Anthropogenic Rivers

Whitington's book analyses a period of unprecedented hydropower development during which the country effectively doubled its major dams. The book is daunting in its complexity, but it essentially con- ceptualises the administration of water from its practices * Australian Book Review * Bursting with insights about dams as an ecological response in the contemporary moment, Anthropogenic Rivers will be required reading for environmental anthropologists, historians, sociologists, and science and technology studies scholars with an interest in enviro-technical landscapes. This book also adds to the burgeoning literature on rivers and waters in Asia tackling what it means to do environmental scholarship in late industrial and post-socialist landscapes in the global South. Finally, this book breaks fresh ground in ethnography of the statist development by rethinking how we define expertise and uncertainty. Every reader will come away from the book to look at rivers and dammed waterscapes with a new lens. * H-Net * Through the ethnographic study of an unusual, experimental collaboration between a hydropower company constructing dams in Laos and a transnational activist group, Whitington's Anthropogenic Rivers examines the purposeful production of uncertainty as a strategic political ontology and as a form of knowledge. Anthropogenic Rivers is an exciting contribution to the study of uncertainty and a slightly rebel addition to the by now well established subgenre of analyses of the Anthropocene. * Anthropos *