Surface fires burning long or hot enough have the potential to ignite peat soil, through which combustion can spread largely undetected through vast areas of dry peatland. The subsurface fire can sometimes reignite surface vegetation far from the original surface fire location, though researchers are still unclear how or why this happens.9 When it does occur, especially during dry seasons in drained peatlands in Kalimantan and Sumatra, fire origin and causality is particularly perplexing. If someone uses fire to clear his land or a fire accidentally starts around a campsite but fire users extinguish all visible flames, the fire can still smolder in the soil, spread underground, and reignite surface vegetation in another location. If flames from a secondary surface fire are detected by officials looking for a culprit, people in the vicinity of the secondary fire risk being targeted and victimized by local law enforcement. Despite increasingly precise satellite-derived remote detection of fire hot spots, it remains difficult to connect a haze episode in Singapore or Malaysia to a specific village or agricultural plantation in Indonesia. Most geo-investigations on fire occurrence in peatlands is conducted remotely using fire hot spot data from MODIS or Landsat satellites and cadastral land maps. Hot spots are defined by a temperature differential between one location and its immediate surroundings, indicating the likelihood of fire. Hot spot data is published every two weeks by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), allowing researchers to monitor fires in near real time and send field-workers to confirm fire occurrence by checking for flames or burn scars, land or vegetation that appears recently burned. In analyses following severe haze episodes, researchers found that a majority of hot spots were concentrated in company plantation land on deep peat soil with little forest cover (Ekadinata et al. 2013). Much of this land had been legally designated for plantation crops, including oil palm and pulpwood,

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although government-published concession maps in Indonesia are notoriously obscure, out of date, or inaccurate (Murdiyarso et al. 2004; Gaveau et al. 2016), complicating efforts to precisely match fires to land control. Furthermore, the biophysical dynamics of peat fires further complicate hot spot detection as a useful device for determining fire causality. Because peat fires burn under the surface and do not emit hot flames, they often remain invisible to satellite detection that relies on temperature differentiation. Yet despite its inaccuracies in detecting peat fires, satellite imagery remains the predominant technology for determining causes of haze-generating fires. As legal scholars writing on Singapore’s transboundary haze pollution bill, passed in 2014, noted, “Since proving what happens abroad is difficult, presumptions are introduced to allow reliance on satellite imagery, meteorological information, and maps” (Tay and Wei 2014). Limits to knowing how a peat fire will behave or even where it is precisely located mirrors the many scientific uncertainties of a changing climate itself as it plays out across space and in an unknowable future. Technical uncertainty responds to and renders further sociopolitical uncertainty in which blame and evasion of responsibility thrive.

Shifting Blame Remote satellite imagery first played a significant role in shifting blame away from apolitical environmental causes after the 1997–1998 conflagrations. Prior to 1997, agriculture-related land clearing and land fires in agricultural areas were rarely linked to transboundary haze (Barber and Schweithelm 2000). As fires raged across Sumatra and Kalimantan in 1997 and into 1998, government officials perpetuated the belief that the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) had perpetuated the fires by causing severe drought, and thus they could not have been prevented (Murdiyarso et al. 2004).10 President Suharto publicly apologized to neighboring countries in late 1997 but, along with Indonesia’s National Disaster Management Agency, reiterated that the fires were a “natural disaster” resulting from El Niño (Harwell 2000; Nguitrahool 2011). However, naturalizing disaster in this way overlooks the cultural and political contexts out of which envirotechnical disasters emerge. Research following the 1997–1998 fires revealed that in addition to the prolonged drought, the haze crisis emerged amid shifting land access in which plantation companies were increasingly claiming and

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cultivating land. Following milder haze episodes in 1991 and 1994, Indonesia acknowledged that drought might cause future fires to spread out of control on agricultural plantations and, as a result, attempted to ban burning by plantation companies. This regulation was hardly enforced, however, and by mid-1998 a majority of burned land appeared to be within plantation concessions (Barber and Schweithelm 2000; Harwell 2000). Remote sensing imagery, overlaid with concession maps, was sufficient visual evidence for some Indonesian officials to determine that many of the 1997–1998 fires were in fact on plantation land. Providing this information publicly also advanced discourses that companies were to blame for the fires and the haze (Murdiyarso et al. 2004). The availability of satellite-based monitoring of fire hot spots has encouraged the media, scientific communities, and officials to speculate further on the culprits responsible for haze crises. Despite evidence blaming corporate entities for fires since the late 1990s, individual suspects—including local farmers—have been singled out as culprits following the 2013 and 2014 haze crises, perpetuating the discursive dichotomy that either local communities or large corporations were to blame for the haze. Forsyth (2014), in an analysis of Indonesian, Singaporean, and Malaysian media reports of haze blame, shows that since 1997 there has been an increase in articles that blame each state government for failing to enforce fire prevention and control among domestic companies. While there were no references in the Jakarta Post newspaper to corporate plantations vis-á-vis haze in 1997 or 2005, media-based criticism of commercial entities increased sharply after 2005. Government authorities in Singapore were also quick to blame plantation enterprises in 2013 and 2014, relying on visual data from overlaid cadastral maps and analyses of fire hot spots (Gaveau et al. 2016). In response to a 2013 haze episode, the minister of environment and water resources in Singapore declared that “the root cause is commercial. It is not the weather or the environment” (Leong 2014), referring to fires he believed were deliberately set for corporate gain. Additional research seemed to support this, showing that the most recent haze crises in 2013 and 2014 occurred without El Niño weather patterns present (Gaveau et al. 2014). Indonesian officials have been less forthright in assigning blame to plantation companies following the 2013 and 2014 fires. Some prominent officials, such as the Indonesian minister of forestry, publicly announced their uncertainty as to whether the fires were caused by companies or communities. Near burning sites in Kalimantan and Sumatra, local and national law

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enforcement singled out individuals accused of setting fires to clear land. One field monitor working for the World Wildlife Foundation was quoted as saying that “the fires here were started by small farmers who are encroaching on the land” (Cochrane 2013). In March 2014, the Indonesian minister of forestry told the media that “the instructions by the National Police chief and the chief of the military that those found burning forests should be shot on the spot are very strict. If [the suspects] resist arrest, just shoot them.” While the forestry minister went on to vaguely point fingers at business owners, he did not clarify that business owners were also responsible for the fires by mismanaging peatlands and should be subject to punitive measures as well (Genie and Tunggadewa 2014). According to Global Forest Watch, a project of mapped data published by the World Resources Institute, over one-third of fires in Sumatra during the March 2014 fire episode occurred in plantation concessions owned by the two largest pulpwood conglomerates, Asia Pacific Resources International Limited (APRIL) and Asia Pulp and Paper (Sizer et al. 2014). Companies regularly argue that it is not in their financial interest to allow fires on their land because they have to divert staff to fight the fires. Moreover, they say they risk losing planted land and thus profits to fire. Some of the largest pulpwood and oil palm plantation companies have been quick to defend themselves against accusations that they have contributed to haze crises. In one instance, the president of APRIL argued that the fires were “the fault of smallholders using slash and burn methods, and fires in APRIL’s concessions were in areas overlapping or disputed with local communities” (Taylor 2014). Because fires on plantation-owned land have destroyed valuable crops, some companies declared themselves victims of the fires rather than perpetrators. Companies have also argued that fires would not occur if companies managed land beyond their concessions, thereby justifying further corporate expansion (Azhari 2014). Indonesia’s fires have never remained exclusively a domestic matter because of foreign capital investment in lands where fires occur (Nguitrahool 2011). Some of the largest plantation company operators in Indonesia have parent companies based in Singapore, such as Golden Agri-Resources and Wilmar International, and Malaysia, such as Darby Bhd and Cargill (Taylor 2014). By some estimates, Malaysian investments control two-thirds of Indonesia’s oil palm sector (Varkkey 2013, 20). These connections have resulted in vague finger-pointing at corporate plantation managers, including many who have connections to Singaporean and Malaysian holding

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companies and investors, but few corporate actors claiming responsibility for the haze. Over the past fifteen years, Malaysian and Singaporean investment in Indonesia’s plantation sector has rapidly increased (McCarthy, Vel, and Affif 2012). While Malaysia once boasted the largest oil palm production in the world, it has since been surpassed by Indonesia. Yet this reflects oil palm produced on Indonesian land, not the nature of the company ownership. Malaysia has offered incentives for domestic companies to invest abroad since the late 1990s. These economic policies reflect a tightening labor market, perceived land scarcity for increased production, and forest protection commitments that have made it difficult for plantation companies to clear land for agriculture in Malaysia (Varkkey 2013). Seeking higher economic returns, Malaysian investors have looked to their southern neighbor for cheap labor, large tracts of available land, and a market-oriented economic policy that welcomed foreign investment following the collapse of the Indonesian economy during the Asian financial crisis in 1997 (Hameiri and Jones 2015). Malaysian interests in Indonesia’s oil palm sector are well protected by lobby groups, including the Association of Palm Oil Plantation Investors of Malaysia in Indonesia. In addition to providing bureaucratic help and market knowledge, the group has pushed for special agreements on transboundary haze pollution, ensuring that no legal action would be taken against Malaysian-operated plantation companies if fires occurred on their land (Varkkey 2013). These measures have directly contradicted existing Indonesian law that sought to prosecute companies responsible for plantation-based fire. But more significantly, they present serious obstacles to successful implementation of the most recent Singaporean transboundary pollution law.

Enforcing the Law Singapore’s government has arguably been the most forceful in advancing legislation intended to curb the haze by making companies operating on Indonesian territory responsible for fires in their concessions. The 2014 Transboundary Haze Pollution Bill passed by Singapore establishes parameters for determining haze causality and culpability. In targeting corporations operating in Indonesia, the Singaporean law implicitly acknowledges that the Indonesian government has failed to prevent fires on their territory.

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But in addition to the difficulty of connecting haze to specific fires on certain lands, plantation agriculture companies operating on Indonesian land are entangled with Singaporean and Malaysian capital, making it unclear who the law is really targeting: operators and workers on Indonesian territory or foreign investors. Though the law has been difficult to enforce, it nevertheless reinforces existing discourses: that blame for the haze is associated with land-based territory rather than a notion of territory as deterritorialized flows of capital (Elden 2013). The law also fails to acknowledge the difficulty in determining the precise origin of a haze-producing peat fire. The Transboundary Haze Pollution Bill requires evidence that haze pollution “at least partly” came from a specific fire on a company’s land (Leong 2014). In court, however, the defendant can argue that “haze pollution was caused solely by a grave natural disaster or phenomenon,” such as an El Niño–perpetuated drought, or was caused by actors not under their control, such as farmers working in nearby areas (Tay and Wei 2014). These stipulations recall the measures the Indonesian government took following the 1997–1998 fires to publicly reinforce ideas that the haze was a “natural disaster” and that smallholders are responsible for the largest conflagrations. Indonesia lacks a strong record of enforcing environmental laws (Murdiyarso and Tacconi 2013). It was the last ASEAN country to ratify the Transboundary Haze Pollution Bill enacted in 2002,11 and many scientists and policy makers in Indonesia and Singapore remain skeptical that the ASEAN bill has been effective in enforcing measures that stop haze (Chin 2014; Murdiyarso et al. 2004). Provincial-level laws against fire use for land clearing in Indonesia have rarely convicted accused companies. In 2013, for example, eight companies were accused of unlawfully setting fires in Riau Province, but only one was ever tried in court. Meanwhile, the police continue to arrest local farmers suspected of setting fires. In Riau in 2013, fortyfour people were arrested, only one of whom was a company employee, while the rest were locals without company affiliation (Jakarta Globe 2014). Though the most recent Singaporean law intends to punitively fine or arrest suspects outside of Indonesian territory, it remains unclear whether or how the law will be enforced on Indonesian land. Furthermore, the measure does little to encourage Indonesian officials to bring corporate suspects to trial or support fire prevention measures on the ground. As such, while the Singaporean law is a show of government action amid public criticism that ASEAN has done little to stop the haze crises, it circumvents many of the issues at stake in this transterritorial environmental disaster.

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Conclusion Each haze crisis generates new data that adds uncertainty about the precise causality of peat fire ignition. The haze episodes that occurred in June 2013 and March 2014 highlighted the ways that emerging scientific knowledge adds complexity to existing discourses about who is to blame for the fires. Recent research looking at the directions of burned areas put forth an alternative claim: that midlevel entrepreneurs, neither local smallholders nor the largest companies, were responsible for the fires. Because many of the largest companies have reached limits on how much land they are allowed to hold under Indonesian law, they have subcontracted agricultural production to laborers (often migrants) willing to work on behalf of the companies. Because this land is not officially within the bounds of plantation companies, it allows companies to evade responsibility for practices outside their concessions (Ekadinata et al. 2013). A more thorough analysis of the March 2014 fires showed that many of the fires started outside plantation concession areas on land claimed by smallholders or contract workers. But culpability for specific fires cannot be determined through concession maps and hot spot data alone, despite the fact that it is the predominant method used to present evidence of fires (Gaveau et al. 2014; Gaveau et al. 2016). Land indicated on concession maps as leased by a specific company is not necessarily controlled by that company, a point that companies themselves use to evade responsibility for land practices. During and after each haze episode, the discourses analyzed here are reinforced by the media, government officials, and communities of experts. It is no doubt easier to cite oft-repeated lines blaming companies or scapegoating local farmers for the fires that seem to connect linearly to haze affecting urban residents. Yet by reinforcing these discourses through public declarations and reinforcing them through policy measures, such as the recent Singaporean law, the fires and related haze crises risk becoming a normalized, inevitable disaster. As I have suggested here, illuminating the biophysical dimensions of the fires can disrupt this understanding, raising the possibility that new configurations of actors—and the complex relations between them—are to blame for the haze. Attending to the materiality and political economy of Indonesia’s peat swamps meanwhile shows that such widespread fires have become possible because millions of hectares of peatland are drained for agribusiness production. Yet as Kull (2002) argues, there remains political opportunity in maintaining ambiguity of the fires’

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origins and causes; actors can exploit this ambiguity for their own ends. The ways in which they are able to do that lie not in the spectacular but rather in the quotidian practices of everyday land use and interpersonal accusations. Finally, the Southeast Asian haze crisis and its proximate biophysical cause—the peat fires—exemplify many of the challenges of the Anthropocene. Earth smolders, entangled with homo Capitali, and flares up to wreak havoc on economies, livelihoods, and human health, becoming a normalized series of unnatural disasters. Subterranean combustion generates transterritorial plumes of particulate matter that cross boundaries and penetrate bodies, traversing scales from hectares to nations to alveoli. Along with the plumes, responsibility remains dispersed, shrouded in hazy uncertainty. Regardless of the accusers or the target of blame, few question the assumption that it is, in principle, possible to assign simple responsibility for this complex, transterritorial crisis. Likewise, few question the assumption that it is, in principle, possible to police the problem through technological means or simple governance tools such as fire bans. Yet the account presented in this chapter questions both of these assumptions. What if it is not possible to identify a single, unambiguous cause or perpetrator for a specific fire, especially through the technologically mediated view of satellites? As other chapters of this volume also illustrate, all of this is emblematic of the complex, multiscalar envirotechnical crises that characterize the Anthropocene. Ultimately, it leaves anthropos with an unsettling question: In such an epoch, what are the ecological, political, and health consequences of persisting in facile assumptions about simple linear narratives of responsibility and technological solutions? Notes 1. Estimates of land burned during the 1997–1998 fires vary widely, from Indonesian government’s estimates of seven hundred thousand hectares to researchers’ estimates of over seven million hectares (Barber and Schweithelm 2000; Frankenberg, McKee, and Thomas 2005; Harwell 2000). 2. ASEAN adopted the term after the 1997–1998 conflagrations to avoid criminalizing Indonesia by implying that the particulate matter originated from fires on Indonesian land (Harwell 2000; Nguitrahool 2011). 3. The smallholders I refer to here are primarily indigenous Dayaks, who have traditionally practiced shifting cultivation that includes fire use. Not all smallholders in Sumatra and Kalimantan are Dayaks; smallholders from Java and other islands who have settled in Kalimantan use agricultural fire less frequently.

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4. Interview with fire researcher, October 2014, Jakarta. 5. Several fire scientists told me that there is no scientific evidence that cigarette butts ignite fires in peatlands. Accidents involving gas stoves can, however, ignite fires that spread out of control. 6. Interview, August 2014, Palangkaraya, Central Kalimantan. 7. Workshop presentation by Kevin Ryan, August 2014, Palangkaraya, Central Kalimantan. 8. Here I refer to both foreign and Indonesian scientists associated with and funded by major research institutions, such as NASA and the Center for International Forestry Research, whose research is seen as credible in international circles. For more on the rhetoric used by industry-aligned Indonesian and Malaysian scientists, see Goldstein (2016). 9. Workshop presentation by Mark Cochrane, August 2014, Palangkaraya, Central Kalimantan. 10. According to Marlier et al. (2012), landscape fire occurrence in Southeast Asia correlates strongly with ENSO phases, but there is no indication that the arrival of El Niño causes fires directly. In addition to enabling dry conditions, ENSO cycles also create atmospheric inversion conditions that suspend particulate matter, which would normally be quickly dispersed, over Southeast Asia for longer periods of time (Murdiyarso et al. 2004). This indicates not only that El Niño exacerbates conditions leading to fire but also that inhabitants of Singapore and peninsular Malaysia bodily experience poor air quality more than they would during a non–El Niño year, even if fires burn in Indonesia. 11. Indonesia ratified the 2002 bill in September 2014.

References Aiken, S. Robert. 2004. “Runaway Fires, Smoke-Haze Pollution, and Unnatural Disasters in Indonesia.” Geographical Review 94, no. 1: 55–79. Azhari, Muhamad Al. 2014. “Pulp Company APRIL Challenges Conservation Groups to Chip in on Land Care.” Jakarta Globe, February 19. Barber, Charles, and James Schweithelm. 2000. Trial by Fire: Forest Fires and Forestry Policy in Indonesia’s Era of Crisis and Reform. Washington, DC: World Resources Institute. Bergmann, Luke. 2013. “Bound by Chains of Carbon: Ecological–Economic Geographies of Globalization.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 103, no. 6: 1348–70. Bickerstaff, Karen, and Gordon Walker. 2003. “The Place(s) of Matter: Matter Out of Place—Public Understandings of Air Pollution.” Progress in Human Geography 27, no. 1: 45–67. Chin, Neo Chai. 2014. “Anti-Haze Laws ‘Could Spur On-the-Ground Enforcement in Indonesia.’” Today, February 28. Cochrane, Joe. 2013. “Tight Lips over Who Started Fires in Sumatra.” New York Times, June 28. Dennis, Rona A., Judith Mayer, Grahame Applegate, Unna Chokkalingam, Carol J. Pierce Colfer, Iwan Kurniawan, Henry Lachowski, et al. 2005. “Fire, People and Pixels: Linking Social Science and Remote Sensing to Understand Underlying Causes and Impacts of Fires in Indonesia.” Human Ecology 33, no. 4: 465–504.

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Ekadinata, Andree, Meine van Noordwijk, Suseno Budidarsono, and Sonya Dewi. 2013. “Hot Spots in Riau, Haze in Singapore: The June 2013 Event Analyzed.” ASB Policy Brief No. 33. Nairobi: World Agroforestry Center. Elden, Stuart. 2013. “Secure the Volume: Vertical Geopolitics and the Depth of Power.” Political Geography 34: 35–51. Forsyth, Tim. 2014. “Public Concerns about Transboundary Haze: A Comparison of Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia.” Global Environmental Change 25: 76–86. Frankenberg, Elizabeth, Douglas McKee, and Duncan Thomas. 2005. “Health Consequences of Forest Fires in Indonesia.” Demography 42, no. 1: 109–29. Gaveau, D. L. A., R. Pirard, M. A. Salim, P. Tonoto, H. Yaen, S. A. Parks, and R. Carmenta. 2016. “Overlapping Land Claims Limit the Use of Satellites to Monitor No-Deforestation Commitments and No-Burning Compliance.” Conservation Letters 10, no. 2: 257–64. Gaveau, David, Mohammad A. Salim, Kristell Hergoualc’h, Bruno Locatelli, Sean Sloan, Martin Wooster, Miriam E. Marlier, et al. 2014. “Major Atmospheric Emissions from Peat Fires in Southeast Asia during Non-Drought Years: Evidence from the 2013 Sumatran Fires.” Scientific Reports 4: 6112–17. Genie, Herman, and Mattangkilang Tunggadewa. 2014. “Fires Spread, from Riau to Kalimantan.” Jakarta Globe, March 12. Goldstein, Jenny E. 2016. “Knowing the Subterranean: Land Grabbing, Oil Palm, and the Politics of Divergent Expertise in Indonesia’s Peat Soil.” Environment and Planning A 48, no. 4: 754–70. Hameiri, Shahar, and Lee Jones. 2015. Governing Borderless Threats: Non-Traditional Security and the Politics of State Transformation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Harwell, Emily. 2000. “Remote Sensibilities: Discourses of Technology and the Making of Indonesia’s Natural Disaster.” Development and Change 31, no. 1: 307–40. Jakarta Globe. 2014. “Forestry Minister Echoes Calls for Strict Action on Haze Issue.” March 18. Jasanoff, Sheila. 2010. “A New Climate for Society.” Theory, Culture and Society 27, no. 2–3: 233–23. Johnson, Elizabeth, Harlan Morehouse, Simon Dalby, Jessi Lehman, Sara Nelson, Rory Rowan, Stephanie Wakefield, and Kathryn Yusoff. 2014. “After the Anthropocene: Politics and Geographic Inquiry for a New Epoch.” Progress in Human Geography 38, no. 3: 439–56. Kull, Christian A. 2002. “Madagascar Aflame: Landscape Burning as Peasant Protest, Resistance, or a Resource Management Tool?” Political Geography 21: 927–53. Lave, Rebecca, Matthew W. Wilson, Elizabeth S. Barron, Christine Biermann, Mark A. Carey, Chris S. Duvall, et al. 2014. “Intervention: Critical Physical Geography.” Canadian Geographer 58, no. 1: 1–10. Leong, Grace. 2014. “Government Proposes Law to Fight Transboundary Haze Pollution.” Business Times, February 20. Mahony, Martin. 2014. “The Predictive State: Science, Territory and the Future of the Indian Climate.” Social Studies of Science 44, no. 1: 109–33. Marlier, Miriam E., Ruth S. DeFries, Apostolos Voulgarakis, Patrick L. Kinney, James T. Randerson, Drew T. Shindell, Yang Chen, and Greg Faluvegi. 2012. “El Niño and Health Risks from Landscape Fire Emissions in Southeast Asia.” Nature Climate Change 3, no. 2: 131–36.

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McCarthy, John F., Jacqueline A. C. Vel, and Suraya Afiff. 2012. “Trajectories of Land Acquisition and Enclosure: Development Schemes, Virtual Land Grabs, and Green Acquisitions in Indonesia’s Outer Islands.” Journal of Peasant Studies 39, no. 2: 521–49. Murdiyarso, Daniel, Louis Lebel, A. N. Gintings, S. M. H. Tampubolon, Angelika Heil, and Merillyn Wasson. 2004. “Policy Responses to Complex Environmental Problems: Insights from a Science–Policy Activity on Transboundary Haze from Vegetation Fires in Southeast Asia.” Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment 10, no. 1: 47–56. Murdiyarso, Daniel, and Luca Tacconi. 2013. “A Hazy Climate: Will Anyone Do the Right Thing?” Jakarta Post, June 22. Murphy, Michelle. 2008. “Chemical Regimes of Living.” Environmental History 13, no. 4: 695–703. Nguitragool, Paruedee. 2011. “Negotiating the Haze Treaty.” Asian Survey 51, no. 2: 356–78. Sizer, Nigel, James Anderson, Fred Stolle, Susan Minnemeyer, Mark Higgens, Andrew Leach, and Ariana Alisjahbana. 2014. “Fires in Indonesia Spike to Highest Levels since June 2013 Haze Emergency.” World Resources Institute, March 13, http://www.wri.org /blog /2014/03/fires-indonesia-spike-highest-levels-june-2013-haze-emergency. Tay, Simon, and Chua Chin Wei. 2014. “To End the Haze Problem, Both Penalties and Cooperation Are Needed: Draft Transboundary Haze Pollution Bill.” Today, February 21. Taylor, Michael. 2014. “Draft Plantations Bill on Foreign Ownership Limit Hits Presidential Hurdle.” Reuters, September 8, https://www.reuters.com/article/indonesia-plantations - law /draft - plantations - bill - on - foreign - ownership - limit - hits - presidential - hurdle -idUSL3N0R91MU20140908?irpc=932. “Transboundary Haze Pollution Bill.” 2014. Bill No. 18/2014. Parliament of Singapore, https:// www.parliament .gov.sg /docs /default-source /Bills -Introduced /transboundary -haze-pollution-bill-18-2014.pdf. van Vliet, Nathalie, Ole Mertz, Andreas Heinimann, Tobias Langanke, Unai Pascual, Birgit Schmook, Cristina Adams, et al. 2012. “Trends, Drivers and Impacts of Changes in Swidden Cultivation in Tropical Forest-Agriculture Frontiers: A Global Assessment.” Global Environmental Change 22, no. 2: 418–29. Varkkey, Helena. 2013. “Malaysian Investors in the Indonesian Oil Palm Plantation Sector: Home State Facilitation and Transboundary Haze.” Asia Pacific Business Review 19, no. 3: 381–401. Véron, René. 2006. “Remaking Urban Environments: The Political Ecology of Air Pollution in Delhi.” Environment and Planning A 38, no. 2: 2093–109. Whitehead, Mark. 2009. State, Science and the Skies: Governmentalities of the British Atmosphere. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.

CHAPTER 6

Reimagining the Natures of State The Rise of Fisheries Co-management in Vietnam Edmund Joo Vin Oh

States and Natures in Transition Given the scale and speed with which human societies are having to come to terms with environmental change, it is perhaps unsurprising that much scholarship is devoted to understanding how our relationship with nature is either changing or needs to change to adapt to a new normal (cf. Bassett and Fogelman 2013). Arguably less studied, however, is how society itself is evolving as a consequence of the imperative to respond to the exigencies of a changing environment. A central feature of this evolution is the transformation of the nationstate—the peculiarly modern institution to which blame is often attached for our current predicament but perhaps may be best placed to rescue humanity from it. Put differently, attempts to seek better and more enlightened ways of relating to nature—often by managing it or governing its use in a more sustainable way—entail a concomitant change in the way society and the state relate to one another, thus transforming the very notion of the state itself. The state plays a central role in the drive to mitigate human impacts on the environment and is co-constituted through this very process. Hence, the imperative to deal with our present reality is as much about the changing nature of the state as it is about the changing state of nature. In this chapter I attempt to urge a rethinking of resource governance, its ultimate ends and how its implications extend into domains beyond mere

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human-nature relations. I do so by examining the emergence of a novel mode of resource governance in Vietnam—a nation-state that is in many ways in transition. Specifically, I focus on the rise of co-management in Vietnam’s fisheries sector and explore the ways in which it is beginning to transform state–civil society relations in Vietnam. Co-management is understood in Vietnam to be the sharing of responsibility and authority between the state and a community of resource users over the management of a defined resource. The practice emerged in the 1990s as a response to the creeping catastrophe of mismanaged natural resources, which increasingly threatened the livelihoods of Vietnam’s rural poor. The changes wrought upon the governance landscape by the adoption of co-management may have ramifications that go beyond the domain of natural resource management. Indeed, considering just how radical such a power- and responsibility-sharing arrangement is in the context of a largely authoritarian state wherein power is still very much centralized and decisions are made in a top-down fashion, it is possible to imagine that comanagement may potentially redefine the relationship between society and the state. This becomes especially plausible given the tension between Vietnam’s commitment to its socialist ideals and its impetus toward reform. By opening up space for deliberation and debate, such tension may allow innovation of a certain kind to occur. As my analysis suggests, the growing viability of co-management may indeed be an example of such innovation. Fisheries Co-management Reforms in Bê´n Tre Province Of the nine provinces selected to pilot co-management under the Danidafunded project component Strengthening of Capture Fisheries Management (SCAFI), Bê´n Tre has been described as the most progressive (WorldFish Center 2009).1 A coastal province in the Mekong Delta, Bê´n Tre had five SCAFI co-management sites as of 2013 (Pomeroy 2013). Much of Bê´n Tre’s success with co-management stems from its experience with managing a clam fishery. The Bê´n Tre clam fishery became internationally renowned when it was awarded Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) certification, making it the first fishery in Southeast Asia to meet the organization’s standards of sustainable management (Pomeroy 2013). Apart from ensuring a sustainable harvest, the highly sought after MSC certification helps to increase the market penetration and salable price of the clams, especially in lucrative export markets.

