This page was created by Michitake Aso. 

Bodies and Structures 2.0: Deep-Mapping Modern East Asian History

Conclusion: Invasion Mapped

Some historians have begun to reflect on the Cold War histories of environmental warfare that took place in various locations. Jim Fleming's Fixing the Sky has considered the history of weather modification techniques, including those used in the skies over Vietnam. In addition, there has been much scholarship on the American and South Vietnamese use of herbicides, including books by Ed Martini and David Zierler. David Biggs's recent Footprints of War has considered how the landscapes of central Vietnam have been shaped during decades of war. Yet, there has been little work done on the local perspectives on, and experience of, environmental warfare. This includes the fear of biological weapons, and environmental warfare more generally, in the Red River Delta and the following pages start to explore some of this history.

Focusing on Vietnamese responses to biological warfare reveals that mapping and mobilities (of the geobody and body) were key to this warfare and responses to it. These two processes may seem to exist in tension: maps define and solidify, while mobility destabilizes and makes “all that is solid melts into air.” Yet, the two processes depend on each other. On the one hand, maps cannot be created without movement and exploration. There is the physical movement of the explorer and the material and symbolic flows that happen in knowledge networks. Airplanes have helped this mapping. On the other hand, understanding, and therefore engaging in, movement is very difficult if not impossible without some kind of map. These maps can be official, state created maps or they can be unofficial and personal, from individual mental maps to communal songlines to airplane routes. So mapping and movement are two complementary, intertwined processes.

TBC...

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