TY - JOUR
AU - Ribó, Ignasi
AB - I Place is an elusive concept. And yet, it is a central concept for many disciplines, notably for geography and ecology. It is also a key concept for ecocriticism and the environmental humanities, as they attempt to make sense of human culture at a time of global environmental crisis (Emmett and Nye). We speak of a certain “sense of place” shared by human groups as they inhabit particular locations of the world (Tall). We also speak of more-than-human places, not only the empty wilderness idealized by Western conservationists (Cronon), but also the “emergent ecologies” shared by a multitude of species, including the human one (Kirksey). And the experience of place, in all its diversity and complexity, is the matter of much environmental writing (Lopez). For some writers, as well as for many traditional cultures, place, or the land, constitutes the deep structure of stories, not just their passive setting, but the “mesh” (Morton 28) where events take place, the expressive potency that narratives attempt to bring forth (Abram). But what is place? And how do we go about making sense of it? Humanistic geographers have been grappling with these questions for some time. They established a basic distinction between “space,” the abstract and undifferentiated extension of location, and “place,” which would emerge when human beings give meaning to that location, both by experiencing it and conceptualizing it in language (Relph; Tuan). However, this distinction tends to turn place into a wholly anthropocentric concept. Just like words, place would be something that humans have and nonhumans lack (Ribó, “Worlds and Words: Of Bats, Ticks, and Apes”). Place would be the human experience of space, the semiotically mediated “being-there” (Dasein) that constitutes the absorbed and concernful projection of human “being-in-the-world” (Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking”; Heidegger, Being and Time). In short, place is supposed to be how humans make themselves at home in the world. Critical geographers have generally objected to this essentialist conception of place, arguing that places are “socially constructed,” not only because it is human society that gives them meaning but also because they are materially produced by social processes (Harvey, Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference). While recognizing the role of society in the construction of place, contemporary geographers have been moving away from dogmatic constructionism, as they try to make sense of the fact that places are not only the product of human activity but also its foundation (Malpas). Whether this paradox is conceptualized as a dialectic (Thrift, “On the Determination of Social Action in Space and Time”) or as a process (Massey; Thrift, Non-Representational Theory), human geography is for the most part faithful to the tenets of the “sociology of the social,” that is, the idea that social aggregates, such as place, can be explained by other social aggregates of a higher order, like the economic, political, or social forces that work in the background, often behind the backs of the actors themselves. Against this dominant sociological paradigm, the “sociology of associations,” also called assemblage or actor–network theory (ANT), attempts to trace the complex associations of heterogeneous actors that constitute the “social” as an emergent assemblage or network (Latour, Reassembling the Social 68). Unlike organisms or structures, assemblages are collective wholes that emerge from the dynamic and fluid interaction of multiple actants in a flat “field of immanence” (Deleuze and Guattari 154). Importantly, these actants need not be human, or even animate beings. Drawing from contemporary posthumanist thought, a crucial proposition of assemblage theory is that nonhumans, including material entities, participate in producing and sustaining assemblages, not simply as objects or passive intermediaries but also as autonomous actors or mediators (Callon), often so entwined with humans that we can speak of “hybrid” or distributed forms of agency (Latour, We Have Never Been Modern). Material ecocriticism has recently tapped into assemblage theory as part of the new materialist turn in the environmental humanities (Iovino and Oppermann, Material Ecocriticism). Material ecocritics, following long-standing concerns of literary scholarship, are mostly interested in studying how nonhuman agency is represented or enmeshed in narrative and other texts. But we can also look beyond the traditional object of literary studies, by applying literary hermeneutics to the interpretation of material–semiotic assemblages (Ribó, “Ecocriticism, Hermeneutics, and the Vanishing Elephants of Thailand”). “In this latter case, matter itself becomes a text where dynamics of ‘diffuse’ agency and non-linear causality are inscribed and produced” (Iovino and Oppermann, “Material Ecocriticism: Materiality, Agency, and Models of Narrativity” 79–80). Far from being an overstretch of the ecocritical endeavor, the material turn in ecocriticism parallels ANT’s original deployment of narrative semiotics, particularly Greimas’ actantial model, in its effort to make sense of the dynamic interactions and mediations between the multiple actors entangled in actor–networks or assemblages (Latour, The Pasteurization of France 252–53). Material semiotics, a term first coined by Donna Haraway and then taken up by ANT scholars, studies “the enactment of materially and discursively heterogeneous relations that produce and reshuffle all kinds of actors including objects, subjects, human