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Uniquely, the clam fisheries are managed by local cooperatives that provide round-the-clock monitoring of the juvenile and harvestable clams in the mudflats within their area (Starr 2008). This surveillance ensures the clams are harvested only by cooperative members according to strict regulations. The success of such community-based management has gained the Bê´n Tre model a remarkable reputation; it is not unusual for busloads of visitors to stop by the Rạng Đông Fisheries Cooperative—the biggest in Bê´n Tre—to learn about its unique management model. These clam cooperatives were established by the Provincial People’s Committee, with support and advice from the Bê´n Tre Department of Agriculture and Rural Development. In fact, the establishment of some of the older cooperatives predate the SCAFI project; the Rạng Đông fisheries cooperative, for example, was established in 1997 (Starr 2008). As such, the co-management initiatives supported by SCAFI aimed to build upon the experience and success of the clam cooperatives. Some of the new co-management sites established under the SCAFI project entailed the management of mixed species, including both capture fisheries and aquaculture of fish, crustaceans, and bivalves. As of 2009, for example, plans were under way to develop a fishing rights regime within a six–square kilometer zone from the shore with rights to be allocated to two clam cooperatives and to near-shore fishers (WorldFish Center 2009). These new co-management arrangements thus encompass scales substantially larger than that of the individual clam cooperatives. Much of the success of the co-management initiatives can be attributed to the efforts of the then vice director of the Bê´n Tre Department of Agriculture and Rural Development, Ms. Trần Thị Thu Nga. Ms. Nga’s interest in co-management and fishing rights has gained her a reputation among fishery professionals as an innovator. At a regional conference on small-scale fishery co-management,2 I witnessed Nga present her long-term vision for fisheries in the province in which co-management was to play a pivotal role. She was not merely content to implement and oversee the co-management pilot sites in her province that were supported by the SCAFI project but was also actively seeking ways to leverage the SCAFI sites, the older clam cooperatives, and the MSC certification in order to obtain further funding to establish an ambitious network of co-management sites within Bê´n Tre. Apart from the fisheries in the coastal districts, she was also planning to establish co-management sites farther upriver in the Hàm Luông estuary to sustainably manage the culture and harvest of freshwater snails—a delicacy in this region (WorldFish Center 2009).

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One of Nga’s most innovative plans yet was to establish an organizational structure to streamline the management of both capture fisheries and aquaculture in the province. This would entail establishing one Provincial Comanagement Steering Committee for each district where co-management was to be implemented (Tran 2009). Comprising representatives from various government agencies and the respective People’s Committees, these steering committees would form the cross-sector and cross-scale nexus of a system of accountability, representation, and oversight over the various co-management initiatives in Bê´n Tre. This amounted to an ambitious and unprecedented scale of experimentation. By adeptly using her position of authority and by taking advantage of the policy window that emerged through the fortuitous occurrence of multiple favorable conditions,3 Nga successfully instituted a policy innovation at the level of provincial structures of authority. Notably, she achieved all of this largely independent of explicit guidance or policy from the ministry level in Hanoi, which neither permitted nor prohibited such action. Nga’s policy entrepreneurship contrasted with the relative inertia of many other provincial leaders—including some within the SCAFI project—who felt paralyzed by the lack of policy guidance and clarity.

Co-management as a Technical Development Intervention The concept of co-management was introduced in Vietnam during the 1990s to policy makers, who then authorized limited testing of the concept through pilot projects. In the fisheries sector, one of the earliest indications of the government’s receptiveness to co-management was the endorsement of the concept by the Ministry of Fisheries in 1995 as a strategy for managing coastal fisheries (Pomeroy 1995; see also Pomeroy, Nguyen, and Ha 2009, 423; Zweig et al. 2005, 19). Internationally, the 1990s was a period during which co-management was being discussed, debated, experimented with, and researched on an unprecedented scale. After three decades of war, the 1990s was also a time when peace and stability became the norm rather than the exception for Vietnam. It was the decade after the đổi mổi economic and administrative reforms had been instituted, which marked not only a move away from centralized planning but also a clear pivot toward socioeconomic performance as the single most important source of legitimacy for the Communist Party

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of Vietnam (Le 2012; Vasavakul 1995). The centralized top-down approach to resource governance was failing to protect the food security of the rural poor, whose resource-dependent livelihoods were being increasingly threatened by mismanagement and resource overexploitation; authorities recognized the need for an alternative. Moreover, the quest to establish legitimacy led to an important policy shift in the late 1990s toward engaging popular participation in administrative reform at the commune level. Known as the promotion of grassroots democracy and embodied in the slogan “dân biểt, dân bàn, dân làm, dân kiểm tra” (the people know, the people discuss, the people implement, and the people review) (Vasavakul 2002, 46), this policy initiative sought to empower citizens to play a more engaged role in resource management and planning, among other things (see also Tuong 2008). Such favorable conditions provided the ideal context for the introduction of co-management, which appeared to have the ingredients necessary to simultaneously encourage participation, promote democracy at the grassroots, improve resource management, build administrative capacity, and strengthen state legitimacy. Once the idea caught on, donor funding began to pour in, and projects were soon established to pilot co-management in selected sites. By the 2000s, sufficient experience and knowledge had been gained from the pilot projects to begin mainstreaming the approach into national policy.4 As evidence of “success” from these pilot sites began to accumulate, so too did a growing sense that co-management was gaining broad acceptance among policy makers. Writing in 2009, Pomeroy et al. (2009, 423) suggested that “the concept of co-management, and the need for more participation of fishers in management and sector planning, has spread as an accepted alternative fisheries management paradigm in Vietnam” (emphasis added).5 Sollows noted that “co-management is recognized on all sides as essential; the big question is not ‘if,’ but ‘how’?” (2005, 6). Such pronouncements lent the impression that a consensus had already been established on whether co-management should be adopted in Vietnam; the challenge therefore was to find ways to “make it work.” Yet, for a country where the state constitutionally has exclusive control over natural resource governance, the emergence and spread of a mode of governance that not only allows but also requires the participation of local resource users in decision making is a rather surprising—if not profoundly anomalous—development. Few observers of Vietnam, however, would necessarily register the significance of this moment. Many regard the state’s experimentation with

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co-management as no more than an enlightened and pragmatic attempt to deal with the growing problems of resource scarcity, overexploitation, and conflict. Such a characterization, evinced by the official development policy discourse, is a product of the fact that co-management in Vietnam is considered a development intervention above all. Like most development interventions, co-management initiatives are typically initiated and funded by international donors and involve the deploying of foreign technical expertise to support and build the capacity of the local government agency charged with overseeing the project. Dependent on such assistance to maintain much of the operating budgets of local agencies, the government is naturally inclined to demonstrate some commitment toward governance reform, upon which the continuation of such aid is often contingent. At the same time, being accountable to their respective governments, donor organizations want to see quantifiable progress toward such objectives as promoting accountability, encouraging participation, empowering local communities, developing institutional capacity, and so forth (e.g., see Kühl 2009). Therefore, for both the Vietnamese government and these donor organizations, co-management projects represent a useful and pragmatic way to further their respective agendas. Consequently, it is also in both parties’ interest to keep co-management couched within a highly technical discourse. Such a discourse confines the sharing of power within the relatively “safe” realm of resource management and no further. Moreover, by defining comanagement in terms of knowledge, the discourse serves to acknowledge and legitimize relations of power between the foreign “experts” and the local officials as well as between the state and the people. By treating co-management as if it were a technical solution to a technical problem, this “interventionist” discourse at once depoliticizes and dehistoricizes it. This “rendering technical” discourse (Li 2007, 2011) masks the web of power relations that co-management arrangements invariably reconfigure while also disembedding them from the specific particularities of time and space in which they appear. Thus sterilized, co-management becomes a neutral and unthreatening concept that is easily transplanted across regions, cultures, and even political ideologies. The rhetoric of participation and empowerment appeals to donors, eager to justify their taxpayers’ investment in international development. Poorly funded and understaffed local authorities are attracted by the promise of funding and the opportunity to benefit from developedworld knowledge, expertise, and training. Finally, the ostensible ideological

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neutrality of co-management reassures government bureaucrats that alien though this concept may be, it could be made to work in Vietnam.

Innovating at the Margins of the Law One cannot speak of how decisions regarding policy are made in Vietnam without considering the distribution and exercise of power between the state and society, including between the different levels of government. Of the various administrative levels to which power was gradually decentralized following đổi mổi in 1986, the district (huyện) is particularly noteworthy, because this is where much innovation occurs (Hicks 2004; Werner 1988). Lying below the province (tỉnh) and above the commune (xã), the district is a unit of special importance to the central government, as it “represents the primary interface between the grassroots and higher authority” (Hicks 2004, 279). In the case of agricultural development in the Mekong Delta, Natalie Hicks (2004, 281) notes that although decentralization entailed “a retreat of the state in terms of personnel and central planning of agriculture,” there has also emerged “more dynamic district administrations, with a clearer sense of their own destiny.” What this suggests is that two possibly mutually reinforcing processes may have occurred during the reform era of the 1990s that had the effect of encouraging innovation: first, a greater willingness of the central government to allow local experimentation, and second, the emergence of more assertive district administrations with the capacity, creativity, and willingness to experiment. Such experimentation, while never completely free of the constraints and oversight imposed by the central government, is characteristic of the idiosyncratic way in which policy innovation occurs in Vietnam. On one hand, an autocratic hierarchy of power still holds whereby the central government not only retains the final say as to what a particular policy should look like but is also responsible for formulating the policy and legislation that set the boundaries of what is and is not permissible. On the other hand, these boundaries are constantly being tested through experimentation at the local level in ways that are deemed locally appropriate. This pushing of boundaries, while occasionally sanctioned by the central government, is more often simply tolerated, as it leaves the authorities the option of either (a) more strongly prohibiting the experimental policy should it fail to produce the

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desired outcomes or (b) co-opting it into mainstream policy to be applied elsewhere should it succeed. So institutionalized is this boundary-pushing in Vietnam that scholars have used the term “fence-breaking” to describe it (Fforde and de Vylder 1996; Malesky 2004; Jandl 2013). Originally used to describe “the violation of central government rules and regulations by state-owned enterprises (SOEs) during the central planning era” (Malesky 2004, 308), the term has since been extended to include “provincial government activity that violated central government regulations during the postplanning period, and provincial government experimentation or innovation in situations where regulations do not exist” (Malesky 2004, 308). Because such experimentation often occurs either in spite of or in the absence of official regulations, the innovating provinces or districts are said to be operating under de facto autonomy or decentralization (Malesky 2004). Jandl (2013, 40), however, emphasizes that this autonomy “was not granted—it was taken by daring provinces who weighed the risks against the benefits of being first movers.” A significant literature already attests to the fact that many of the policy innovations in Vietnam occurred through this process of fence-breaking. These include, among many other reforms, the rise and spread of condominium homeowner associations in Ho Chi Minh City (Huong and Sajor 2010), the growth of informal farmers’ groups (Fforde 2008), the recognition of forms of corporate ownership other than the official three (state, nonstate, and collective) (Malesky 2004), and perhaps most famously, the decollectivization of agriculture (Kerkvliet 2001; Pingali and Vo-Tong Xuan 1992; White 1986). One important corollary of Vietnam’s reliance on this mode of policy innovation is that its provinces (and indeed districts) vary significantly not only in terms of their wealth but also in the capacity or readiness of their leadership to innovate. The case of Bê´n Tre described above illustrates how pivotal such leadership can be to the success or failure of a province’s attempts at innovation.

Co-management as Policy Innovation Though rarely referred to specifically as a “policy innovation,” the gradual emergence of co-management does indeed exhibit many characteristics typical of the messy and improbable way in which new ideas incrementally make their way from the fringes of acceptability into mainstream state policy.

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One such telltale sign is the way co-management initiatives are often referred to as “models” (mô hình).6 The use of this term to describe comanagement experiments alludes to their unspoken promise as exemplars for other localities to emulate if deemed successful. The term also implies an expectation that the lessons gained from these experiments will be disseminated not only outward but also upward—that is, toward higher scales of governance—ultimately making their way into policy at the national level. Another innovation-like characteristic of co-management is the fact that successful examples of co-management are often brought about through the efforts of individual policy entrepreneurs who champion the concept (see Kingdon 1995). These local-level leaders display the courage, tenacity, and political will needed to risk pushing through reform, despite a hostile and uncertain policy environment at higher levels—that is, to “break fences.” As the Bê´n Tre case study mentioned above shows, this kind of political derring-do is often what sets the progressive co-management initiatives apart from those that stagnate or fail. Yet another feature is the opportunistic way in which such innovators take advantage of policy windows, the “emergence of junctures or openings for concerted action” (Armitage, Marschke, and Truong 2011, 703; see also Kingdon 1995) to enact reform. As argued above, co-management’s rise in Vietnam has been occasioned by numerous factors that have made it an especially opportune time for this to occur. These factors include the growing threat of climate change, increasing resource conflict owing to acute population densities, and a shift away from central planning marked first by đổi mổi and, more recently, by reforms to the Land Law. The final characteristic is the policy and legislative environment that is largely inimical to the introduction of co-management, despite which the concept has persisted and gradually gained acceptance. Some of the most progressive examples of co-management can be found in provinces such as Bê´n Tre, where the local government pushed ahead with legislative reform in creative ways, often despite a lack of guidance or clarity from the central level about whether such reform is indeed permissible.

Uncertainty as a Space for Innovation At first glance, the paralysis of local decision makers due to unclear policy at the central level makes sense, given the ostensibly authoritarian hierarchy of

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rule in Vietnam. For decades, local cadres have been trained to heed the panoply of legislation governing all aspects of life; they disobey the decrees issued from Hanoi at their peril. Thus, it would make sense for them to exercise caution when implementing a particular governance reform that appears to contradict some of the most fundamental tenets of the constitution. Even where—as is the case with co-management—there appears to be tacit approval at the highest levels, many local leaders are still hesitant to enact reform without clear guidelines that spell out how such reforms are to be implemented. Yet compared to central policy makers, local authorities are often more attuned to the day-to-day issues that affect people’s livelihoods and thus seek to implement reform as speedily as possible. On the other hand, those who formulate policy and fine-tune legislation at the central level are dutybound to ensure long-term viability and nationwide applicability of the statutes they enact. Moreover, there often are careful political considerations regarding the effects of such reforms on, say, the distribution of authority and the legitimacy on which such authority rests. Consequently, the central level exercises much caution before changing the status quo. The upshot of these twin, opposing forces—one that seeks urgency of action versus the other that exercises caution and restraint—is a time lag between the need for a particular reform to be enacted at the local level and the central government’s issuance of the legislation and policy guidance necessary for that reform to be carried out. What this policy lag does is to create a state of uncertainty for the local authorities; they are not given the green light to go ahead with their locallevel reforms, nor are they explicitly prohibited from doing so. In fact, in certain cases, as described above in the case of co-management, they are enjoined in vague terms to proceed with reform, except that the legislation and explicit guidance on how to enact it is yet forthcoming. The resultant confusion does much to impede efforts to enact reform. Some have interpreted the uncertainty generated by this state of affairs as constituting an instrument of rule. Gainsborough (2010, 181), although writing about a rather different context, argues that “keeping people in a state of uncertainty about what they can and cannot do is a sure way of exercising power over them.”7 In the perpetual tug-of-war over authority between the central and local levels of government (Jandl 2011, 2013), it seems plausible that Hanoi exploits the policy lag to keep the provinces in line.

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Nevertheless, this study proposes another way of understanding the policy lag. For bold local leaders, the uncertainty generated by the policy lag can be seen as affording a space for creativity, inventiveness, and innovation. Rather than explicitly specify what can or cannot be done or how it should be done, the vagueness of policy frameworks lying within the policy lag may instead be creatively exploited. For instance, such vagueness provides the gray zone within which local leaders such as Ms. Nga can experiment with solutions as innovative as instituting a province-wide Steering Committee on Co-management or assigning fishing rights over a demarcated area that encompasses multiple fisheries cooperatives. Such entrepreneurial individuals, however, constitute a minority among local leaders; apart from Bê´n Tre, other provinces in which such individuals have contributed toward significant policy innovations include the coastal provinces Thừ Thiên Huê´ (Armitage et al. 2011), Bình Định (Pomeroy 2013), and Sóc Trăng (Schmitt et al. 2013). Each of these provinces has passed provincial-level legislation formalizing the formation of resource users’ organizations and the allocation of collective property rights, both of which are highly significant developments. In each of these cases, the province, not the central government, has been at the leading edge of change. Some of the lessons learned from these attempts at reform have already begun to feed back into and consequently shape the character of the evolving policy guidance at the central level. In these cases, then, as is typical in Vietnam, the fence breakers have ended up as the trailblazers, recognized ex post facto as innovators; where successful, the knowledge gained from their experimentation has been co-opted by the center and adopted as a model(mô hình) for other local governments to emulate. The space for innovation afforded by the uncertainty of the initial policy lag has been exploited by more entrepreneurial local leaders to devise and experiment with creative solutions.

The Meeting of Scales and Rethinking the Role of the State Notwithstanding the experimentation and innovation that occurs at the policy-making level, the actual operationalization of co-management at the local level belies official claims that it is merely a technical approach. On the contrary, it is often a deeply political enterprise fraught with friction

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and tension. Because co-management, by definition, aims to bridge scales of knowledge and power, it also tends to intensify the interaction between different scales of governance. This brings the relationship between society and the state into sharper focus and spurs a rethinking of what that relationship should or could be. The following incident illustrates this point well. Like many co-management initiatives, it involved the convergence of actors operating at different scales of governance—a convergence that proved crucial to instigating the incident in the first place. In March 2010, I participated in a field visit to a village where a mangrove co-management project was under way. The visit was held as part of a national-level workshop on co-management hosted by a coastal zone management project, of which this particular co-management initiative was one component. The workshop was pioneering, because for the first time it convened decision makers and co-management practitioners from different resource sectors and different scales of governance across Vietnam. Several powerful dignitaries attended, including a vice minister of the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development and the vice chair of the Provincial People’s Committee. Held on the first day of the three-day workshop, the field visit provided a way to ground the largely conceptual and technical discussions that were to follow in an actual example of a recently implemented co-management project. More importantly for the organization leading the project, the field trip was a way to showcase what it believed were best practices in comanagement. Conceivably, much was riding on the success of this field visit: it had the potential to attract significant donor interest, strengthen the commitment and buy-in of the provincial and central authorities, and inspire other co-management initiatives elsewhere in Vietnam to adopt more enlightened approaches. Upon arriving at the village, we were greeted by a host of shy but smiling villagers, many of whom were wearing T-shirts emblazoned with the project name and logo. The majority of these villagers were members of the ethnic Khmer minority population in southern Vietnam (see Taylor 2014). Under a large makeshift canopy structure erected in front of the home of RT, the head of the co-management project’s resource user group, we listened to a number of speeches.8 The chair of the Commune People’s Committee, representing the local government, spoke first, followed by the director of the Provincial Forest Protection Subdepartment, representing the coastal zone management project.

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Then RT, representing the villagers, presented a brief history of resource use in the village in which their vulnerability as coastal peasants could hardly be starker. After a 1992 typhoon damaged a dike, causing widespread soil salinization, the villagers’ livelihoods had come to rely on the collection of various mangrove forest resources.9 Their continued access to these valuable resources, however, was being threatened mainly by illegal poaching by “outsiders,” often entailing unsustainable harvesting methods. RT then described the management measures in place since the co-management regulations went into effect, including spatial and temporal restrictions on resource harvesting, identification badges worn by all group members entering the sustainable use zone, designated footpaths, and community monitoring of resource use. The next person to speak was JG, an internationally renowned expert on co-management and one of the earliest and best-known advocates of the concept.10 Impressed by the project’s achievements, she commended the project team, the authorities, and the resource users on their willingness to work together. Notably, however, she also stressed the importance of keeping channels of communication open as well as the idea that resource users should continue to have a genuine say in deliberations over resource management options. Up to this point, everything said by the various speakers painted a favorable picture of the project despite it being a work in progress, thus burnishing the credentials of all involved. JG’s very presence and approving remarks, in particular, lent the project considerable gravitas. Her unique position allowed her to speak with authority derived from expertise and experience and to raise issues that others may not have been able to say in public due to protocol and the need for tact. What happened in the ensuing question-and-answer session, however, took many of us in the audience by surprise. In response to JG’s invitation to the audience for questions, RT, who was seated just beside her, stood and calmly took the microphone, even though he had already spoken. His tone and body language now seemed rather more serious than before although with the same quiet and dignified demeanor. Speaking in response to JG, he appeared to be directing his remarks as much toward her as toward the audience, as if making a plea. The following quote betrays some of the desperation with which RT spoke: We are having difficulties implementing the village co-management regulations. [According to the regulations] only members of the comanagement group can go to the forest and use the forest [resources]

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there. However, before the group [was established] we had many people [using the forest]; it was open to everyone. But now even those who are nonmembers of the co-management group can still enter, and of course we have no right to prevent them, no power to prevent them. That’s our difficulty. So how can we solve that issue? Reminding everyone present of the extent to which the exploits of “outsiders” affect their access to the mangrove resources, RT then lamented that even after adopting the co-management regulations, these poachers continue to plunder the forest bordering their village. Despite attempts at community monitoring and surveillance, the villagers remain mostly powerless to apprehend poachers when they encounter them. Not only do they lack the legal authority to do so, but any such attempt would risk their safety and even their lives. His was a plea, then, for greater effort by the authorities who did have the power and means to enforce regulations to keep their end of the bargain and protect the mangroves from poachers. This was indeed a question of RT’s own legitimacy as a community leader. RT and the other user group leaders had staked their reputation to a significant degree by convincing resource users in the village to agree to abide by a new set of rules, which entailed considerable sacrifice on their part. In return, the resource users were promised more secure livelihoods in the belief that the sources of their livelihoods would be protected and that they would continue to have access to these resources in the long term. However, for them to forgo short-term gain and yet continue witnessing blatant poaching by outsiders would be testing their trust in the co-management arrangement and ultimately in RT’s word. Arguably, RT was not just making a plea but was also articulating a rather serious charge—namely, that the government has not been doing enough to ensure equitable and sustainable access to natural resources— that under normal circumstances would rarely be made so openly. Implicit in his remarks was a warning that the resource users’ compliance with the co-management arrangement should not be taken for granted. For a Khmer peasant to make such a statement in the presence of so many high-profile individuals from all over the country was hardly an insignificant act. Why, then, did RT so brazenly express what he felt were his fellow villagers’ longstanding frustration and sense of injustice? RT probably knew enough about the field trip participants to realize that at least some of them might have the authority to address the issue of

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poachers. Yet it may not have been clear initially whether this would be a safe arena for him to voice his grievances. It may well have been that JG’s comments, assertive and sympathetic as they were to the plight of the typically powerless resource-dependent poor, provided RT the courage and impetus to speak truth to power. As this episode suggests, despite the ostensibly level playing field and power sharing that co-management purportedly affords, relations between resource users and the state extend beyond—and will likely outlive—the co-management project itself. The assignment of land leases, the ability and will to enforce resource use regulations, the provision of basic infrastructure such as water, sanitation, and electricity and, more critically in the case of the coastal village described above, the construction and maintenance of coastal defense structures in the face of rising sea levels and increasingly frequent storms—these are all decisions affecting the livelihoods of the rural poor, which different levels of government have the power to either execute, delay, or withhold. In a political system with limited downward accountability, however, political leaders bear little obligation toward meeting the needs of their constituents (see Fritzen 2006). For marginalized communities such as the Khmer peasants in this village, this imbalance in power is all the more acute. Such are the power dynamics within which co-management is being implemented in Vietnam and with which its participants must contend. Whatever motivated RT to make those remarks, his words had real consequences. Later that evening as the workshop participants reconvened to process the day’s events, much discussion was devoted to the crucial role of the state in providing adequate enforcement of co-management regulations, eventually shaping to a considerable extent the wording of the workshop’s concluding statement. The episode drove home the point that comanagement does not merely entail engaging the participation of the local community but, just as important, also involves recommitting the state to the resource management roles that it is uniquely positioned to undertake. It is worth noting that this discussion was sparked by an encounter between actors who would otherwise be operating at very different scales of governance.

Conclusion Contrary to what the official technicist development discourse implies, the rise of co-management is not simply a gradual acceptance of a development

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intervention representing an enlightened method of governing resource use. Rather, it was precipitated by a historical convergence of favorable windows of opportunity, then championed by various policy entrepreneurs who continue to innovate despite (and perhaps because of) the uncertainty inherent in what I have described as the “policy lag.” Interestingly, the way in which the very uncertainty generated may serve as a resource to be exploited by those entrepreneurial enough to recognize its opportunities appears to be reminiscent of what Nikolas Rose (1999) has termed “powers of freedom,” where the “freedom” afforded by modern society comes only at the price of growing uncertainty, fragmentation, and anomie. This is apropos to understanding conservation and environmental governance in postsocialist states such as Vietnam and to making sense of the new modes of management emerging within their transition toward an increasingly neoliberal order. It also raises the question of whether comanagement—or even managerialism or entrepreneurialism as fields of practice much exalted within neoliberalism—may in fact be regarded as a feature of postsocialist neoliberal environmental governance (see Heynen et al. 2007) and what the implications might be. Admittedly, one could regard co-management as a technology of government implicit in the making of what Agrawal (2005a, 2005b) calls “environmental subjects.” Through the empowerment of ordinary villagers to play a more prominent role in the management of their local resources, the state can be seen as creating (or co-opting) an environmental citizenry to advance its goals of environmental protection. Yet as the foregoing discussion demonstrates, co-management entails appeals to and the exercise of power at multiple levels and in multiple directions and therefore cannot simply be understood through the lens of governmentality (see Rutherford 2007). Rather, as I have argued, the rise of co-management will likely occasion new and complex ways in which society and the state relate to each other through the convergence of institutions and individuals who would otherwise operate at different scales of governance to negotiate new configurations of power and accountability. Given the trajectory of change in the discourse and practice of fisheries co-management in Vietnam, it is likely that co-management will continue to gain acceptance and perhaps may even be co-opted into mainstream policy. That co-management has already given rise to an “’early-stage’ governance transformation” involving far-reaching structural reforms (Armitage et al. 2011, 703) therefore belies the technicist fallacy that “the effective

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administration or ‘management’ of development is essentially a technical or practical matter” (Leftwich 1994, 363). On the contrary, what I have tried to argue in this chapter is that co-management is an eminently political matter. Why does all this matter when compared to the large-scale environmental changes being wrought even now, key among which, especially for Vietnam, is the threat of climate change to the livelihoods and food security of the most vulnerable? At one level, the new governance landscape shaped by co-management’s remarkable rise matters because it promises a more democratic, accountable, and sustainable way of governing natural resources. Co-management may represent one of the best opportunities yet for Vietnam’s resource-dependent poor to mitigate the impacts of imminent and ongoing environmental change. At another level, the rise of co-management in Vietnam also matters because it illustrates a crucial yet overlooked way in which human society is changing—namely, through the transformation of state-society relations— and how this process is being driven by the urgent need to navigate the many environmental ruptures that have come to characterize our present historical moment (Elinoff and Vaughan, introduction to this volume). Just as environments are being reconfigured through our quotidian encounters with nature, so too are the institutional structures we build to govern our relations with nature, for better or for worse. Seen through such a lens, these ostensibly disastrous times may be as much a moment of opportunity and hope as they are an age of crisis.

Notes 1. SCAFI was one component of a broader bilateral sectoral reform program funded by the government of Denmark. The program, known as the Fisheries Sector Programme Support, Phase II (FSPS II), ran from 2006 to 2010 (Embassy of Denmark in Vietnam n.d.). 2. This was the Regional Conference on Small Scale Fishery Co-management organized by SCAFI in Da Nang, Vietnam, October 26–27, 2009. 3. These favorable conditions include the funding and national platform afforded by the SCAFI project; the success of the clam cooperatives, especially in receiving the MSC certification; and the clear and present threat of climate change. 4. One study listed eighteen fisheries or fisheries-related co-management projects in Vietnam that were ongoing as of 2008 (Tuong 2008). 5. The currency of co-management as a concept has also been noted elsewhere. According to a global review published in 2011, “co-management is now established as a mainstream approach to small-scale fisheries management across the developing world” (Evans, Cherrett,

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and Pemsl 2011, 1938). Likewise, the Mekong River Commission (2010, 9) claimed that comanagement “has now become the preferred form of management in all four of its member countries.” 6. This terminology harkens back to the điển hình (typical models) used during the 1953– 1956 land reform in North Vietnam. Heilmann (2008a) argues that such nomenclature was derived from China’s own experience with experimental policy innovation, where the concept was known as dianxing (典型). Other variations on the term include model demonstrations (dianxing shifan, 典型示范), model experiments (dianxing shiyan, 典型实验), and model experiences (dianxing jingyan, 典型经验) (Heilmann 2008a). 7. Gainsborough (2010) considers the uncertainty generated by the equitization (or partial privatization) of state enterprises in Vietnam. 8. Names in this vignette have been anonymized. 9. Snails, crabs, fish, shellfish, and snakes, for example, provide important sources of protein; fish fingerlings and shrimp larvae sold to aquaculture farms provide income; and mangrove trees provide fuelwood. Although several villagers farm rice, onions, and other crops, many still depend on these aquatic resources for a significant portion of their meager income and diet. 10. JG was invited to present the keynote address at the workshop earlier that day.

