On the Mekong River, where the current forms the border between Thailand and Laos, a new being has appeared. The naga – a kind of gargantuan water dragon – forms a key part of local lives, appearing on nights of the full moon (especially at the end of the rainy season) to belch fire into the sky and to which some of my interlocutors attributed their own ancestry. But around 2012, a new kind of naga appeared. An older man, recently arrived from Kanchanaburi, a province near Bangkok, set up his home in an old Bronze Age copper mine behind a temple overlooking the river. Here, he claimed to be possessed by the spirit of the Black Naga, a being that promised help securing labor contracts and job offers, rubber prices and the favor of Bangkokian officials.

In this, the Black Naga runs counter not only to its older kin, but also to another divine beast of the waters – the Lord of the Fish. The patron deity of Pangasianodon gigas, the Mekong Giant Catfish, was a local deity whose worship extends back at least to the founding of the village, where a noble exile from Laos discovered a pool full of the massive fish. During the French colonial era, the Laotian monarch and French officials would sponsor a medium of the Lord to give a blessing as well as perform divination for the year to come.

The Lord of the Fish’s jurisdiction was clear – should the community uphold certain standards of morality, he would send some of his subjects to be caught in fishermen’s nets. But in the wake of the Mekong’s transformation, after hydropower projects turned the red water blue and dropped the current to historically low levels, there were simply no fish to send. Some residents hedged their bets, visiting the Black Naga’s medium in addition to making offerings at the Lord’s shine. Other devotees of the Black Naga simply discounted the older river beings altogether – “they grew tired of us,” said one.

Here, I look at the transformation in myths and religious practice surrounding divine animals of the Mekong – specifically naga and fish spirits – in the wake of hydropower projects and climate change. New naga cults arise, both local spirits such as the Black Naga but also regionally famous naga spirits such as the naga of Kham Chanote forest, by re-focusing ritual practice away from dwelling in the landscape and towards the more inchoate blessings of capital and migration. Breaking ties with kin groups, they foster ties of capital and migration abroad. Thus, with a collapse of ecological systems in the Anthropocene, we see not a de-sacralization of the landscape, but rather a shift in its enchantments, as new beings arise in the wreckage of what has come before.  

Keywords: Southeast Asia, animism, naga, fisheries, riparian lives

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Andrew Alan Johnson is a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at the University of California-Berkeley. He is the author of Ghosts of the New City (2014, U Hawaii Press) and, relevant to the topic of this conferences, Mekong Dreaming (2020, Duke University Press), as well as many articles relating to local religion and the environment. He has done ethnographic research in Thailand, especially Lao-speaking parts of the country, since 2000.