beings, machines, animals, ‘nature,’ ideas, organizations, inequalities, scale and sizes, and geographical arrangements” (Law 141). Rather than relying on a well-formed methodology, the material–semiotic approach to the interpretation of these assemblages tends to follow a set of general principles, which are more or less explicitly stated in its different applications (Michael). First, there is the principle of relationality, a notion shared by ecology and most systems thinking, which basically sees material and semiotic reality, matter and meaning, as emerging from a complex web of relations (Kohn). According to the principle of symmetry (Callon), these relations are not circumscribed to human beings alone, but entangle all sorts of actors, both nonhuman beings and material things, which appear endowed with a vitality or vibrancy of their own (Bennett). Moreover, the associations between all these actors are deployed on a plane of immanence, following the principle of flatness that prevents the observer from providing depth or a hidden structure to explain the various interactions (Latour, Reassembling the Social). Thus, the complexity of assemblages is not derived from their structural configuration, but rather from the principles of emergence and fluidity that characterize all processes of assembly. While assemblages are interconnected networks of actors at the same level, the wholes that emerge from their association are not necessarily of the same order or scale (De Landa 32). The process of emergence, however, is not simply unidirectional, moving inflexibly from the micro to the macro. Rather, it is a fluid process that links provisional and contingent wholes, where “the big could at any moment drown again in the small from which it emerged and to which it will return” (Latour, Reassembling the Social 243). From its beginnings in Science and Technology Studies, the material–semiotic approach has been making inroads in the field of geography, as critical geographers tried to make sense of the hybrid and relational forms of agency that participate in the production of place (Whatmore). Before the influence of ANT could be felt, a minor strand of semiotic geography, largely inspired by social constructivism, had already approached place as a kind of text, an arrangement of signs, or a discursive formation whose meaning and significance could be interpreted with the geographer’s hermeneutic tools (Duncan). The new materialist turn has allowed geography to move beyond the nature–culture dualism underlying this textual metaphor (Hinchliffe), in order to embrace a non-representational ontology that emphasizes the material–semiotic interactions that constitute place (Thrift, Non-Representational Theory). Following this line of thought, we can consider place itself to be an assemblage (Dovey), a relational, symmetrical, flat, emergent, and fluid association of heterogeneous actants, many of which are assemblages themselves. Being an assemblage, the actants or components that constitute a given place can be analyzed across two dimensions or axes (De Landa). On the one hand, the role that the various actants play in the assemblage may be mapped on a material/semiotic axis, from a purely material actant to a purely semiotic one, with all the mixtures in between. In addition, a second axis tries to identify whether actants interact with other actants in order to cohere or stabilize the assemblage (territorialization) or, on the contrary, to disaggregate or destabilize it (deterritorialization). According to assemblage theory, “one and the same assemblage can have components working to stabilize its identity as well as components forcing it to change or even transforming it into a different assemblage. In fact, one and the same component may participate in both processes by exercising different sets of capacities” (De Landa 12). Having outlined the theory of material–semiotic geography, or at least some of its elements, the rest of this essay applies it to the analysis of a particular place, the so-called Golden Triangle, located in Southeast Asia. My aim is not so much to provide a comprehensive historical or geographical exposition of this area, but rather to use it as a case study to illustrate the potential of the material–semiotic approach in the ecocritical reading of place. For this purpose, I will begin by telling in some detail the story of the opium trade assemblage, not only because this actor–network has been particularly effectual in territorializing the Golden Triangle in recent times but also because it offers a vivid example of the kind of human–nonhuman interaction that underlies the material–semiotic understanding of place, in particular by highlighting the role of the opium poppy as a key nonhuman mediator. Of course, I do not mean to imply that opium, or rather the opium poppy, is the only relevant nonhuman actor in the Golden Triangle assemblage. A more exhaustive material–semiotic geography should also take into account the agency of other nonhuman mediators, such as the Mekong river with all its water siblings, as well as the different plants and animals (e.g., rice, teak, elephants, fish, chicken, pigs) that actively participate in sustaining the various multispecies assemblages in this region of the world. Given the limitations of this article, however, I will concentrate here on just one aspect of this complex geography. My account does not claim to be objective, much less to discover the sociological truths supposedly hidden behind the actors themselves. It is simply an attempt, and most likely an imperfect one, to present what Latour calls a “good