Time and the River: Temporal and Material Flows and the Potency of Life on the Mekong

Time and the River: Temporal and Material Flows and the Potency of Life on the Mekong

ABSTRACT
Dams suggest progress – they are a way of arresting the flow of water (and that which it contains) to convert its potential energy into something useable. But in so doing, dams reconfigure the multiple lives and non-lives within which riparian residents live. But this is a transformation, not simply an erasure: as multiple scholars have shown, modernity gives rise to new magics, and new ways of being. This lecture explores these new ways of negotiating power and potency on a changed river, asking what new horizons open as old ones close, and exploring how these new potentials disturb webs of being and dwelling on the river.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Andrew Alan Johnson is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Ashoka University. He is the author of Mekong Dreaming: Life and Death along a Changing River (Duke University Press, 2022) and Ghosts of the New City: Spirits, Urbanity and the Ruins of Progress in Urban Northern Thailand (University of Hawaii Press, 2014).

ORGANIZERS
-ASIAR Research Cluster, HKIHSS, under the CRF Project “Infrastructures of Faith: Religious Mobilities on the Belt and Road [BRINFAITH]” (RGC CRF HKU C7052-18G)
-NYU Shanghai Centre for Global Asia