The Divine Fish in the Unraveling Net: Riparian Futures and Ontological Collapse on the Mekong

On the Mekong, where hydropower and hybrid species have altered the river’s ecology, new sources of potential arise. As the yearly rise and fall of the river is punctuated by sporadic floods and ebbs depending on hydropower generation needs, fish and other species find their spawning and feeding cycles dramatically altered. In turn, they are replaced with new, hybrid species. In the social and religious realms, this material change gives rise to new spirits, and new networks of human and nonhuman forces. While many from the region turn to cash crops or migrant labor, others seek to make new connections by fishing this changed landscape. Through making kin with the new, monstrous river and its new denizens, through tying a new social net as old fishing nets fail, fishermen on the river reach toward new ways of belonging in altered social, ecological, and ontological worlds.