Wissen im Fluss: Der lateinamerikanische Staudammbau im 20. Jahrhundert als globale Wissensgeschichte [Knowledge in flux: Latin American dam construction in the twentieth century as a global history of knowledge] by Frederik Schulze (review)

Reviewed by:

• Wissen im Fluss: Der lateinamerikanische Staudammbau im 20. Jahrhundert als globale Wissensgeschichte [Knowledge in flux: Latin American dam construction in the twentieth century as a global history of knowledge] by Frederik Schulze
• Teresa Huhle (bio)

Wissen im Fluss: Der lateinamerikanische Staudammbau im 20. Jahrhundert als globale Wissensgeschichte [Knowledge in flux: Latin American dam construction in the twentieth century as a global history of knowledge] By Frederik Schulze. Paderborn: Brill Schöningh, 2022. Pp. 515.

The scales of this book match its topic. Frederik Schulze's Wissen im Fluss, on the planning and construction of large dams in Latin America, is voluminous in pages, extensive in bibliography and sources, broad in its temporal and geographical scope—spanning the whole twentieth century with case studies from Uruguay, Mexico, Venezuela, and Brazil—and profound in its analysis. Thanks to its superb organization, coherent narrative, and masterly contextualization, it also makes for a very good read.

Comprised as a history of knowledge, Frederik Schulze sets out to show the central role of Latin America in the production and application of the technological knowledge that was at play in the state-driven planning and construction of large dams and the infrastructures attached to them. Water engineering, he convincingly argues, was a domain of notable Latin American agency throughout the twentieth century. Engineers and other experts from the area produced, adapted, and exported technological knowledge, while politicians skillfully played foreign firms and investors against each other.

Existing literature on the history of dams, Schulze assesses, has neglected the topics of transfer of knowledge and global interactions. Scholars on Latin America and elsewhere have critiqued dams as "large projects intoxicated with modernization" (pp. xxviii–xxix) and have focused on the environmental damage they cause, but Schulze tells us these scholars have neglected the global processes of knowledge production. He vehemently opposes what he refers to as a victimizing perspective on the Global South and presents [End Page 695] convincing arguments and evidence against such approaches. Latin America, for one, created centers of technological knowledge of its own, he shows. The unpredictability of nature, he further illustrates, made it impossible to create stable knowledge on dams, and this precarity opened spaces of contestation for local technicians and politicians.

His journey starts in Uruguay (Rincón del Bonete Dam, 1904–48), continues to Mexico (Miguel Alemán Dam, 1944–60) and Venezuela (Guri Dam, 1949–86), and ends in Brazil (Tucuruí Dam, 1973–84). Beyond the geographical voyage, the book also moves through development ideas in Latin America's twentieth century. It starts with the construction of a dam for the singular purpose of the production of electricity (Uruguay), continues with a dam's embeddedness in TVA-style regional development planning (Mexico), then moves to the Cold War context of industrialization and economic planning (Venezuela), and finishes with a project that symbolized technological independence from the North while being heavily contested for its social and ecological consequences (Brazil). Importantly, all four chapters end with a conclusion that places the national cases in a broader Latin American perspective at their respective moments in time. Each of these case studies would merit a review of their own.

All the cases substantially add to Schulze's argument that Latin American nation-states, technocrats, and private businesses were confident producers and applicants of technological knowledge, who could compete and self-consciously negotiate with their European and North American partners. Not surprisingly, among the producers of knowledge, engineers played a particularly important role, and Schulze elaborates on their training and professionalization in all the countries under study. Engineers, however, are by far not the only characters who appear in Schulze's story. Politicians, diplomats, entrepreneurs, and anthropologists—to name but a few—also figure prominently. And despite the focus on knowledge production, the book also expands on cultural dimensions and the nation-building function of the dams. More often than not, Schulze shows, dam construction came with a civilizing mission targeted at the rivers that were to be "tamed," but also at the environments and populations surrounding them. It is a special strength of the book that while always adding to its line of argumentation, it also allows for many small stories...