“Charlie Don’t Surf”:
Conflict and Confluences of Water Lifeworlds
in Southeast Asia
Eric Haanstad
Director of Undergraduate Studies
Professor of the Practice
Department of Anthropology
University of Notre Dame.
In Apocalypse Now (1979), a single phrase signals an iconic enemy and creates a chain of conflicting associations that separate Western Selves from Eastern Others. The phrase, “Charlie don’t surf” is one of many complex narratives characterizing the Southeast Asian region that call for ongoing critical relationality. This talk begins with earlier research on policing and emerging questions about predictive policing in the region, where logics of anticipation and suspicion can frame people as threats to be managed. It then turns to the region’s indigenous relationships with water, which incorporate people and waterways in entrenched symbiotic networks. Historical and archaeological accounts highlight internal maritime trade linking Southeast Asian rivers, lakes, and seacoasts in water-based exchange. From riverine margins to resilient canal transport in regional megacities, complex cultural, cosmological, ecological, and economic vectors underpin regional water lifeworlds, the shared experiencing of lived phenomena. Filipinos, the hosts of the film’s principal shooting locations, as well as Cambodians and Vietnamese, where the film purportedly takes place, infuse daily life in relation with water through fundamental practices, technologies, and cosmologies. Reading Apocalypse Now’s visual merger of two opposed approaches to water, the talk traces how the film’s transformations of sound and image move from colonizing technological domination through airborne surf invasion toward an internalized adoption of Southeast Asian water lifeworlds in the Philippines, Cambodia, Vietnam, and beyond.