In Praise of Floods is the final book by James C Scott, a renowned anthropologist and political scientist, published posthumously after he died in 2024. Much of Scott’s earlier work has focused on agrarian politics and acts of political resistance, this is a rather different book, focusing instead on the life history of a river, the Ayeyarwady (Irrawaddy).
Scott makes a strong argument as to why an anthropologist would look at rivers. Rivers are alive, he argues, “they are born; they change; they shift their channels; they forge new routes to the seas; they move both gradually and violent; they teem (usually) with life; they may die a quasi-natural death; they are frequently maimed and even murdered.” This biography of the Ayeyarwady, he argues, would be just as distinct as a biography of the many people who live along it. Indeed Scott does discuss those who live on its banks, as rivers have long represented a “zone of contract, intercourse and cultural influence that, over time, fosters a cultural homogeneity despite political rivalries.”
In order to consider the life history of a river, we need to expand our timeframe, far past that of human life, and instead to rivers’ far longer lifespan. We also need to view rivers not just as the scene of human interaction, but rather as “an assemblage of life forms that depend on the river for their existence and well-being” of which humans are just one small part.
Scott provides a historical and geographical overview of rivers in general, drawing examples from the Yellow River and Danube, from the movement of tectonic plates 250 million years ago to today, explaining how rivers are shaped and formed. Describing the vast impact that mankind has had on such rivers, Scott wonders, in a play on Heraclitus’s metaphor, that “perhaps the major reason why, for much of the last two millennia, you cannot step into the same river twice is that humankind has radically changed the ecology of rivers and their surroundings.”
Annual flooding is one of the most important and consequential movements that happens to a river. It is also important for the river’s ecological health, with demonstrable links between floods and higher hauls of fish in subsequent years, called the flood pulse. While for humans, such flooding can be highly damaging and dangerous, “for ecologists, the disturbance caused by annual flooding and natural fires is seen as normal and largely beneficial.”
The main focus of this book is the Ayeyarwady River, the largest in Myanmar. The Ayeyarwady basin has been populated since the first millennium BCE, by the Pyu people. They used the river, through construction of small weirs, to irrigate cropland and ponds. In these early days, humans adapted to the river, they did not adapt the river to suit the needs of humans.
The Ayeyarwady undergoes vast changes in size throughout the year. The river is shallow in the dry season between December and March. During the dry season navigating the Ayeyarwady is challenging due to low water level and the increased risk of running aground on rocks. Some of the boats that do run aground, particularly larger vessels, may have to wait until the arrival of the rainy season to resume their journey.
Being able to navigate during the dry season is essential for the hundreds of boats that ply the river. Until the invention of trains and modern roads, transport in Myanmar—as in the rest of the world—was far faster by boat and river than land. By 1920, the Irrawaddy Flotilla Company operated 600 vessels on the river, carrying people and cargo up and down the river. When the rainy season begins, which brings 92% of Burma’s annual rainfall, the river swells in size and the volume of water increases up to 8 times higher than in dry season,
Scott explains how villagers use alluvial islands, small islands made of flood sediment, to their advantage. These small, temporary islands many of which will erode naturally, are between 3 and 10 times productive than adjacent paddy land on the mainland.
Yet all is not well in the Ayeyarwady. Scott details how humans have irrevocably changed the river, through overfishing, oil spills, deforestation and sand and gravel extraction. While dams have not been placed on the main Ayeyarwady river, there are now many on its tributaries. This has a mass impact on river, and limited the rivers’ ability to transport sediment, has decreased water flows and blocked the passage of migratory fish. These large dams, Scott argues, imprison the rivers.
Scott then anthropomorphises the animals native to the Ayeyarwady, as if they were talking heads, and he imagines what they would say to humans about present their own challenges of living in the river amidst mass human activity. In this slightly bizarre section of the book, we hear from the Ayeyarwady river dolphin who declares “we want our river back from the colonists! We want its floods, silt, wetlands, swamps, mangroves forests,” and the snow carp who laments “gone are many of the plants and insects that were the stables of my diet.” A hilsa fish that tells readers humans have “penned us in, you have incarcerated us and have prevented us from reproducing” Even the humble mollusc declares that “now our very existence is at stake, we can no longer clean up your mess.”
A short read at just under 200 pages, Scott freely admits much of the planned research for the trip, was disrupted, initially by COVID and then by the coup. Therefore, he has used local Burmese contributors for some sections in order to overcome these challenges. The book paints a strong picture of the challenges that biodiversity in the Ayeyarwady faces and highlights the inherent contradictions in man-made conservation efforts, given what is best for mankind is so often at odds with what’s best for nature.
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