In late 2023, my friend and longtime resident of the Indonesian coastal city Semarang, Pak Puji, sent me a cellphone video displaying the spread of the water hyacinth on his neighborhood’s river. The water hyacinth (Eichhornia crassipes) is a free-floating perennial freshwater plant that flourishes in dammed rivers and reservoirs.¹ The video pans over the Banger River to show large excavators heaving leaves and stems of the hyacinth out of the water. Next, a panoramic sweep allows viewers to take in the plants’ propagation upstream, where the surface of the river has been thoroughly colonized. Along with this video drawing attention to the plant’s advanced encroachment on the river as well as the somewhat ingenuous attempt to remove the plague by raw force, Pak Puji sent me a copy of an appeal he had written to the government:

The existence of [the] water hyacinth in Kali Banger [Banger River] is both a blessing and a disaster. It is a blessing because it absorbs the pollutants in it so that microorganisms and other living creatures—snakehead fish, waterhens, macaws, etc.—can live there. Please note that the water in Kali Banger is household sewage. Before being dammed, the waters of Kali Banger were [flushed] by sea water at high tide. Now, the hyacinth rinses the river. If there is no hyacinth during the long dry season, Kali Banger smells bad and there are no living creatures that can live there. [However], it becomes a disaster when the hyacinth gets out of control. [It] can hamper the flow of the Banger River. Because the flow is blocked, it can cause flooding in settlements around the Banger River during heavy rain…. [Our] community needs to be empowered to cultivate the hyacinth so that it has economic value. In this way, [the] hyacinth is controlled at a very cheap cost.²

I’ve known Pak Puji for many years and immediately recognized his signature style of thinking and arguing with officials, the message’s main addressees. Instead of criticizing the government and subdistrict staff head-on for neglecting his neighborhood and ignoring the outbreak, he makes a case for working together to exploit the potential benefits of the plant. And why not involve local residents in managing the plant to harness its ecological functions and boost aquatic biodiversity along with the neighborhood’s esthetic appeal? Why not exploit the plant’s organic productivity to reduce poverty? Notably, Pak Puji is not asking for the impossible—to get rid entirely of this deep-rooted problem and “destroy” the plant for good. He is not villainizing the hyacinth. His diplomatic tone notwithstanding, he cleverly insinuates a tipping point beyond which the plant could become a disaster: if left untreated, the sheer biomass of the plant could obstruct water flow and cause flooding throughout the area, impairing an already overwhelmed drainage system.

In Pak Puji’s scenario for governing the situation, there is a sweet spot, a middle-path that would not only ensure the river’s main function but also alleviate poverty, two proclaimed goals of the incumbent mayor. Elsewhere (Ley 2021), I call this politics a strategic form of “gnawing” at the government: a soft style of criticizing and incriminating practiced by some civil actors as well as non-governmental organizations in Semarang that aims at extracting support from local authorities, whether in the form of one-time grants or in-kind benefits, such as infrastructural repair. This politics relies on mapping and monitoring urban ecosystems, such as rivers or drains, as they variably come to stand for good or bad governance, promise or failure. The path sketched out by Pak Puji requires finding ways to live with the hyacinth and gauging the benefits of coexisting with the plant in an uncertain environment.

While Li (2015) has argued that one-time improvement projects have become a governing structure in Indonesia, effectively replacing policy, the same can perhaps be said for sociotechnical systems like canals, vibrant “bioinfrastructures” (Acosta and Ley 2023) whose ecological agency both spurs and distills political action. Like the “project system” (Li 2015), the functioning of these actor-networks does not map onto linear visions of betterment. Rather, they are held together by uncoordinated acts aimed at solving immediate problems—acts that are leveled against potential breakdown and crisis. Becoming involved in conversations about drainage and plant growth (how much of it is acceptable?) allows contemplating the risks of breakdown while thinking with the liveliness of coinhabited urban ecologies. Postponing judgement on the hyacinth shows an attitude of being open to a range of tangible outcomes of its spread and how it could be folded into the vagaries of local life.

In the story I tell here, rivers and drainage canals play an important role in this politics, not as receptacles of human action and technology but as palimpsests of infrastructural and ecological becomings, that is, systems “held together by the fraught ways of being alive in the ongoing present” (Anand 2023, 3). This essay asks what the hyacinth, a lifeform thriving in polluted downstream ecologies, and residential efforts of living with it can tell us about acting in the mode of despite?