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Rose, Nikolas. 1999. Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rutherford, S. 2007. “Green Governmentality: Insights and Opportunities in the Study of Nature’s Rule.” Progress in Human Geography 31, no. 3: 291–307. Schmitt, K., T. Albers, T. T. Pham, and S. C. Dinh. 2013. “Site-Specific and Integrated Adaptation to Climate Change in the Coastal Mangrove Zone of Soc Trang Province, Viet Nam.” Journal of Coastal Conservation 17, no. 3: 545–58. Sollows, John. D. 2005. Strengthening of Participatory Water Management in Soc Trang Province, Viet Nam. Vientiane: Mekong River Commission. Starr, Peter. 2008. “Clams and Cockles in the Mekong Delta.” Catch and Culture 15, no. 1: 28–34. Taylor, Philip. 2014. The Khmer Lands of Vietnam: Environment, Cosmology and Sovereignty. Copenhagen: NIAS Press. Trần Thị Thu Nga. 2009. “Tổ chức tốt mô hình đồng quản lý khai thác phát triển bền vững nguồn tai nguyên ven biển của Bến Tre” [Well Organized Co-management Models of the Sustainable Development and Exploitation of the Coastal Resources of Bê´n Tre]. In Vietnamese. Paper presented at the Regional Conference on Small Scale Fishery Comanagement, Da Nang, Vietnam, October 26–27. Tuong Phi Lai. 2008. “Fisheries Co-management in Vietnam: Issues and Approach.” Paper presented at the 14th Biennial Conference of the International Institute of Fisheries Economics and Trade, Nha Trang, Vietnam, July 22–25. Vasavakul, Thaveeporn. 1995. “Vietnam: The Changing Models of Legitimation.” In Political Legitimacy in Southeast Asia: The Quest for Moral Authority, ed. Muthiah Alagappa, 257–89. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ———. 2002. Rebuilding Authority Relations: Public Administration Reform in the Era of Doi Moi. Hanoi: Adam Fforde and Associates. Werner, Jayne. 1988. “The Problem of the District in Vietnam’s Development Policy.” In Postwar Vietnam: Dilemmas in Socialist Development, ed. David G. Marr and Christine P. White. 147–62. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Southeast Asia Program. White, Christine P. 1986. “Everyday Resistance, Socialist Revolution and Rural Development: The Vietnamese Case.” In Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance in South-east Asia, ed. James C. Scott and Benedict J. T. Kerkvliet, 49–63. London: Frank Cass. WorldFish Center. 2009. Final Report: Strengthening of Capture Fisheries Management Component (SCAFI); International Consultancy Services on Support to Co-management Activities (Covering Activities 3.7 and 3.8). Phnom Penh: WorldFish Center. Zweig, Ronald, Ha Xuan Thong, Le Thanh Luu, Jon Cook, and Michael Phillips. 2005. Vietnam: Fisheries and Aquaculture Sector Study. Hanoi: Ministry of Fisheries/World Bank.

CHAPTER 7

The New, Accidental Gods Engaging with the Spirits of Disaster in Bangkok Andrew Alan Johnson

Displacements, Temporal and Otherwise In 1855 at the very end of the feudal period in Japan, a series of earthquakes with their epicenters near Edo (modern-day Tokyo) brought a new deity into being (Smits 2006; Smits 2012). Those affected by the quake blamed the destruction on Namazu, the great subterranean catfish whose turning was, in Japanese mythology, believed to cause such quakes. In the wake of the disaster, somewhat counterintuitively, Namazu and his divine controller, Takemikazuchi, became the centers of a cult among Japan’s peasant and merchant classes. Amid the debris of the earthquake, Namazu ceased to be simply associated with the shaking of the earth and also became associated with the shaking of the social fabric: the catfish shook apart the grip that the merchant class had on capital and showered it on the rest of Edo society. In the moment of the physical and social destruction brought about by the earthquake, the being that caused that destruction was suddenly transformed into a liberator—no less destructive but destructive in a way that opened the door for opportunity. For many parts of the world, the current moment is just such a moment of upheaval and disaster. Climate change, rapid urban growth, and other environmental, economic, and political shocks reverberate alongside new fears and new hopes. In some places, emergent economic systems that enrich and impoverish seemingly at random recall witchcraft—another

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system that acts invisibly and often perniciously (see Comaroff and Comaroff 1999). Sometimes the divine beings associated with such disruptions cause those hoarding wealth to disburse it (as in the case of Namazu; see also Small 2012, 160), whereas in other cases new sources of power allow the morally suspect to prey upon others in more predatory ways (as Comaroff and Comaroff illustrate). Even as neoliberal capitalism increases in scale, new forms of urbanism emerge with similarly distorting and mutating effects on everyday life. Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid (2014, 165) describe urbanization in the wake of the 1980s (and intensifying in the crises of the 2000s and 2010s) as a process displaced from particular regions, divorced from particular modes of habitation. Such an idea is particularly relevant in Thailand, where increasingly since the 1990s “rural peasants” have been anything but rural, moving within and across Thai borders in large numbers (Walker 2012). This chapter seeks to understand the ontological dimensions of Thailand’s urban transformation as a turn toward the productive power of destruction. By this I mean the harnessing of those powers that destroy preexisting power structures, be they economic, political, or karmic. Such a characterization brings together figures as diverse as Kali, the Buddha, and indeed capital itself. In this chapter, I consider how precarious laborers in Bangkok dramatically affected by the country’s shifting economic and environmental terrain encounter wild spirits in the city. The “new era” that I describe here does not have the firm starting point of the Edo earthquake, the ending of apartheid, or the restructuring of a socialist economic plan. Rather, this study takes as its start Thailand’s decades-long urban transformation, which began during the 1960s with a gradual increase in migrant labor out of Isan, Thailand’s ethnically Lao northeastern region, and intensified during the 1980s and 1990s with the country’s economic boom. This boom enriched some, but crashes in the price of rice, rubber, and other agricultural goods in the 2010s impoverished many more. The economic boom and bust radically transformed the northeastern economy, which moved away from subsistence agriculture and toward industry, cash-cropping, and, significantly, the exportation of labor (see Mills 1999). For labor migrants in Bangkok working in the unregulated or illegal economy, the city and its sites of danger and disaster become places of potential, homes to wild spirits with the power to cause harm or grant fortune. The nature spirits that such laborers seek out are, like Namazu, powerful forces that reshape the structures of lives, thus providing the possibility for dramatic gain or loss.

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Here, I am using the term “disaster” in two senses. In one, the disaster that Bangkok’s “wild” spirits bring normally takes the shape of dramatic personal trauma, most notably traffic accidents—which are not uncommon, given that Thailand has the world’s second most dangerous roads (Sivak 2014). In addition to this very immediate, very personal notion of disaster, I also refer to the “slow disaster” of the precarious lives of rural-to-urban migrants in Bangkok. For those living and working in the unregulated economy of day labor, piecemeal manufacturing, petty vending, and illegal activities, disaster in the form of traffic accidents, violence, police action, fraud, and so on is not only feared, it is expected. This focus on vulnerability to and expectation of disaster draws upon recent anthropological attention to precarity. James Clifford (2013) describes the current era of neoliberal capitalism as one in which there is “an awareness of a given world suddenly gone” and a “feeling of exposure” (6, 7). With the stripping away of support formerly provided by networks, be they kin networks or labor unions, life becomes vulnerable to, as Andrea Muehlebach describes it, “the multiple forms of nightmarish dispossession and injury that our age entails” (Muehlebach 2013, 298) or, in a different sense, the existential dread in the realization that such networks are themselves products of particular times and places (Funahashi 2013). On the individual level, precarity and its affect are marked by a collection of moments of fragility and vulnerability that create a continually shifting, incomplete mosaic that suggests the changeability and fractured nature of the present. With that in mind, I focus here on Lek, a slim young man with a cracked tooth who worked under the table for a computer parts factory and who one day, to his great happiness, was violently attacked by a tree spirit who was in love with him. Lek’s story not only offers a window into the ways laborers in Thailand navigate the risks associated with the country’s rapid environmental and urban changes but also points toward a new ontological horizon, one in which humans seek control over a volatile world via building alliances with unseen sources of potency. The experiences I describe here demonstrate that urbanization and environmental transformation have not paved over the spirit world or diminished its power. Rather, according to Lek and his fellow migrants, the spirits have themselves urbanized. Lek points to a world permanently altered by human activity: an Anthropocene but something very different from the idea of ecological interconnectedness called forth by that term. The stories told by Lek and others like him reveal not other ways of seeing and knowing life in the Anthropocene but rather other

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Anthropocenes, other realms in which human and nonhuman are bound in a mutually constructing embrace.

Thailand’s Wild Economies Before I address Lek and the spirit, the Thai translation of “precarity” requires some thought. A literal translation of “precariousness” would be “khwam1 siang” (risk, danger), a meaning that does not have the evocative dimensions of vulnerability that Stewart, Clifford, or Muehlebach provide. Other Thai words, such as “khwam chai khop” (marginality) or “khwam awn ae” (weakness), remain equally unsatisfactory, as they fail to address the sense of bodily danger running through Lek’s discourse. But turning to the official language regarding marginal labor, we find something else. In Thai, the informal economy is officially termed the sethakit theuan (wild economy). The term “theuan” is connected with violence, vulnerability, looseness, illegality, and the wild forest (pa theuan). Thanet Aphornsuvan, arguing on the difficulty of translating Western concepts of freedom in nineteenth-century Thailand, describes theuan as the negative version of concepts of freedom: to be unregulated, untamed, unaccountable to those above and not responsible for effects on those below—to be cut off, feared, unpredictable (Thanet 1994,170).2 It is a definition that applies to Lek, the day laborer, as it does to the nature spirits that he both seeks out and blames for his misfortune. Each are unaccountable, uncontrolled. The term “theuan” also speaks to the unpredictability that seems to be an endemic part of Thailand’s urban transition. Theuan things are, as I argue here, sources of potential as well as fear. The symbolic taming of wilderness—the drawing in and, via engagement, rendering un-theuan of the wild—is a key feature in conceptions of Southeast Asian urbanity and progress (Johnson 2014). But in Thailand, something seems to have gone wrong with this model of progress. The growth of Bangkok and the expanding reach of the city have not led to a taming of theuan. Rather, the present moment of unregulated labor and increased capitalization is one where khwam theuan runs rampant. Tamaki Endo (2014, 12) argues that previous economic models, which predicted that the urban informal economy3 was merely one step in the chain of development from an agricultural society toward an industrialized one, were incorrect. Instead, she argues, modernization as it is experienced

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in Thailand has increased the scale of the informal sector and made formalsector work more and more dependent on its informal counterpart. Industrialization, marketization, and modernization bring more, not less, instability, and the Thai middle class becomes more, not less, reliant on the precarity of lives such as Lek’s. Such a finding is in line with studies of rural livelihoods as well, as Thais shift away from farming as the primary source of income in the countryside and a more market-driven diversification predominates (Rigg 2006). Farms, Rigg argues, are becoming less profitable owing to increased market penetration and less productive due to environmental degradation, rendering other sources of income more attractive. But as Endo (2014) implies, this is not a move toward greater security along with integration. In recent years, rubber and rice prices both crashed—the latter badly enough that Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra was forced to intervene, leading to charges of corruption and her 2014 ouster at the hands of a military coup d’état. Lek, like many of Bangkok’s migrants, is from Thailand’s poorest region, Isan (the northeast). It is an area that has long produced migrants to Bangkok as well as Singapore (Pattana 2014) and the Middle East. Such moves come with risks: migrants face duplicitous recruiters and hostile employers, not to mention the strain that such moves place on families back home (see Mills 1995; Pattana 2014). Northeasterners are particularly prominent in construction and taxi driving (Sopranzetti 2017), and northeastern women used to hold a significant role in factory labor (Mills 1999), although this workforce has shifted toward cheaper, international migrants from Myanmar (Endo 2014, 37), or informal workers such as Lek. Indeed, just over the border in Laos, undocumented migrant workers from Laos to Thailand play an increasingly important role in the nominally agriculture-dependent Lao economy (Inthasone 2001). Migration has thus become fundamental to the region’s economy, offering new possibilities and new risks. Recent research has focused on the new aspirations held by many northeasterners. In recent years, new flows of capital have opened horizons of desire and political consciousness, transcending older relations that placed farmers at the lower end of patron/client networks (Jakkrit 2012; Walker 2012; Keyes 2014). However, with the influx of capital came increasing speculation and indebtedness, in turn contributing to decisions to migrate to Bangkok. Given easy credit and sitting on the surface of massive price bubbles in rubber and palm oil, in just a few years many northeasterners

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found themselves in worse straits than before,4 a status only worsening with the Prayuth (military) regime’s dismissive attitude toward rural concerns. In this way, poverty persists but in a different form, stretched across rural/ urban networks. If Lek is subject to disaster, it is a disaster already anticipated by these larger economic forces. His state of being is linked with the exodus of labor from the northeast and the dependence of Bangkok factories on undocumented labor such as his. Accident has been written into his situation since the beginning—indeed, accident here is no accident. To demonstrate this claim, I turn to the crash that transformed Lek’s life.

Accident Lek was driving his motorcycle down a narrow alley (soi) in eastern Bangkok off of On Nut Road on his way to his girlfriend’s dormitory. While crossing a small bridge over a drainage canal, he lost control of the bike and rammed it into a concrete street-lamp post, suffering severe injuries. He lay on the street beside a vacant lot cordoned off with barbed wire, underneath a gum-kino tree,5 before someone found him. Lek had been warned. Nui, his girlfriend, had dreamed of the accident, seeing Lek fly off of his motorcycle into the dark street some nights before it happened. “[I] almost died,” Lek told me, his smile revealing a front incisor cracked in half. “Then [when I was recovering] Nui dreamed again, of the Mother [the spirit of a banana tree].” Nui, short and slender like Lek and with the same high cheekbones and wide smile, joined us later, explaining: “The spirit was in love with him! She wanted to take him away to be her lover. The dream is how we knew that they were a couple.” Such behavior was entirely to be expected from a tani tree. Banana ghosts, like the ghosts of gum-kino trees (pradu) or tall, straight dipterocarps (takhian), often developed personalities: attractive women dressed in traditional silk dresses, most often green in color, that would occasionally seize young men passing by to be their paramours.6 While a belief in their existence extends across Thailand and into insular Southeast Asia (cf. the Malay and Indonesian pontianak), seeking out such dangerous ghosts and entering into relationships with them is common in Bangkok. This particular banana tree had a turbulent history (see Johnson 2012). The tree first grew in the yard of a nearby house, attracting visitors because

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its flower looked like a human head. The house’s owner, disturbed by the group of migrant laborers clustered in her yard, chopped the tree down and flung the trunk into a nearby vacant lot, ringed by gum-kino trees. This act, though, intensified the worship of the spirit, and hundreds of devotees began coming to the lane, especially on nights near the announcement of winning numbers in the biweekly illegal lottery. It was during this period of initial intensification in 2011 that I began coming to the lane. The banana spirit, according to the devotees, had escaped into one of the gum-kino trees and was hiding there. Shortly afterward another spirit began to be seen in the photographs and dreams that followers would take from the lane, the spirit of a fetus illegally aborted by his Burmese7 mother and then unceremoniously thrown into the vacant lot. Finally, the spirit of the gum-kino tree too began to manifest, thus making a triad of spirits: Mother Tani, the banana ghost; Mother Pradu, the gum-kino spirit; and the kuman, the fetus spirit. Lek saw himself as lucky in his choice of tree. He had discovered Mother Tani, the banana tree ghost, hiding in a gum-kino tree. Tani, like the aborted fetus, was a wandering spirit, moving from tree to tree depending on her whims. It was up to devotees to find the correct one, via cell phones and bark rubbings, and give the correct offering. After the accident and after the dream that linked the accident to Lek’s inadvertent romantic entanglement with the tree spirit, Lek and Nui came again late at night after his shift, asking the tree for numbers. They squatted in front of the tree, Lek rubbing its bark with his fingers and Nui holding up her Samsung mobile phone to take pictures. After each photo, Lek would pause to pour oil he purchased at a nearby Buddhist temple over his fingers while Nui examined the photos. Others were there too, of course. Lek had to shoulder in past other devotees in order to reach the bark, and vendors sold oil, flowers, and incense as well as food and drinks to the growing crowd. These devotees were, like Lek, largely informal economy workers at nearby factories and, like Lek, were all migrants from Thailand’s poorest regions: the north and northeast.8 What Nui was searching for—and what she found—were winning lottery numbers. Within the photos, she showed me the swirl of an “8” along with two blobs that she identified as Mother Tani and the kuman, signs of Tani’s favor. Playing these numbers, Lek won “many tens of thousands” of Thai baht, just over US$1,000. In exchange, he brought to the shrine a silk dress for the spirit to wear, joining the many others proudly displayed and showing off the spirit’s power to all passing by. Other devotees sought the kuman, adopting him into their families by pledging weekly gifts of toys

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and snacks and a new home on the family altar along with statuettes of the Buddha, famous monks, or other auspicious spirits. Themes of violence run throughout Lek’s story. The tree, unusual to begin with, is violently cut down and flung into the vacant lot to rot. The owner of the house does so because, according to the shrine’s caretaker, she fears seeing the migrant northeastern laborers in her yard. The infant, similarly, is cast into the lot to die, its fate explained by reference to its mother’s ethnicity, Burmese being cast as particularly cruel in Thai casual racist stereotyping. Lek, in his turn, is flung off his bike because the spirit takes a passing fancy to him and wants to kill him in order to keep his spirit close. Displacement, too, is central to Lek’s story. The banana tree spirit lives in a gum-kino tree. The aborted fetus, abandoned by its parent, becomes adopted in spirit form by others. Lek and Nui, like the other devotees of the lane, are internal migrants. Not ethnically Thai, they speak something closer to Lao than the state-sanctioned and socially approved Central Thai dialect. They arrive in Bangkok on the heels of a northeastern agricultural economy thrown into flux as crashing rice prices drive farmers en masse to capital-intensive rubber plantations, and the price of rubber then crashes. In this cycle of disaster after disaster, more and more find work as migrant laborers elsewhere (see Mills 1999). Because they are not holding official jobs, their lives in Bangkok depend on being able to shift from factory work to construction to market vending at a moment’s notice. Finally, Lek’s story is deeply concerned with accident. In addition to the accident that knocks Lek off of his bike, there is also the happy accident of his finding the correct tree, choosing the correct numbers, and thus winning the lottery. Spirits act capriciously, causing injury in one moment and fortune in the next. Lek’s is a cosmology of chaos. His interaction with the spirit, like that of many other Thai-Lao marginal workers lining the lane that night, is one founded on an interaction with a world in flux. Doubt and its counterpart, hope, are, as Nils Bubandt argues in his excellent study of Buli witchcraft, “an impetus for action and a driving force for a particular kind of engagement with modernity” (2014, 239). Here, there are three disasters. First, there is the disaster of environmental and economic change in Thailand’s northeast,9 as intensification of cash-cropping and the damming of the Mekong River lead to increased prosperity for some and poverty for others (Johnson 2019, 2020). Then, there is the “slow disaster” of the precarious life of a migrant worker, an experience of temporary housing, uncertain income, and the vulnerability

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to accident (Endo 2014). Finally, there is the personal disaster of the traffic accident. In the wake of disaster, Lek seeks out forces that cause disaster; he enters into a relationship with a thing that he admits may not even be there and, even should it be found, has already proven itself dangerous. Dealing with these new, more precarious forms of life require new forms of religiosity, forms that, in Lek’s case, deal with khwam theuan—both the wildness that the seemingly ordered space of the city erases and the wild thing that one becomes upon moving to and living in the city. Mother Tani and the kuman are not alone. On the new highways radiating out from Bangkok, amid rows of concrete shophouses and the floodlights of new “lifestyle malls” are shrines to what once existed. Spectral elephants, snakes, and trees stand in for biological versions. Like their theuan biological precedents, these spirits are menacing to some, offering traffic accidents and vicious hauntings, but are guardians to others, giving lottery numbers and protection from traffic accidents. The changing cityscape is not entirely a secular one. As I have documented elsewhere (Johnson 2014; Johnson 2013), new buildings and spaces become home to new spectral inhabitants, themselves reflective of the forms of fear and hope experienced by those living in and around them.

Disaster and Doubt What is it about the experience of migrant labor, in the move from small town to metropolis,10 that spurs engagement with doubt and disaster along the lines that Lek pursues? What can Lek tell us about a world where humans are embedded within deep and intimate relationships with nonhumans that might be otherwise? How is the experience of urban precarity, or khwam theuan, understood in an ontology that includes possible sources of potential and risk such as Mother Tani? I say “possible” here to foreground doubt. Lek does not “believe in” Mother Tani’s existence in the way that a model of worldviews or religion would assume. Rather, Mother Tani is a proposition, a possible explanation for why Lek suffers the disasters that he does, a model for reality understood as a model rather than an expression of deep faith. It is this position that foregrounds doubt that Nils Bubandt deploys in his ethnography of Buli witchcraft. Unlike scholars who have posited witchcraft as an explanation for misfortune (cf. E. Evans-Pritchard 1976 [1937]), for Bubandt

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witchcraft highlights “the absence of explanations and stable meaning” (Bubandt 2014, 42). In Lek’s case, the supernatural and the uncanny as a “philosophy of uncertainty” (Bubandt 2014, 42) is heightened by the increased uncertainty of his everyday experience; we can see the link between cosmologies, social worlds, and lived experience. Conceptions of reality—religious or otherwise—do not simply shape how individuals and communities perceive events; rather, reality is itself shaped by the kinds of experiences that individuals and communities undergo. Based on the experiences of Lek and other devotees of Bangkok’s theuan spirits, I argue that life marked by continual instability and vulnerability in turn gives rise to a conception of power underlying the everyday as unstable, capricious, and intimately intertwined with disaster. Just as the Edo earthquakes signaled to Japanese peasants that social and cosmological upheaval were similarly under way, the series of disasters—”slow” and “fast”—that Lek undergoes signal that the world is undergirded by a system of power that is irrational, unpredictable, and at the same time highly personal. Engagement with this power allows for some degree of agency by precarious people such as Lek and Nui. Here, we may be tempted to claim that Lek understands increasing environmental and economic uncertainty via spirits, a claim similar to that of Comaroff and Comaroff (1999). One could see Lek’s acknowledgment of Mother Tani as an acknowledgment of his embeddedness within larger systems of power such as world capitalism and environmental change— systems too large and in which we are too embedded to be properly seen, what Timothy Morton (2013) calls “hyperobjects.” But this would be to reduce Lek’s encounter with Tani to simply a misunderstanding of something that “we” understand (more) correctly: the Anthropocene, the world inextricably bound with human activity. Instead, taking other ontological worlds seriously (de la Cadena 2010) involves understanding Lek’s world as an Anthropocene: a world shaped by human interaction but just one possibility among others. Lek’s Anthropocene is one in which gifts of silk dresses modify the lived world, where human and nonhuman interact not as coresidents of a shared Earth but instead as lovers or as mothers and sons. It is not a restating of what we already know in metaphoric terms but instead is a new reality. Lek’s precarity is not limited to him and his fellow migrant workers. A year after Lek’s lottery victory, Mother Tani’s shrine stood abandoned. The spirit house still remained, along with the department store mannequin

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that housed Mother Tani’s spirit, but her wig was gone, stolen in the night by thieves who up to that point had been put off by threats of supernatural retribution. A vendor had stayed for several weeks after the shrine’s decline, selling candles and incense to those who had undertaken long-term contracts and were loath to renege on them despite the shrine’s obvious decline, but she too eventually moved on. Elsewhere, new shrines gained some degree of fame: a tree outside of the Criminal Court rumored to be an old gallows gained some followers; elsewhere, the ghosts of the horrific Santika fire11 were said to have found a new home in a large tree in a vacant lot near the site. The locus of power had shifted, and Lek, like others, followed it to its new equally fragile and temporary, incarnation. Notes I would like to thank Eli Elinoff and Tyson Vaughan for being the driving forces behind this volume, Sarah Starkweather for her careful copy-editing, Gregory Clancey for his mention of Namazu, and Michiko Ito for careful searching of Japanese wood-block archives. 1. Khwam here renders an adjective or verb an abstract noun. For instance, rak is “to love,” and khwam rak is “love.” Apropos to this chapter, theuan is “wild,” and khwam theuan is “wildness.” 2. Thai authors, according to Thai naming convention, are referred to by their first name (e.g., Thanet) instead of their family name (e.g., Aphornsuvan). 3. The informal economy comprises approximately 57 percent of Thailand’s gross domestic product (Next City 2015). 4. This should not necessarily be read as a critique of all aspects of the Shinawatra regimes, especially in light of the mismanaged and misguided military juntas that followed them. These governments were the first to take rural and especially northeastern demands seriously, and plans such as universal health care remain some of the most popular and effective interventions in recent Thai policy. Rather, here I seek to highlight the complicated network of hope and speculative capital that emerged during this time. 5. Pterocarpus macrocarpus, or pradu in Thai. 6. A psychological take on the myth was the subject of a feature film, Nang Mai (Nymph, 2009) by director Pen-Ek Ratanaruang. 7. The fetus was described to me as Burmese. Given the status of Burmese as being the most marginal of Thailand’s migrant workers and given Myanmar’s antagonistic role in Thai nationalist propaganda, I believe that calling the child Burmese was a way that my interlocutors sought to, in a racist manner, highlight the cruelty involved in its death. The accusation of “Burmese” here should also be combined with the social proscription on abortion—abortion being common but illegal and considered sinful. As a result, the cruelty shown here testifies to the resulting efficacy of its spirit. This should be seen in the same way as Lek’s accident: the worse the accident, the better the result. I never learned the fetus’s name, if he had one. He was identified simply as kuman or kuman thong, the “golden fetus god.”

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8. Of roughly forty individuals I got to know while the shrine was active, I met only one who was not from the north or northeast, a lottery ticket vendor who came in occasionally from the neighboring market. 9. Here, I do not mean to imply that the northeast’s fortunes are on the whole decreasing. Through the Thaksin administration of the early 2000s and subsequent Yingluck administration of 2011–2014, overall incomes slowly rose in Thailand’s northeast. But such a rise was not universal, and the rice and rubber sectors especially suffered. 10. Lek’s hometown, Ban Rai (a pseudonym), has a population of just over three thousand, a number that includes those who, like Lek, live and work elsewhere. Bangkok has a population of just over eight million, a number that does not include those who live and work elsewhere or those, like Lek, who live and work in the city but are registered elsewhere. 11. The Santika nightclub burned down on January 1, 2009, when a band named Burn took the stage and set off fireworks that ignited the overcrowded club. Sixty-six people died.

References Brenner, Neil, and Christian Schmid. 2014. “The ‘Urban Age’ in Question.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 38, no. 3: 731–55. Bubandt, Nils. 2014. The Empty Seashell: Witchcraft and Doubt on an Indonesian Island. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Clifford, James. 2013. Returns: Becoming Indigenous in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Comaroff, Jean, and John L. Comaroff. 1999. “Occult Economies and the Violence of Abstraction: Notes from the South African Postcolony.” American Ethnologist 26, no. 2: 279–303. de la Cadena, Marisol. 2010. “Indigenous Cosmopolitics in the Andes: Conceptual Reflections beyond ‘Politics.’” Cultural Anthropology 25, no. 2: 334–70. Endo, Tamaki. 2014. Living with Risk: Precarity and Bangkok’s Urban Poor. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Evans-Pritchard, E. E. 1976 [1937]. Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Funahashi, Daena Aki. 2013. “Wrapped in Plastic: Transformation and Alienation in the New Finnish Economy.” Cultural Anthropology 28, no. 1: 1–21. Inthasone Phetsiriseng. 2001. Preliminary Assessment on Trafficking of Children and Women for Labor Exploitation in Lao PDR. ILO-IPEC, International Programme on the Elimination of Child Labour, in collaboration with the Mekong Subregional Project to Combat Trafficking in Children and Women. Vientiane: Lao PDR. Jakkrit Sangkhamanee. 2012. “Watthanatham Kanmeuang nai Chiwit Pracham Wan: Kap khreua khai khwam samphan nai kan phatthana thong thin [A Community Named Desire: Everyday Political Culture and Social Network in Local Development].” In Thai. Chulalongkorn University Community Research Report 2- 027/2553. Bangkok: Chulalongkorn University. Johnson, Andrew Alan. 2012. “Naming Chaos: Accident, Precariousness and the Spirits of Wildness in Urban Thai Spirit Cults.” American Ethnologist 39, no. 4: 766–78.

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———. 2013. “Progress and Its Ruins: Ghosts, Migrants, and the Uncanny in Thailand.” Cultural Anthropology 28, no. 2: 299–319. ———. 2014. Ghosts of the New City: Spirits, Urbanity and the Ruins of Progress in Chiang Mai. Southeast Asia: Politics, Meaning, Memory series. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. ———. 2019. “The River Grew Tired of Us: Spectral Flows along the Mekong River.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 9, no. 2: 390–404. ———. 2020. Mekong Dreaming: Life and Death along a Changing River. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Keyes, Charles. 2014. Finding Their Voice: Northeastern Villagers and the Thai State. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Mills, Mary Beth. 1995. “Attack of the Widow Ghosts: Gender, Death, and Modernity in Northeast Thailand.” In Bewitching Women, Pious Men: Gender and Body Politics in Southeast Asia, ed. Aihwa Ong and Michael Peletz, 244–73. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 1999. Thai Women in the Global Labor Force: Consuming Desires, Contested Selves. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Morton, Timothy. 2013. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Muehlebach, Andrea. 2013. “On Precariousness and the Ethical Imagination: The Year 2012 in Sociocultural Anthropology.” American Anthropologist 115, no. 2: 297–311. Next City. 2015. “Bangkok—The Informal City Dialogues.” Rockefeller Foundation, http:// nextcity.org /informalcity/city/bangkok /P10. Pen-Ek Ratanaruang, dir. 2009. Nymph [Nang Mai]. Fortissimo Films. 109 minutes. Pattana Kitiarsa. 2014. The “Bare Life” of Thai Migrant Workmen in Singapore. Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books. Rigg, Jonathan. 2006. “Land, Farming, Livelihoods, and Poverty: Rethinking the Links in the Rural South.” World Development 34, no. 1: 180–202. Sivak, Michael. 2014. “Mortality from Road Crashes in 193 Countries: A Comparison with Other Leading Causes of Death.” Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute. Small, Ivan V. 2012. “Over There: Imaginative Displacements in Vietnamese Remittance Economies.” Journal of Vietnamese Studies 7, no. 3: 157–83. Smits, Gregory. 2006. “Shaking Up Japan: Edo Society and the 1855 Catfish Picture Prints.” Journal of Social History 39, no. 4: 1045–78. ———. 2012. “Conduits of Power: What the Origins of Japan’s Earthquake Catfish Reveal about Religious Geography.” Japan Review 24, no. 2012: 41–65. Sopranzetti, Claudio. 2017. Owners of the Map: Motorcycle Taxi Drivers, Mobility, and Politics in Bangkok. Berkeley: University of California Press. Thanet Aphornsuvan. 1994. “Slavery and Modernity: Freedom in the Making of Modern Siam.” In Asian Freedoms: The Idea of Freedom in East and Southeast Asia, ed. David Kelly and Anthony Reid, 161–86. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Walker, Andrew. 2012. Thailand’s Political Peasants: Power in the Modern Rural Economy. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

CHAPTER 8

The Unspectacular Spectacle of Low-Carbon Life Climate Change and Self-Governing in an Urban Community in China Nikolaj Blichfeldt

This is the problem: lamb kebabs have to be roasted, right? For this you need charcoal. It comes from wood that has been burned. You shouldn’t eat that stuff! Just have a biscuit instead, that should be fine. It also has a bad influence on your body. And it isn’t low-carbon.

