Disturbed Forests, Fragmented Memories: Jarai and Other Lives in the Cambodian Highlands 0295746904, 9780295746906

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, ,  

Studies in Anthropology and Environment K. Sivaramakrishnan, Series Editor Centered in anthropology, the Culture, Place, and Nature series encompasses new interdisciplinary social science research on environmental issues, focusing on the intersection of culture, ecology, and politics in global, national, and local contexts. Contributors to the series view environmental knowledge and issues from the multiple and often conflicting perspectives of various cultural systems.

Disturbed Forests, Fragmented Memories        

Jonathan Padwe

    Seattle

Disturbed Forests, Fragmented Memories was made possible in part by a grant from the Association for Asian Studies First Book Subvention Program.

Copyright ©  by the University of Washington Press Composed in Warnock Pro, typeface designed by Robert Slimbach Printed and bound in the United States of America           All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.     uwapress.uw.edu    --     record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/  ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/  ---- (hardback)  ---- (paperback)  ---- (ebook) Cover photograph by Kevin Morris The paper used in this publication is acid free and meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials,  .–.∞

 Foreword by K. Sivaramakrishnan vii Acknowledgments

ix

A Note on Orthography and Language xiii Overview Maps of the Area of Study xv 



  Cambodia’s Northeast Hills



  Slaveholding Chiefs on the Resource Frontier   The Jungle Girl and the Wild Man    Rubber, Rule, and Revolt





  Ecologies of Invasion    Revolution in a Rice Field



  Garden-Variety Histories



 Fragments Shored against Ruins Notes  Bibliography Index







 War and displacement, with attendant disruptions of farming and ties to land as home and heritage, have been recurrent themes of rural history in many parts of Southeast Asia, especially the highlands of Cambodia, Vietnam, and Myanmar. Never has this occurred with more traumatic consequences than in the twentieth century, as colonialism; bloody revolutions sparked by communism, ethnic hatred, or military dictators; and struggles for livelihood have transformed landscapes of forest and farm repeatedly. In this volume, drawing on over a decade of painstaking and empathetic research, Jonathan Padwe has taken up these themes, working resolutely from the brave, wise, and resilient perspective of the Jarai people of northeastern Cambodia. In doing so, he rewrites the narratives of disaster, exploitation, displacement, and structural and intimate violence to draw out the small voices of history. In the s, Pierre Nora and Simon Schama produced contrasting accounts of the relations between landscapes and their remembrance in human history. These works sparked a lasting interest in how modern societies remember ties to land and what social and political outcomes result from these fraught, often contentious, and frequently traumatic recollections. In Cambodia, themes of war trauma, remembrance, and reconstruction have already been described powerfully. Padwe addresses these concerns from the vantage of Jarai in the forests and fields that they called home through war and privation, including a period of forced relocation in the time of the Khmer Rouge. As he notes, plants, insects, animals, and people were displaced, and along with them, structures of memory and connection were disrupted. He carried out itinerant research, therefore, traveling and living with Jarai to observe with deep compassion and understanding how the Jarai narrate violence committed on them as well as on the land. Padwe recovers stories that disrupt neat teleological accounts of the advance of civilization 

into the hills. James Scott has famously argued that this was always hard until the advent of the twentieth century in upland Southeast Asia. Focused precisely on that previous century, which features but scantly in more synthetic work, Padwe presents the fragmented histories and forgotten voices of those often subsumed into civilizing metanarratives as pawns and patients well into the twenty-first century. He has thus written a powerful ethnography of a people and their land who rarely speak for themselves. He is quick to note that the Jarai, especially when he has them telling their history of settlement and nineteenth-century wars, were also powerful actors in the relations between highlands and lowlands, even in the Khmer Rouge period when their deprivation was perhaps less extreme than that of lowland farmers. Yet, by the late twentieth century, the Jarai were barbarians in the eyes of now powerful Cambodians, and they are viewed as primitives in need of development by the larger international community. This recognition leads into an account of the vicissitudes of Jarai encounters with rural and social development, their becoming rice farmers, and their ultimate settling as residents of hill towns. Padwe shows Jarai mobility and identity formation in the landscape constituted by the United States’ bombing of the northeastern hills of Cambodia during the Vietnam War, the communist revolution that followed, and finally their return to swidden agriculture in the hills over the past three decades. This is a landscape that was not only depopulated or planted over with rubber but also cratered and land-mined by the ravages of war and its retreat. The resilience of swidden farming in violently reconstituted social and ecological conditions, as settlement and rice returned to the hills in recent times, shines through in this work. Jarai are neither essentialized nor rendered univocal here; their lives are depicted vividly across domains of social reproduction, ecological knowledge, historical memory, religion and spirituality, and events of celebration and mourning. Ritual, neither exoticized nor romanticized, becomes a lens through which to view the making and unmaking of difference and hierarchy, thus integrating the study of religion into environmental anthropology in a very rewarding fashion. Padwe brings alive a socialecological field of struggle, where rubber trees and rice join earlier plant communities and animals, insects, and birds in the world the Jarai inhabit and remake through their troubles, struggles, and persistence. Much has been said of late about the need to produce a more-than-human anthropology. This study actually does that work, always from the location of those whose humanity and ecological selfhood have been constantly challenged and placed under adverse scrutiny in modern times. .  Yale University