The tangles of modernization

The first time I noticed the water hyacinth, called eceng gondok in Indonesian, was in 2018. I was revisiting Semarang shortly after defending my PhD thesis. Walking with Pak Puji to the riverbank near his house located in a densely inhabited downstream area, I noticed that water levels in the canal had dropped drastically. I also spotted small islands of glossy green leaves on the surface of the water. Low water levels were a positive sign, as the river had previously often lurked right below the edge of its banks, threatening to leak into Pak Puji’s street at any time. Now, the Banger River no longer posed an immediate threat of flooding; a fleet of water pumps located at its mouth kept water levels steady. Pak Puji had been advocating for the anti-flooding system (also called polder) for more than ten years at the municipal level before it was finally installed.

Pak Puji and the engineers in charge of designing and building the polder were focused on solving flooding—on fixing a dated and crumbling infrastructure which produced regular events of rob, which is how residents refer to tidal flooding. Yet, attempts to modernize the river had an undesired effect—a few years after the intervention, the remaining water looked even more stagnant and murky than before. A thick layer of branches and leaves covered the water surface. Growing strongly entangled with sediment and trash, plants’ roots increasingly hampered water flow. That damming the river created the perfect biological niche for the hyacinth had not been anticipated by polder supporters. Solving one problem created another.

The Banger River and adjoining neighborhoods before (2013) and after (2023) building the dam in the estuary. Source: Google Earth.

The hyacinth was endemic in tropical America before being introduced to Asia around the turn of the twentieth century. As Iqbal (2009) has shown for Bengal, the development of railway infrastructure required diverting and enclosing rivers and canals. Damming rivers ended up inviting the spread of the water hyacinth which, as a result, “not only polluted drinking water but posed a danger to the cultivation of fish, an important source of nutrition for many residents” (40–41). As such, Iqbal argues, the construction of railway infrastructure was a watershed moment in Bengali history, kicking off a cascade of ecological transformations that continue to haunt human and non-human populations.

With striking similarity, the Dutch-built drainage canals in North Semarang, constructed in the early twentieth century and intended to drain unnavigable wetlands and facilitate the expansion of train infrastructure, ended up producing problems with stagnant water (see Ley 2018) and attendant non-human proliferation: algae impeding navigation, mosquitoes spreading vector-borne diseases, or silt choking rivers. In particular, it set off the exploitation and settlement of an amphibious realm, a brackish and silted environment wedged between a sprawling city and the sea. Human-induced environmental problems became even more pronounced as downstream areas began to grow in population. The solution, as both colonial and postcolonial governments believed, was to reestablish flow by dredging and widening waterways, though funding to achieve this was often lacking. After the canal system in North Semarang had repeatedly failed to absorb rainwater, causing massive flooding in the late 1980s and into the 1990s, the central government intervened by widening the Banger River and raising its embankments. Damming the river in 2017 was another infrastructural intervention meant control unruly waters, one that brought on an explosive spread of the hyacinth. But instead of advocating for more state action, some residents are now suggesting to become active in the management of a stubbornly proliferative plant.

Getting mixed up in the mode of despite

A quick search for papers on the water hyacinth reveals a vested interest in harnessing the bountiful plant in both the natural and engineering sciences. Clearly, Pak Puji is not the only one probing the biological properties and values of the hyacinth in light of its intractable presence. Publications by Indonesian authors between 2022–24 describe using plant extract for bathing soap and bokashi textile printing. Others use pyrolysis to produce sugar from the plant. Another paper suggests fermenting organic detritus to generate bioethanol. Composting to obtain fertile soil for small plantations is another envisioned way of appropriating the spread. A study by Unitomo et al. (2022) even tested the compressive strength of concrete after adding hyacinth stem fibers. These engagements with the organic properties of the plant suggest an effort to embrace the presence of the hyacinth and chart ways to co-inhabit with it in the urban ecologies inherited from colonial city-building and modern urban development.