The Problem with Kebabs Sitting on the Community Party secretary’s chair in the small community office, Mr. Zhu, a pensioner in his seventies, explains the virtues of living a low-carbon life. This is the focus of a climate change mitigation campaign in the residential community Dongping Lane in central Hangzhou, capital of Zhejiang Province in eastern China. The campaign activities—which consist of competing to save energy and resources, sorting garbage, and raising awareness through exhibitions, lectures and excursions—have mainly been taken up by older people.1 Zhu’s admonition against lamb skewers encapsulates one way residents attempt to make sense of climate change through the concept of low-carbon life. In evoking the carbon emissions and resource use involved in burning charcoal as well as possible negative health implications of barbecued food, he is performing a discursive connection of concerns that is characteristic

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of the campaign. Climate change, resource depletion, air pollution, and personal health are routinely drawn together in local discussions of lowcarbon–life practices. This conflation, which captures the tension between a focus on everyday practices and a focus on the global consequences of their cumulative carbon emissions, is an example of how the quotidian connects with fears of anthropogenic global disaster in urban twenty-first-century Asia. The conflation also encapsulates how carbon can work as a cultural object, a device for rethinking one’s place in the world (Whitington 2014). Global climate change cannot be perceived or grasped in its entirety. Connections between everyday life consumption and chemical composition of the atmosphere have to be established conceptually and socially for a set of ideas such as low-carbon life to make sense as a response to anthropogenic climate change (Giddens 2009; Latour 2011; Sayre 2012). As a result of China’s reform-era development strategies in pushing for rapid economic growth at almost any environmental cost, China’s air, water, soil and food have been polluted on a vast scale and with devastating consequences (Shapiro 2012). Parallel to this development, China’s greenhouse gas emissions have risen dramatically (Kassiola and Guo 2010, 3). In 2010 the Chinese government initiated climate change mitigation programs in a number of provinces and cities—among them Hangzhou, where a dimension of the climate change mitigation strategy addresses consumption in the everyday lives of citizens (Delman 2014). Interacting with this policy, local officials at the community level are addressing climate change mitigation as part of urban governance. The campaign in Dongping Lane is an example of how the politics of climate change can be addressed locally in early twenty-first-century Asia. As such, the study of the campaign can become a climate ethnography, tracing local engagements with universalizing claims in a specific physical, as well as a sociocultural climate situation (Crate 2011). Before retiring in 1995, Zhu worked as a factory manager. A party member, volunteer mediator, and neighborhood watchman who first came to Dongping Lane in 1976, he is known locally as something of an expert on energy saving, garbage sorting, and other areas of low-carbon life. Like many other retired people in urban China, Zhu engages with current social and environmental issues by working as a community volunteer. The combination of engagement in community affairs and the focus on climate change that characterizes Zhu’s voluntary work brings together new forms of urban governance in China with everyday life practices that attempt to

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grapple with predicaments of development and globalization by focusing on connections between everyday life and global climate change. The campaign brings together two groups of people who have very different life experiences. A group of retired residents, who volunteered to participate, make up the backbone of campaigners. The administration and propagation of the campaign, however, is primarily coordinated and carried out by community officials, many of whom were born in the 1970s and 1980s and have not experienced the mass-mobilization campaigns, the austere material conditions, or the political violence of the Mao Zedong era. Bringing these two groups of people together, the campaign contributes to the party–state-sponsored project of community building, the stated aim of which is to generate social cohesion in the increasingly individualized society of the late socialist era (Wang 2005; Bray 2006). An equally important part of the community-building policy is the aim of fostering responsible citizens, who take it upon themselves to contribute to the governing of community life by engaging in voluntary work (Parris 2012; Tomba 2009). In Zhu’s community, Dongping Lane, this broadly conceived communitybuilding project of the Chinese state and the Communist Party is combined with attempts to make sense of the connections between everyday life and disaster in the shape of climate change in ways that require reexamining and reevaluating various aspects of everyday life: a campaign to promote garbage sorting and energy saving explicitly stressing global climate change as a reason for the need to organize. On the initiative of a young community official, the campaign began with meetings, expert lectures, and the development of information material for distribution in the community.

Low-Carbon Life in Dongping Lane Dongping Lane, a residential community in the center of Hangzhou, has a population of around fifty thousand five hundred people (DPX 2009). Twothirds of the residents are pensioners. Most buildings are gray seven-story apartment blocks common to Chinese cityscapes. At the center of the community is a small park made up of a square lined with trees and bushes. A local Community Work Station is run by a small number of salaried public servants who provide various services to the residents and are responsible

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for running campaigns to promote officially mandated manifestations of civilized behavior. In 2010 the community got the attention of national and local media by initiating a competition to become designated as low-carbon model households. The households that participated in the competition subjected themselves to a standard requiring specific lifestyle changes such as reducing the consumption of water, gas, and electricity. Points were awarded for various lifestyle changes, and the households could become low-carbon models by earning a certain number of points. These campaign activities have been supplemented with open-air theatrical sketches and quizzes, a composting competition, and exhibitions of handicrafts made from various reused materials. The engagements with carbon and climate change take shape in the encounter between officials and residents that is played out according to a script favoring harmony and civility. The term “low-carbon” has become a near-ubiquitous part of environmental discourse in China. Government policies, television shows, citybranding strategies, and campaigns led by nongovernmental organizations (NGO) employ the term in framing their approaches to climate change mitigation. A Xinhua news report from 2009 characterizes the message of low-carbon life as “promoting that everyone begins from their own habits, controlling or paying attention to their personal volume of carbon dioxide emission in order to reduce the emission of carbon dioxide worldwide” (Li 2009). Low-carbon life is thus conceived as having to do with the relationship between day-to-day lives of individuals and emissions of carbon dioxide affecting the whole planet. This approach connects the personal with the global by casting ordinary people as being responsible for climate change and their daily lives as the site of engagement. This is different from strategies that have often been employed around the world by environmental NGOs focusing on companies and governments. The figure of the ordinary person plays a leading role in the campaign. By describing the actions of individuals as “beginnings,” the definition points to a reliance on emulation of exemplars as a campaign technique. The low-carbon life campaign in Dongping Lane has adopted the following definition: “What is low-carbon life? It means reducing energy consumption in daily life so as to reduce carbon (especially carbon dioxide) emissions. For us ordinary people, lowcarbon life is an attitude, not an ability. We should actively promote and practice low-carbon life, paying attention to saving electricity, oil and gas,

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bit by little bit.” The definition can be found in a leaflet titled “Dongping Lane Residents’ Handbook,” which was prepared ahead of the campaign and is distributed to residents by the community officials (DPX 2009). In the leaflet, the implications of this definition are fleshed out in a list of energy saving tips titled “Low-Carbon Life Golden Points” (Table 8.1). The “Golden Points” spectacularize small and unspectacular energysaving practices by showing what those practices amount to when multiplied by 1.3 billion, thus reminding readers of the scale of consumption of a population as vast as the Chinese. The campaign invokes a key figure: “ordinary people.” A comparison with the Three Gorges Dam—the grandiose spectacle par excellence of Chinese energy policy—also invokes this sense of magnitude. Furthermore, the final tip on the list presents an environmentalist version of a sense of lagging behind Western countries, which is at the heart of contemporary Chinese conceptions of modernity underlying much of the country’s rapid urban development (Zhang 2006). This narrative of urgency and late arrival into a desirable modernity is here extended to energy conservation through the reference to double-glazed windows being common in Western countries. As such, the campaign strives to contribute to the “cosmopolitan project of Chinese participation in global environmental affairs” (Whitington 2014, 54). The low-carbon life campaign becomes a way of connecting with the world by not only addressing the planetary nature of carbon emissions and climate change but also connecting with imagined peers around the world. The majority of campaign participants are retired community residents. The core group of people who organize campaign events is composed of community officials and retired volunteers, most of whom have organizational experience from their previous jobs; from the resident committees that preceded the community office; and from membership in the local Communist Party branch. There are no hard targets for reaching a certain number of people, and there is no formal definition of participation in the low-carbon life campaign. The propaganda efforts of the campaign have reached most people in the community through meetings, posters, performances, leaflets, and home visits. Participation is voluntary, and many in the community have chosen not to join in the various activities.2 According to the organizers, the target group is “community persons,” that is, people who are active in local communal life as opposed to those who “merely live there” and exercise the hard-won right of Chinese citizens, to some degree, to be left alone by a sometimes intrusive party-state.

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Table 8.1: Low-Carbon Life Golden Points • Lamps, computers, air conditioners . . . all electrical appliances should be turned off when not in use. • Mobile phones should be unplugged when fully charged. • Choose energy-saving air conditioners and don’t turn up too high or down too low. This is not just energy consuming, but also uncomfortable and weakens the body’s ability to adjust to temperatures. • Use energy-saving light bulbs. The light from an 11-watt energy-saving bulb is equivalent to that of a 60-watt normal bulb. An energy-saving bulb saves 80% electricity compared to a normal bulb. If the country’s 1.2 billion bulbs were replaced with energy-saving bulbs the energy saved would be the equivalent of the annual output from the Three Gorges Dam Hydropower Station. • If you drive when shopping, please plan your trip so it can be done in one go. If it is not too far you can walk instead of driving. • Drivers can also save gas; avoid cold starting the car; avoid abruptly changing speed; avoid idle running; choose the right gear, avoid low gear at high speeds; use low-viscosity lubricating oil; change motor oil regularly; don’t open the windows at high speeds; keep a proper tire pressure. • Buy a low-priced, low-consuming, low-polluting and safe low-emissions vehicle; it is also convenient to park. • Walk, bike and take public transport. • Don’t set TV screen brightness too high, but to medium brightness, it saves power and is better for the eyes, especially for children whose eyes are developing. There are 300 million TV sets in China. The small action of adjusting the brightness can save five billion kilowatt hours per year. • Shorten the time it takes before your computer screen goes to sleeping mode. • Normal refrigerators can save energy, for example by defrosting in time, reducing the amount of time the door is open. Take out things from the freezer to thaw well in advance and put them in the refrigerator. This lowers the refrigerator temperature. • Use a toilet with two flushing volumes and use the small volume button as much as possible. All kinds of waste water from daily chores can also be used to flush the toilet. • Use email, MSN and other instant messaging tools, avoid using printer and fax. • Around half the energy loss of a building happens at the windows. Double glazed windows not only keep out heat waves and cold spells, they also cut off noise and dramatically reduce the amount of energy needed to heat the building. They are already common in Western countries.

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Low-Carbon Life as Community Governance Following Ong and Collier (2005), the low-carbon life campaign in Dongping Lane can be viewed as a site of technological, political, and ethical renegotiation of what it means to be a citizen at a specific historical conjuncture. In this case, it is the point when late socialism in China meets the moment of concerted engagements with climate change in urban China. The conception of low-carbon life as a community-based campaign organized by officials and volunteering residents represents one way of politically circumscribing climate change mitigation. The focus on energy and resource consumption in everyday life practices represents another. The combination of these conceptions of low-carbon life leads to an embedding of the campaign into the party-state–sponsored urban reform project of community building and specifically into a conspicuously normative aspect of that project: the promotion of “civilized community life.” In the “Dongping Lane Residents’ Handbook” (DPX 2009), the outlines of low-carbon life presented in the “Low-Carbon Life Golden Points” (see Table 8.1) and the “Low-Carbon Household Standard” (Table 8.2) are part of a section on civilized community life. Efforts to educate residents in the theories and practices of lowcarbon life become part of what Luigi Tomba, following Nikolas Rose, refers to as the “responsibilization” of new self-disciplined subjects (Tomba 2009, 605; Rose 1999, 174). Images of middle-class lifestyles, the promotion of which are central to the party-state’s approach to civilizing campaigns as tools of community governance, are pervasive in the low-carbon life campaign, but they are carefully mixed with images of frugal living and distaste for waste embraced by older people in urban China (Boermel 2006). These images set the campaigners apart from many in the younger generations, embracing a more consumerist lifestyle that the older campaigners fully recognize as the dominant trend in society. As a result of urban reform in the 1990s, rather than the work units that had dominated urban life, residential areas became units of administration in urban China. The Chinese party-state has been pursuing a policy of “community building” based on the idea that if urban residential areas are to have an identity beyond that of administrative units and generate some level of social cohesion, they must be imagined as meaningful social communities to which people can feel they belong (Bray 2006; Xu 2008; Heberer and Göbel 2011). Conceiving of community building as a necessary project for the generation of a sense of belonging resonates with Michael Lambek’s suggestion

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Table 8.2: Dongping Lane Community “Low-Carbon Household Standard” Lifestyle • The household must participate in the garbage sorting scheme. • Bring your own bag when shopping, don’t use plastic bags. • Eat less meat, eat more vegetables; eat vegetarian food once a week. • Keep more than 10 potted plants in the home. • Bring a cup when you go out, don’t use doggy bags or disposable chopsticks. • Exercise more outside, go less to the gym. Electrical appliances • All light bulbs in the home must be energy-saving bulbs. • 70% of electricity consumption must come from electricity-saving appliances. • Unplug electrical appliances when they are not in use. • Open windows in summer to cut in half the time using air conditioning. • Set air conditioners to 26 [C] or above in summer and 18 [C] or below in winter. Water and gas Use piped gas instead of buying gas cylinders. Use 10% less gas. Don’t drink bottled water. Reuse water—15% of water must be reused. Transportation Use public transport for 60% of all trips. If you have a car, reduce the number of days you drive it to work by two, use public transport instead. Extra points Keep a low-carbon journal and write in it once a week.

that instead of seeing locality as primary, something that is just there, and people inhabiting it as secondary, the process could be seen in reverse so that “acts of inhabiting” are what make the local (Lambek 2011, 206). The idea of “civilized community life” constitutes communities as meaningful places rather than empty spaces in an administrative grid. Appadurai’s (1996, 196) characterization of locality as a “fragile achievement” hinging on rituals that produce local subjects directs attention to the contingent, imagined, and constructed nature of local communities as well as the connections between place-making projects and people-making projects. In advocating community building as a project that moves well beyond public

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administration into orchestrated attempts at fostering a certain sense of belonging, the Chinese party-state subscribes to the idea of communities as constructed through certain ways of inhabiting urban spaces. In this context, campaigns to promote civilized behavior and mobilize volunteers among the residents can be seen as attempts to foster certain kinds of self-governing moral subjects, enabling a shift in urban governance from hands-on mass mobilization to “governing from a distance” (Jeffreys and Sigley 2009, 2). The party-state–sponsored project of urban community building represents a fundamental shift in the logic of state-society relations and the formation of a citizenry who take responsibility for self and community (Parris 2012, 190). State-sponsored community-building efforts and citizen responses to them, such as volunteering or joining various campaigns, lead to the production of locality through “realized moral action” (Lambek 2011). The lowcarbon life campaign in Dongping Lane is inscribed onto the assumption that a part of the local population subscribes to the ideas of community building by identifying themselves as civilized community people and by adopting the idea that a sense of belonging is necessary in order to make the residential community a good place to live.3 The ideological underpinning of community building by state mandate, as embodied in the case of residential communities in China, has been characterized as “authoritarian communitarianism” by Thomas Heberer (2009, 510), who argues that through the project of community building the Chinese party-state acts as a “moral state” trying to counter expected negative consequences of individualization by means of “moral engineering.” In the words of David Bray (2006, 546), “As local activists, the volunteers become exemplary models for training the rest of the population in the arts of governing the communal self.” Although many of the retired residents of Dongping Lane have lived in the same place for many decades, their experiences in youth did not necessarily foster a sense of belonging to Dongping Lane. They have been attached to different work units and different microdistricts. Before urban reform, Dongping Lane was just a street and not the reference point of an imagined community. In the revolutionary period, appeals to nation building and loyalty to the party and Chairman Mao overrode expressions of place attachment, preventing any strong sense of local belonging to such intermediary entities as neighborhoods (Whyte and Parish 1984, 367). Despite the difference in scale, there are indications that nation building to some extent serves as a mental model for community building. Andrew Kipnis (2012) argues that the mimetic approaches to urban forms that make

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so much of urban China look alike to foreign eyes are part of nation building. This observation may also apply to community building. Communities are conceived as the “cells” of society in the propagation of the project of community building (Wang 2005). Besides the obvious parallel use of the term “building,” the two projects share the language of family relations.4 Like nation building, community building is a homogenizing project that is constantly challenged in the encounter with heterogeneity. In urban China as elsewhere, coresidence does not necessarily equal shared ideas and values or a sense of belonging to the same collective. The idea of civilized community life projects an image of community as a social collective onto residential areas; however, there are also residents, such as migrant workers, who are excluded from this imagined community on the grounds of their perceived lack of “quality.” Residence alone is thus not enough to be seen as fully belonging to a Chinese urban community. One must also meet the requirements of emulating middle-class ideals of quality and civilized behavior (Bray 2006; Tomba 2009). By positing a frugal low-key lifestyle as “high quality,” the campaigners tap into the discourse of quality and project an image of exemplarity, despite the fact that Dongping Lane resembles more of an old working-class neighborhood than the newly built, often gated, compounds associated with the “high-quality” middle class. The campaigners can be seen as attempting to use carbon and climate change to position their lives as more relevant and their lifestyles as more desirable so as to take on a more central role after becoming increasingly marginalized in recent decades, pointing to engagement with climate change as a way to infuse their everyday lives with meaning. The low-carbon life campaign is part of the place making that constitutes a certain space, framed by four particular streets in Hangzhou, as the meaningful place “Dongping Lane.” Local officials are important agents in the place-making processes of urban communities in China. Through their active presence, they contribute to the liveliness and the negotiations of meaning and morality that constitute the locality. Developing and conducting a climate change mitigation campaign with constant reference to community, the local officials are attempting to engender a sense of shared identity and belonging. Campaigning then becomes moral action that makes locality, in the sense that community building becomes part of what shapes the issues that volunteers address in their day-to-day engagement with the idea of climate change mitigation through attempting to live low-carbon lives. How one responds to the call to change everyday life practices in light of global

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climate change comes to reflect on one’s identity and moral agency as a citizen. As such, the campaign can be seen as an example of “the conduct of carbon conduct” (Paterson and Stripple 2010). Not everyone in Dongping Lane has embraced the low-carbon life campaign. As a form of community governance, the campaign reaches a limited part of the population who are willing and able to participate. Outsiders to the campaign can be divided into two groups. The first group is those who lack the understanding or motivation or are excluded because campaign insiders either do not meet them or assume they cannot be made part of the campaign. Following a dominant pattern of discursive marginalization, migrant workers are routinely placed in this category by campaigners. The second group is businesspeople and young professionals who are generally not drawn into community affairs because campaigners consider them to be too busy with their jobs. In his studies of urban communities in China, Luigi Tomba found different forms of governing in different types of Chinese communities. Property management companies played more active roles in newly built middle-class communities, while community offices were more influential in older, more working-class–dominated communities—suggesting that the modes of governing may be different depending on who is being governed and who is doing the governing (Tomba 2009). In Dongping Lane, with its many pensioners and a population that generally leans as much toward working-class as middle-class lifestyles and sensibilities, the community office plays a vital governing role but only to a part of the population. Chinese party-state actors often approach different social groups differently, effectively “ruling by differentiation” (Zeuthen 2010).

Low-Carbon Life as Unspectacular Spectacle The low-carbon life campaign is conceived not only as a way of changing consumption patterns among the participants but also as communication with people outside the campaign. The participants are enacting citizenship by offering up themselves as one of the most prominent tools of governance in China: exemplars. Their actions are meant to be seen and to promote similar thought and action in others. A significant aspect of the campaign, then, is that of practice as spectacle. The campaign is about generating difference by singling out those who perform well and also about generating sameness by inviting imitation.

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Recognition of low-carbon life practices as meaningful responses to global climate change depends on a degree of common understanding among practitioners and witnesses. Journalists play a crucial role in disseminating knowledge about the campaign, officials from various levels of the municipal administration visit to learn about the campaign, and the nonparticipating residents and passers-by witness the slogans and other public manifestations of the campaign. The “Low-Carbon Household Standard” (see Table 8.2), with its specific requirements for civilized community life embodied in consumer practices, represents a highly stylized rendering of a desirable modern lifestyle—consciously cast as a low-key alternative to the lifestyle of conspicuous consumption embraced by some, desired by others, and criticized by many in contemporary China. In this context, the campaign can be read as a response to the “consumer revolution” that has swept across urban China in the late socialist era, normalizing lifestyles that would have been considered impossibly extravagant and politically dangerous in the high socialist era (Davis 2000). What used to be problematized with reference to class struggle is now reproblematized with reference to global climate change. The standard depicts low-carbon life as everyday life in the home and the community. Politics, business, and formal education seem to be external to low-carbon life. The campaigners do not interfere with the ways businesses or schools engage with climate change mitigation or fail to do so, neither do they lobby for or stage protests against political decisions. The campaigners are conceptualized as being on the same side as the party-state. The standard targets people in their roles as members of private households. Schoolchildren and other busy people seem to fall under other moral jurisdictions and are excused for not participating in low-carbon life. This omission of large parts of the urban population is connected with the conceptualization of the campaign as a series of voluntary activities among community residents. The boundaries drawn around the campaign minimize the dangers inherent in confrontation and conflict in an authoritarian state, but at the same time they also limit the power of the low-carbon life exemplars offered up by the campaign. The decision by campaigners not to bother other people may also be rooted in the experiences of the campaigners, many of whom remember periods of state-sponsored persecution and violence from which there was nowhere to hide. In the words of a campaigner, “back then you couldn’t refuse to participate [in campaigns]. You’d be labeled a counterrevolutionary.”

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Over the last decade, many electronically mediated “social credit systems” have evolved in China, arguably as tools for social control (Creemers 2018). Some of these may have some degree of similarity with parts of the low-carbon life campaign, but the similarities are superficial. The campaign in Dongping Lane differs from social credit systems in that the scoring is never tied to the power of the party-state to constrain or incentivize citizens by affecting their social or economic capital beyond the chance to win small prizes. Low social credit scores may have consequences such as being barred from buying tickets for planes or high-speed trains for a period of time (Creemers 2018). There are no such penalties for low scores in the lowcarbon life campaign. When environmental protection is drawn into the development strategies of Chinese cities, there is often an element of “spectacularization”—that is, a focus on highly visible projects such as eco-cities conceived as flagship projects (Ren 2012). The campaign in Dongping Lane could hardly be more different from prestige projects such as Dongtan Eco-City (near Shanghai) and Tianjin Eco-City, both emblematic of this development (World Bank 2009). At the same time, it could hardly be more different from the rallies of the Cultural Revolution era that many residents experienced as young people. Although the campaign is in some sense a spectacle because Dongping Lane is embedded in formal networks of comparison and competition to be recognized as a model community, the locally employed strategy for attaining this exemplary status is to orchestrate small low-key, unspectacular events. The campaign is never noisy or flamboyant. The focus is on local residents and the minute details of consumption in their everyday lives. Campaign messages are consistently moderate and modest. Participants do not take to the streets with banners or megaphones. The avoidance of confrontational tactics is not just rooted in memories of extremism and chaos bit is also a response to the very real danger of present-day violent repression of any protest that offends or challenges the party-state. Embedding climate change mitigation in the everyday lives of retired people in an established urban community, the campaign posits itself as an alternative to such grandiose green modernization projects as eco-cities. Low-carbon life, as it is envisioned by most of its practitioners in Dongping Lane, is consciously antiheroic and mundane. Rather than showing off their willingness to sacrifice money or effort, the campaigners attempt to show that neither of those sacrifices is necessary. The point they are making is that low-carbon life can be practiced without much trouble: you do

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not need to go out of your way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. There is a large area of overlap between the image of low-carbon life presented in the “Dongping Lane Residents’ Handbook” (DPX 2009) and the practices described by the residents in the community. Using public transport, eating less meat, and cutting down on the use of air-conditioning were among the most frequently mentioned practices, and their climate change mitigation dimensions were routinely connected with their perceived benefits to health, comfort, and convenience. Carbon here works as a cultural object that connects (Whitington 2014). Low-carbon life addresses not only the predicament of global climate change but, crucially, also the joys and cares of everyday life. By promoting a quiet transformation of carefully selected aspects of private life rather than a noisy public rallying forces and calling for wholesale change, the campaign represents a move away from activism as heroism and sacrifice toward a modest proposal for merging climate concerns with concerns for quality of life. The prestige of being an exemplary low-carbon life campaigner is rather limited, and the campaign’s proposed changes to consumer practices are presented as neither costly nor troublesome. What is at stake for campaigners, then, is less about social differentiation through display of spending power or willingness to endure trouble and more about the enactment of the role of exemplar. The overall civilizing campaign, in which the low-carbon life campaign is embedded, posits the adherents to its mandates as a force for change in that they can inspire and educate others to follow their examples. The retired community volunteers were born in times of poverty and were not socialized into a culture of consumerism. They draw on a long history of political mobilization and seem willing to be mobilized again while always remaining careful not to revive the violent ambition and totalizing drives of Mao-era politics. In contrast to the mobilization of the Mao era, which was often carried out in the name of class struggle, the present-day mobilization is conceived as an enjoyable hobby to adopt in old age, not unlike yangsheng activities such as choral singing, tai chi, and big-brush water calligraphy practiced by the middle aged and elderly in the parks of urban China (Farquhar 2009). In doing so, the campaigners avoid antiestablishment critiques as well as aggressive shaming of outsiders, which could generate conflict and opposition. Local as well as national media have showed some interest in the campaign (e.g., Huang 2010; Meng 2010). Among other things, they are attracted to the tension between the scale and gravity of global climate change and

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the unspectacular nature of local low-carbon life. Some media representations of the low-carbon life campaign frame it as a curiosity by focusing on unusual and imaginative practices such as converting a pair of jeans into a bag (Liu 2010) or setting up experiments in homes to compare the energy efficiency of participants’ refrigerators (Mao 2010). While this secures attention, it also entails the risk that low-carbon life in Dongping Lane comes to be served up to readers, who are not the target groups for this kind of campaign, as merely a story of old people’s quaint attempts to fit their everyday life concerns into the agendas of a mainstream Chinese society that has long ago left them behind.

Conclusion In the low-carbon life campaign in Dongping Lane, the quality of the relationship between individual and community is coming to be understood, at least in part, in terms of engagements with global climate change. Being a proper citizen, then, means relating not just to agents of state power and to one’s fellow citizens. Crucially, it also means relating to potentially disastrous anthropogenic changes to the atmosphere of the planet. In Dongping Lane, climate change has become part of the enactment of community. The climate change mitigation activities of low-carbon life produce a community of campaigners by constructing participants and nonparticipants as different groups. The community of campaigners then becomes a community in the normative sense of being people who enact their sense of belonging to the residential community through moral action directed toward global climate change. To the retired residents of Dongping Lane, the low-carbon life campaign represents an attempt to recast their citizen role, which is but the latest in a long row of party-state attempts to mold the people of China to the ideals and needs of the ruling elite. It is also an opportunity to participate in a mobilization that connects their everyday life practices with the global challenge to mitigate anthropogenic climate change. The local climate change mitigation efforts are underpinned by the party-state–sponsored project of “community building” and its aim of fostering self-governing citizens. The material culture promoted is relatively modest and inconspicuous compared to the middle-class exemplars of “civilized community life” promoted by the party-state and property management companies. Rather than wealth and refined manners, the appeal of

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low-carbon life campaigners as exemplars is connected with frugal habits and willingness to be mobilized as volunteers cultivated in times of material scarcity and Maoist politics. In this context, low-carbon life becomes a part of community governance and is confined to addressing local everyday life among a certain population segment rather than larger scales of engagement with the threats of disaster, which pervade the present era. The campaign takes places in the particular political situation of an authoritarian developmental state haunted by pollution that is threatening to make urban spaces less habitable at the same time as cosmopolitan desires engender a striving to make urban spaces more habitable. The study of the campaign in Dongping Lane offered here thus becomes a climate ethnography, focusing on the ways in which local engagements with warnings about global climate change play out in a small part of a large Asian city, where residents enact their roles as citizens in ways that connect with climate change mitigation agendas by spectacularizing the unspectacular.