account,” that is, a text that traces a network. As Latour says, “a good account will perform the social in the precise sense that some of the participants in the action—through the controversial agency of the author—will be assembled in such a way that they can be collected together” (Reassembling the Social 138). II The Golden Triangle appears at first as a purely semiotic object. The term seems to have been coined by Marshall Green, the United States Vice Secretary of State, during a press conference on July 12, 1971 (Chouvy 1). It was a catchy expression immediately picked up by reporters and soon widely used to refer to a geographical area in Southeast Asia that had gained notoriety as an important opium-producing region. The triangular shape vaguely evoked the shared borders of three modern states, Thailand, Laos, and Myanmar, along the banks of the Mekong river. This is a mountainous and densely forested region, inhabited in the valleys by lowland Tai groups (Lanna, Lao, Shan) and by numerous other ethnic groups dispersed throughout the highlands. Despite close historical and ecological links, the “triangle” that took shape in public discussions in the 1970s had never been a unified political entity. Lacking any administrative existence, it constituted a loosely defined transboundary region whose reality seemed to be an effect of discourse. And yet, the “golden” adjective was a transparent reference to something quite material that was going on at that time in that part of the world. Right at the center of the triangle, in the border towns of Tachilek (Myanmar) and Mae Sai (Thailand), opium traders were selling their merchandise, bought from poor farmers in the highlands, in exchange for pure gold ingots (Lintner 11). Thus, even if the place known as the Golden Triangle appeared as discourse, its emergence is linked with a complex material–semiotic assemblage, the highly profitable system of opium production and trade that came together at that location from the 1950s until the 1990s. While opium had been grown in the region at least since the nineteenth century, this particular assemblage only came into being after the new communist regime in China began to suppress opium production in the southwestern Yunnan province in the early 1950s (McCoy 375). It was then that a heterogeneous and precarious network of interrelated actors assembled across the northern borders of Thailand, Myanmar, and Laos (Lintner). First, because we need to start somewhere, there were the farmers who grew the poppy plants (Papaver somniferum) whose milky sap or latex, once coagulated, becomes the narcotic substance known as opium. Most of these farmers belonged to so-called “hill tribes,” a diversity of ethnic groups, especially Hmong, Kachin, Mien (or Yao), Wa, Lahu, Lisu, and Akha, who had subsisted for generations practising nomadic or semi-nomadic swidden agriculture, moving from one mountain site to another in order to plant dry rice, maize, yam, and other hardy cultivars. With different intensities, these groups grew poppy as a key cash crop that had relatively low labor and financial requirements (Crooker). The profits made by these farmers from the sale of their opium production to roaming traders never amounted to much and were often subject to taxation by the different armed groups controlling the hills. But it was a reliable income that complemented their subsistence crops and allowed them to buy rice, salt, tools, and other consumer goods in the lowland markets. The traders who bought the opium from the farmers were often respectable businessmen, in many cases of Chinese origin, who lived in the market towns and traded in other merchandise besides opium. After the harvest, they would send their agents to the hills to purchase the opium from the farmers and then transport it to the refineries along the tristate border, where the opium would be processed into morphine and heroin (Lintner). Given the economic value of the merchandise, this was of course a dangerous operation that required the protection of armed bands. Opium traders would contract these services from various providers, usually rebel armies but also government forces. Often, these groups would cut out the middleman and engage in the opium trade themselves, especially after the rise in heroin demand from American GIs during the Vietnam War substantially increased the profitability of the business (McCoy 181–85). Among the better organized armed groups in the region were the Chinese nationalist units of the Kuomintang (KMT), who had taken refuge in the hills of Myanmar’s Shan State after Mao Zedong’s proclamation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. Initially, these forces could only rely on the undercover support of Taiwan and CIA operatives in their fight to take China back from the communists, but they soon found out that the opium trade could provide them with a steady source of cash with which to buy weapons and fund extensive military operations throughout the region, including the forced recruitment of soldiers and footmen from the hills. Thus, the KMT became increasingly engaged in providing security for opium traders as well as trading in opium on their own, profiting from their connections with the Hong Kong and Taiwanese crime syndicates that were setting up heroin refineries near the borders of Thailand and Laos (Lintner 11). Later on, as China succeeded in organizing and arming the Burmese and Laotian communists, these KMT units were forced to move into Laos, and then to the hills of northern Thailand, where they settled under the protection of the United States (McCoy 247–48). Displaced