Andrew Alan Johnson
I am a cultural anthropologist (Ph.D. Cornell University, 2010) and games writer (Civilization VII), and am an Associate Professor at Stockholm University's Department of Social Anthropology.
I conduct original research in Southeast Asia, as well as bring anthropological and historical insights to bear on popular media, especially games.
I am available for consulation for cultural, historical, or other games writing.
New Release
Sid Meier's Civilization VII
I served as the Senior Historian for Sid Meier's Civilization VII, and continue to write and research for Firaxis.
This included:
- Helping to select featured civilizations and cultures
- Writing the in-game "Civilopedia"
- Narrative design
- Writing dialogue for leaders
- Liaison with local and indigenous cultural groups
New Release
Mekong Dreaming (2020)
The Mekong River has undergone vast infrastructural changes in recent years, including the construction of dams across its main stream. These projects, along with the introduction of new fish species, changing political fortunes, and international migrant labor, have all made a profound impact upon the lives of those residing on the great river. It also impacts how they dream. In Mekong Dreaming, Andrew Alan Johnson explores the changing relationship between the river and the residents of Ban Beuk, a village on the Thailand-Laos border, by focusing on the effect that construction has had on human and inhuman elements of the villagers' world. Johnson shows how inhabitants come to terms with the profound impact that remote, intangible, and yet powerful forces—from global markets and remote bureaucrats to ghosts, spirits, and gods—have on their livelihoods. Through dreams, migration, new religious practices, and new ways of dwelling on a changed river, inhabitants struggle to understand and affect the distant, the inassimilable, and the occult, which offer both sources of power and potential disaster
Mekong Dreaming is both an exemplary work of ethnography and a timely and important intervention in contemporary debates in anthropological theory. Focusing on northeast Thailand and the effects of dam construction on the Mekong among local fishing and farming communities, this book's original contribution consists in its foregrounding of uncertainty and unknowability in the lived experience of non-western cosmologies.
Stuart McLean, author of Crumpled Paper Boat
Praise & Reviews
Andrew Alan Johnson's lucid and richly detailed ethnography of the Thai-Lao border shows how the inchoate and the unknowable can be apprehended through genuinely empirical research. In this masterful analysis, Johnson shows how a marginalized population grapples with the intensified environmental uncertainties generated by modern technology and political upheaval by deploying a cosmological vision that enfolds piety, potentiality, and materiality in a tangled experiential frame.
Michael Herzfeld, author of Siege of the Spirits
Mekong Dreaming is a lovely, fluent ethnography of a river and its political ecology, focusing on the people on one bank of the Mekong where it forms a border between Thailand and Laos…. Johnson’s style is crisp and engaging and his dealings with recent theory are all concrete and pointed…. Johnson has produced political ethnography of a high order.
Leo Coleman, author of A Moral Technology
See Upcoming Appearances
I am presenting at the Games Developers Conference in San Francisco, March 18, 2025.