Notes 1. I stayed in the community for eight months in 2011 and 2012, carrying out ethnographic fieldwork, and paid shorter visits to the community in 2013 and 2015. 2. According to local officials, around 10 percent of all households in the community have been designated low-carbon model households, and around a third of all residents participated in garbage sorting in 2011. 3. In a study of a former model community in Shanghai, Wing-Chung Ho (2010) notes that appeals to a local sense of belonging is expressed metaphorically in the popular slogan “Community is my family, everybody loves it” (209). 4. Mimicking the use of national anthems, the community officials have promoted “The Dongping Lane Song,” which is printed with musical notation on the last page of the “Dongping Lane Residents’ Handbook.” The song ends with the line “you and I meet in Dongping Lane, our home” (DPX 2009), echoing the sentiments found in patriotic songs.

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Crate, Susan. 2011. “Climate and Culture. Anthropology in the Era of Contemporary Climate Change.” Annual Review of Anthropology 40: 175–94. Creemers, Rogier. 2018. “China’s Social Credit System: An Evolving Practice of Control.” SSRN Electronic Journal. doi 10.2139/ssrn.3175792. Davis, Deborah S., ed. 2000. The Consumer Revolution in Urban China. Berkeley: University of California Press. Delman, Jørgen. 2014. “Climate Change Politics and Hangzhou’s ‘Green City Making.’” In Branding Chinese Mega- Cities: Policies, Practices and Positioning, ed. Per O. Berg and Emma Björner, 249–61. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar. DPX. 2009. Dongping Lane Resident’s Handbook, Hubin Distric, Hangzhou . Hangzhou: Dongping Lane Community. Farquhar, Judith. 2009. “The Park Pass: Peopling and Civilizing a New Old Beijing.” Public Culture 21, no. 3: 551–76. Giddens, Anthony. 2009. The Politics of Climate Change. Cambridge, MA: Polity. Heberer, Thomas. 2009. “Evolvement of Citizenship in Urban China or Authoritarian Communitarianism? Neighborhood Development, Community Participation, and Autonomy.” Journal of Contemporary China 18, no. 61: 491–515. Heberer, Thomas, and Christian Göbel. 2011. The Politics of Community Building in Urban China. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Ho, Wing-Chung. 2010. The Transition Study of Postsocialist China: An Ethnographic Study of a Model Community. Hackensack, NJ: World Scientific. Huang, Min. 2010. “居民低碳生活有了民间标准 养10盆花草得5分” [Residents Have Their Own Standards of Low-Carbon Life—Keeping 10 House Plants Gives 5 Points]. Green Sina, July 22, http://green.sina.com.cn/news/roll/2010 - 07-22/101120734165.shtml. Jeffreys, Elaine, and Gart Sigley. 2009. “Governmentality, Governance and China.” In China’s Governmentalities: Governing Change, Changing Government, ed. Elaine Jeffreys, 1–23. London: Routledge. Kassiola, Joel J., and Sujian Guo. 2010. China’s Environmental Crisis: Domestic and Global Political Impacts and Responses. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Kipnis, Andrew. 2012. “Constructing Commonality: Standardization and Modernization in Chinese Nation-Building.” Journal of Asian Studies 71, no. 3: 731–55. Lambek, Michael. 2011. “Catching the Local.” Anthropological Theory 11, no. 2: 197–221. Latour, Bruno. 2011. “Waiting for Gaia: Composing the Common World through Arts and Politics.” Lecture at the French Institute, London, November 2011, for the launching of the Sciences Po Experimental Program in Political Arts. Li, Jian. 2009. “哥本哈根牵动全球气候变暖呼唤低碳生活” [Copenhagen Turns the World’s Attention to Global Warming, Calling for “Low-Carbon Life”]. Xinhuanet, December 7, http://news.xinhuanet.com/life/2009-12/07/content _12605310 _1.htm. Liu, Dong. 2010. “东平巷社区评出15位低碳示范户 个个有绝活” [Dongping Lane Community Names 15 Low-Carbon Model Household—All Have Unique Skills]. Zhejiang Online, July 8, http://zjnews.zjol.com.cn/05zjnews/system/2010/07/08/016745436.shtml. Mao, Jun. 2010. “冰箱装几成最省电? 看看杭州低碳人家怎么做” [At Which Degree of Fullness Does a Refrigerator Save the Most Power? Looking at How Hangzhou’s Low- Carbon Households Do It]. Zhejiang News, August 4, http://zjnews.zjol.com.cn/05zjnews/system /2010/08/04/016817987.shtml.

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Meng, Yangbin. 2010. “低碳家庭”有了民间标准 东平巷社区成领头羊” [There Is a Popular Standard for Low-Carbon Life—Dongping Lane Community Takes the Lead]. Zhejiang News, July 8, http://zjnews.zjol.com.cn/05zjnews/system/2010/07/08/016745874.shtml. Ong, Aihwa, and Stephen J. Collier. 2005. Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Parris, Kristen. 2012. “Transforming State and Citizen through Community Building: A View from Zhejiang.” In Civil Society and Governance in China, ed. Jianxing Yu and Sujian Go, 189–213. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Paterson, Mathew, and Johannes Stipple. 2010. “My Space: Governing Individuals’ Carbon Emissions.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2010 28: 314–62. Ren, Xuefei. 2012. “’Green’ as Spectacle in China.” Journal of International Affairs 65, no. 2: 19–30. Rose, Nikolas. 1999. Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sayre, Nathan F. 2012. “The Politics of the Anthropogenic.” Annual Review of Anthropology 41: 57–70. Shapiro, Judith. 2012. China’s Environmental Challenges. Cambridge, UK: Polity. Tomba, Luigi. 2009. “Of Quality, Harmony and Community: Civilization and the Urban Middle Class in China.” Positions 17, no. 3: 591–616. Wang, Lanxiang. 2005. “文明社区建设: 构建和谐社会的重要切入点” Civilized Community Building: A Crucial Point for the Construction of a Harmonious Society]. People’s Daily, June 8, http://theory.people.com.cn/GB/49154/49156/3451015.html. Whitington, Jerome. 2014. “Carbon as a Metric of the Human.” PoLAR Political and Legal Anthropology Review 39, no. 1: 46–63. Whyte, Martin King, and William L. Parish. 1984. Urban Life in Contemporary China. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. World Bank. 2009. Sino-Singapore Tianjin Eco- City: A Case Study of an Emerging Eco- City in China. Technical Assistance Report. Xu, Feng. 2008. “New Modes of Urban Governance: Building Community/Shequ in PostDanwei China.” In The Chinese Party-State in the 21st Century, ed. André Laliberté and Marc Lanteigne, 22–38. London: Routledge. Zeuthen, J. W. 2010. Ruling through differentiation in China: Chengdu’s Urban-Rural Integration Policy. Roskilde: PhD Dissertation from Roskilde University. Zhang, Li. 2006. “Contesting Spatial Modernity in Late-Socialist China.” Current Anthropology 47, no. 3: 461–84.

CHAPTER 9

Drawing the Future Urban Imaginaries After the 2011 Thai Floods Eli Elinoff

We’re familiar with the area: a dense valley of buildings in different stages of decrepitude. Some are leaning, some have crumbled. Wriggly vines often cover them, erasing telltale floors, so that from a distance they look like ancient cliffs risen out of the sea. The light shines strangely there, passing through gouged floors and the remnants of glass facades. Not the most hospitable part of Krung Nak, if you ask us. The only ones who go there are the swifts’ nest harvesters, who are secretive about their sites and not very friendly. They sometimes shoot without warning. —Pitchaya Sudbanthad, Bangkok Wakes to Rain

After Bangkok’s End Published in 2019, Bangkok Wakes to Rain weaves together the loosely bound karmic fates of the Thai capital’s residents, drawing them into relation with one another across time through the city’s buildings, houses, and, changing waterways. Paying special attention to one particular plot of land, Sudbanthad’s (2019, 280) tale brings us into a future Bangkok—calling it Krung Nak—after the end has already happened.1 The capital of Thailand has been inundated. Various parts of the city are wetter than others, and poorer citizens live amid filthy water, clouds of mosquitoes, and the danger

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of a floating world on top of a terrestrial one. Yet, many residents live amphibiously—fishing, shopping, traveling, selling, and living in ways not entirely unlike those that preceded them in the era of a drier terrestrial city. In the passage above, some children, residents of one of the watery city’s most marginal communities, are charged with taking a medical health volunteer to visit a woman suffering from cholera. On their way back the volunteer asks them to return to her childhood home, which the children know will be unrecognizable. The image of the city with its buildings toppling but life circulating apace despite these dystopian conditions suggests something profound about the temporalities of life in this new postdiluvian moment and also reflects the complex and, for a moment, ubiquitous circulating anxieties of life in Bangkok since the 2011 floodwaters receded. In 2011 when the overflowing Chao Phraya River and its tributaries inundated parts of the capital (and especially the areas surrounding it) for close to two months, there was an eerie resonance with what Sudbanthad (2019, 280) describes. The 2011 floods were caused by unusually high rainfall, politicized water management, and a transformed riparian environment. At the time, the floods were the world’s fourth-costliest natural disaster largely due to the way they disrupted global supply chains of everything from hard drives to cameras to auto parts. The World Bank estimated the total economic impact of the floods to be close to $US45 billion. The floods also resulted in nearly eight hundred fatalities. The flood made what were previously dystopian speculations something imminent, tangible, and decidedly present tense. A character in Thai novelist Tew Bunnag’s book Curtain of Rain narrates the 2011 flood from within: “I can only see that things will get worse: judging from the lurid texture of the water’s surface, and the toxic stench thickening the air, an epidemic of some kind seems inevitable. Bangkok has reverted to its swampy origins: Snakes, rats and giant cockroaches swirl amidst the shit and debris floating by” (Bunnag 2014, 9). The description is not unlike that from Sudbanthad’s Bangkok Wakes to Rain without the speculative technologies. Both authors use the floodwaters to emphasize the return of the city to the wetlands, describing present-tense and distant-future landscapes to highlight the contrast between the existing sociotechnical landscape and the latent biophysical one.2 In 2011 when the black waters receded, they revealed the seemingly irresolvable paradoxes locked up in the relationship between the wetlands and the city. The city’s surfaces and subsurfaces, its splintered infrastructure

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systems both present and yet to come (Marks and Elinoff 2019), the fractured and siloed agencies that govern them (Marks and Lebel 2016), the city’s small or nonexistent green spaces, and its haphazard land planning all formed part of a flood story as a series of interlocking and cascading disasters (Marks 2015; see also Miller and Douglass 2015; Douglass 2016). The configurations of these spaces and technologies reflected the uncertainties associated with the Chao Phraya River’s “cyborg delta” and its odd compositions of riparian geographies, wetlands, irrigation infrastructures, canals, paddy fields, real estate developments floodwalls, factory outflows, and industrial tarmacs (Morita n.d.; Morita 2017; see also Morita and Jensen 2017). For a brief moment following the floods, a critical national conversation ensued that emphasized the entangled character of the landscape. Everyone seemed to be asking the same question: Why were the floods so devastating, and what might the government do to lessen the impact of inevitable future floods? This discussion entailed debates about both the present landscape dilemma and a future marked by increasing disasters wrought by climate change. The 2011 floods acted as what Whitington (2013, 318) has called a “model event,” which is “a real world environmental event that enables people to think through situated climate futures.” As Whitington argues, such an event enables speculation not because it “insists on facts” but because it generates questions. What were the causes? When might this happen again? What will we do next time? In the wake of the flood these and a host of other questions emerged, each evoking the sense of dangerous possibility already built—and continuing to build—in the landscape. Instead of wading into debates about the forensics of the floods—something other scholars have already done (see Marks 2015)—here I want to focus on the ways in which a variety of actors across Thailand have begun using speculative landscapes to think through these problems and present alternative futures of various sources. By speculation, I follow a number of scholars in anthropology attempting to engage with the anticipation as a site of social action that highlights, following Whitington, the forms of “experimentation and judgement” (2013, 325) entailed in solving problems that appear near, at, or just beyond future horizons of possibility. In Thailand, speculation has enabled debates about the causes of the flood and their relation with the twisted political-economic structures that lie underneath, behind, and above urban surfaces (e.g., Elinoff 2017). It has also involved conversations about other sorts of speculation, specifically real estate and infrastructural development, mirroring the rise of speculative markets

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elsewhere in Asia (Searle 2016; Harms 2016; Shatkin 2017). Speculations have also provoked conversations about new urban possibilities and new kinds of coalitions. This chapter, by engaging with both ideational and graphical manifestations of these speculations, traces these conversations and asks what it means when the landscape itself becomes a problem. How do we imagine new landscapes? What work are common images of speculative future landscapes doing? What might a safe and livable postflood landscape look like? What kinds of political work is necessary to attend to these sorts of landscape problems? In asking these questions, I hope to describe how they fostered a kind of postdisaster speculative urbanism that reflects the varied quotidian forces behind the production of the urban in Thailand.

Drawing Anthropocene Futures I locate answers to these questions in the sorts of visualizations of future urban landscapes that have circulated around Thailand after the flood. These are what Jasanoff and Kim (2009, 120) have called “sociotechnical imaginaries,” or “collectively imagined forms of social life and social order reflected in the design and fulfillment of nation specific scientific and/or technological projects.” As I show here, these imaginaries offer visions of new possibilities while seeking to neutralize political questions about the landscape through engineering practices. Echoing debates about “good” and “bad” Anthropocenes (Szerszynski 2012, 172), the speculative imaginaries I describe here do not posit an alternative to Anthropocene naturecultures but extend the notion that through the application of “good” or “appropriate” expertise, the Anthropocene might be made better. Some of this sentiment is reflected implicitly in ontological experimentation with postflood infrastructures as actors attempt to come to terms with the highly complex problems associated with contemporary urban flooding (Jensen and Morita 2017). Yet as I show, such experimentation is not without its own politics. Considering such projects requires one to ask what logics inform such experiments and whether or not engaging in political critique foreshortens the horizons of experimental thinking. By analyzing drawings and visualizations, I highlight their underriding logics and probe their politics in tentative ways. I describe the ways these visualizations seem to neutralize the inherent unevenness of environmental change by martialing the language of “Thainess” to emphasize the

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local origins of ideologies of harmonious balance and natural restoration. These imaginaries often employ nationalist-inflected ontological frames such as “Thainess” and “Thai culture” to project futures where “foreign” influences such as capitalism and modernity have been domesticated within a localized hierarchical order. At the same time, they extend a global logic of what Katsikis (2014, 481) has called “world management,” which seeks to use technoscientific practices as a means of managing and organizing the world on a grand scale. Here, these drawings—both quotidian and otherwise—can be tied back to maps and other visual renderings as critical technologies of rule (e.g., Winichakul 1994). Jasanoff and Kim (2009) emphasize the “role of the state” in the production of such imaginaries, yet the kinds of speculative landscapes I analyze here echo scholars of the state and governmentality (see Abrams 1977; Ferguson and Gupta 2002; Foucault 1991) who see the practice of governing occurring in multiple locations by disparate actors. Real estate developers, materials manufacturers, urban designers, foundations, and overlapping state agencies all generate potent material visions of urban governance. Although the speculative landscapes I describe in this chapter operate with different degrees of actual world-making power, they nevertheless reveal two things. First, these imaginaries show how the landscape problem responds to a set of dilemmas closely associated with the contradictions of late industrializing (Fortun 2014) urbanism. Expansive nonporous urban growth, shifting population distributions, structural inequality, uneven legal enforcement, and rapid economic transition have etched their mark on the landscape. Managing riverbanks requires rethinking housing in ways that dispossess some at the expense of others; building floodwalls demarcates future wet and dry zones, producing a concomitant distribution of injury and blame (Marks and Elinoff 2019).3 Second, these imaginaries raise questions about the Janis-faced role of the engineer in the Anthropocene, both a protagonist and an antagonist in the new ecological order, designing new solutions and creating new problems simultaneously (e.g., Beck 1992, 178). As I demonstrate, these problems are not simply technical flaws but also, similar to Katsikis’s (2014) critique of Buckminster Fuller and Costantino Doxiadis’s “world management” strategies, rely on a faith in universal reason instead of an attention to situated concerns and local political economies (see also Mitchell 2002; Scott 1998). The limits of such schemes are particularly apparent in the complex temporal conjuncture of the late industrial Anthropocene, marked, as Morton has put it, by an end of the world that “might already have taken place” (2013, 16). Floods such as the ones that occurred in

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Bangkok bring with them future echoes of disasters to come. The reverberating quality of past and future disaster materializes in everyday speculations about the limits of contemporary ways of organizing the world. Thus, the speculative landscapes I describe in this chapter, although serving distinct purposes in different economies of knowledge and power, nevertheless vibrate with the uncertain anxieties of Anthropocene futures. In what follows, I analyze three different postflood imaginaries: the Siam Cement Group’s (SCG) one hundredth anniversary campaign “Drawing the Future,” the projects associated with the Siamese Architecture Association’s exhibition Water/Brick: Liquid Perception in Thai Urbanism (2012), and finally a massive “unbuilt” Thai flood remediation project. These imaginative landscapes reflect on problems in the present by projecting them into bettermanaged futures. The landscapes are quotidian in the sense that they reflect a new normal in which past disaster structures a pervasive contemporary debate about what to do with a sinking city built atop seemingly past and yet still future wetlands. Often they aim to relieve present anxiety about the urban environment by leading viewers into an imagined future free of disruption. Yet, more often these landscapes also highlight the tense uncertainty surrounding present-tense natureculture in rapidly urbanizing contexts, the complex role of engineers in knowing and producing new landscapes, and the enormous (and frightening) political power implied in addressing these problems on a grand scale. Drawing, as I show, is a technique of projection that both enables and forecloses speculations. The relative freedom of the pen opens as much as it narrows. The pen can enable future-oriented imaginings but also narrow the horizons of what those futures might be by situating them within particular regimes of knowledge and power. Drawing opens up new possibilities while obscuring the force required to enact them in the world. In paying attention to drawing as a tool of speculation, I carefully attend to what each image makes visible and ask what remains latent or is rendered invisible within these modes of future making.

Concrete Imaginaries The opening of SCG’s one hundredth anniversary ad campaign features a young girl drawing a butterfly. As she sings about the better world to come, the butterfly flies directly off her paper. Throughout the commercial, this motif repeats itself—buildings emerge out of architectural schematics,

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forests grow from mere tracings, and pipes burst out of printed blueprints. By the end of the ad, a whole city rises out from the drawing table. This city is not contemporary Bangkok, wall to wall with traffic and limited tree coverage; this is a newer, greener city to come, with vertical gardens, hygienic pipes, green spaces for play, and “magic mortar” that reveals images of plants and shrubs when it gets wet. At the end, hand-scrawled Thai says “Drawing a Sustainable Future.” To understand Thailand’s urban transition, it is in many ways necessary to understand the role of SCG and the place of concrete in Thai history. By revenue, SCG is Thailand’s third largest company. Although SCG started out as the nation’s only supplier of industrial cement, it is now one of seven. As of 2013, SCG was among the twenty-five largest cement manufacturers in the world (Saunders 2013). The company’s key role in the nation’s history and its growing role in regional development mark it and its vision of the future as indicative of present-day thinking about the Anthropocene future. Before 1861, there were very few roads in Bangkok and even fewer beyond the brick-paved areas of the palace; until 1880, there were no more than five roads beyond the royal compound. Instead, the city was largely organized around its river and canal system. Beginning in 1890, however, the monarchy launched an ambitious series of projects that effectively transformed the city from one based around water to a land-based settlement (Ouyyanont 1999). Founded in 1913 by royal decree in partnership with a Danish-led firm, SCG was created to provide a basis for domestic supplies of cement as the monarchy deepened its efforts to refashion Thailand as a “modern” nation-state. Throughout the early part of its existence the company supplied cement to the government, serving as the material base for Bangkok’s spatial transformation. Ferroconcrete buildings lined these new roads, offering a building technique that became essential to the creation of the state’s nationalist aesthetic. Concrete provided an architectural grammar—nationalist, modern, and masculine—that eventually gave form to the core of Rathanakosin Island and the aesthetic of its government buildings (Chua 2012). By the 1960s, the SGC was expanding at a rapid pace through American purchases for the Southeast Asian war effort, which spread throughout the region. Starting in 1965, the U.S. government started making formal purchases of up to five hundred thousand metric tons of cement per year, which went into the construction of military installations and related infrastructure across Southeast Asia. In Thailand, this included multiple military

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bases, several large highways, and a number of water control systems (Grossman 2009, 144). In essence, SCG provided the material infrastructure for Thailand’s urban transition, which began in the post–World War II period and intensified throughout subsequent decades. During the 1960s the population of Bangkok nearly doubled, from 1.8 million residents to 3 million (Phongpaichit and Baker 2002, 162). While the concrete industry transformed radically during the oil shocks of the 1970s and deregulation in the 1980s, construction did not abate. Instead, new injections of capital from international organizations, increased foreign direct investment in industrial production, and the liberalization of the cement industry during the 1980s and 1990s contributed to the spatial and economic transformation of the nation’s capital region and its hinterlands. By 1996 Thailand was home to the fastest-growing economy in the world, which fueled a significant property bubble. By the time of the Asian currency crisis in 1997, the bubble popped, and the optimism of the previous years was replaced by a sense of wary skepticism. Andrew Johnson (2013, 2014) argues that as the economy regained its footing, the meanings of urban development had shifted. Whereas many in the middle class saw construction as a welcome sign of development and the nation’s moral progress during the previous periods, after the economic crash construction and urban development became viewed as something suspect; progress implicitly contained its own failures as the market’s promises of improvement were sown with the seeds of its collapse. As Johnson describes, after the crash dead skyscrapers dotted the landscape, becoming spectral reminders of the capricious nature of the market and the inherent dangers of capitalism. The cement industry has grown rapidly throughout this turmoil. SCG is Thailand’s third-largest company and is now poised to expand throughout the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, with over a billion dollars invested in cement plants in Laos, Myanmar, Cambodia, and Indonesia. The floods themselves were a boon for SCG. During the floods, chief executive officer Kan Trakulhoon noted that a year after the floods the company recorded a 116 percent increase in profits from October to December 2012 (Global Cement 2013). Postflood reconstruction was good for the construction sector and its suppliers. In this context, the ad offers four insights into SCG’s vision of Thailand’s urban future. First, the ad’s basic premise is that urban modernity remains a broadly shared social good that can be achieved through the appropriate application of imagination and technical expertise. Drawing in particular

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features as a critical technique of expressing a vision of futures yet to be made. Second, the ad reflects how hope remains elemental to the project of urban modernity (cf. Elinoff 2018). The snarled traffic and noxious canals can only disappear if people continue to employ their ingenuity and material imaginations to fix the problems created by urbanization. In this sense, fixing the contemporary environment does not require a fundamental ontological shift but instead requires new materials, new ideas, new drawings, and enhanced and expanded envirotechnical infrastructure systems. Better engineering and better materials will renew the promise of urban modernity. The ad, which does not reference the flood, makes its case by connecting visions of engineering projects and a hopeful future. The logic is clear: continued environmental engineering—through the appropriate application of knowledge—can produce newer, better worlds. Third, the ad’s optimism is not only tied to investment in new and appropriate materials and good design but is also coordinated by imaginative, apolitical experts. As the song playing behind the advertisement describes, a world drawn with kindness of spirit (khwam namjai) will make everything beautiful (suay ngam). This emphasis on aesthetics has its roots in a deeper expression of aesthetic power that links that beauty and righteous power (Jackson 2004; Elinoff 2016; Herzfeld 2017). The application of just power is not political but technical. Drawing the future is a matter of imagination and expertise unfettered by politics. This point recalls Li’s (2007) notion of how development projects often render political problems as technical ones, bracketing the contentious questions of development itself. The suspension of politics seems like a first principle that justifies engineering as a mode of future. The future is imagined, drawn, and then produced through material componentry, human ingenuity, and loving kindness. Politics has been erased from the scene. Conflicts endemic to processes of city making and its inequities are ignored or obscured. This is because such conflicts not only result in complex, unseemly urban configurations but also because political negotiations threaten to destabilize the company’s proposition that a greener, safer, and more hygienic and convenient urban future will require more than engineering expertise to achieve its aims. This disposition toward politics is not incidental in a country wracked by turmoil and, at the time of writing this, governed by a government with deep ties to the military (Elinoff 2019). Finally, the ad implies that the Anthropocene itself is essentially an engineering problem. Through the extension and innovation of the materials

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that compose the built environment, urban life can continue, transforming the city into a hybrid space where nature and culture merge harmoniously. The promise of these cyborg cities, or “smart” cities, to make life more livable, using new technologies to spread greenery, and fundamentally rethink what a city is and who builds it is a large one indeed. If the story of urban growth in Thailand has largely been uncoordinated and rhizomatic, then SCG’s new promise is that through better engineering, concrete itself can become a kind of soil for a greener, cleaner urbanism. They promise to close the circle on all the disruption that took place during the earlier phases of urbanization, which were associated not with the urban form but instead with its improper deployment. This ad is, in short, a doubling down on the company’s faith in modernity. Although the ad campaign does not have the direct political force of the unbuilt flood project that I describe at the end of this chapter or the speculative creativity that I describe in the next section, it nevertheless responds to the same anxieties. The campaign replaces the quotidian experiences of most residents of Thailand’s capital city with a pastoral landscape of integrated technical and natural systems. The city in the ad is not the one that is subsiding at a rate of ten centimeters per year but instead is one that is thriving through the application of imagination, materiality, and expertise. The ad points us toward what others have called the “good Anthropocene” (Szerzsynski 2012; Revkin 2014), an improved human-engineered environment shorn of the sorts of political conflicts central to working out contemporary environmental engagements (see also Blasser 2019). The emotional aesthetic of these engineered futures reassures the ad’s audience that technoscientific projects and technical know-how will preserve the dream of modernity and better it, resetting the clock rather than extending on the logics of late industrialism. For SCG, imagination and drawing become essential to producing new modes of existence that will bring, at long last, a modernity that harmonizes progress with nature.

