ABSTRACT
Ethnographic attunement to such complicated entanglements creates a position from which to nuance arguments about thing-power. In 2015, the Vietnamese Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment commissioned the Danish Hydraulic Institute, which specializes in hydrological modelling, to conduct a ‘Study on the Impacts of Mainstream Hydropower on the Mekong’. The push to hydropower occurs in a landscape overflowing with events and initiatives, saturated with promises and threats, political manoeuvring and forms of knowledge. Jane Bennett’s analyses of ‘thing-power’ offer an influential answer. For Bennett, ‘thing-power’ opens up to an ‘adventurous ontological imaginary’ in which matter is ‘active, intricate, and awesome’. The casual visitor may encounter scenic sunsets, river dolphins, dredging boats or garbage accumulated where the river passes urban areas. Such fleeting scenes might well testify to ‘thing-power’ in Bennett’s sense of an unexpected experience giving rise to a flash of intuition.