from the main poppy-growing areas, the KMT remained nonetheless a major player in the opium trade of the region. However, other armed groups—irregular militias like the Shan rebels, the Laos right-wing factions, the Burmese Ka Kwe Ye (KKY), or the communist parties of Myanmar, Thailand, and Laos, as well as government units like the Royal Laotian Army or the Thai military and police forces—were able to control, protect, and tax more effectively the opium trade in their respective territories. All of them tried at one point or another to exploit the self-reinforcing association of arms and opium in the region: arms gave them the power to control the lucrative opium trade and the money obtained from this trade allowed them to buy more arms, which could then be used to pursue their own political goals, or to expand control of the opium business, or to do both at the same time (Renard). The distribution, initially within Southeast Asia, but increasingly to America and Europe, of the heroin produced in the Golden Triangle was undertaken by international narcotic syndicates, especially Chinese based in Hong Kong, Taiwan, or Macao, who also provided the chemists to operate the local refineries and export routes through Bangkok, Vientiane, or Saigon (Lintner 11–12). Only a fraction of the opium harvested in the hills during the period under consideration was consumed in the traditional form, by smoking the cooked resin in specially designed pipes (Booth). Even in this unrefined form, opium is a highly addictive substance, sought after by all sorts of consumers, from villagers in the hills where it is produced to people living in the large metropoles of Southeast Asia and beyond. The medicinal, narcotic, and addictive properties of opium are basically due to its morphine content, which generally makes up around 10% by weight of the latex obtained from the Southeast Asian poppy (McCoy 287). This alkaloid can be processed into heroin, which is significantly more potent and addictive than raw or cooked opium. A large part of the end users of the heroin produced by local refineries lived far away from the Golden Triangle, even if the effects of the drug trade in terms of addiction and related social problems, including a large HIV/AIDS epidemic, could also be felt within the area (Lyttleton 910). This brief review of the main mediators in the Golden Triangle opium trade assemblage would be incomplete without including one last key actor, this time a nonhuman one. Following the principle of symmetry (Callon), we must consider the poppy plant as an actor in its own right. In fact, the plant identified by botanists as P. somniferum has been an actor in human history since very ancient times. While its origins are unknown, archaeological evidence shows that it was already cultivated for its medicinal and narcotic properties at least since the Neolithic age (Merlin). The unique effects on mammals and birds of the plant’s latex, including its addictive potency, have probably evolved in order to lure animals to consume the pods and spread its seeds. Throughout their history, humans have been moved by these same properties to cultivate the plant, extending its geographical range to almost all corners of the world (Tétényi). This long-lasting symbiotic relationship between humans and poppies is easily misrepresented as a form of domestication. In general, our use of the verb “to domesticate,” with humans as subjects and nonhumans as objects, “overlooks the active agency of domesticates” (Scott, Against the Grain 18–19), relying exclusively on anthropocentric notions of human agency. But nothing puts more clearly into question human agency than the dependency of humans–through the complex chains that link farmers, distributors, and consumers–on the plant that they are supposedly controlling. In the association between the morphine or heroin addict, whose craving drives the demand for opium, and the innocent-looking poppy bulb that blooms in the mountains, who controls whom? Thus, more than a passive device of men, poppies should be considered active participants in the opium trade assemblage of the Golden Triangle. While they are highly adaptable to different environments, poppies prefer moist, alkaline soils, with a temperate climate and plenty of sunlight (Schiff). In the Golden Triangle, these conditions can be found in the slopes of limestone mountains, at altitudes ranging between 1,000 and 1,500 meters. And these are the areas where the opium-growing Hmong, Akha, Lahu, and other hill peoples that migrated from southwestern China during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries tended to establish themselves (Anderson 119–21). It is here that the poppies thrived, associating themselves with many other actors (farmers, fighters, traders, addicts) to constitute effective natureculture hybrids with far-reaching effects, at least until the 1990s, when the actor–network they had contributed to assemble began to break down. III The opium trade of the Golden Triangle that I have just described was a relational, symmetric, flat, fluid, and emergent assemblage that developed in the 1950s but has largely ceased to exist today, even if the Golden Triangle remains a coherent and meaningful place. In order to explain this persistence, we need to consider both the fluidity of the actor–networks involved and the dynamics of longer-lasting geographical assemblages in the region. Before engaging in this material–semiotic analysis, however, it is important to note the different factors that have contributed to dissolve the associations between the actors described above. One factor