Liquid Perceptions In 2012, a year after the flood, the Association of Siamese Architects held a conference titled Water/Brick. Held under royal patronage and with sponsorship by PTT Limited, Thailand’s quasi-privatized/quasi-state-owned petroleum company, the exhibition brought together architects, urban planners,

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archaeologists, and historians to rethink the relationship between the solid city and its watery surrounds. The bound edition produced for the exhibition begins with what one might be inclined to argue is a Buddhist critique of modern ontologies: Zen Buddhism envisions that every part of the environment has life. This idea does not only apply specifically to humans and animals, but also trees, flowers, mountains, rivers, and even stones. All of them have life. From this we can extrapolate that even other inanimate objects like bridges, buildings, walls, flowerpots are alive too. . . . Architecture is built to endure through harsh elements but it too will be gone. . . . However, we are able to know when a building has cracks or a pipe starts to leak, it calls for maintenance. In a larger perspective, when there is an earthquake, storm, or flood, it is necessary [to] remember that the earth is alive and sentient. (Water/Brick 2012, 10) From this pan-vitalist starting point, the collection moves back and forth between localist histories of Thai cities of the past and the advantages of their vernacular designs for watery living to wholesale rethinking of the principles of perception at work in the building of cities. The underlying ethos of the project is captured in the chapter titled The Relationship between Water Basins, Cities and Communities. The authors argue that “solid perception” is central to our current development model. Solid perception is defined through rigid structures/flood protection, “stagnant lives behind flood walls,” resistance to changes in water levels and quantity, incoherent arrangements of land and water, and a general attitude that is itself a hazard (Tachakitkachorn et al. 2012, 103). “Liquid perception,” on the other hand, favors open and flexible structures that allow water to flow; cultural, social, and economic life tied to water; resilience and adaptation to evolve with the seasonal flow; and continuous connections to land and water. In addition, water is associated with vulnerability but is managed. The end point of this logic is that it is better to live with flood than to fight against it (Tachakitkachorn et al. 2012; cf. Meyer and Waggonner 2009). The clearest example of this shift in perception is the Ayutthaya 2050 plan created by SHMA Designs for the Water/Brick exhibition (SHMA Designs 2012). The plan takes us forward in time to a new version of the ancient

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pre-Bangkok Siamese capital. Contemporary Ayutthaya is a place where the chief economic resources are the ancient ruins of the old capital and its emerging industrial estates. The city is roughly eighty kilometers from Bangkok and now serves as a major manufacturing center for everything from hard drives to textiles to automotive parts. In 2011 the floods devastated the city and especially these manufacturing centers, causing much of the disaster’s economic damage. The city now finds itself very much at the center of contemporary debates about flood remediation. Designers from SHMA told me that their plan was created through extensive research with city planners, experts, and community residents. They determined that Bangkok’s materiality—concrete roads and expansive unchecked growth—had transformed the Chao Phraya River into a clogged artery. Thus, they decided that if Ayutthaya was to survive into the future, it would be necessary for city residents to embrace flood. By resurfacing the city with water, SHMA’s project hoped to provide a visual basis not only for rethinking the city spatially and economically but also for reimagining humans and their relationship with water. Their plan tilts the economy away from industrial production toward “agri-industry” through new dikes, polders, and floating gardens. The designers proposes a shift in the city’s energy strategy to “waste to power” projects and employs the famous kaemling (monkey cheeks)—flexible water catchment areas—designed by the late Thai King Bhumipol Adulyadej to enable better management of the flooding (personal communication, July 31, 2014). The projects are stunning visual concepts. They offer striking attempts to radically reorder thinking about disaster and urban life. Living with and through flood is a compellingly counterintuitive idea. Yet, the clarity of these speculations raises questions about the murkiness of politics. In interviews with SHMA’s design principles, they emphasize that collaborative design meetings with residents shaped their approach to the speculative project. The designers described meetings with residents, local officials, and environmentalists. Despite these processes of consultation, it is clear that enacting radical transformation such as the ones suggested by the drawings would be a deeply political process. As Danny Marks and I describe elsewhere (Marks and Elinoff 2019), most of the fragmented flood remediation projects constructed after the 2011 floods have been contentious and uneven, producing highly uncertain environmental effects with respect to future floods. Plans on the scale of those in the exhibition would require the mobilization of actors in a new coalition to try to debate their way toward

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the making of these new landscapes and the management of their uneven effects and implications. So, even as they prompt new thinking about the future, these drawings also obscure the already complex politics that flood prevention has inspired. In 2015, the rudiments of something that reflected these kinds of outwardly facing social movements seemed to be taking shape. SHMA and other collaborators on the Water/Brick project formed a group called Friends of the River to challenge the design and disrupt the construction of an overbuilt riverside promenade along the Chao Phraya River proposed by the Thai military junta. Although those struggles continue, the emergence of this coalition indicates that the speculations have the power to move actors in the world toward politics. In this sense, the drawings move beyond engineered solutions in the making of potential political struggles to come. These coalitions seem increasingly necessary to answer the charged questions of who gets flooded and who stays dry, who has to adopt liquid perception and who will retain the privilege of solid walls and dry feet. The project also raises important questions about how speculative projects such as these aestheticize disaster in ways that ignore the unwanted vitality of water. If the realpolitik of these plans is complex, the realecology, if you will, is just as obscure. The visualizations substitute crystal-clear water for the fetid, black water that writers such as Bunnag describe during the 2011 event. This kind of aestheticization elevates contemporary human and nonhuman relations to harmonious exchange through clear “liquid” but ignores the already murky interrelationship between the city and its water systems. Where are the nonhumans, the trash, snakes, rats, viruses, alligators, mosquitoes, and bacteria (and the quasi-humanlike medical waste, sewage, etc.) that exerted their own “vitality” (Bennett 2010) during the flood? Do those agentive things upset the harmony that frames the ontology of living with flood? How might greater attention to these excluded nonhuman forces reframe the kinds of speculations that inform an Anthropocene future? Water/Brick: Liquid Perception in Thai Urbanism and Architecture opens up as many questions as it obscures. Persistent across the various projects is the same modern will to manage nature that is key to the “Drawing the Future” ad campaign, extended here in naturalist guises. Both the ad and the exhibition rely on a culturalist-nationalist naturalism undergirded by extensions of overt and implicit forms of engineered modernist knowledge. The effect is to deepen a particular mythos about the relationship between

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Thainess and nature that emerged in the 1970s, repositioning ideas of the environment from being associated with the fear of pa thuen (untamed wild forest) toward manageable, wholesome, and uplifting thammachat (nature) (Stott 1991). Although some projects, such as the massive Superbowl urban housing project-cum–irrigation polder proposed by the architectural firm Supermachine, offer new renderings of a kind of mass urban nature, most elevate nature in opposition to the existing city’s densities and entanglements (Supermachine 2012). Thus, the exhibition seems to deepen the assumption that the unruly city of the present is primarily a space of degradation and immorality. Nevertheless, the pastoral scenes from Ayutthaya 2050 show us what might be possible by retuning urban spaces to accommodate floods. At the same time, they tell us little about who will be consigned to live an amphibious life and who will be afforded the dryness of urban modernity. Similarly obscure is the answer to the question of what life would look like at the interface between the murkiness of the city’s contemporary infrastructures as they are and the flow of the clear pastoral waters in the flooded city still to come.

Risky Plans Of all of these three projects, the unbuilt Thai flood mitigation project of 2012 is by far the most controversial. While SCG’s ad campaign was made to stoke consumer imagination and the imagery of Water/Brick was created to provoke new thinking about the landscape, the 2012 flood project was designed as a real effort to radically transform Thailand’s hydrological topography. Rendered in maps, PowerPoint slides, and policy documents, the project sought to bring the whole of Thailand’s riverine management under centralized control through a coordinated strategy aimed at preventing future flood disasters. The controversy stoked by the US$11 billion plan was nearly as large as the project itself. Proposed by the Thai Water Resource Association in the immediate aftermath of the flood, the project offers a snapshot of a transformative imaginary grounded in a kind of real postdisaster politics of destruction and loss. The plan, scaled to the entire nation, proposed a series of landscape interventions to bring the whole of the Chao Phraya River basin into manageable order under a comprehensive system of dikes, channels, polders, and catchment projects. After receiving backlash at nearly every

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point of insertion, the project was shelved. Dogged not only by vocal resistance from local communities especially in the flood-prone areas outside Bangkok, there were also widespread accusations of corruption leveled against the projects designers. The project was also the target of very visible public resistance in 2013 especially to the Mae Wong Dam, which critics said was an unnecessary project that would destroy some of the last habitat for wild tigers in Thailand. A chief proponent of the flood mitigation project was Dr. Apichart Anukularmphai, president of the Thai Water Resources Association and an experienced technocrat who has worked for a variety of integrated water management agencies throughout Southeast Asia. In describing the project to me in an interview, Apichart argued that Thailand had all of the key institutions in place to come up with a comprehensive plan, but such a thing never surfaced because of the way power has been divided in Thailand. For a large-scale flood plan to work, he argued, it needed to be comprehensive. It needed to rein in the landscape as well as the venal bureaucrats and the forest encroachers (corporations, individuals, and communities) and also rationalize urban growth itself. “These things,” he told me, “have not happened.”4 Apichart’s flood plan was premised on both the creation of a new bureaucracy and a new landscape itself. The project’s plans are, then, speculative imaginaries in their own right. They create a new territorial division in the country, breaking it into new zones in response to the flood—unsurprisingly, Zone A was the Chao Phraya River basin and its eight associated watersheds. Zone B, it should be noted, included everything else. This division is unsurprising for people familiar with Thailand’s political landscape, because the central region has always been positioned as hierarchically superior to the rest of the country (see Winichakul 1994). Within Zone A, the project was further divided. In the upper zones— the watersheds—large and small dams would be employed to manage seasonal flows. These dams came under intense scrutiny by environmental activists, as they were proposed in national park areas where there was a small population of tigers still present. In the middle zones closer to the urban periphery, Apichart suggested that wetland rehabilitation, the uses of the late king’s “monkey cheeks,” and smaller check dams and weirs could be used to slow the movement of water. In the lower zones closest to Bangkok, a large flood diversion channel would shunt excess water away from the city center through these canals toward the Gulf of Thailand. Displacing water

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here might not spare these peripheral areas from flooding but would leave the city dry. Keeping Bangkok dry was the highest priority for Apichart. “The total value of the money lost was forty-five billion dollars. We could either lose that again or spend eleven billion now. It may not rain like this next year or in five years, but it will rain like this again.”5 Here, climate change loomed large over our conversation even if it was unspoken. From this vantage point, Apichart’s flood plan rendered a certain future through the uncertainty of the present. While it was unknown when the next flood would occur, he asserted that another flood was inevitable. Apichart argued that the heart of the debate surrounding the plan was the unknowable relations that compose the landscape and the selfish individuals who have profited off its unknowability. So, he pointed out, only by rezoning large areas of the country via hydrological engineering would it be possible to manage water effectively via a rational bureaucracy. Thus, the visual plans were underscored by a new comprehensive water bureaucracy responsible for digging trenches, building new dikes, managing dams, and rehabbing wetlands. For Apichart, the solution to produce more predictable relations with nature was to manage unforeseen events better when the time comes. For those who opposed the plan—such as the protestors who gathered to struggle against the Mae Wong Dam, a key part of the project that aimed to build dams/reservoirs in some of Thailand’s last habitat for wild tigers—the (mis)management of nature itself has been a point of contention. Although the protesters did not present an alternative plan, they argued that the plan itself represented an unnecessary incursion into the country’s landscape that would fail to bring flooding under control. For Apichart, the activists who disrupted the project were uncompromising idealists—he described them simply as “anti,” using the English prefix to denote this opposition—who did not understand that without any further intervention, another disaster would be inevitable. In the middle of these struggles lies the unanswered question about how Thailand will proceed through a future of tumultuous weather cycles, urban subsidence, and volatile politics. In this telling, the culprits behind the flooding are the bureaucrats who manipulated the nation’s water policy for political gain, the forest encroachers who misuse the land, the environmentalists who obstruct rational policy solutions, and the corporations that cut down the jungle to replant with oil palms, rubber trees, and eucalyptus. Instead of thinking through the ways in which those practices come into being and their relationship

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with embedded histories of power in Thailand, the massive flood plan extends technocratic rationalities of environmental management seeking to protect the center by bringing the periphery under more strict control. This pattern reflects the figure of the ouroboros chasing its own tail in multiple ways, highlighting the patterns of entrenched governance but also the kind of seemingly intractable challenge of trying to address the problem of the landscape from within the problem of the landscape.

Speculative Landscapes of the Anthropocene If the grand plans for the city embodied in the projects, images, and imaginings I have described above have not yet come to pass in any real sense, then what do these images help us understand? The speculative landscapes I have described here offer a window into contemporary imaginings of different Anthropocene cities under better control. They rarely offer a clear vision of how to enact such projects politically, but they nevertheless bolster the idea that the city and its effects on surrounding natures might be manageable with better engineering and less politics. By rearranging Bangkok’s naturecultures through engineering, they aim to reconcile the contradictions of Thailand’s late industrializing urban landscape and its political landscape. The sociotechnical imaginaries I describe above and the contentious politics they omit or incite illustrate why the conception of landscape has become important to many concerned people in Thailand as they imagine the environmental future of their cities. Thinking the future through the 2011 floods, many encountered the way troubled material, sociotechnical, political, and environmental relations were embedded in the land itself. They also encountered the complex temporalities unfolding through disasters such as this. As Kim Fortun describes, late industrial environmental dilemmas are characterized by an entangled temporal landscape: “the levee has broken, retention walls have failed. The sludge runs over homes and lives, eventually hardening into a gray matter that will be ‘remediated’ by moving it to another, more marginal place, out of sight and mind” (2014, 310, emphasis added). Landscape yokes together these complex temporalities, tying past formulations, present entanglements, and future efforts together to fix such problems, situating these temporal debates within conversations over space, materiality, and subjective being.

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As Eric Hirsch (1995, 4) points out, landscape links together several related concepts: foreground (actuality, here now)–background (horizon, potentiality), place–space, inside–outside, image–representation. Through the linkages between those seemingly opposed relations, attention to landscape opens up possibilities for linking quotidian relations between humans, nonhumans, and sociotechnical systems to broader macrolevel environmental shifts across temporalities. Tim Ingold’s attention to landscape as composed of and composing both human and nonhuman action across long temporalities points our attention to the way the landscape is itself lived through action and constituted of actions. Arguing that the landscape is the “congealed form of the Taskscape,” which is never complete, he emphasizes how landscapes are “neither built nor un-built but perpetually under construction” (Ingold 1993, 162). In this sense, imagining landscapes to come offers a potent resource for those wishing to rethink the environmental relations that currently compose the city and the ideas behind those relations. Anthropological engagements with landscapes often omit the deeply political quality of these conversations, so I have foregrounded such debates showing how politics is intimately bound up in these future-city imaginations. At the same time, such efforts to reimagine the physical city have also fostered efforts to reimagine ontologies of the urban. For example, Cattaleeya Noparatnaraporn (2004), a professor of landscape architecture at Kasetsart University, has reposed the problem of urban environmental disaster with the contrast between Thai ontological approaches to land and those marked by western forms of urbanization. She argues that “Thai” conceptions of space are marked by an “unbound” or “linked” quality shaped by desires for openness, ventilation, and psychological comfort (2004, 2). In this analysis, Thailand’s transition from agrarian to newly industrialized country entailed a concurrent transformation in space from an unbounded riparian city to a bounded land-based one. This transition prompts her to ask, “To what extent have the ‘unbounded’ quality of both nature and human insertions into it survived in the modern day Bangkok?” Urbanization, for Cattaleeya, poses not only an environmental problem but also an ontological one disrupting “traditional Thai” worldviews and their expression in space. Many scholars (Vandergeest 1996; Bowie 1992; Stott 1991), myself (Elinoff 2014) included, have historicized these discourses on the village, the city, and nature. Nevertheless, this discursive rendering of “Thai space” remains potent for the way it narrates the transformation of the region’s

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political economy via the disruption of endemic ways of thinking. On the one hand, these counternarratives can conflate nationalist rhetoric with ontological propositions about how “Thais” think. Beyond being ahistorical—downplaying the fundamentally diverse character of Thailand’s body politic—the story also neglects the way state initiatives, often themselves cloaked in nationalism, facilitated and accelerated Thailand’s radical environmental transformation. On the other, these reevaluations of local ontologies of space and nature may offer a means to reform or remake the city anew, as was evident in the Water/Brick exhibition. So, although these reassertions of indigenous ontological spatial relations extend some nationalist tropes, they also ask an important question about how to remake the city for our new ecological condition. Thus, we must ask whether these alternative ontological renderings that seek to challenge the principles of urban modernity merely reflect an extension of the ontological nationalism of previous eras or represent a kind of productive “ontological experiment” (Jensen and Morita 2017) that might loosen contemporary thinking on the urban in Thailand? Jensen and Morita point out that “slowly, often imperceptibly, infrastructures change, and change subjects and objects along with them” (2017, 619). As Blichfeldt and Vaughan describe elsewhere in this volume, attention to quotidian practices highlights how local resources offer ways for actors to think through potential actions in moments of radical transformation. Taken alongside the Water/Brick exhibition, Cattaleeya’s proposition about the unbounding of space is worth taking seriously. Yet even as we consider these ontological experiments, the political histories of nationalist ontologies and the political economic inequalities they inform need to remain firmly in view. Concrete and engineering remain potent mediums to telegraph political ambitions, enact state power, and mobilize urban aspirations for both government officials, consumer markets, and among citizens themselves (Elinoff 2016, 2017). After the recent military takeover of the Thai government, numerous infrastructure projects were restarted. These projects, championed by previous governments, were all either on hold or canceled due to ongoing investigations and charges of corruption by oppositional groups, many of which now back the coup makers. All of this critique speaks to the complexity of the material politics surrounding the expansion of urban life in Thailand. As Brenner (2014, 18), points out, to deal with this new condition, urban theory demands reconceptualizing without an “outside,” emphasizing “world-making” itself, which I take to be simultaneously

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political, economic, cultural, material, and ecological. In Anthropocene Thailand, the problem of the city is built into the land, people’s quotidian experience of it, and the social and political lives of the people who dwell there.

Conclusion Understanding visions of real and speculative landscapes takes on a new salience in postdisaster moments, because past spatial formulations are called into question and new possibilities seem necessary. Although such contentious moments occur in the present, recovery, or what Vaughan (this volume) calls re-mooring, is very much a question about the future. What the spatial organization of things, distributions of harm, and relations between humans and nonhumans will become depends to a large degree on how futures are imagined and then brought into being. As I have argued in this chapter, speculative sociotechnical landscapes offer an important lens into these debates. The proliferation of these speculative renderings in the wake of Thailand’s disastrous floods is testament to the pervasive anxiety in Thailand that the city and its citizens are at risk and that future transformation will be necessary, sparking the call to imagination and speculation. This chapter demonstrates that drawing is a powerful tool for such a task. By rendering imaginings in aesthetic forms, drawing makes distinct futures available to be acted upon and also critiqued. Drawing gives texture to an idea, makes its possibilities tangible, and also presents a simplified picture of the world that elides the difficult questions entailed in actual world making. There are two conclusions that follow from this. Drawings themselves are critical objects of analysis for thinking about how present-day anxieties are resolved and not resolved. Drawings can calm nerves even if they do not spark any tangible actions. However, they are also powerful sites of politics themselves, bringing some visions of the future into view while occluding, eliding, and ignoring others (even specific futures already latent in such renderings). The forms of engineered modernism, liquid perception, and hydrological control that I describe here demonstrate how such speculative possibilities cluster around different visions of making, managing, and living the uncertain urban future. In this, they raise more questions than they answer. Central, then, to re-mooring to disruptive and disrupted natures in Thailand and beyond will be a process of creating new future imaginaries

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that grapple with not only a changing material environment but also the political, social, and economic implications of such changes.

Notes 1. Sudbanthad does not translate “Krung Nak,” but the word “krung” is used to describe a capital or a metropolis. The word “nak” is a bit more complex: it describes heaviness in weight and a harsh severity. For example, the word “kaamnak” refers to misery emerging from one’s bad deeds or, as in the famous anticommunist song “Nak Phaendin” (Heavy on the Earth), which was used as anti-communist propaganda to target violence at student activists in the 1970s (Walker 2007). In this case, it may be possible to leave the precise meaning ambiguous, instead thinking both definitions together—the weight of the now sunken city is tied to its past/ present moral failings. 2. American science fiction writer Paolo Bacigalupi’s 2009 book The Wind Up Girl projects a similarly flooded future for a Bangkok, whose long history of life amid water allows it to develop enough technology to stand singularly as an outpost of urban life amid the gloom of chronic technogenic diseases. 3. It is worth pointing out that on Fortun’s time line, the dawn of late industrialism, 1984, is almost a genesis point for the rapid and radical intensification of industrialism in many parts of Asia. These historical relations are probably worth exploring in greater detail. 4. Interview by author, July 23, 2014. 5. Ibid.

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Stott, Philip. 1991. “Mu’ang and Pa: Elite Views of Nature in a Changing Thailand.” In Thai Constructions of Knowledge, ed. Manas Chitakasem and Andrew Turton, 142–54. London: University of London. Sudbanthad, Pitchaya. 2019. Bangkok Wakes to Rain. New York: Riverhead Books. Supermachine. 2012. “Super Bowl Project.” In Water/Brick: Liquid Perception in Thai Urbanism and Architecture. Bangkok: Association of Siamese Architects, 2012. Szerszynski, Bronislaw. 2012. “The End of the End of Nature: The Anthropocene and the Fate of the Human.” Oxford Literary Review 34, no. 2: 165–84. Tachakitkachorn, Terdsak, Danai Taitakoo, Prin Jhearmaneechotechai, and Poon Khwansuan. 2012. “Khwamsampan khong lumnam kap muang lae chumchon” [The Relationship Between Watersheds, Cities, And Communities.] In Water/Brick: Liquid Perception in Thai Urbanism and Architecture. Bangkok: Association of Siamese Architects. Vandergeest, Peter. 1996. “Real Villages: National Narratives of Rural Development.” In Creating the Countryside: The Politics of Rural and Environmental Discourse, ed. Melanie Dupuis and Peter Vandergeest, 279–302. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Walker, Andrew. 2007. “Scum of the Earth.” New Mandala, September 11, https://www .newmandala.org /scum-of-the-earth/. Water/Brick, eds. 2012. “Introduction.” In Water/Brick: Liquid Perception in Thai Urbanism and Architecture. Bangkok: Association of Siamese Architects. Whitington, Jerome. 2013. “Fingerprint, Bellwether, Model Event: Climate Change as Speculative Anthropology.” Anthropological Theory 13, no. 4: 308–28. Winichakul, Thongchai. 1994. Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.

CHAPTER 10

Re-mooring Rethinking Recovery and Resilience in the Anthropocene Tyson Vaughan

Re-mooring in an Age of Rupture This volume posits that life in contemporary Asia entails a near-continuous, staccato stream of rupture in which the experience or threat of disaster has become a new normal. In such an era, postdisaster is also predisaster. Slow disasters threaten to grind on tragically for decades, while inequitably distributed precarity and vulnerability have become enduring sociopolitical conditions. And normalcy has become a kind of permanent state of emergency (see Choi, this volume; cf. Orihara and Clancey 2012). Under these conditions, it is no surprise that concepts such as sustainability and resilience have become buzzwords, operating as polestars of policy, objects of academic inquiry, attractors of capital investment, and justifiers of humanitarian funding. Adopting a term used by residents of Minamata, Japan, I propose a notion of “re-mooring” as an alternative to “resilience.” Whereas the latter is a broad, anodyne category without reference to particular practices or conditions, “re-mooring” is specific and unabashedly normative—even moral. “Re-mooring” refers to a mutually constituted effort to remake human and nonhuman community through reflection and reimagining of collective self, ultimately reconnecting neighbor to neighbor, regrounding the human and technological in the natural, and reestablishing a continuity of past,

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present, and future. Re-mooring interrogates the sociotechnical and environmental conditions that unmoor communities during times of rupture. Thus, “re-mooring” gestures toward a conceptual language for understanding the kinds of questions surfaced by postdisaster crises and controversies, offering a normative vision for how to address such ruptures and return the planet—and the human species—to a better condition. Although those who attempt to re-moor their communities may not seek political change per se, re-mooring is profoundly political in its operation and in its ramifications. Such an approach offers a sensible conceptual framework for understanding the sociotechnical and environmental recovery of degraded or disasterstruck communities in these disastrous times and the politics entailed thereby.

Minamata: Recovery by Moyai-Naoshi, or Re-mooring The language of re-mooring is not merely an analyst’s category; it is an empirical concept proposed by actors in postdisaster settings themselves to reconfigure their lives and spaces in response to disruption. The origins of re-mooring are rooted in the aftermath of an envirotechnical disaster: industrial mercury poisoning in Minamata, Japan. There, locals use the term “moyai-naoshi” (re-mooring) to capture their own approach to recovery. Politically and economically dominated by the industrial factory of the Chisso company, the environment of Minamata was slowly poisoned over a period of decades in the mid-twentieth century by the factory’s mercuryladen wastewater.1 Released directly into Minamata Bay, the organic methylmercury in Chisso’s effluent bio-accumulated in greater and greater concentrations in the bodies of crustaceans, fish, and eventually birds, cats, and people as it made its way through the food web. Shellfish lost their ability to affix themselves to surfaces; barnacles slid off boat hulls. Inflicted birds fell dead from the sky. Cats danced crazily before throwing themselves into the water to drown. Trees along the shore turned brown and died. The whole natural environment in and around the water was corrupted. Among humans, the mercury poisoning primarily affected relatively cash-poor fishermen and their families, who depended on their own catch for sustenance. Adults suffered from pain, paralysis, uncontrollable muscle spasms, and severe deterioration of all five senses, while children suffered

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significant brain damage and babies were born with deformities. Disease sufferers and their families became the objects of severe social stigma, and the town—which depended heavily on Chisso for employment—was riven by bitter social divisions. The tale of these people’s suffering and their quest for justice against a recalcitrant Chisso and a complicit Japanese government is horrific, complex, and far too long to be recounted here beyond noting that the mercury dumping ceased in 1968, that victims won a landmark court case that definitively assigned responsibility to Chisso in 1973, and that subsequently Minamata began a long (and still ongoing) process of social healing and environmental remediation, dredging or concreting over the most contaminated areas of its bay. As one part of this process, Minamata has remade itself into an officially recognized and government-supported “eco town.” The Japanese government named it a Model Environmental City in 1992 and designated it as the nation’s eco-capital in a number of recent competitions (2005, 2006, 2011, etc.). The city follows stringent ISO14001 standards for environmental management and strives to implement the “four R’s”: refuse, reduce, reuse, recycle. In 1994, Masazumi Yoshii became mayor of Minamata. At a memorial ceremony for sufferers of so-called Minamata disease, he offered an official apology for decades of insufficient support by the municipal administration. He declared a vision of building a new Minamata with a cooperative spirit, which he dubbed moyai-naoshi, a term used by local fishermen, that might best be translated into English as “re-mooring,” although this doesn’t quite capture the full texture of the Japanese. The Minamata Disease Museum published a pamphlet in 1994 (revised in 2001), which describes it this way: “Moyai” literally means to tie boats together or to do something together, and “naoshi” means repairing something, or doing something again to get it right. We have given the name “Moyainaoshi” to cooperative community projects which stress tackling the Minamata disease issue directly and talking and working together here in Minamata, where the relationships among people and between people and nature were once destroyed. (Minamata Disease Museum 2001) After Yoshii’s declaration, grassroots organizations became more active in Minamata. For example, a women’s group started working to reduce the production of waste (e.g., by replacing single-use shopping bags with

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reusable bags). These women devised a certification for “eco-shops” that reduced their waste and energy usage. In 1998 the city began its own “green” certification program, in which it offered certification as “environment meister” to producers of safe and environmentally friendly products meeting a list of specific criteria. In addition, local communities have begun the practice of jimotogaku (local study) in which they study their own history to learn about their own past and present resources and capabilities and to appreciate their own local culture. All of these endeavors, among others, are said to be undertaken in the spirit of moyai-naoshi. Below, I will further illustrate re-mooring in action through comparative examples and contrasting cases; however, the basic contours are already visible from this description of Minamata. Actions are characterized by mutuality, cooperation, and reciprocity—doing things again and doing them together—and instigated at the local level. They implicitly depend on the broad distribution of agency among all community members. There is a normative moral component (repairing, getting something right), including a sense of mutual responsibility to fellow members of the community as well as a sense of responsibility to the larger natural environment. Critically, re-mooring is also marked by a drive toward communal self-reflection, as in jimotogaku, and as the term “moyai-naoshi” itself embodies, traditional indigenous culture is valorized.

Shattered Cosmologies and Unmoored Communities The catastrophe that befell Minamata is a textbook exemplar of what sociologist Kai Erikson (1994) calls “a new species of trouble,” which he says is described by three characteristics: they are technogenic and humaninduced, they involve toxins, and they instigate chronic individual and social trauma. Furthermore, such disasters entail two additional qualities. As Erikson implies with little discussion, toxins—be they methylmercury or radiation, for example—are invisible agents of ruin, inscrutable to all but experts and esoteric detection devices. In addition to inciting an “uncanny dread,” as Erikson notes, this inscrutability moves to the center of public concern questions about the knowledge of risk and uncertainty, the credibility of experts, and the politics of expertise and authority in a democratic society facing technological risks. These are characteristic conditions of late industrial modernity (Fortun 2012; cf. Funtowicz and Ravetz 1990;

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Irwin 1995; Irwin and Wynne 1996; Collins and Evans 2002; Jasanoff 2003; Latour 2004). The second quality is one that Erikson (1994) discusses at length as an important component of social trauma: disasters such as Minamata’s mercury pollution destroy cosmologies. Because catastrophes belonging to this “new species” are technogenically induced by humans, Erikson says that they gravely undermine people’s trust in each other, in social institutions, and in technologies. This contributes to social trauma and “the destruction of community,” part of the subtitle of Erikson’s 1976 monograph Everything in Its Path. In Minamata’s case, fishermen had revered the sea for generations as their preeminent source of sustenance, income, communal and individual identity, and even spiritual well-being. They discovered that this foundation of their lives was contaminated with an invisible toxin, was poisoning their beloved environment, and was torturing and killing their families, friends, and themselves. Moreover, the poisoning had been perpetrated by their town’s largest employer, the Chisso company, and had been hidden, denied, or justified by officials and experts of such august institutions as Tokyo University and the Ministry of International Trade and Industry. The result of these discoveries was a peculiar kind of communal trauma that environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht (2007) has termed “solastalgia,” which is distress caused by “desolation of the physical environment (home) by forces that undermine a personal and community sense of identity, belonging and control,” resulting in a profound, dissonant sense of dislocation or “homesickness [that] one experiences when one is still at ‘home’” (see also Albrecht 2005, 2006; Albrecht et al. 2007). Crucially, the solastalgia experienced by Minamata’s fishermen went beyond mere ennui or psychosocial malaise; the contamination of all that they knew and valued—waters, neighbors, institutions—shattered their very ability to make sense of the universe. All of their sense-making narratives about self and world had been betrayed by unspeakable trauma, a desolation that Law and Singleton (2009) call “the destruction of sense.” Narrative order no longer held, having been replaced by “a loss of confidence in tradition, a loss of the sureties that a culture is supposed to confer, [and] a loss of the sense of the wholeness of things” (Erikson 1994, 55). Erikson, writing about the Ojibwas of Grassy Narrows, another people grappling with the consequences of environmental mercury pollution, notes: “This poison is a pervasive fear that the world of nature and the world of human beings can no longer be relied upon in the old way. The fish are full of poison, the waters are

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contaminated, the land itself . . . is diseased, and the social world is in disarray” (39). Put simply, the community has been unmoored from all the things that gave its people’s lives order and meaning. Erikson (1976, 1994) focused his empirical studies mainly on unambiguously technogenic catastrophes: the collapse of a coal slurry impoundment dam, industrial mercury poisoning, the Three Mile Island accident, the first atomic bomb dropped on a city of civilians. However, I argue that technogenic disasters involving toxic substances are not so unique in their tendency to shatter cosmologies and upend lifeworlds. Any sufficiently extreme catastrophe may produce similar kinds of trauma. Indeed, even not so extreme disasters may do so, at least temporarily. When Japan’s secondhighest volcano Mount Ontake erupted in 2014, killing more than fifty hikers, a local official said that the mountain “has always been a reassuringly protective presence for us. . . . Never in our wildest dreams did we think it could kill” (Fackler 2014). This remarkable statement about a known active volcano does not betray scientific ignorance; rather, it illustrates the cognitive dissonance that results when the sacred and revered turn violent and deadly: in an instant, the natural order of the universe has been overturned, and things no longer make sense. It is this shock, this experience of being suddenly unmoored, that nudges actors in postdisaster settings toward remooring as a mode of healing and recovery, prompting them to ask big, existential questions as a means of reconfiguring their own visions of life in the wake of rupture. Such questioning wedges open the opportunity for transformation, political and otherwise, but is also often sealed off by state practices seeking to “build back better” or simply return to the status quo. Although many powerful agencies and allies of the Japanese state originally supported Chisso against the victims of Minamata disease, eventually the government provided compensation to victims and funded physical remediation and the concrete infilling of Minamata Bay. These are common tools of the state in disaster recovery projects: money, concrete, spatial planning and reorganization, and construction. The use of such tools bears little resemblance to re-mooring and often contravenes it.

