Natural Potency and Political Power: Forests and State Authority in Contemporary Laos by Sarinda Singh (review)

Can Animals Mediate Neo-liberalism?

It comes as no surprise to many that developing-country settings often display a major gap between formal government policies and the actuality of governing. In the case of Laos, as Sarinda Singh illustrates in her recently published village ethnography of forest- resource politics, the extreme bifurcation between policy and practice is a central theme for important new research on Lao political practice. The split is the effect of, on the one hand, impossible demands for coherent environmental policy on the part of international donors and, on the other, the profound social contradictions generated by several decades of intensive transnational resource extraction. “[F]ew people take [forest] policy as a guide for practice”, writes Singh (p. 131), in a passage that describes how the obvious fabrication of statistics can serve to ward off criticism. Rather, optimistic policy assertions function as warnings: “Forest decline is not to be linked to the state” (p. 131). Her book is about how those links are made explicit in spite of official optimism.

Singh’s anthropological contribution to the political ecology of Lao resource extraction is an important step in the study of the country’s resource regimes, and in orienting a new generation of critical scholars of Lao political ecology. Particularly welcome is Singh’s sustained effort to think about the form of the Lao state, as she does with respect to three processes: “the policy-practice divide, patronage politics, and practices that rely on and perpetuate secrecy, fear and uncertainty” (p. 7). By 2004, the time of Singh’s fieldwork on the Nakai Plateau in central Laos, the area’s wealth had been systematically plundered by monopolistic military logging enterprises, wildlife depletion made easy by the porous border with Vietnam, and the planned Nam Theun 2 hydropower facility, which had provided almost a decade of anticipated prosperity and demise. This was plenty of time to work out the details of localized control over remaining resources and the hegemony required to hold that control in place. In this sense, Singh’s ethnography of decline is an ethnography of what is left after liberalization.

One might say the book’s primary question is, “what is the legitimacy of the Lao state in the context of its having presided over the systematic decline of the country’s natural wealth?” Its answer is roughly: the state’s hegemony is secured through a combination of rigorous intimidation of villagers’ knowledge and suppression of their expertise, the perpetual promise of prosperity, and the symbolic importance of animals and forests. Her contribution rests on its attention to the sociocultural symbolic importance of specific animals, whereby the decline of forests and wildlife consistently pose a symbolic critique of state legitimacy and therefore form a political resource that political elites literally have no control over. Villagers are left hunting field rats while watching thousand-dollar trees head to Vietnam by the truckload, but more importantly, the symbolism of animals and trees calls state legitimacy into question.

The structure of Singh’s argument about legitimacy is built across the five core chapters. To simplify in broad brushstrokes, the chapter on conservation sets up the limits on what can be discussed, limits defined by blaming international conservation groups for stifling development. The subsequent two chapters on wildlife then establish the symbolic resources for debate, and the last two chapters, both concerning forests, explore how the struggles over hegemony play out.

In that resource conservation is the excluded term, discursive hegemony is established by powerful actors shouting down any suggestion that conservation might be important. Singh describes the way in which serious conversation about environmental effects of the planned hydropower dam “ended rather abruptly when one young woman — the daughter of a wealthy businessman — emphatically asserted, ‘We must do NT2, people are poor, your country is already prosperous and Lao people want the same!’” (p. 121). In addition to this kind...