Hot Science, High Water: Assembling Nature, Society and Environmental Policy in Contemporary Vietnam by Eren Zink (review)

Eren Zink’s Hot Science, High Water examines a range of scientific and development projects in contemporary Vietnam, focusing in particular on “what it means to be a scientist and to do science” (vii). Based on one year of fieldwork and mostly English-language published sources, Hot Science applies an STS framework to analyze various disciplines supposedly related to development projects including agriculture, aquaculture, and nature conservation. Hot Science challenges dichotomies such as local/global, Vietnamese/foreign, and science/politics by showing that such dichotomies more aptly describe the framing of these projects than the targets of their interventions. In this way, the book offers a corrective to commonly held conceptions of how science and development currently intertwine in non-Western countries that receive foreign aid.

The title of the book suggests that Zink will devote substantial space to the issue of climate change, and Hot Science does analyze how attempts to commodify carbon dioxide work on the ground. It also shows that “climate change has become an issue that ministries, research institutes, universities, and local and international NGOs are scrambling to address through development programs, national policies and scientific studies” (125). In this way, Hot Science offers an important case study of climate change debates in a developing country. Zink wrote Hot Science relatively quickly, however, and this has led to uneven coverage. The book tacks back and forth between a study of Vietnamese scientists (four of eight chapters) and a study of climate science (only two chapters, not counting the introduction and conclusion). These topics are mostly complementary, but at times this bifurcation results in less satisfying discussions. Furthermore, the anthropologist Zink admirably attempts “to integrate history into the explanation of science, society and nature in Vietnam” (236). Unfortunately, Zink’s rather wooden historical analysis contrasts unfavorably with his lively, nuanced, and detailed portrayal of contemporary Vietnam. I will start with the book’s contributions and then move to its drawbacks.

The first contribution of Hot Science is its delineation of authority and authorship and the role of “slippery spaces” in contemporary science. These spaces of misrecognition open up as scientists, funding organization officers, government officials, and others attempt to establish equivalencies and exchange rates while doing science. Slippery spaces are created when neither funding agencies such as the International Foundation for Science, which Zink has worked for, nor scientists want to account too closely for the ways they channel resources to others and to themselves. These slippery spaces can induce the redirection of funds away from scientific knowledge production toward other goals in a process often defined as “corruption.” But rather than lament this “corruption,” Zink argues that it provides essential room for scientists and donor agencies to act and pursue their own ends. He claims that “elements of human sociality are oftentimes themselves the intended ends of the projects. They are the point of the matter, and not only the context” (233). In other words, science funding produces a number of cultural, social, and political outcomes just as important as any scientific knowledge listed as the official goal of funding.

Zink also has a sharp eye for irony, and in chapter 3, “Science Economies,” he provides a hilarious yet not unkind description of a Vietnamese scientist attempting to service his intellectual debt to his Japanese doctoral adviser referred to as “Sensei” (63–71). At Sensei’s behest, Dr. Hang organized a research trip to the shrimp ponds of the south-central coastal region of Vietnam for a motley crew composed of Vietnamese scientists, an Indian postdoctoral student, Japanese master’s students, and Zink. Linguistic misunderstandings resulted in premature lunches, potentially ruined livelihoods, and complete puzzlement regarding Sensei’s scientific reasoning (69). In addition, when the scientific article (in English) appeared in a peer-reviewed international journal, no mention was made of the essential work of the Vietnamese scientists and shrimp farmers who allowed Sensei and his team access...