Social Science Research Council

"Orienting the Resource Landscape: Institutionalized Mapping and Upland Development in Laos"

My research uses two forms of resource stabilization—land use planning and infrastructure building—as a stage on which to investigate the transformation of Laos from landlocked periphery to “land-linked” center. Regional markets in hydroelectricity and agro-forest commodities have stimulated investment in new forms of connectivity between Laos and its neighbors. Focusing on the production of electricity in central Laos and agricultural and forest commodities in northern Laos, I am investigating how the institutions charged with what Polanyi called the protective side of capitalism’s double movement put their socio-environmental mandates into practice, and how this politics of mitigation ties into state-driven attempts to use a resource-rich landscape as an economic motor for nation-building.

My approach is to “follow the maps” through archival, interview and ethnographic methods. Map-based planning has emerged as an integral component of efforts to predict, understand and mitigate the negative impacts of new infrastructure—in my case, an interbasin hydropower project and a new highway between Thailand and China—on local communities. As mapping practitioners operationalize what it means to be “close” to infrastructure, “sustainable” and “relevant,” they provide a technical/safe opening to investigate a range of more controversial and difficult topics.

The contemporary moment of export-oriented natural resource capitalism owes much to the decades of war that decimated Laos’ human resources, and created the socio-institutional bases for capitalizing on Laos’ natural wealth of forestry, hydropower and agricultural potential. As I attempt negotiate the difficulties of working in Laos as an American interested in the past, I hope to put development in the critical perspective of the longue durée without treating the future as overdetermined. I see the cartographic production of resource landscapes as a good place to begin my efforts because such maps render the knowledge of the past into the development options of the present.