Academic Publications
Mekong Dreaming
Life and Death along a Changing River
Duke University Press, 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.
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Ghosts of the New City
Spirits, Urbanity and the Ruins of Progress in Chiang Mai
University of Hawaii Press, 2014
Chiang Mai (literally, “new city”) suffered badly in the 1997 Asian financial crisis as the Northern Thai real estate bubble collapsed along with the Thai baht, crushing dreams of a renaissance of Northern prosperity. Years later, the ruins of the excesses of the 1990s still stain the skyline. In Ghosts of the New City, Andrew Alan Johnson shows how the trauma of the crash, brought back vividly by the political crisis of 2006, haunts efforts to remake the city. For many Chiang Mai residents, new developments harbor the seeds of the crash, which manifest themselves in anxious stories of ghosts and criminals who conceal themselves behind the city’s progressive veneer.
Hopes for rebirth and fears of decline have their roots in Thai conceptions of progress, which draw from Buddhist and animist ideas of power and sacrality. Cities, Johnson argues, were centers where the charismatic power of kings and animist spirits were grounded; these entities assured progress by imbuing the space with sacred power that would avert disaster. Johnson traces such magico-religious conceptions of potency and space from historical records through present-day popular religious practice and draws parallels between these and secular attempts at urban revitalization.
Through a detailed ethnography of the contested ways in which academics, urban activists, spirit mediums, and architects seek to revitalize the flagging economy and infrastructure of Chiang Mai, Johnson finds that alongside the hope for progress there exists a discourse about urban ghosts, deadly construction sites, and the lurking anxiety of another possible crash, a discourse that calls into question history’s upward trajectory. In this way, Ghosts of the New City draws new connections between urban history and popular religion that have implications far beyond Southeast Asia
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Ethnos, 2022
What are we saying when we lie? Here, I examine two hoaxes in Thailand: a fisherman manufactures evidence of nagas – water dragons – in his town to counter mining claims and Thai security forces double down on the use of a discredited bomb detector. Building on Michael Herzfeld’s cultural intimacy, I argue that these lies do not ask for resolution with ‘truth’, rather, they build a community via provoking a kind of doublethink, calling for the interlocutor to affirm that certain truths are true only in the ideal, at certain times, or at an unresolved future point. Thus, lies are an invitation to a solidarity that remains unspoken: an acknowledgement of a ‘resonance’ that remains unsaid, and a presentation of a world that is still malleable.
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Special Issue: Pacific Affairs
Introduction: "In and Out of Plain Sight" (with Akarath Soukhaphon)
"Hidden Flows"
Deferral and Intimacy: Long-distance Romance and Thai Migrants Abroad
Anthropological Quarterly, 2018
Aek's fiancée, Fern, was already married to a European man. But each month, she sent remittances back to Aek so that he could build them a home and rubber orchard in their hometown in northeastern Thailand. In the meantime, Aek waited for Fern to return. But in the time spent waiting, plans, aspirations, and even bodies changed. As Aek and Fern charted a life together, this deferred life grew more and more spectral. This article is an ethnographic study of the Thai male romantic partners of Thai women working abroad as sex workers or marriage migrants, and their engagement with the problems of impermanence and deferral. Via the "work of waiting" (Kwon 2015) of those left behind, I argue here that waiting is in tension with the impermanence of hopes, selves, and bodies. I ask: what does it mean to "wait," when what is promised, who promises, and the future date when promises are to be realized are each in flux?
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