H-Net Review Publication: Kantor on Biggs, 'Quagmire: Nation-Building and Nature in the Mekong Delta'
David Biggs.
Quagmire: Nation-Building and Nature in the Mekong Delta. Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books Series.
Seattle University of Washington Press,
2010. Illustrations. xviii + 300
pp. $35.00 (cloth), ISBN
978-0-295-99067-5.
Reviewed by Michael Kantor
Published on H-HistGeog (August, 2013)
Commissioned by Robert M. Wilson
Making and Remaking a Hydraulic Bureaucracy
In _Quagmire_, David Biggs describes an apparently
endless process of dredging, filling, diking, draining, and cultivating in the
Mekong Delta of Vietnam. Biggs argues that these processes both produce and are
produced by acts of nation building, imperialism, war making, and market
expansion. While these are potentially heady subjects, Biggs never strays far
from the ground, or at least observations of the ground, in the form of aerial
photos, maps, surveys, and land use documents. And while Biggs discusses
presidential cabinet meetings and war room strategy, his environmental history
always returns to the individuals who live and work in the Delta, reminding us
that "survival in such a place demands movement, negotiation, and
experience" (p. 13). It is precisely this keen awareness of movement,
sometimes shockingly powerful--the flooding of a monsoon or the carpet bombing
of an American B-52--and sometimes subtle--the gradual buildup of _dos d'ane_
(river sediment that forms sand bars) or the impact of hundreds of thousands of
small outboard motors on the flow of water in the Delta--that Biggs brings to
both his concrete descriptions of land use and his metaphors for nation
building. There is far too much beautiful detail in _Quagmire_ to do the book
justice in such a short review, so I will focus on what I take to be the
central concern of Biggs's research: the role of the Delta environment in
making (or unmaking) a concrete and legible state.
At the heart of this research agenda is an understanding
that the state is something more than a collection of people or a series of
institutions. To exist, a state needs subjects and institutions and laws, but
it also needs symbols and territory and, most important, facts on the ground.
Biggs never wades too deeply into a theoretical discussion of state making or
nation building. He briefly cites Michel Foucault's governmentality and Gilles
Deleuze and Félix Guattari's schizophrenic spaces. Instead, Biggs uses the
sedimented artifacts of state making, the instruments of measurement and the
earth-moving machines, the technologies that make space legible and thus
governable, to tell a story about the repeated attempts to
"concretize," "harmonize," and "stabilize" the
Delta and its people.
_Quagmire _is a story about the tension between a series
of attempts to find the Delta's "final form" and the incessant
eco-logic of the Delta itself, a logic that bends even steel and concrete
toward movement and flow. The result, so similar to other famous flood control
projects (the levees and spillways of southern Louisiana come to mind), is a
"work of Penelope," a never-ending hydraulic engineering project. And
it is this project that necessitates and justifies what Biggs describes as a
hydraulic bureaucracy.
In the opening chapter, _Quagmire _"orient[s] the
reader to the delta's basic geography and the two ways of navigating it--from
above and from the surface" (p. 22). As the book progresses more or less
chronologically through successive political regimes, Biggs alternates between
these two modes of navigation, weaving together the often contradictory God's
eye view with the view from sea (or
canal) level. This narrative approach allows him to
juxtapose a multiauthored landscape apparently "born of the masses"
(p. 109), in the words of archaeologist J. Y. Claeys, with the unevenness of
power produced and sustained by certain technologies of government (e.g.,
aerial photography, land parcel surveys, gunboats, helicopters). The shift
between a "horizontal view" and a "vertical view" allows
Biggs to confront the ruptures and slippages of a rigid techno-managerial
discourse in a fluid and hybrid landscape. While some actors (including the
author) move between the two views with relative (though unequal) ease, the
discourses that produce and are produced by the landscape are often more rooted
in their artifacts and modes of production. Biggs is always interested in the
uneasy hybridity of the material and discursive, the human and nonhuman, and
the concrete and fluid. Blending disciplinary perspectives from history,
anthropology, and geography, Biggs approaches the Mekong Delta as a
landscape--as things on the land, as people, institutions, discourses,
artifacts, metaphors, and eco-logics--with a particularly unstable morphology.
The landscape-as-quagmire refers to "both the physical space and the
political complexities associated with it,"
and as such, it has something to tell us about the
successive regimes of governance, the lived experience of peasants and
laborers, and the land (and water) within and upon which such relative
permanences are constructed (p. 8).
>From the royal power of the precolonial Vietnam state
to the French
_mission civilisatrice_ to postcolonial Vietnam to the
American military and finally to the international economic colonization of the
"virgin" Delta region, each governing regime worked to manage the
hydrology of the Delta through channelization, road and bridge construction,
dike and dam building, and land distribution schemes.
As Biggs pointedly notes, "the failure of colonial
engineers and administrators to achieve the steady hydraulic state thus implied
a possible failure to control the flow of politics as well" (p. 90).
Not only did the dynamic hydrology of the Delta impede
state governance by slowing transportation and playing havoc with scientific
measurements and mapping exercises, but it also made land reclamation and
distribution and agricultural modernization difficult. Such challenges weigh
heavily on a centralized state apparatus attempting to overcome the ethnic
balkanization of an already environmentally balkanized "frontier"
landscape.
Without permanent "improvements" to the land,
especially physically unstable land, the hegemony of the center over the
periphery is hard to maintain, the civilizing mission hard to justify. Biggs
notes that "early surveys and expeditions ... demonstrate what [Benedict]
Anderson explains as the necessary business of creating property histories that
locate the colony geographically and historically, but such acts of nonerasure
also advanced and preserved existing framings" (p. 82). Biggs articulates
how successive governing regimes used the same surveys, maps, and aerial photos
to make the Delta legible. As Foucault has suggested, it is through the
language of statistics that the modern state expresses itself and secures the
consent of the governed. Yet these sedimented "acts of nonerasure"
allow for multiple framings of space and land, and Biggs
describes how the failures of measurement and engineering "revealed the
shortcomings and vulnerabilities of an expanding, modern state" (p.
82). The attempt and failure to control nature
effectively delegitimizes the central state.
We can draw fascinating parallels between the Mekong
Delta and the Mississippi Delta, which Biggs does on several occasions, not
only because the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has played such an important role
in the engineering of space in both places, but also because we can see
firsthand how the control of nature becomes inexorably linked to the legitimacy
of the state. The administration of George W. Bush was never so criticized as
after their failure to respond aggressively to Hurricane Katrina; there is no
organization more maligned in southern Louisiana than the Army Corps of
Engineers. And yet, in a region often so opposed to federal government
intervention, the anger over the failure of the federal government to control
the movement of water in the Delta is a curious ideological anomaly. Once they
have begun, the works of Penelope have a strange mandate to perpetuate
themselves, demanding ever-greater layers of hydraulic bureaucracy.
Biggs's use of the word "quagmire"_ _is
telling. To become bogged down, mired, inextricable, is to be firmly embedded
in struggles over land, and not just land as territory, but also land as home
and livelihood. It would perhaps be a form of environmental determinism to
suggest that delta landscapes resist schemes of governance, but what Biggs
suggests is that the sedimented and schizophrenic spaces of land tenure,
resource extraction, nation building, and home building combine with the
shifting eco-logic of the Delta to create an uncertain terrain. However often
it is mapped and measured it continually surprises and frustrates those who
would seek a final form, for whatever purpose.
Citation: Michael Kantor. Review of Biggs, David,
_Quagmire:
Nation-Building and Nature in the Mekong Delta_.
H-HistGeog, H-Net Reviews. August, 2013.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.