has been the increasingly effective action of governments and intergovernmental agencies, both at the local and global levels. Far from being homogeneous, governments are composed of a multiplicity of branches and organizations (De Landa 36). While some governmental actors have been active players in sustaining the Golden Triangle opium assemblage, other actors within the same governments, moved by concerns over the social and economic effects of opium trade and addiction or by external pressure, have been actively engaged in fighting it. The so-called “war on drugs,” initially launched by the United States in the 1970s (McCoy 2) and pursued by a network of global and local agencies, has involved repressive military and police actions against opium producers, traders, and users, as well as rehabilitation programs for addicts and development projects in the hills of the Golden Triangle, aimed at promoting the substitution of opium for other cash crops, such as coffee, cabbage, potatoes, or red kidney beans (Anderson 121–22). Where state bureaucracy is more developed, as in Thailand, and to a lesser extent in Laos, these efforts have had some success. But they cannot account, on their own, for the decline in opium production and trade in the Golden Triangle during the last decades. The end of the Cold War and the expansion of opium production in Afghanistan and other areas has also contributed to this decline (Lintner). But the main factor seems to be the transformation of the Golden Triangle opium trade assemblage into a different kind of actor–network since the 1990s. While opium poppies continue to be grown and traded, especially in the northern Shan and Wa states of Myanmar, their capacity to act as effective mediators, that is, to “transform, translate, distort, and modify the meaning or the elements they are supposed to carry” within the network (Latour, Reassembling the Social 39), has been weakened by the emergence of artificial competitors. The same actors that used to refine and distribute morphine and heroin have now turned to the manufacturing of synthetic drugs, especially amphetamine-type stimulants (ATS), which do not rely on harvested opium (Lintner and Black). These drugs, especially methamphetamine, known as yaba or the “mad medicine” in Thai, have quite different effects on humans. They are not depressants like opioids, but strongly exciting substances, causing consumers to become accelerated and hyperactive, even aggressive. In Thailand, the use of ATS has become widespread in all kinds of social groups, both rural and urban, who tend to consume them for recreation or to deal with the stresses of modern life and labor (Lyttleton). In 2003, the Thai government launched a vigorous “war on drugs” aimed at suppressing traffic of ATS throughout the country, and most especially in the Golden Triangle border area, which included extrajudicial killings of suspected drug dealers (Human Rights Watch). While this and other campaigns launched in cooperation with neighboring governments or international agencies have driven drug trafficking and usage deeper underground, they have generally failed to eradicate it (Chouvy 21–22). The transformation of the drug trade actor–network, from one assembled around opium in the 1950–90 period to the recent one, mostly based on the manufacturing of ATS, has weakened some of the actors (in particular, the armed insurgencies who relied on the opium trade, the opium farmers, and the opium poppies themselves) while strengthening other actors (especially, the illegal syndicates operating the refineries and distribution networks beyond the Golden Triangle). In terms of our analysis of place, this successful reconfiguration of the drug trade actor–network, its fluidity, might explain, at least in part, the persistence of the Golden Triangle as a material–semiotic assemblage. There are some indications, however, that this assemblage is more durable and less linked with the drug trade, whether of opioids or ATS, than it appeared at first to be the case. In recent years, the Golden Triangle theme has often been exploited as part of a marketing message launched to promote this transboundary region amongst Asian and Western tourists. The geographical point where the modern borders of Thailand, Myanmar, and Laos meet, on the banks of the Mekong River, near the ancient town of Chiang Saen, rebranded and signposted as the Golden Triangle landmark, is visited on day trips by busloads of tourists throughout the year. On the Burmese and Laotian sides of the border, new casinos, such as the notorious Kings Roman, have sprung, profiting from the newly set up special economic zones. These casinos, allegedly funded with capital generated by the drug trade, have also been linked with an increase in illegal trafficking of protected wild species, such as tigers, elephants, bears, or pangolins, as well as with the ongoing human trafficking across the region’s borders (Eyler 128–30). While the special economic zones are often presented as engines of economic growth for the local people, they have mostly attracted new Chinese immigrants setting up businesses that cater to the increasing number of tourists visiting the area from mainland China, lured by the mild weather, available sex, exotic adventures, and promises of quick riches that the Golden Triangle seems to evoke (Sims). These uses of the Golden Triangle motif might appear as purely semiotic, little more than signifying practices that exploit the meanings associated with this borderland in the public opinion. In fact, however, they are intricately linked with the new and powerful material