 I began studying the culture and history of Cambodia and of Southeast Asia in , after more than a decade working in Latin America. The differences between the two regions are profound: what seem like the most basic categories of analysis—such things as colonialism, the state, or Indigenous identity—take on quite different meanings within the specific historical, cultural, and ecological composition of the different regions. I learned a great deal from having made this shift in focus, but it would not have been possible without the many people in Cambodia who helped me to make sense of what was at first a bewildering and complex place. Foremost among them were the people of the village I call Tang Kadon in this book, who invited me to drink jars of rice beer with them, to eat their food, and to share their lives. I am grateful to you. Others who helped me along the way include Suon Neang, a great Khmer language teacher and one of the wisest people I know. In Cambodia, Seng Teak, Tapley and Mia Jordanwood, Dave Hubbel, Laurent Jeanneau, Ashish John, and Sal Yumko offered hospitality, companionship, and encouragement. I’m also grateful to friends and fellow scholars of the region, including William Chickering, Andy Maxwell, Jeremy Ironside, Sarah Milne, Erik Davis, Erin Collins, Sylvain Vogel, and Frédéric Bourdier. Sara Colm and Ian Baird both read portions of this manuscript, and I am grateful for all I have learned from them. I would also like to recognize a special intellectual and personal debt to Mathieu Guérin, a generous scholar and friend. Other friend-colleague-collaborators to whom I am indebted include Jason Cons, Christian Lentz, Shafqat Hussain, Vikramaditya Thakur, Sarah Besky, Kevin Woods, Andrew Mathews, and Pam McElwee. I’m also grateful to fellow shrippers Mary Mostafanezhad, Justine Espiritu, and Adam Doering. In the vein of friendship, camaraderie, and scholarship, this book would not have been possible had it not been for my association with a few different 

centers of social and intellectual activity at Yale University, including the Program in Agrarian Studies, which provided me with an intellectual home in a bucolic basement on Trumbull Street; the Dove lab, whose members offered solidarity and a sense for what is possible; and the members of the so-called clubhouse, who deftly fended off raccoons. Finally, I submit this book as the latest contribution of the Skagen School of Land and Politics in Asia; many thanks to Michael Eilenberg for bringing together this group, to Nancy Lee Peluso and Christian Lund for guidance, and to all of our crew for the careful reading and comments—Laurits Tuxen would be proud. A number of institutions opened their doors to me during this research, among them the Maison Asie-Pacifique in Marseilles, the Archives nationales d’outre-mer in Aix-en-Provence, the Documentation Center of Cambodia, the Cambodian National Archive, the Echols Southeast Asia Collection at Cornell University, and the Southeast Asia Collection at the Sterling Memorial Library. I am grateful to Rich Richie, Southeast Asia librarian at Yale, who among other things liberated a quite useful volume from the remote alpine fastness where it was kept prisoner. Stace Maples, then of the Sterling Memorial Library Map Collection, provided much needed help, as did Larry Bonneau at the Yale Center for Earth Observation. I am grateful to have received grants and fellowships in support of this work from the US Environmental Protection Agency STAR Program, the Fulbright-Hayes Program of the US Department of Education, the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the Center for Khmer Studies, the Henry Luce Foundation, and the GeoEye Foundation. I am also grateful for institutional support and small grants from Yale University and from the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. In  Tania Li came to Hawai‘i from Canada to think through my theninsubstantial book manuscript together with Barbara Andaya and Geoff White as part of a workshop made possible by the generous support of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Hawai‘i. I greatly appreciate their contributions, even as I am sure the final product does not bear very much in common with our discussions. My colleagues in my department and at the university have provided many other forms of support in recent years, and I’m grateful to them for their belief in me. I am likewise thankful to Michael Hathaway for reading some of what is presented here and discussing it with me during rainy walks. The manuscript also benefited greatly during the review process from the generous contributions of two initially anonymous readers who turned out to be Erik Harms and Penny Edwards; their close reading of the manuscript, their insightful suggestions, and the line-by-line editorial comments they provided challenged me and 



