Negotiating Life in the Shadow of the Dam: Rhythmic Livelihoods in the Agno River Basin, Philippines

This article explores how river-reliant peoples negotiate the enduring socioecological disruptions caused by the afterlife of large-scale dam infrastructures. We examine how smallholders along the Agno River in the Philippines have repeatedly adjusted their livelihoods in response to the San Roque Multi-Purpose Dam’s reordering of hydrological regimes and agrarian ecologies. For the Philippine government, the dam’s completion marked a defining moment in the pursuit of hydraulic modernity. Yet for local communities, its lingering impacts continued to shape possibilities for making a living, transforming three livelihood practices connected by the river’s hydrological pulses: rice farming, riverine fishing, and gold panning. Drawing on ethnographic research in the riparian villages along the Agno River, we trace how households negotiate the loss, persistence, and reconstruction of livelihoods in dam-affected ecologies. Our analysis extends the concept of infrastructural afterlives by showing that a dam’s legacy persists not only as material ruins but also in the ongoing rhythms that reorganize everyday livelihood practices long after construction ends. We introduce the concept of rhythmic livelihoods to capture how making a living in dam-altered riverscapes involves temporal, spatial, and material negotiations with shifting river flows, sediment dynamics, and controlled water releases.