relationships that have emerged since the end of the Cold War, entangling various actors across the region. Perhaps the most significant actors in this emerging network are the increasingly assertive People’s Republic of China and the Asian Development Bank (ADB). Since 1992, these actors have been implementing a comprehensive regional strategy to develop and integrate the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS) through new infrastructures and economic corridors (Tan). Within this GMS strategy, the so-called Economic Quadrangle, which includes not just the Laotian, Burmese, and Thai tristate borderlands, but also the southwestern Chinese province of Yunnan, has been promoted as a forward-looking and economically flourishing trading zone (Walker 3–5). From a material–semiotic point of view, however, the Economic Quadrangle is hardly distinguishable from the Golden Triangle. Already during the emergence of the latter’s opium trade actor–network, intimate connections existed between this area and Chinese Yunnan. It was from Yunnan that the opium poppies and the opium-growing “hill tribes” had originated. It was also from Yunnan that the KMT forces and many of the traders involved in the Golden Triangle opium business had moved into the region. Thus, the Economic Quadrangle can be viewed as an attempt by the ADB to redefine the semiotics of an already configured place, trying to present it as a completely new assemblage, untainted by the illegal and conflict-ridden associations of the preceding one. Overall, these efforts at semiotic rebranding have been largely unsuccessful. “Economic Quadrangle” t-shirts are no longer sold in the region and the concept has mostly died out as a signifier outside the publications connected with the ADB, whereas the Golden Triangle continues to be used as a meaningful concept to identify a place assembled by underlying material–semiotic relationships that remain as strong as ever (Swe and Chambers). In order to understand the persistence of this assemblage, we need to step back from its fluid configurations and consider how the territorializing and deterritorializing dynamics of contingent actor–networks have contributed to the production of such a place in the long term (“longue durée”). In the analysis of these dynamics, it is important to persist in the material–semiotic approach, avoiding anthropocentric conceptualizations that define territoriality in terms of human power and sovereignty over political boundaries, as the unmediated result of human strategies “to affect, influence, and control people, phenomena, and relationships” (Sack 19). As mentioned above, the geographical space comprised within the Golden Triangle, including southwestern parts of Chinese Yunnan, has never been a unified political or administrative entity. Yet, for a long time it has constituted a place, that is, an assemblage of interrelated human and nonhuman actors, subject to both territorializing and deterritorializing dynamics. In fact, the Golden Triangle seems to replicate material–semiotic patterns of assembly found throughout a much larger transboundary region that some scholars call Zomia, which extends for approximately 2.5 million square kilometers between the highlands of northern Vietnam and the rugged peaks of Bhutan. This vast massif, composed of a multitude of hills and mountains interspersed with remote upland valleys, has been populated for centuries by a wide variety of ethnic groups who practised nomadic or semi-nomadic subsistence agriculture and avoided as much as possible being subsumed by the different state entities that, throughout history, have been emerging and collapsing in the neighboring lowlands (Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed). Thus, the rugged and tree-clad mountains, the upland streams and valleys, the heavy seasonal monsoon rains, the hardy plants and wildlife of the forests, as well as the human groups dwelling in the hills, constitute a dynamic assemblage that gives coherence and meaning to the whole region. While the association of all these human and nonhuman actors has been strongly territorializing, the territory that has emerged from this particular assemblage is in direct conflict with another territorializing dynamic, that of the states. Before the borders of modern states were even drawn, the opposition between lowland state-forming assemblages and upland state-evading assemblages had been a constant throughout the region, following dynamics of state formation and resistance that seem to be widespread (Clastres 189–218). As in other parts of Zomia, the state-forming populations of the Golden Triangle, generally ethnic Tai, associated with significant nonhuman mediators like rice, oxen, or elephants, and settled in the valleys, where they developed a centralized, hierarchic, literate, urban form of society that they themselves defined as “civilized” (Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed 28). These states were generally weak and depended on the number of humans and nonhumans they could assemble, by persuasion or force, in order to raise taxes and wage wars. Their borders were vague and constantly fluctuated, expanding or contracting like a mandala, as they increased or decreased their power over neighbors and tributaries (Winichakul 82). Beyond the hazy borders of these “mandala states,” lay a very different assemblage of significant nonhuman mediators, such as taro, yams, or wild pigs, associated with the so-called “barbarian” peoples who lived in the hills, hunting, foraging, or practising swidden agriculture, avoiding taxes, worshipping spirits, speaking