The Reconstruction State Without wading into the current debates over “resilience,” a buzzword du jour in both academia and policy circles, the term generally conceptualizes

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the ability to put “things” back the way “they” were before—if not “better.”2 Yet for policy makers, “things” are defined by whatever is legible to established instruments of governance (Scott 1999)—technologies of prediction and control (Jasanoff 2003)—thus excluding things hidden in knowledge gaps (Frickel and Vincent 2012) or structured by regimes of imperceptibility (Murphy 2006). Policy makers pursuing greater “resilience” or more effective “recovery” therefore systematically tend to prioritize certain kinds (e.g., material and econometric) of “bouncing back.” In postdisaster recovery, this single-minded focus on rapidly rebuilding “what came before” tends to de-emphasize the very things that communities often wish to prioritize in the aftermath of disaster. The approach is technocratic, planned, and quantized, with little space for negotiation, local agency, or critical reflexivity. Unlike re-mooring, this focus is not mutual, polyvocal, locally directed, or ecumenically open to alternative ways of knowing, and it rules out the interrogation of fundamental operating logics that re-mooring instigates. In 1993 an earthquake near Okushiri, Japan, a small island to the southwest of Hokkaidō, generated a local tsunami that devastated villages along the island’s coast. The government-directed recovery provided a preview of its current approach in Tōhoku, the region recovering from the tsunami of March 11, 2011: public debt financed concrete-intensive construction of massive seawalls and the relocation or elevation of entire districts. Since 1993, Okushiri’s population has shrunk and its fishing industry has collapsed, leaving the local municipality mired in debt. The mayor has warned that Tōhoku should not follow the same path (Fackler 2012). Residents of Tōhoku have expressed fears of replicating Okushiri’s fate. There, state-sponsored recovery plans include land-use planning based on elevation and proximity to water and the construction of massive seawalls, levees, and elevated roads. By moving residences to high ground and erecting huge walls, these plans would separate communities from the sea, the physical and historical foundation of their economy and the center of their culture and identity. Such plans are ostensibly predicated on protecting residents from the next large tsunami. Yet, they cannot guarantee residents’ safety. Prior to 2011, the Sanriku coast was already structurally among the most heavily defended coastlines in the world with respect to tsunamis. Much of the Tarō district of Miyako had been built and inhabited after the construction of a system of ten-meter-high seawalls. This district was largely destroyed by

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the tsunami of 2011, which was fourteen to seventeen meters high in Tarō. A tsunami’s force is not only a function of its height, however, but is also a horizontally conveyed hydraulic wave of immense power. The Kamaishi Tsunami Protection Breakwater, a massive dam-like concrete structure that had taken three decades and US$1.5 billion to construct, was pulverized by this wave. All along the coast, seawalls and breakwaters intended to protect citizens and property were overtopped or smashed to pieces. Floodgates at the mouths of streams—designed to prevent the tsunami from climbing up the streambeds—failed, with few exceptions. Indeed, due to their nearuniversal failure, official recovery plans have largely abandoned floodgates as a protection strategy, opting instead to extend the seawalls back along the banks of streams as levees. Aware of this context, many residents along the tsunami-affected coast of the Tōhoku region argue that large seawalls would accomplish little beyond merely encouraging an exaggerated sense of safety. Rather, they argue that the indigenous knowledge of tsunami risk embedded in their local culture—born from deep historical (and, for some, personal) experience— could be more effective at saving lives than concrete walls. Moreover, some residents complain that official plans may actually introduce or exacerbate other risks, such as additional river drownings due to the high, concrete levees, or landslides and fires in the residential zones on the flattened tops of previously undeveloped hills. They also point out that spatial rezoning would separate people from their businesses and their neighbors. In the Shizugawa district of MinamiSanriku, for example, many people lived and worked in shophouses near the seashore. They were able to commute up and down stairs or walk to nearby shops, the shore, neighbors’ homes, or the local train station. As in much of Tōhoku, many of these people are over sixty-five years old. Minami-Sanriku’s recovery plans now designate separate zones for residences and businesses. Residential zones would be split into three neighborhoods on three hilltops separated by steep roads, which would potentially become icy in Tōhoku’s cold winters. Thus, older residents who may not drive or possess their own cars would be required to use (as yet nonexistent) public transport or else take up driving in order to visit friends, go shopping, or commute to work. Simply put, the Japanese doken kokka (construction state) is doubling down on its familiar policies and instruments of (re)development. Public works construction had helped to fuel Japan’s postwar “developmental

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state” (Johnson 1982). It was also used, without success, as a stimulus for reviving its moribund economy in the “lost decade” of the 1990s. By the middle of that decade, Japan spent more on public works construction as a portion of its annual budget than the United States spent on defense (McCormack 1995; cf. Kerr 2001). In absolute quantities, Japan poured as much concrete per year as the United States, in spite of having less than half the population of the United States and a smaller geographic footprint than the state of Montana (Kingston 2004). Now, the massive scale of Tōhoku’s reconstruction is seen as yet another stimulus toward broader economic revival. In short, large-scale, debt-financed public works construction is the state’s hammer-like solution, and from its perspective this problem, too, looks like a nail. In this view, re-covering is as much about covering up again the iniquities and vulnerabilities of the predisaster system as it is about bouncing back or regaining something that was lost. Guided by the logic of doubling down, the Japanese reconstruction state implicitly pursues the following postdisaster goals, in contrast to the re-mooring approach (cf. Olshansky 2002; Hilgartner 2007): 1. Reestablish hierarchies of control, social order, and citizens’ tacit consent to be governed. 2. Reestablish the predisaster status quo, vis-à-vis the metrics of legibility upon which the state relies (population, tax revenue, etc.). 3. Increase public safety against the type of hazard that has just struck— and only that hazard. 4. Exploit a postdisaster state of exception to double down on predisaster political, economic, and technical commitments. For example, neoliberal economic policies are likely to be broadened and reinforced, while practices and technologies of surveillance are likely to become even more panoptic. Planning and development objectives that may have been stalled prior to disaster are pursued to completion with renewed vigor (Edgington 2010). The instruments for accomplishing these goals are the same instruments upon which the state relied prior to the disastrous event. These include certain forms of discourse and rhetoric as well as objects within technical frames of reference readily operationalizable by experts and officials—e.g., budgets, benchmarks, and buildings. Less “legible” to the instruments of governance

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and to the technocrats who wield them are the social foundations of community: human relationships, emotional bonds to places, and the quotidian rhythms of daily life. What matters most to local residents is precisely what is systematically disregarded by the reconstruction state. The priorities of stateled recovery effectively appear to invert the priorities of local community-led recovery projects, which tend to favor a re-mooring approach.3

Reclamations, Resistance, and Re-mooring In the Shizugawa district of the tsunami-devastated town of MinamiSanriku, a group of residents led by a diminutive Shintō priestess is confronting the Japanese reconstruction state. Mayumi Kudō envisions a town that has recovered a long-lost sense of intimacy with nature and a local culture in which knowledge of nature—including tsunamis and how to escape them— is deeply ingrained and concretely invoked in rituals and daily practices. Although she doesn’t use the term “re-mooring,” her approach exemplifies the kinds of mutuality and critical reflection on pasts, present, and future entanglements of humans and nature that are fundamental to re-mooring. Kudō is not a mere Miko, or “shrine maiden”; she is a true priestess, a rarity in the ancient patriarchal religion of Shintō. She inherited her father’s shrine, which sits atop a ridge overlooking the lower Shizugawa district and the river for which it was named at a height of perhaps fifteen to twenty meters. From the orange-red torī gate outside the shrine, one could see the majority of the district, a compact bustling town sandwiched between two tree-lined ridges that gradually slope upward, away from the seashore below. When the earthquake struck on March 11, 2011, Kudō, her husband, and their four-year-old son ran up the slope of the ridge, toward the public school, in order to ensure their escape from the coming tsunami. They witnessed the tsunami literally wash away the town below, their ears assaulted by the strange roaring din of colossal currents, snapping cables, and boats, cars, and collapsing buildings all scraping against each other. After they returned to find their shrine unharmed, Kudō wrote and illustrated Tsunami no Ehon: Boku no Furusato (A Picturebook of the Tsunami: My Hometown), a children’s book telling the story of the tsunami from her son’s point of view. Since then, she has been active in recovery planning efforts within the town to the point that she has become recognized as a recovery planning expert in her own right.

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Kudō favors a recovery that provides for a Minami-Sanriku of realistic size (smaller than before) that lives in harmony with nature rather than trying to oppose it and keep it at bay: “We have to manage by ourselves, after all. We have to do something we can manage with a population of 10,000. So the solution has to be simple. Things should not be as they were before [the tsunami]. I believe that if we don’t rebuild our town using the power of nature, if that power doesn’t become a part of our town, then we simply won’t have the strength to rebuild.”4 One of Kudō’s projects is a plan to mark tsunami evacuation routes by planting rows of flowering camellia trees, which have a special place in local lore. Several prominent shrines and other locations with reputations as natural and spiritual power spots in the area are strongly associated with camellias. Kudō noticed that connecting these locations on a map resulted in a line drawn straight through her district and her own shrine, proceeding up the ridge. With fellow residents, officials, and planners, she began discussing the idea of planting rows of camellia trees that would lead people from low to high ground. Not only would this “natural” and “cultural” solution to disaster risk reduction be beautiful and appropriately embedded in traditional, local culture, but the practice of planting the trees would also function as a bonding, community-strengthening activity. Whereas official plans, drawn up by government planning agencies and vast general contracting firms, convert formerly inhabited zones of the town into dry park land separated from the sea by gargantuan seawalls, Kudō wants instead to return this area, “reclaimed” from the sea in recent decades, back into a natural tidal flat. Kudō suggests that if that land were returned to its previous state, birds and other wildlife, such as shallow-water shellfish, would also return. She notes that elderly residents still fondly recall playing by the seaside, gathering shellfish and watching the birds as one of the highlights of their youth. Thus, Kudō argues that it would be a boon for the community as a whole, perhaps especially for its children, if they were to embrace that bit of nature back into their village—even if it comes with some risk. Of the community’s support for her plan, Kudō says: “They do support it, but many people just don’t consider such ideas unless someone else says it first. When they are told, ‘we should return this area to the sea,’ they understand and sympathize. Then they remember that they used to swim there, naked. Fifty years ago they did. But then fifty years passed, and they forgot, and they started thinking about their town as if it had always existed in its current form.”5 Kudō attends as many recovery planning meetings in the

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town of Minami-Sanriku as she can. She has also organized machi-zukuri (community making) meetings for kids and young adults, facilitating their involvement in participatory recovery planning. Two points that she repeatedly emphasizes are, first, that even young children are quite capable of understanding and deliberating issues of disaster recovery and planning, and second, that because recovery planning is fundamentally about shaping the future of the community, it is critically important to include voices of the young in the process. Planners and engineers working for the Miyagi prefectural government have agreed to consider modifying some of their original plans according to Kudō’s requests, such as covering the seawalls with greenery or building low platforms and ladders into the high levees to be constructed along the Shizu River. The latter would allow children and others to fish in the river while also providing a place for ingress and egress in the unfortunate event that someone should fall into the currents; these platforms would be equipped with lifesaving floats and rods. Kudō’s plans are not unique in Tōhoku. Not far north of MinamiSanriku, for example, locals in the town of Rikuzen-Takata have independently proposed planting a line of camellia trees, albeit in that case to mark the maximum extent of the 2011 tsunami’s inundation. Such a line, symbolically and physically “drawn” with living trees, would serve as a reminder of the tragedy, a memorial to the town that was lost, while visually circumscribing the geographic zone of risk in any future tsunami of comparable magnitude. In a large earthquake, residents would be able to see the edges of the zone of relative safety, and they would know where to run. The grassroots recovery plans of Rikuzen-Takata and Kudō’s MinamiSanriku are grounded in local tradition and guided by imaginaries of a sustainably stable community that has been reoriented toward a harmonious relationship with the natural environment, in which the quotidian lives of residents become centered around pleasurable engagement with that environment as well as social relations with each other.6 Kudō reflects: “We were destroyed by the power of nature, so we should recover by the power of nature. . . . I feel that it makes sense to start [our recovery] from a single seed.”7 Contrary to official recovery plans, such imaginaries do not express any aspiration toward a future of urbanized rural repopulation enabled by the protection of coastal fortresses of concrete. Instead, they propose a path of critical reflection and mutual navigation toward a more modest settlement and a humbler relationship with nature.

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Without using the term “moyai-naoshi,” Kudō’s vision of postdisaster recovery is one of re-mooring community to nature; local heritage; inclusive and rewarding practices of quotidian life; fiscal, economic, and demographic stability; and the constitutive social relations of neighbor to neighbor. Moreover, while Kudō may act as a leader, facilitator, and instigator of local deliberation and planning processes, she presents her ideas to her neighbors for deliberation before any decisions are made or negotiations are pursued (e.g., with government officials). The process is thus predicated on mutuality of agency and communal identity and equally up on plurality of perspective.

Conclusion: Rethinking Priorities and Politics in Disastrous Times Because they have become unmoored, many communities that have suffered catastrophic disasters have intuitively turned to some version of remooring in their endeavors to recover from disaster. In each case, even as governing bodies double down on predisaster policies, people seem to react by soberly reassessing themselves and their relationships to their neighbors, their community, their heritage, and their imagined futures. It is as if the blow—whether from “nature” or “technology”—has awakened them: Who are we, really? What is truly important to us? Isn’t it high time we went back to what we always knew we really were? It is almost as if disaster survivors become sensitive to geological time scales, recognizing the Anthropocene for the recent outlier of a blip that it is: We only recently figured out how to use fire, how to write, how to build cities, and now we think that we can control the forces that power the stars? Just who do we think we are? Ultimately, regardless of official responses or nonresponses, communities unmoored by disaster often seem to pursue similar kinds of recovery (cf. Tidball et al. 2010): 1. Re-mooring to community (i.e., social relationships) 2. Re-mooring to nature 3. Re-mooring to more traditional roots of identity Thus, community-led disaster recovery endeavors typically prioritize different goals, processes, and values than state-led endeavors. Indeed, communityled disaster recovery endeavors seem to invoke distinct definitions of

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“recovery” itself, begging the question, what is “postdisaster recovery”? It may be useful to note that the verb “to recover” is often used intransitively in the postdisaster context (as in debates about how long it may take “to recover”), but using it transitively forces us to ask, what is to be recovered? Is “normalcy” that which is to be recovered? In that case, if “normalcy” is defined as a state as close to predisaster conditions as possible, then what were those conditions? By whom and by what means has knowledge about them been produced and institutionalized? What politics are implicated thereby? Which of those conditions matter most? To whom? Why? The concept of resilience is commonly expressed through a visual drawing of a line that drops sharply, representing the impact of a disaster, and then slowly curves back toward its previous level. If the objective is to “build back better” (cf. United Nations 2015), the line is shown ultimately rising higher than its original altitude. Such a representation works well for metrics such as population, percentage of people housed, tax revenue, etc. However, can such metrics function as adequate proxies for the lost things that residents and communities most fervently long to recover, such as “confidence in tradition, . . . the sureties that a culture is supposed to confer, [and] . . . the sense of the wholeness of things”? (Erikson 1994, 55). Leaving unexamined vague assumptions about what constitutes “postdisaster recovery” precludes the possibility of interrogating its politics and its downstream implications. It re-covers or covers up again political inequities and unevenly distributed vulnerabilities. For state-aligned technocrats doubling down on predisaster modalities, recovery may be a measurable objective—a set of specified, empirical milestones to be achieved at a certain cost by a certain deadline. But often for communities and individuals in the midst of recovery, it is not as much an objective or an end result as it is an ongoing process of re-mooring. It implicates “an economy of affect” (O’Keefe 2014); it involves seemingly wishy-washy intangibles such as the sense of community; relationships with friends, family, and neighbors; the grounding rhythms of quotidian life; a restored connection to nature; the sense of belonging to a particular time and place in a universe that remains ordered in a sensible way; and the conviction that it is not rash to hope for a brighter future. The perspective of people engaged in re-mooring is one of profound, collective self-reflection about what came before, who they are, and who they wish to be. If they have been unmoored from their sense of order and meaning in the world, they also have been unmoored from the political

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conventions and sociotechnical somnambulism of their previous existence: things no longer feel that they must be as they are simply because they have always been that way. Must the physical layout of the town remain as it was, or could it be improved? Must political institutions operate as they did, or could they be changed? Must policies be decided by the same people and procedures as before, or could more voices participate through more inclusive processes? Must one’s work and family and commercial activities be prioritized as they were, or could there be a more rewarding way of living? Merely by asking such fundamental questions, thinking about what was once unthinkable, people commit subversive political acts; they convert what may have been a passive subjectivity into an active citizenship. And they open spaces for more consequential political and sociotechnical transformation in their communities and the broader society at large. In the Anthropocene age, when the experiences of recovering from or preparing for disaster have become continuous, when human experience is constantly punctuated by technologically mediated rupture—from nature, from tradition, from other people—re-mooring seems a rational, appropriate, and perhaps essential response. The tendency of communities throughout Asia to pursue re-mooring as their approach to disaster recovery points to certain observations about the experience and the politics of living in the Anthropocene. Re-mooring represents an implicit critique of the norms and instruments with which the Anthropocene has been constructed. It is not necessarily an outright rejection of the priorities implicit in conventional techniques of government, including technological safety measures (e.g., levees, tsunami warning systems), statistical metrics of social well-being (e.g., rates of fertility, employment, or death), laws and regulations (e.g., legal measures to reduce taxes and regulatory burdens on new businesses in recovery zones), or capitalistic allocations of money, manpower, and land. However, it does indicate a recognition that such measures only indirectly index and influence what matters most in citizens’ lives, including the less tangible yet elemental stuff of human community itself. In contrast, remooring represents a back-to-basics approach for reconstituting human community, recentering it, and reorienting it with respect to nature. A community engaged in re-mooring seeks to include and parse all of its voices in a mutually negotiated process aimed at rethinking what truly matters, remembering heritage and identity, reevaluating knowledge and authority, and reenvisioning sociotechnical imaginaries. Thus, re-mooring represents

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a reordering of the priorities of contemporary human society in the Anthropocene and indicates a hunger for authentic relationships with human and nonhuman neighbors. In short, re-mooring is a communal, mutually constituted process of rethinking the relationships between humans and nature. Re-mooring entails critical, ethical reflection on disaster and the conditions (e.g., social, political, technological) that led to disaster and are exacerbated by disaster. It is a “technology of humility” (Jasanoff 2003), which is deployed toward the production of new futures based on principles of mutuality and critical reflection, a humane kind of “becoming.” Thus, re-mooring offers not only a particular approach to postdisaster recovery but also an alternative to notions of resilience that merely recapitulate stale sociotechnical imaginaries and reinforce existing power dynamics. Through re-mooring, communities interrogate the most fundamental assumptions of life in the Anthropocene, thereby mounting a quiet challenge to established regimes of governance and power and articulating a profound new vision of humanity in the world.

Notes 1. Superb anglophone accounts of Minamata’s experience can be found in, for example, Smith (1975), George (2001), and Walker (2010). 2. For example, the 2015 Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction favors the notion of “building back better.” 3. In recent years, Daniel Aldrich (2012), Etsuko Yasui (2007), Christian Dimmer (2014), and other scholars have persuasively argued for the importance of a community’s “social capital” in facilitating faster and more successful recovery from a disaster. Conceptually, social capital is complex, multifaceted, and difficult to measure. Aldrich makes arguably the most ambitious and rigorous attempt to operationalize the concept, which he describes as a combination of the connections among networks of people and the resources (money, goods, information, etc.) that flow across those networks. Aldrich bypasses discussing the affect or phenomenology of social relationships; yet their importance remains implicit in the notion of social capital. Social ties, after all, require work to forge and maintain; they raise not only capacities but also bodily felt stakes. Though gaining strategic access to resources may motivate the work of building such relationships in some circumstances, in many—perhaps most—others it is affect that animates this work: personal feelings for individuals and groups as well as the sense of community. 4. Mayumi Kudō, interview by author, February 2013. 5. Mayumi Kudō, interview by author, March 2013.

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6. Though local rather than national (as per Jasanoff and Kim 2009; Elinoff, this volume), these imaginaries are sociotechnical in that they necessarily implicate the social order and technological configurations of community, including physical infrastructure and the spatial arrangements of people, practices and the built environment. 7. Mayumi Kudō, interview by author, March 2013.

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CONTRIBUTORS

Nikolaj Blichfeldt is an external lecturer at the University of Copenhagen. His research on aging, gender, and climate change in China has been published in Chinese-Nordic Perspectives. Vivian Choi is an assistant professor of anthropology at St. Olaf’s College. Her research on disaster, nationalism, and war in Sri Lanka has been published in Cultural Anthropology. Eli Elinoff is a senior lecturer of cultural anthropology at Victoria University of Wellington. His research on urbanization, democracy, and the environment in Thailand has been published in Political and Legal Anthropology Review, the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Society, and City. Jenny Elaine Goldstein is an assistant professor of development sociology at Cornell University. Her research on palm oil, deforestation, and fires in Indonesia has been published in Geoforum, Environment and Planning A, and Environment and Society. Andrew Alan Johnson is a fellow in Southeast Asian studies at Cornell University. His research on urbanization, environmental change, and animism in Thailand has been published in Cultural Anthropology, American Ethnologist, and Hau. Samuel Kay received his PhD in geography from Ohio State University. He is currently conducting research on urban greening and dispossession in China. His previous research has been published in the Professional Geographer.

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Lukas Ley is a postdoctoral fellow in social anthropology at Heidelberg University. His research on climate change, sea-level rise, and infrastructure in Indonesia has been published in Environment and Planning C and Geoforum. Edmund Joo Vin Oh is an associate professor at ELM Graduate School at HELP University. He has published on fisheries, resource politics, and comanagement in Vietnam. Malini Sur is a senior research fellow at the University of Western Sydney’s Institute for Culture and Society. Her research on borderlands, infrastructures, and urbanization in India has been published in Comparative Studies in Society and History, Mobilities, the Economic and Political Weekly, and City. Tyson Vaughan is a sociologist with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Institute for Water Resources. He works on stakeholder collaboration and public engagement in flood risk management and community resilience. He received his PhD in Science and Technology Studies from Cornell University.

INDEX

activism: disasters as focal points, 7–9; Friends of the River, Thailand, 184; Kolkata cycling groups, 14, 65–68, 70–74, 77–79, 81; Komayu interest group, tidal floods in Indonesia, 51, 56–61; Minamata, Japan, 198–99; Shizugawa district, Minami-Sanriku, 203–8; spectacle as campaign practice, 164–68; against Thailand flood mitigation project (2012), 185–88; Under the Dome, air pollution in China, 36–37. See also Dongping Lane, Hangzhou, China adaptation behaviors: to air pollution in China, 25–26, 29–30, 31, 33–34, 37–41; to urban flooding, Indonesia, 46, 55; to urban flooding in Thailand, 182 Adey, Peter, 78 Adin, 51, 57, 60 advertising: of adaptation technology in China, 34, 37–38, 40; cycling advocacy in Kolkata, 78; Siam Cement Group (SCG), 177–81 aesthetic power, 180 agriculture: in Indonesia, 107–9; migrant labor, 116; palm oil plantations, 2, 12–13, 104, 108–9, 111–14; peat and forest fires, 102–3, 109–14; political economy and, 13, 107; swidden agriculture practices, 107–9, 113; in Thailand, precarity of, 142, 145, 148; Transboundary Haze Pollution Bill (2014) (Singapore), 114–15. See also Vietnam, fisheries co-management Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ), 32 air pasang (high tides), 47 air politics, 66–69 air pollution: atmospheric sovereignty, 31–37; in Beijing, China, 11, 25–41; blue

sky days, as metric, 32; defining of, 31–32, 42n3; governing the air in China, 33–37; haze, definition of, 105; health impact of, 25, 26–27, 30–31, 71–72, 77–80, 81n1; market-based solutions, 34–35; masks and filtration devices, 39–40; measuring and reporting of, 30–31; palm oil plantations, 2, 12–13, 104, 108–9; politics of, 66–69; size of pollutants, 26–27; spatializing of, 105–7; Transboundary Haze Pollution Bill (2014) (Singapore), 114–15; uneven adaptations to, China, 37–40; urbanization and, 27–31. See also Kolkata, India, urban cycling; Southeast Asian haze Air Quality Index (AQI): in Beijing, 33, 37, 38; in Kolkata, 40, 65, 80–81 Albrecht, Glenn, 200 All India Trinamool Congress, 70 alveoli, 26–27, 32, 117 Amman, Karuna, 90 animals: response to tsunami, 93–94, 98n6; tigers, displacement of, 186, 187 Anthropocene: defined, 4; ecological interconnectedness, 143–44, 150; as engineering problem, 180–81; knowledge, use and power, 9–12, 15, 41; priorities and politics of disasters, 78, 117, 208–11; Quotidian Anthropocene, 18–19; social responsibility questions, 59; speculative future landscapes, 175–78, 188–92; spiritual forces in, 150; technology mediated rupture, 210–11; use of term, 4, 20n3, 67–68. See also re-mooring (moyai-naoshi) Aphornsuvan, Thanet, 144 Apichart Anukularmphai, 186 Arief, 53–54

218 Arnold, David, 69 ASEAN. See Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Asia: disruption in, 7–9; historical context of, 5; as research site, 4–5; urban and industrial growth in, 5–7. See also specific country names Asian currency crisis (1997), 178 Asia Pacific Resources International Limited (APRIL), 113 Asia Pulp and Paper, 113 Association of Palm Oil Plantation Investors of Malaysia, 114 Association of Siamese Architects, 17, 181–82 Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), 102; Transboundary Haze Pollution Bill (2002), 105, 114–15 atmospheric governance (sovereignty), 26, 28–30; in Beijing, 31–37, 41; knowledge production and legitimization, 34–37; participants and strategies, 33–37, 41; reporting of air pollution data, 31 authoritarian communitarianism, 162 Ayutthaya 2050 plan, SHMA Designs, 182–85 banana ghosts, 146 Banerjee, Mamata, 70–71, 75 Banger River, 54–56; Komayu interest group, 56–61 Bangkok. See Thailand, 2011 floods Bangkok Wakes to Rain (2019) (Sudbanthad), 172, 173 Beijing, China: air pollution, 11, 25–41; governing the air, 33–37, 41; health effects of pollution, 25, 26–27; measuring air pollution, 26–27; reporting of air pollution data, 31; uneven adaptations to air pollution, 37–40; urbanization, effects of, 30–31 Beijing Environmental Protection Bureau (EPB), 33 Bến Tre Province, Vietnam, 122–24, 129, 131 bicycling. See Kolkata, India, urban cycling bioaccumulation, 197 Blichfeldt, Nicolaj, 15 blue sky days, 32 Bray, David, 162

Index breakwater systems, 48, 203 Brenner, Neil, 142 Brunei Darussalam, 103 Bubandt, Nils, 52, 148, 149–50 Buli witchcraft, 148, 149–50 Bunnag, Tew, 173 cadastral land maps, 110–11 Cambodia, 179 capital accumulation: carbon accounting and, 106; pulpwood and oil palm plantations, 113–14, 115; urbanization and, 6, 27, 142 capitalism: Asian currency crisis and dangers of capitalism, 179; as historical process, 4, 5, 19, 68, 150, 176; Capitalocene, 67–68; homo Capitali, 117; as hyperobject, 150; precarity and, 142–43, 144, 145–46, 148; re-mooring after disaster, 210; transnational economies, 106, 113–14, 115; urbanization and, 6, 15–16, 27, 142 Capitalocene, 68 carbon emissions: accounting for, 106; China, climate change mitigation programs, 155. See also low-carbon life, China activism Cargill, 113–14 cement, 177–81 Chai Jing, 36, 37, 41–42n2, 42n6 Chao Phraya River. See Thailand, 2011 floods charcoal, use of, 154–55 chemical regime of living, 26 China: Air Quality Index (AQI), 33, 37, 38, 40; climate change mitigation programs, 155; community building policy, 160–64; consumer revolution in, 165; eco-cities, 166; ecological modernization, narrative of, 35; environmental policies, 35–37; pollution in, 155; social credit systems, 166. See also Beijing, China; Dongping Lane, Hangzhou, China Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA), 32 Chisso, mercury poisoning by, 197–99, 200 Choi, Vivian, 14 cities. See urbanization citizen science, 10 civic science, 34–37