encouraged me at the same time. At the University of Washington Press, Lorri Hagman not only provided guidance and expert help with the text, but also made extraordinary efforts on my behalf for which I am grateful, as I am to Neecole Bostick, Julie Van Pelt, and other members of the editorial team. I am furthermore grateful to Kevin Morris, whose photographs appear throughout the book, and to Aaron Reiss, who made the maps. Among the scholars and mentors I have been lucky enough to know, I am particularly grateful to Michael Dove; the care and attention he devoted to my writing and education continue to inspire me and give me something to strive for in my own work. K. Sivaramakrishnan likewise provided me with guidance and patient mentorship. I could not have found a better guide to Cambodian and Southeast Asian history than Ben Kiernan. I am also grateful to have had the participation of Eric Worby, Arjun Appadurai, and Anna Tsing. James Scott has been not only a generous teacher but also an inspiration. My family played an important role as well. I’m grateful to my parents, Gerry and Alice Padwe, for a lifetime of love. Beyond that, my mother and her sister, Laura Strauss, both read the complete draft manuscript and provided expert editorial help. My wife, Jenny Grimm, helped keep me focused on what is really important in life. And my kids, Moses, Charles, and Louisa, demonstrated just what that is. It is customary in acknowledgments like this to point out that while the work has benefited from the help of others, its faults are those of the author alone. This is absolutely true in the case of this book. It would have been so much easier, though, to take the approach adopted by Captain Pierre-Paul Cupet, the French explorer who spent time among the Jarai in the late nineteenth century. Reflecting on how his account of those explorations came to be published in a popular journal, he wrote of his memories that “these would no doubt forever have remained stored away in a box, if my friends had not assured me that they could interest the readers of Le tour du monde. If they were wrong, I leave all responsibility to them.”





      A word is in order regarding the writing system used to represent Jarai and other languages in this book. I have provided the Jarai terms for key concepts and words in the text in parentheses following the English. In cases in which the Khmer-language term is most relevant or was used by Jarai or Khmer speakers in conversation, I provide transliterated Khmer followed by the indication “Kh.” Regarding the orthography I have used for Jarai transcription, it corresponds to the widely used written form of the Jarai language prevalent in Vietnam today, a writing system initially devised by missionaries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Jarai speakers from Vietnam will find that the version of Jarai spoken in Cambodia differs greatly from that of Vietnam. Key orthographic features of Jarai include the letter ơ, a schwa sound that is pronounced like the a in about; the diphthong aô, pronounced somewhere between the aw in shawl and the o in hole; the ñ, pronounced like the second n in continue; and shortened vowels, indicated as ă, ĕ, ơ˘, and so forth. The spelling of the ethnonym “Jarai” is a somewhat open question in the anthropological record. The word is generally pronounced as if it were written Jơrai, with a schwa sound for the first vowel and, in parts of Cambodia, a breathy r in the middle. The French ethnographer and authority on Jarai culture Jacques Dournes spelled this word Jörai, as ö was his idiosyncratic representation of ơ. Other spellings include Djarai, Djiarai, and Jorai (the Vietnamese province Gia Lai, formerly Pleiku, is named after the ethnic group). I have chosen to keep the spelling as “Jarai,” a form common to English and French practice, providing continuity with previous scholarly work. This is a spelling that English speakers are likely to pronounce more or less correctly, and one that conforms to the word’s spelling in the written Jarai used by Jarai speakers in Vietnam. 

Many of the ethnic minority groups discussed in this book, the Jarai, Kacŏ, Tampuan, Kavet, Kreung, Brao, Bunong, Mnong, Edé, and others, are hill-rice farmers who live in the uplands of the Annamite mountain chain. Collectively these groups have been known by many names, including a number of disparaging terms in local dialects, such as moï, kha, phnong, and others; these terms are discussed in greater detail in the text. The term Montagnard was applied to them by the French during the colonial period, and was used by the US military and in popular discourse in English during the United States–Vietnam War. In scholarly and popular literature during the mid-twentieth century these upland farmers were also called hill tribes. I have opted for the word highlanders as a relatively neutral term that avoids the semantic burdens associated with these other namings. I have assigned pseudonyms to several place-names and to all personal names of nonhistorical figures in this text, to preserve the anonymity of the people who were kind enough to share their stories with me. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are mine.