a myriad of tongues, and shunning written culture and administration, as well as hierarchical and centralized forms of government (Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed 28). Historically, these two assemblages have been opposed to each other, both materially, through recurrent wars and slave raids (seeking to capture people, but also elephants), and semiotically, insofar as the different group’s identities have generally been defined as mirror images of one another. At the same time, they have also depended on each other, both for material exchanges, as in the trade of forest products for iron, salt or clothes, and semiotic exchanges, through the constant flow of religious and social ideologies between lowland and highland groups. Despite their complex interactions, these two assemblages emerged from quite different association dynamics. Using the terms of Deleuze and Guattari, we could say that one was arborescent while the other was rhizomatic. What was territorializing for the lowland state-making assemblage, things like taxes, administration, hierarchy, settlement, literacy, or intensive agriculture, was deterritorializing for the state-evading assemblage. Conversely, what was territorializing for the state-evading assemblage—things like hunting, animism, anarchy, nomadism, orality, or shifting agriculture—was deterritorializing for the state-making assemblage. Only trade has, in principle, been a territorializing force for both assemblages, at least until the emergence of the modern territorial state with its neatly defined geographical borders and center–periphery power relations. The formation of the modern states of Thailand, Laos, and Myanmar is a recent phenomenon, intimately linked with Western colonialism (Winichakul 131). Thanks to its role as a buffer state between the British and French colonial possessions, Thailand was able to integrate its territory much more effectively than the postcolonial states of Laos and Myanmar. But all of them have relied, in one way or another, on the pre-existing state-making lowland assemblages, in order to extend the power of the state to the borders of their newly mapped geo-bodies. With the aid of modern technology, centralized administration, and infrastructure development, it has become possible for the first time in the history of the region to attempt to hold together a political entity defined in terms of its territory. Regardless of the uneven resources available to them, the three states of the Golden Triangle, Thailand, Laos, and Myanmar, share this same territorializing ambition that drives the ongoing state-building processes in which they have been immersed since the end of the nineteenth century. From the perspective of these states, the traditional state-evading assemblage of the hills, with its roaming and fluid ethnic groups, its wild animals, and deep forests, constituted a powerful deterritorializing force. Similarly, the transboundary opium trade actor–network of the Golden Triangle described above, which connected the hills with the valleys across the state borders, was also strongly deterritorializing. Unlike rice, and much more than any other cash crop, the unruly agency of opium poppies unsettles the hierarchies and power relationships on which the lowland state-based assemblage relies for its stability and expansion. It is not surprising, therefore, that state authorities, particularly in Thailand, have often linked both components together in the so-called “hill tribe problem,” which effectively conflates transboundary dynamics of human migration, deforestation, and drug trafficking, into the same deterritorializing threat to the power of the central state (Laungaramsri 31–61). Another deterritorializing force for these states, but one that state authorities are generally powerless to counter, is the push toward trade and regional economic integration by China and the Asian Development Bank, through initiatives like the Belt and Road, Upper Mekong Navigation Improvement Project, or the Greater Mekong Subregion economic corridors, amongst others (Soong). These regional dynamics, linked with global financial and trade networks, are deterritorializing for the Laotian, Burmese, and Thai states, insofar as international capital tends to overflow and disrupt the territorially bounded nation-state, as Marxist scholarship has repeatedly pointed out (Harvey, Spaces of Capital). But they are also deterritorializing for the Golden Triangle transboundary assemblage, insofar as they remake the material relationships, and the space itself, on which local communities of humans and nonhumans depend for their subsistence (Yong). An example of this remaking of the physical space in the region is the ongoing development of large hydropower dams along the Mekong river and its tributaries (Middleton and Allouche), which has severe impacts on “seasonal hydrology, sediment flows and fish passage” (Hirsch 67). In some ways, the emergence and expansion of the GMS actor–network, through the action of multilateral institutions like the ADB or ASEAN, but also private corporations and regional superpowers like China, parallels the emergence and expansion of the illegal trade in ATS that has come to replace the opium trade. Both of these actor–networks, while assembling very different matters and meanings, seem to operate with the same business logic, by connecting local producers and consumers to global distribution networks. In effect, each one of them constitutes what Deleuze and Guattari describe as a “diffuse and polymorphous war machine” (360), a technological and financial assemblage