Index civilized community life, 161–62, 168–69. See also community life clam fisheries, 122–23 Clean Air Kolkata, 65–66 Clifford, James, 143 coastal communities: tidal flooding, overview of, 46–47. See also Semarang, Indonesia Collier, Stephen, 85 colonialism: historical processes, 4, 5, 19, 62; India, legacy of, 66, 68, 69, 70 co-management. See Vietnam, fisheries co-management community life: civilized community life, 161–62, 168–69; community building in China, 160–64, 168–69; disasters, social trauma of, 200–201; Japan, postdisaster recovery, 17–18; post-disaster recovery, state efforts, 201–5, 211n3; priorities and politics of disasters, 78, 117, 208–11; Quotidian Anthropocene, 18–19; Shizugawa district, Minami-Sanriku, 203–8; Tōhoku, Japan tsunami (2011), recovery efforts, 202–5; transformations in, 15–16. See also Dongping Lane, Hangzhou, China community making (machi-zukuri), 207–8 concrete: Siam Cement Group (SCG), 177–81; Thailand, post-flood landscapes, 16–17 crisis talk / thinking, 8 Crutzen, Paul, 67 cultural festivals, 57, 59 currency crisis (1997), 178 Curtain of Rain (2014) (Bunnag), 173 Cycle Samaj, Kolkata, 71–74, 78–79 cycling. See Kolkata, India, urban cycling daily life, transformations in, 15–16. See also community life Darby Bhd, 113–14 destruction of sense, 200–201 developmental aid in Vietnam, 125–27 Dinada. See Vietnam, fisheries co-management dipterocarps (takhian), 146 disaster, use of term, 143 disaster nationalism, 85–86 disasters: aestheticizing of, 184; characteristics of, Erikson on, 199–201; chronic

219 disaster, living with, 61–62; connections to everyday life, 156; economic forces as cause, 145–46; post-disaster recovery, state efforts, 201–5, 211n3; priorities and politics of disasters, 78, 117, 208–11; social response, failings of, 49 doken kokka (construction state), 203–4 Dongping Lane, Hangzhou, China: community governance, low-carbon life as, 160–64; kebabs, campaign against cooking, 154–55; low-carbon Golden Points, 158–59; Low-Carbon Household Standard, 160, 161, 165; as low-carbon model, 157–59, 168–69; outsiders to low-carbon campaign, 163–64; overview of community, 156–57; spectacle as campaign practice, 164–68 Dongtan Eco-City, 166 Doxiadis, Constantino, 176 dramaturgy, 53 drawing, speculative futures and, 177, 191–92 Duara, Prasenjit, 5 Durban, South Africa, 34 earthquake: animal responses to, 94–95; Edo, Japan, 141, 150; Okushiri, Japan 1993 tsunami, 202, 205; safety zones, marking of, 207; Sumatra, Indonesia 2004 tsunami, 83, 95–96 eco-cities, 35, 166 ecological modernization, 35 economic impact: Asian currency crisis (1997), 114, 178, 179; bicycle riding in Kolkata, 67, 70; boom and bust cycles, Thailand, 142, 148, 179; informal economy, 144–45, 147, 151n3; infrastructure spending, Japan, 202, 203–4; infrastructure spending, Thailand, 183; lost decade, Japan, 204; migrant labor, Thailand, 142–43, 145, 147–48; Thailand, 2011 floods, 173 Edo earthquake, 141 elephants, response to tsunami, 93–94 Elinoff, Eli, 16–17, 68 El Niño events, 103, 111–12, 118n10 emotions. See infrastructures of feeling Endo, Tamaki, 144–45 engineers, roles of, 176, 177, 180–81

220 environment: transterritorial harm, 13; urbanization, effects of, 6–7 environmental justice, distribution of risk and harm, 28 Environmental Protection Law (2015), China, 35–36 environmental subjects, 136 environment meister certification, 199 Erikson, Kai, 199–201 Everything in Its Path (1976) (Erikson), 200 fence-breaking, 127, 129, 131 ferroconcrete, 178 festivals, cultural, 57, 59 filtration devices, air pollution, 39–40 fires: forest fires, 102–3; palm oil plantations as source, 111–14; peat bogs, 1–2, 102–5; as tool in agriculture, 107–9. See also Southeast Asian haze fisheries. See Vietnam, fisheries co-management floodgates, 203 flooding: aestheticizing of, 184. See also Semarang, Indonesia; Thailand, 2011 floods forest fires, 102–3; as tool in agriculture, 107–9 Fortun, Kim, 188 Friends of the River, 184 Fuller, Buckminster, 176 genangan rob, 46–47 Ghosh, Amitav, 4 ghosts, tree spirits in Thailand, 146–49 Gilmore, Ruth Wilson, 87 Global Forest Watch, 113 Golden Agri-Resources, 113–14 Goldstein, Jenny, 12–13 governance, 12–15; atmospheric, 26, 28–30; carbon emissions, accounting for, 106–7; China, climate change mitigation programs, 155–56; China, social credit systems, 166; community building in China, 162; community governance, low-carbon life and, 160–64; environmental issues and limits of state, 14–15; fence-breaking, 127; fire prevention efforts, 108–9; haze from fires, responsibility for, 103, 104, 116–17; Kolkata, traffic regulations, 69–70, 72,

Index 76–77; manipulation of emotion, 87; peat fire detection and mapping, 110–14; peat fires, shifting blame for, 111–14; post-disaster recovery efforts, 201–5, 211n3; power-sharing arrangements, 121–22, 124–27; priorities and politics of disasters, 78, 117, 208–11; role in speculative future landscapes, 176–77; Transboundary Haze Pollution Bill (2014) (Singapore), 114–15; uncertainty, power relationships and, 129–31, 135; ways of knowing, 10–12. See also Dongping Lane, Hangzhou, China; Vietnam, fisheries co-management government: Komayu interest group work with, 56–61; tidal flooding, infrastructure projects, 50–54; Vietnam, levels of government in, 127–28 government with science, 33; knowledge production and legitimization, 34–37 Graham, Stephen, 68 gum-kino trees (pradu), 146–47 Haraway, Donna, 8 haze, definition of, 105. See also Southeast Asian haze health: air pollution, effect on, 25, 26–27, 30–31, 71–72, 77–80, 81n1; social inequality and, 29–30, 105; tidal flooding, effects of, 48 Heberer, Thomas, 162 Hicks, Natalie, 127 Hirsch, Eric, 189 Houston, Texas, 29 Hudson, Mark, 4 humankind: awareness of weather changes, 94–95; impact of activities on Earth, 67–68; interactions with landscapes, 188–91; role in disasters, 199–200; transformations in, 15–16. See also Anthropocene humor, as response to disaster, 83–84, 87, 88, 96 Hundred Flowers Campaign, 42n5 hyperobjects, 150 India. See Kolkata, India, urban cycling Indonesia: agriculture practices in, 107–9; cement industry, 179; palm oil plantations, 2, 12–13, 104, 108–9, 111–14;

Index Semarang, tidal flooding, 11–12; Transboundary Haze Pollution Bill (2014) (Singapore), 114–15; tropical peatlands, 103–4. See also Semarang, Indonesia informal economy (sethakit theuan), Thailand, 142–46 infrastructure: affective and material roles of, 86–87; air pollution, design decisions and, 11; Banger River project, 54–56; Bangkok flooding, impact on, 173–75; kampung infrastructure, life span extension, 50–54; Kolkata, bicycles and transportation, 69–70; Komayu interest group, 56–61; living with chronic disaster, 61–62; as promise of modernity and civilization, 62–63n4; riverbanks, risks and benefits of, 55–56; Shizugawa district, Minami-Sanriku, 203–8; SHMA Designs, Ayutthaya 2050 plan, 182–85; Siam Cement Group (SCG), Thailand infrastructure, 177–81; street elevation (peninggian), 53; Thailand, post-flood landscapes, 16–17; tidal flooding (rob), effects of, 46–47; tidal flooding (rob), prevention efforts, 48–50; tsunami defenses, Tōhoku, Japan, 202–3; urbanization and, 7. See also Sri Lanka infrastructure commoning, 50 infrastructure of awareness, 96–97 infrastructures of feeling, 14, 87–89, 94–98n4 Ingold, Tim, 189 Isan, Thailand, 141, 142–43, 145 Jadu Babu Bazar, 74, 76 Jaju, Ekta Kothari, 71–72 Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna, 97n1 Japan, 2; Edo earthquake, 141; Minamata, mercury poisoning in, 197–201; Model Environmental City designation, 198; Mount Ontake eruption (2014), 201; postdisaster recovery, 17–18; RikuzenTakata, 207; Shizugawa district, Minami-Sanriku, 203–8; Tōhoku tsunami (2011), recovery efforts, 202–5 Jasanoff, Sheila, 175–6, jimotogaku (local study), 199 Johnson, Andrew, 15, 178 Jones, Gavin, 6

221 Kalimantan, Indonesia, 13; agriculture practices in, 107–9; peat fire detection, 110–14. See also Southeast Asian haze Kamaishi Tsunami Protection Breakwater, 203 kampung infrastructure, 47, 50–54 Kanhaiya, 75–76 Karang Taruna, 47 Kay, Samuel, 11 Kemijen, 47, 52–54; Komayu interest group, 56–61; riverbank repair, 55–56 khwam theuan, 149, 151n1 Kipnis, Andrew, 162–63 knowledge: air pollution, atmospheric sovereignty, 26, 32–33; co-management as technical solution, 126–27; government with science, 33; haze episodes, discourse around, 116–17; indigenous knowledge, value of, 203; of Kolkata’s traffic regulations, 76–77; low-carbon life campaign tactics, 164–68; production and legitimization of, air quality example, 34–37; Siam Cement Group advertising message, 179–81; tidal flooding, daily decisions about, 49–50; ways of knowing, 9–12. See also scientific knowledge Kolkata, India, urban cycling, 13–14; activism around, 71–76; air politics, 66–69; air pollution and health, 71–72, 77–80, 81n1; Air Quality Index (AQI) data, 65–66, 80–81; cargo cyclist traffic, 66; Cycle Samaj, 71–74, 78–79; health benefits of cycling, 78–79; history of bicycling in, 69–70; migrant vs. activist cyclists, 67, 68–70, 74, 76–77; traffic regulations, 69–70 Kolkata Clean Air, 71–74 Komayu interest group, 56–61 Krung Nak, 172, 192n1 Kudō, Mayumi, 203–8 kuman, 147, 149, 151n7 Kumaratunga, Chandrika Bandaranaike, 84–85 Lakoff, Andrew, 85 Lambek, Michael, 160–61 land ownership, environmental responsibility and, 13 Landsat satellites, 110–11

222

Index

landscapes, conceptions of, 188–91 Lane, Dongping, 16 Laos, 179 Lek, 143, 145–51 Ley, Lukas, 11, 12 Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), 86, 90–93, 97n2 life expectancy, air pollution, effects of, 25, 26, 30–31, 40 liquid perception, defined, 182 longue duree, 87 low-carbon life, China activism: as community governance, 160–64; Dongping Lane as model community, 156–59, 168–69; kebabs, campaign against cooking, 154–55; Low-Carbon Household Standard, 160, 161, 165; outsiders to low-carbon campaign, 163–64; spectacle as campaign practice, 164–68; use of term, 157–58 LTTE. See Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) lungs (alveoli), 26–27, 32, 117

Minami-Sanriku, Japan: tsunami recovery, 203–8 Model Environmental City designation, Japan, 198 MODIS, 110–11 Moore, Jason, 68 moral engineering, 162, 163–64 mortality, effects of air pollution, 30–31 Morton, Timothy, 150 Mother Pradu, 147 Mother Tani, 147, 149, 150–51 Mount Ontake eruption (2014), 201 moyai-naoshi (re-mooring), 17–18; in Minamata, Japan, 197–99; post-disaster recovery, state efforts, 201–5, 211n3; priorities and politics, 78, 117, 208–11; Shizugawa district, Minami-Sanriku, 203–8; social trauma of communities, 199–201; Tōhoku tsunami (2011), recovery efforts, 202–5 Muehlebach, Andrea, 143 Murphy, Michelle, 25 Myanmar, 145, 179

machi-zukuri (community making), 207–8 Mae Wong Dam, 186, 187 Malay Peninsula. See Southeast Asian haze Malaysia, 103, 113–14 Manoj, 77, 79–80 Mao Zedong, 31 Marine Stewardship Council (MSC), 122 market-based solutions, for air pollution, 34–40 Marks, Danny, 183 Masco, Joseph, 87 masks, for air pollution, 39–40 media: cycling advocacy in Kolkata, 78; marketing of adaptation technology in China, 34, 37–38, 40; Siam Cement Group (SCG) advertising, 177–81 mercury poisoning: Minamata, Japan, 197–99, 200; Ojibwas of Grassy Narrows, 200–201 methodological cityism, 27 migrant workers, Thailand, 143–46, 148–49 Minamata, Japan: mercury poisoning in, 197–99; social trauma in, 200–201 Minamata Disease Museum, 198

Namazu, 141 National Aeronautics an Space Administration (NASA), 110 nation building, 162–63 nature: Anthropocene and changing state of nature, 12, 67–68; changing relationships with, 121–22, 137, 198; flooding as nature reclaiming human-made land, 51; management of, Thailand, 175, 177, 181, 184–85, 187, 188; paying rent to, 51–52, 55, 62; re-mooring with, 197–99, 202–11; unmoored communities, 199–201 nature-blaming, 59, 62 naturecultures, 175, 177, 181, 188 nature spirits, 142–43, 144 Nga, Trần Thị Thu, 123–24, 131 non-governmental organizations (NGOs): China, environmental policy, 31, 33, 35–36; China, low-carbon life initiatives, 157–58; Clean Air Kolkata, 65–66, 68; peat fire monitoring, 104, 113; SWITCH ON, 71–74, 78 Noparatnaraporn, Cattaleeya, 189 normalcy, defining of, 209 norms: citizen reproduction of, 6, 34; disaster and disruption, normalization

Index of, 7–8, 11, 26, 33–34, 105, 116, 117, 196; drawing as tool of speculation, 177; low-carbon lifestyle, promotion of, 160, 165, 168; re-mooring and, 18, 196–97, 199, 210 Nui, 147, 148 Nura (Tambak Rejo resident), 48–50 Oakes, Tim, 5 Oh, Edmund, 12, 14 Ojibwa of Grassy Narrows, 200–201 Okushiri, Japan, 202 Ontake (Japanese volcano), 201 ontological experiments, 189–90 palm oil plantations, 2, 12–13, 104, 108–9, 111–14; Transboundary Haze Pollution Bill (2014) (Singapore), 114–15 Pan Shiyi, 41–42n2 particulate matter (PM), 26–27, 104; peat fires, characteristics of, 109–10; spacializing air pollution, 105–7. See also Southeast Asian haze peat bog fires, 1–2, 12–13; detection and mapping of, 109–14; Southeast Asian haze, overview of, 102–5, 116–17 peninggian (elevation) of streets, 53 people-making projects, 161–64. See also community life place-making projects, 161–64. See also community life plantation agriculture, 2, 12–13, 104, 111–14; Transboundary Haze Pollution Bill (2014) (Singapore), 114–15 polder systems, 48, 57, 60 political economy: agriculture development, 13, 103, 107, 116; of air pollution in China, 16; Thai space, conceptions of, 189–90; transboundary air pollution, 106 political problems: framing as technical problems, 180–81; priorities and politics of disasters, 78, 117, 208–11; Thailand flood mitigation project (2012), 185–88 pollution: in China, 155; knowledge about, distribution of, 11, 32–33; mercury poisoning, 197–201; social inequality and, 27–29; state narratives about, 31–34, 37–38; transterritorial environmental responsibility, 13. See also air pollution

223 pompanisasi (local hydrological schemes), 54, 55–56 powers of freedom, 136 Prabhakaran, Villupillai, 90 Prahlad, 76 precarity: of migrant workers in Thailand, 142–46, 148–49; use of term, 144 public policy: China, environmental policies, 35–37; China, indoor air quality efforts, 29–30, 41; China, low-carbon model communities, 155, 156, 158, 160–62; community engagement in, 125–26; disaster recovery, state role in, 201–5, 208–11; economic policy, effects of, 114; fence-breaking, 128, 129; inequality and, 29–30, 41; information limits for policymakers, Asian haze, 104–5, 109; knowledge production and legitimization, 34–37, 41; local policy entrepreneurs, 14, 124, 129, 131, 136; normalizing disaster with, 116–17; Sri Lanka, disaster management policy, 85; stakeholders, controlling of, 187–88; SWITCH ON sustainability summit, 78–79; Transboundary Haze Pollution Bill, 114–15; uncertainty as form of government control, 130–31, 136; Vietnam, co-management as policy innovation, 124–37; Vietnam, government power structure, 127–29–130 Quotidian Anthropocene, defined, 18–19 Rajapakse, Mahinda, 93 Rạng Đông Fisheries Cooperative, 123 reconstruction state, 201, 204. See also doken kokka re-mooring (moyai-naoshi): 16–9; in an age of rupture, 196–97; disaster recovery, state efforts, 201–5, 211n3; priorities and politics, 78, 117, 208–11; Shizugawa district, Minami-Sanriku, 203–8; social trauma of communities, 199–201; Tōhoku tsunami (2011), recovery efforts, 202–5 rendering technical, 10, 126 resilience, 18, 88, 182, 196, 201–2, 209. See also re-mooring resource governance. See governance; Vietnam, fisheries co-management

224 responsibilization, 160 rezeki (fortune and livelihood), 52 Rikuzen-Takata, Japan, 207 risk: air pollution, health risks of, 27, 79–80; of Anthropocene framing, 18; disaster risk management, 85; environmental justice and inequality, 28–30; global risk issues, challenge of, 106; indigenous knowledge of, 203, 206, 207; infrastructures of feeling, 14; Kolkata, urban cycling, 79–80; peat fires, 109–10; perceptions and adaptations to, 29–30, 41, 49–50; precarity in Thailand, 143, 144, 145, 149; public perception of, 28–30; Semarang riverbanks, risks and benefits of, 11, 49–50, 54–56; Sri Lanka, Disaster Management Act No. 13, 84–85; Thailand flood mitigation plans, risks of, 185–88, 191; tidal flooding, daily decisions about, 49–50; urban expansion in Asia, precarity and risk, 6–7, 9 riverbanks, risks and benefits of, 55–56 rob (tidal flooding), 1, 11–12; defined, 46; economic impact of, 51–52; effect on infrastructure, 46–47; living with chronic disaster, 61–62. See also Semarang, Indonesia Rosati, Clayton, 87 Rose, Nikolas, 136, 160 Sarkar, Shamik, 80 SCAFI (Strengthening of Capture Fisheries Management), 122–24 SCG. See Siam Cement Group (SCG) Schmid, Christian, 142 scientific knowledge: of animal response to disasters, 94, 98n6; Chinese state sanctioned knowledge, 32–37, 41; civic science, 34; of fire and haze, 109–11, 112, 116, 118n5; framing political problems as technical, 180–81; government with science, 33, 35, 37, 41; Kolkata cycling activism, 78–80; mobilizing language of, 71–72, 74, 77–80; sociotechnical imaginaries, 175–76, 181; ways of knowing, 9–12. See also knowledge seawalls, 202–3 Semarang, Indonesia, 1, 11–12, 46–63; Banger River project, 54–56; economic impact of flooding, 51–52; extending life

Index span of kampung infrastructure, 50–54; flooding prevention efforts, 48–50, 52–54; Komayu interest group, 56–61; living with chronic disaster, 61–62; riverbanks, risks and benefits of, 55–56; tidal flooding (rob), overview of, 46–47 sensory knowledge, ways of knowing, 10–12 Shamik, 80–81 Shinawatra, Yingluck, 145 Shizugawa district, Minami-Sanriku, 203 SHMA Designs, Ayutthaya 2050 plan, 182–85 Siam Cement Group (SCG), 17, 177–81 Simone, AbdouMaliq, 49–50, 97n3 Singapore, 2, 103; oil palm plantation investments, 113–14; Transboundary Haze Pollution Bill (2014), 105, 114–15. See also Southeast Asian haze Sobooj Sathi (Green Companion), 75 social audit, 59–60 social credit systems, China, 166 social inequality: air pollution, uneven adaptations to, 37–40; health status and, 29–30 Socialist Unity Centre of India (SUCI), 74 social media, air pollution reports on, 32–33 social responses, to rob events, 49 sociotechnical imaginaries, 175, 188–91, 210–11 solar eclipse, 95–96 solastalgia, 200–201 solid perception, defined, 182 South Africa, air pollution in, 34 Southeast Asian haze: fire prevention efforts, 108–9; haze, definition of, 105; overview of, 102–5, 116–17; peat fire detection and mapping, 109–14; shifting blame for, 111–14; social inequality and impact of pollution, 105; spacializing air pollution, 105–7; Transboundary Haze Pollution Bill (2014) (Singapore), 105, 114–15 spatial mapping technology, 104 spiritual forces: Buli witchcraft, 148, 149–50; environmental and economic uncertainty and, 149–51; Shizugawa district, Minami-Sanriku, 203–8; tree

Index spirits, Thailand, 146–49. See also Thailand, urban transformation Sri Lanka, 83–98; Disaster Management Act No. 13, 84–85; Disaster Management Center, 85; highway A-4, 90–91; human awareness of weather, 94–95; infrastructure of awareness, 96–97; no-build buffer zone, 91; solar eclipse, response to, 95–96; terrorism, response to, 86, 89–90, 93, 97n1; tsunami early warning systems, 96; tsunami recovery in, 14; war infrastructures, 89–93 State of Global Air report (Health Effects Institute), 77–78 state power. See governance; government Stoermer, Eugene, 67 Strait of Malacca, 2 Strang, Veronica, 50 Strengthening of Capture Fisheries Management (SCAFI), 122–24 structures of feeling, 87, 97–98n4 Sudbanthad, Pitchaya, 172 Sumatra: peat fire detection, 110–14; tropical peatlands, 103–4. See also Southeast Asian haze superstition, 87 supply chain disruption, 173 Sur, Malini, 13–14 sustainable development, 35 swidden agriculture practices, 107–9, 113 SWITCH ON, 71–74, 78 talut (embankment), 55–56 Tambak Lorok, 47 Tambak Rejo, 47 Tamil New Tigers, 89–90 Tamils in Sri Lanka, 89–93 tanah uruk, 52–53 tani tree, 146 Tanjung Mas, 47 technology: engineers, roles of, 176, 177; peat fire detection and mapping, 109–14; priorities and politics of disasters, 210–11; Siam Cement Group advertising message, 179–81; ways of knowing, 9–12; world management, 176–77 technology of humility, 211 technoscientific solutions: air pollution and, 26; framing political problems as technical, 180–81; knowledge

225 production and legitimization, 34–37, 41. See also scientific knowledge terrorism, Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), 86, 90–93 Texas, Houston, 29 Thailand, 2; animism and urbanization, 15–16; post-flood landscapes, 16–17; Thainess and nature, relationship of, 184–85 Thailand, 2011 floods: economic cost of, 173; flood mitigation project (2012), 185–88; impact on infrastructure, 173–75; landscapes, conceptions of, 188–91; military takeover, resumption of projects, 190–91; overview of, 172–75, 191–92; SHMA Designs, Ayutthaya 2050 plan, 182–85; Siam Cement Group (SCG), concrete imaginaries, 177–81; speculative future landscapes, 175–77, 188–91; Thailand, post-flood landscapes, 16–17; Thailand flood mitigation project (2012), 185–88; Water / Brick conference, 181–85 Thailand, urban transformation: boom and bust economic cycles, 142–44; environmental and economic uncertainty, spirituality and, 149–51; informal (wild) economy, 142, 144–46; Lek, accident and spirit forces, 146–49; migrant workers, precarity of, 142–43, 148–49; overview of, 142–44; types of disasters in, 148–49 Thai Water Resource Association, 185–88 theuan, 144, 149 Tianjin Eco-City, 166 tidal flooding, 1; damage from, 46; economic impact of, 51–52; health effects, 48; living with chronic disaster, 61–62; polder systems, 57; prevention efforts, 48–50. See also Semarang, Indonesia tigers, displacement of, 186, 187 Tōhoku, Japan tsunami (2011), recovery efforts, 202–5 Tomba, Luigi, 160, 164 toxins, 199–200. See also Minamata, Japan Trakulhoon, Kan, 179 transboundary air pollution, 105–7 Transboundary Haze Pollution Bill (2014) (Singapore), 105, 114–15

226 transportation. See Kolkata, India, urban cycling transterritorial issues, 13; air pollution, 106–7 trauma, social trauma, 17, 143, 199–201 tree spirits, 146–49 Trinamool Congress, 74 tsunami: animal responses to, 93–94, 98n6; early warning systems, 85, 96; MinamiSanriku recovery efforts, 203–8; Sri Lanka, 14; Sumatra, Indonesia earthquake, 83; Tōhoku, Japan (2011), recovery efforts, 202–5. See also Sri Lanka Twitter, air pollution reports on, 32–33 Under the Dome (Jing) (2015), 36, 37, 41–42n2, 42n6 urban cycling. See Kolkata, India, urban cycling urbanization: air politics and, 68–69; air pollution and, 27–30; air quality, different experiences of, 78; in Asia, 5–7; Beijing, effects of, 30–31; community building in China, 160–64; community life, transformations in, 15–16; framing of problems caused by, 180–81; mutations of everyday life, 142. See also Thailand, 2011 floods; Thailand, urban transformation urban political ecology, 28 U.S. State Department, 32–33

Index Vaughan, Tyson, 16–18, 68, 191 Victoria Memorial, 65–66 Vietnam: co-management, growth of, 136–37; nature and the state, 12; state and local management of fisheries, 14 Vietnam, fisheries co-management: Bến Tre Province, Vietnam, 122–24; co-management as policy innovation, 128–29; co-management as technical development intervention, 124–27; government, levels of power in, 127–28; overview of, 14, 121–24, 135–37; role of state, rethinking of, 131–35; uncertainty, power relationships and, 129–31, 135 Wahyu, 57–58, 60–61 Water/Brick architectural exhibit, 17 Water Brick conference, 181–82 ways of knowing. See knowledge wetlands, importance of, 51 Williams, Raymond, 87, 97–98n4 Wilmar International, 113–14 witchcraft, Buli, 148, 149–50 world management, 176 World Wildlife Fund, 113 Yala National Park, 93–94 Yoshii, Masazumi, 198–99 Zhu, community activist, 154–55

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book originated with a workshop—The Quotidian Anthropocene: Reconfiguring Environments in Urbanizing Asia—held at the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore in late 2014. The workshop provided two days of intellectually generative exchange and debate about Asia’s changing environments in the context of mass urbanization. We gathered an excellent group of scholars from within Asia and beyond. Though not all of the original scholars from that event appear in this volume, we are grateful to Ali Nobel Ahmad, Sara Fuller, Danny Marks, Tetsu Sato, and Esha Shah, whose scholarship and insights deeply shaped our own thinking. Kim Fortun offered a provocative keynote at the workshop and sustained an incredibly generative intellectual engagement with us throughout the publication process. The original workshop was funded by grants from the Asia Research Institute and received incredible administrative support from its staff, which is among the most professional and organized academic support groups in the world. Thank you to Noorhayati Binti Hamsan, K Kalaichelvi C Krishnan, Henry Kwan, Minghua Tay, Kristy Won, and Valerie Yeo. We are grateful to Saharah Abubakara for her research support. Finally, we are also grateful to Prasenjit Duara for supporting the event. This book benefited from financial support from the Marsden Fund Council from Government funding, managed by Royal Society Te Apārang and a Singapore Ministry of Education Academic Research Fund Tier 2 grant titled “Governing Compound Disasters in Urbanising Asia” (MOE2014T2-1-017). More than this financial support, the book was enlivened by the discussions spearheaded by collaborators on the Disaster Governance project including Sulfikar Amir, Caroline Brassard, Christopher Courtney, Jocelyn Chan Hui Shan, Erik Kerr, Lisa Onaga, Rita Padawangi, Jonathan Rigg, Yi Fangxin, Robert Wasson, Fiona Williamson, and Jerome Whitington, We are also grateful to the project’s research assistant, Marcel Bandur,

228

Acknowledgments

for his help. Thanks to Sarah Starkweather, who provided an early copy edit of this manuscript. We are especially grateful to Greg Clancey, co–principal coordinator of this grant, for his intellectual engagement with this work. Two people at the Asia Research Institute deserve specific mention for their support of this project: Mike Douglass and Michelle Miller. Mike, also a co–principal coordinator on the Disaster Governance project, encouraged this project from its inception, immediately recognizing the value of the Quotidian Anthropocene framing. He offered us space to write and think, and he challenged our ideas at key moments. He also provided an exemplar of how to be a scholar who speaks across multiple fields and audience. Michelle Miller has been a tremendous collaborator throughout this project. She offered not only critical and insightful readings of our work but also deep intellectual fellowship along the way. Her organizational and conceptual work on the Disaster Governance project provided key reference points as we began our own thinking about the nexus of disaster, urbanization, and environmental change in Asia. Although this project has taken quite a long time to come to fruition, Bob Lockhart, our editor at Penn Press, has been patient and supportive, offering important advice on reframing our ideas. We are also very grateful to Scott Knowles and Kim Fortun, the editors of the Penn Press series Critical Studies in Risk and Disaster. They not only helped us think through the ideas articulated herein but also offered support and guidance as we navigated the lengthy publication process. They have energetically championed the idea of the Quotidian Anthropocene, promulgating it to a new community of scholars and applying it beyond Asia to new locales. Beyond scholarly workshops, they have mobilized this concept to ground engagements and interventions in communities that are actively grappling with the consequences of living in these disastrous times. While this book was enduring a prolonged gestation process, Kim and Scott transformed the work of the original workshop into a sustained and vital intellectual—and unabashedly political and moral—project. For this we express our profound gratitude. Finally, we are deeply grateful to our spouses, Ashley Elinoff and Michiyo Vaughan, for their tireless support and understanding as we shepherded this volume through multiple national and international moves and several professional transitions between the both of us. Without their encouragement, this book would never have seen the light of day.