     

A

K h o r at P l at e a u

N

Khe San

N

A

Mekong R.

Hue

M I

T H A I L A N D

T

Da Nang

E

M

O

L A O S

U

Boloven P l at e a u

Champasak

N T

Attapeu

A

I

N

S

Kontum P l at e a u

Mekong R.

Sesan FOCUS R. AREA Pleiku P l at e a u Sesan R.

Sekong R.

C A M B O D I A

Tonle Sap Lake

V I E T N A M

Siem Reap

Srepok R.

Mekong R. Tonle San R.

Kampong Cham

Phnom Penh Saigon R. Mekong R.

Da Lat

D a l at P l at e a u Đồng Nai R.

Ho Chi Minh City

ea

Bassac R.

Bé R.

Darlac Ba R. P l at e a u

T

h

u

a

a

S

MEKONG D E LTA

n

G

lf

il

Of an d

So

u

th

C

h

i

N 50 km

Regional map of Southeast Asia. Map by Aaron Reiss.

S

Voeunsai

. Tuy Hòa

M

Sea

Bandon Ban Me Thuot

Sen Monorom

Snuol

R

na

Kratie

B

Ayun Pa (Cheo Reo)

a

MONDULKIRI PROVINCE

Qui Nhon

Plơi Tur / Plơi Miơng

hi h C

RATANAKIRI P.

KRATIE P. 50 km

Study area

Pleiku

A

R.

O Yadao Lomphat Borkeo

Sambor

KAMPONG CHAM

n

Banlung

C A M B O D I A

Sambok

Labansiek rubber plantation

Sout

ng

Stung Treng

Kontum

e

sa

Sek o

R

.

STUNG TRENG P.

KE Y R.

M e k o ng

L A O S

E T V I

N

Nha Trang

N

Da Lat

I

N

A

E

S

The borderland where northeast Cambodia, Vietnam, and Laos come together. Map by Aaron Reiss.

A

Mekong R.

C

S

O

U

T

H

H

Chong

S at a i River

Peng Muy

Tang-a

Chai

Sesan River

Ket Chai Toic

In Ta Lao

Tang Kadon

Kachut Sesan Loeu R i v e r Kachut Kraom

Loum

Dal

Lom

I

Bokham

Krieng 5 km

Pa Dal

E T N A M

Katae

V I

(Andong Meas)

Nhang

A

O Kop Malik

Nhai

C A M B O D

Ka-Nat

Kak Ka-Nong

Ka Tang

Focus area. Jarai and Kacŏ villages north of the Sesan River in Cambodia’s northeast hills. Map by Aaron Reiss.

N

 ,  

Introduction

A

 is the dustiest month in Banlung, the small-time boom town that is the capital of Ratanakiri Province in Cambodia’s northeast highlands. Newly plowed roads used by newly arrived migrants expose the soil to rain and then to the dry-season sun, producing a fine laterite dust that is borne aloft by the wind and deposited on everything, reddening the surfaces of the world. The almost-urban landscape feels surreal and often desolate: Banlung is brand-new and run-down at the same time, and few, it seems to me, feel at home here. While I am an outsider, this sentiment is also shared by my companion for the day, Rơcom Kwĕn, a man in his late forties who is also something of an outsider here. Kwĕn serves as the chief (me phum, Kh.) of Tang Kadon, a village that lies a mere twenty kilometers east of here, near the border with Vietnam, and he is in town for a political meeting. Were it not for this official obligation, he would almost surely not have come. The last time he visited was in the s, when he was briefly in the army. The town of Banlung, and its inhabitants, most of them new arrivals and members of Cambodia’s Khmer ethnic majority, make Kwĕn uneasy. How differently these urban Khmers live, when compared with his people, the Jarai, one of several groups of ethnic-minority hill farmers who were until very recently the majority inhabitants of this region. Kwĕn’s feelings of unease, and his general dislike for the people who have displaced highlanders throughout this area, feed a stream of semi-ironic commentary that keeps us both amused during our walk. As we pass by what appears to me to be a tacky faux chateau, Kwĕn asks what kind of business it might be. I tell him it is a house, a residence. He says he thought that Khmers did not live in communal dwellings like Jarai longhouses. 