relentlessly at work, synthesizing tradeable goods, turning local communities into displaced migrants, and processing nonhuman actors as countable resources. When powerful enough, this machinic phylum is able to smoothen out the space through special economic zones and infrastructure development projects that attempt to build a fully interconnected urban network linked by superhighways, airports, navigable channels, and high-speed railways, producing a perpetual acceleration of circulation which tends toward the negation of place, an absolute deterritorialization that defeats “the world as a field, as distance, as matter” (Virilio 150). IV For an ecocritical reading, a key question might be which of the three assemblages that are struggling today to define the geography of the Golden Triangle, that is, to write the land as a place, not just on the maps, but also in terms of meaningful and material relationships, should be privileged in order to promote its ecological regeneration. Is it the state-centered territorialization, with its fixed borders and arborescent administrations? Or rather, the machinic deterritorialization promoted by China and international institutions, with their transboundary infrastructures, special economic zones, and free trade agreements? Or is it, after all, the rhizomatic territorialization of the Golden Triangle itself, emerging from a long history of state-evading actor–networks, where humans and nonhumans are closely entangled? The choice, if there is one, between these alternatives is not purely academic. Rather, it has real consequences for the ongoing processes of anthropogenic environmental degradation that are affecting the region, with problems as serious and difficult to tackle as deforestation, transboundary haze, climate change, or biodiversity depletion. Faith in the ability of state governments to solve these problems by creating natural reserves and managing them through their centralized bureaucracies has generally waned as these policies have often served, not to promote ecological regeneration, or even conservation, but to expand political control over critical natural resources (Forsyth and Walker). Similarly, the economic boon heralded by infrastructure development and trade integration into global networks has tended to create incentives that increase environmental degradation, not just through the direct extraction and export of timber and other natural resources, but also through the promotion of cash crops in the hills, often following the patterns established by the opium substitution programs of the previous decades (Delang). For many international and local NGOs, therefore, it is the empowerment of local actors, for example through the promotion of community forestry and traditional ecological knowledge (Ganjanapan), that provides some hope of ecological regeneration for the region (Ribó and Calzolari). The geographical literature tends to address these questions with a marked anthropocentric bias, focusing for the most part on the governance of natural resources. These are generally conceived as objects waiting for human subjects to decide, through negotiation or conflict, on the best ways to allocate, exploit, manage, and distribute them. Thus, “transboundary environmental governance regimes,” such as the Mekong basin, are seen as “driven by human interests that treat common pool resources as passive entities around which governance processes unfold” (Miller 3–4). While there have been some efforts to move political ecology beyond the human (Ribó, “Posthuman Political Ecology”; Ribó, Habitat), the stories that we tell each other about the places that matter for us, the places that we inhabit and on which we depend for our survival, generally cast humans as the only relevant actors. In turn, the multitude of nonhumans with which we share those same places are projected onto the flat surface of the environment, where they are rendered mute and powerless (Latour, Politics of Nature). That most scholars should produce and embrace such dualistic and anthropocentric narratives of place should come as no surprise, given that the modern academy plays a crucial, even if sometimes uncomfortable, role as part of the same war machine that is currently driving the process of deterritorialization, which renders place virtually obsolete and replaces it with a globalized environmental regime. However, a different reading of place is possible, provided that we start paying attention to all those nonhuman actors who struggle next to us, together with us. The Golden Triangle is only one place amongst many others. Its story can be told in many different ways, giving more or less relevance to the various actors and to the various associations between these actors that constitute this particular place as an actor–network or a material–semiotic assemblage of some sort. In my account, some of these actors, both human and nonhuman, have played a larger role than others. I have privileged certain associations and left out many others that are surely as significant. I do not claim to have presented the definitive story of these associations, or even a complete description of the place. After all, material ecocriticism cannot aspire to objectivity, much less to exhaustivity. 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TI - Golden Triangle: A Material–Semiotic Geography
JF - ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment
DO - 10.1093/isle/isaa140
DA - 2020-10-08
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/golden-triangle-a-material-semiotic-geography-baIctHo3p7
SP - 751
EP - 770
VL - 29
IS - 3
DP - DeepDyve
ER -