Putting ‘rupture’ to work at the Three Gorges Dam

Abstract

This provocative article by Sango Mahanty and co-authors proposes rupture as a temporally and spatially expansive view of change and one that encompasses intersections with other crises. In our commentary we put rupture to work as an analytic, thinking through the dynamics of China's massive Three Gorges Dam as a rupture episode with far-reaching disruption to everyday lives and hydrological and socio-economic systems. Through our consideration of the complex temporalities, spatial and material relationships, and generative sociopolitical potential of the Three Gorges Dam, we see value in the authors’ expansive view of change that looks well beyond the boundaries of ‘the project’. Practically speaking; however, we see the need to put some boundaries around our analysis, or the scope of rupture is potentially endless.

Clarifying rupture: An authors’ reply

“…In the Mekong region too, such impacts were evident in dam-affected communities, whose residents had to contend with overlapping changes wrought by large-scale land developments, conservation interventions, and a growing rate of land dispossession from unsustainable debt (Green and Bylander, 2021) connected with the intensification of market-oriented agriculture (also noted by Wilmsen and Rogers in their commentary). These factors combine to drive proletarianization, whereby smallholders turn to other forms of paid labor (Kenney-Lazar, 2012) and outmigration (Barney, 2012;Wilmsen and Rogers, 2023). Besky's attention to 'work' is a welcome addition to our conceptualization because she highlights the impacts on social reproduction as well as physical and emotional 'exhaustion' in these disrupted settings.…”

“…Kumar (2023) emphasizes thatif the timelines are calibrated to European colonization rather than the industrial revolutionepochal frames like the Anthropocene can help to support claims for justice by highlighting the role of coloniality in contemporary environmental crises. Wilmsen and Rogers (2023) find resonances with their research on social ecological disruptions associated with dams in China, while asking a series of important methodological questions on how to 'put rupture to work'. The interconnected themes in these commentaries prompted valuable discussion and reflection, which we share in this response.…”