Flow Piracy and Percolation in a Hydropower Watershed: Interceptions of Indigenous Languages in Upland Laos

Abstract

This article draws on findings of long-term field research in upland central Laos, examining the rapidly changing dynamics of language among multilingual Indigenous communities in the upper reaches of Laos’s massive Nam Theun 2 Hydropower Project. The case study of sudden language shift in the context of new transport infrastructure finds disruption of distributional flow at multiple levels, from natural forces to built networks to the circulation of communicative norms and social encounters. This is understood in terms of layered infrastructures, which are distinguished at three main, interarticulated levels: natural (e.g., river systems), technological (e.g., transport networks), and institutional (e.g., language ecologies). A key finding is that linked infrastructures are causally interdependent through mechanisms of flow piracy (intercepting flows and transforming them for new purposes) and percolation (denuding networks and critically reconfiguring them). The case study from Laos of rapid change in the context of a hydropower dam not only refines our conception of infrastructure, but the idea of language itself as an infrastructure helps us to better understand its spatialized dynamics, foregrounding language as a new empirical domain in the study of infrastructure and other socially spatialized networks.