The Lower Sesan 2 Dam (LS2) is the largest and most controversial hydropower dam ever developed in Cambodia. The 400 megawatt-capacity project, which blocks both the Sesan and Srepok rivers in Stung Treng province, northeastern Cambodia, was first envisioned in 1998, although the project was only completed in 2018. LS2 was initially an Electricité du Viet Nam (EVN) project. Later, however, with strong Chinese government support, a Chinese company, Hydrolancang International Energy Company, took over the Vietnamese share in the project, with EVN holding just a 10 per cent stake, and the Royal Group, a Cambodian company, holding a 39 per cent share. The LS2 was ultimately developed as a Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) infrastructure, with its own political aspects. This article considers the relationship between LS2 and sacred spaces of rural ethnic Lao people, including how spirit mediums and the associated belief systems of local people have been impacted by LS2. We take a feminist political ecology approach to this study, as female spirit mediums have contested the LS2 since before its construction began and have also been directly affected by the dam. They have also served as important shadow infrastructure. We argue that, apart from having potentially important material impacts, dams such as LS2 also serve to alter nature-society relations through variously affecting spirit mediums, their practices, and beliefs associated with spirits.

In this article we rethink the chronotope approach by examining what happened to religious space-times in a Chinese urban development project that completely transformed what had once been five relatively rural townships. What happens to chronotopes when a place is so completely transformed? We focus on multiple chronotopic dimensions in the religious experience of those villagers whose families had long occupied this land, but who now live separated from their old neighbors, without their old livelihoods, having lost their old temples, and surrounded by new migrants who are generally wealthier and better educated. Building on recent anthropological work on chronotopes, coupled with insights taken from Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Gilles Deleuze, this article explores the complex interrelationships and workings of chronotopes through the idea of the fold. This approach reconsiders what the boundaries between chronotopes might look like—not necessarily straight lines that are difficult to cross, but more like the infinite inflections of curves as those curves intersect and interact with each other. Rather than thinking of chronotopes as structured wholes separated by clear boundaries—much as we also tend to think about “states,” “cultures,” or “ontologies”—folding allows us to reconceptualize the kinds of interactions that take place when one space-time touches another. We examine in particular three ways in which folding elucidates how chronotopic boundaries can work: they can make the distant near, separate inside from outside, and complicate the boundary by interdigitating.