Instead of damning the proliferation of some species around the world, recent literature in anthropology documents similar efforts to embrace so-called “invasive” others that may interfere with, disturb, or upend desired ecological arrangements and “natures.” Drawing on work by Roast (2022), Dominic Piacentini³ recently described foraging non-endemic plants in Appalachian forests as a form of reappropriating unproductive wastelands that ascribes new economic and cultural value to aggressive weeds. Roast’s analysis of Chinese kongdi (undeveloped, “empty” land) treated unruly wastelands as indicative of cracks in a state-driven urban project. Kongdi shows that the boundaries and meanings of the urban are being negotiated, suggesting an “incomplete ontology of the urban itself.” Similarly, zeroing in on the benefits of the hyacinth allows for a “temporal (and temporary) position awaiting an imagined future of urban development” (Roast 2022, 388).

From this in-between position, which allows to follow and feel out the cracks in state programs of “discipline and drain” (Bhattacharyya 2018; Ley 2018a), alternative ways forward might spring. Seeing these paths requires getting mixed up in ways of being alive despite all odds, such as that of the hyacinth. Pak Puji’s activism, then, shows a healthy skepticism of state interventions and infrastructural modernization projects. His close watch of the hyacinth and its treatment is charting a way to align with the defiant being of the plant and finding ways to coexist.

Notes

[1] See Iqbal’s (2020) entry in the “Feral Atlas” by Tsing et al., https://feralatlas.supdigital.org/poster/in-the-bengal-delta-the-anthropocene-began-with-the-arrival-of-the-railways.

[2] Translated from Indonesian by the author.

[3] Winner of the AAA Rappaport Prize, unpublished paper.

Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge the tireless and creative political work of my Indonesian interlocutors, especially my friend Pak Puji. Writing this piece was encouraged and supported by another set of determined workers, namely my colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. Special thanks go to Rishabh Raghavan, Mascha Schulz, and Julia Vorhölter for shepherding this collection of essays. Lastly, I would like to acknowledge the support of the German Scientific Foundation (DFG) through an Emmy Noether grant (Project no.: 495006651).

References

 Acosta, Raúl, and Lukas Ley. 2023. “Urban Bioinfrastructures: An Introduction.” Roadsides 10 (November).

Anand, Nikhil. 2023. “Anthroposea: Planning Future Ecologies in Mumbai’s Wetscapes.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, June, 02637758231183439.

Bhattacharyya, Debjani. 2018. “Discipline and Drain: Settling the Moving Bengal Delta.” Global Environment 11 (2): 236–57.

Ley, Lukas. 2018a. “Discipline and Drain: River Normalization and Semarang’s Fight against Tidal Flooding.” Indonesia 105 (1): 53–75.

Ley, Lukas. 2018b. “On the Margins of the Hydrosocial: Quasi-Events along a Stagnant River.” Geoforum, April.

Ley, Lukas. 2021. Building on Borrowed Time: Rising Seas and Failing Infrastructure in Semarang. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Li, Tania Murray. 2015. “Governing Rural Indonesia: Convergence on the Project System.” Critical Policy Studies 0 (0): 1–16.

Roast, Asa. 2022. “THEORY FROM EMPTY LAND: Informal Commoning Outside/Within Economies and Ecologies of the Urban.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 46 (3): 387–404. .

Unitomo, Sipil, Safrin Zuraidah, K Budi Hastono, Elisabet Trisnawati, and Sumaryam Sumaryam. 2022. “Penggunaan Limbah Batang Eceng Gondok Untuk Beton Fiber.” Publikasi Riset Orientasi Teknik Sipil (Proteksi) 4 (2): 96–101.

Lukas Ley is an environmental anthropologist working at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany, where he leads a DFG-funded Emmy Noether research group on the infrastructural lives of sand in the Indian Ocean World. His research is interested in urban marginalization, temporality, and material environments. His first book, Building on Borrowed Time: Rising Seas and Failing Infrastructure in Semarang was published by University of Minnesota Press in 2021.

Cite as: Ley, Lukas. 2024. “Co-Habiting in the Mode of Despite”. In “Living in a Mode of Despite”, edited by Rishabh Raghavan, Mascha Schulz, and Julia Vorhölter, American Ethnologist website, 3 October 2024. [https://americanethnologist.org/online-content/collections/living-in-a-mode-of-despite/co-habiting-in-the-mode-of-despiteby-lukas-ley/]