“They don’t,” I reply. “It’s the house of just one family.” “Just one family?” repeats Kwĕn, a hint of outrage creeping into his voice. “You have to kill a lot of people to own a house like that.” He looks through the bars of the gate, and then looks around at the neighboring houses. There is no forest anywhere nearby; we are in a neighborhood. “So, where do they shit?” he asks me. “They have a bathroom inside the house, probably more than one,” I tell him. “They shit in there . . . ,” Kwĕn remarks, staring at the house, incredulous. “Why would anyone want to shit inside their own house?” Kwĕn continues his wry commentary on what passes for development here as we continue our walk through town. As he mutters and exclaims, he interprets the landscape for me, and I get a sense for what it must look like through his eyes. It is a way of seeing the world from his point of view. The most revealing moments are those of surprise, when his shock at something amiss alerts me to the way he thinks things ought to be. Such a moment arrives just a few blocks farther down the street, as we near the edge of town. We are strolling along under the shade of a large mango tree when, as if to punctuate his feelings of unease, Kwĕn suddenly and with great vigor jumps sideways into the street. “What is that doing here?” he asks, his face white with fear, pointing a finger at a tree by the gate of the house we’ve just passed. As he points, he proceeds to cross fully to the other side of the street. Attached to the tree is a gangly epiphyte, its fronds of foliage dangling beard-like from a cabbageball of leaves. Upon closer inspection, it appears that it was placed here as an ornamental plant. I turn back to Kwĕn to suggest as much, but he is already gone, halfway down the street, and I run to catch up with him. I later learned that the Jarai call this plant bong yang, meaning “spirit’s box” or “spirit’s coffin.” The term yang in this case refers to the spirit beings that animate forest and village alike, inhabiting plants and animals but also rocks and springs, copses and hills, and other places in the forest, as well as houses and buildings and objects like sacred gongs and the ceramic jars used for drinking rice beer. In English the plant is known as staghorn fern, or Platycerium coronarium in the binomial nomenclature of Western botany. I include these terms to help locate the plant, not to privilege outsiders’ understandings of the ecology of this place, about which the Jarai know a great deal. They know, for instance, that the spirits housed by this plant are particularly malevolent ones. “Just seeing that plant causes us to salivate and tremble with fear,” Kwĕn tells me. The plant’s association with malignant





spirits prevails in Vietnam, too, where people will shut their eyes when they encounter it. Most Cambodians do not seem to share these apprehensions. They sometimes use the plant to decorate their yards and gardens. In the s Cambodia exported Platycerium to Europe in great quantities as ornamental plants. Bong yang is indeed a weird plant. An epiphyte that establishes itself on the surface of trees in the region’s forests, it is also a myrmecophyte, meaning that it develops symbiotic relationships with ants. Ants provide it with protection against other insects that might eat its leaves, and in exchange the plant provides ants with housing in internal structures known to Western ecologists as domatia. The Jarai know about the plant’s relations with ants, too, but I am more intrigued when Kwĕn mentions to me that there are “fish” that live inside it. After much discussion of this point, I understand him to mean that over time the bowl formed by the plant’s leaves becomes a reservoir for rainwater, in which one can sometimes find aquatic insect larvae swimming around. • •

•

In our walk through bustling Banlung Town, what Kwĕn saw all around him and to which he drew my attention in his ironic running account was evidence of the rapid social change that had transpired there over a very short period. During his lifetime, the town had transformed from a settlement of a few houses on the edge of a military outpost into a small city, and the histories of appropriation and dislocation that accompanied this shift left Kwĕn feeling ill at ease. The Platycerium plant, pulled from its home in the forest and transposed into this new setting, decontextualized, its out-ofplaceness perhaps as disturbing as its latent spiritual menace, provides a good sense for the fragmentary nature of the hill country landscape and for the kinds of histories that attach to it. The plant thus provides an opening onto the ways that successive projects enacted on the natural world not only have transfigured that world but have left behind a record in the form of remnants and traces. The bong yang plant’s ability to act upon Kwĕn, with its potency and its material presence in the world, is likewise both remarkable and quite telling of the ways that highlanders experience their environment. To know Cambodia’s northeast hill country alongside its Jarai residents is to recognize the landscape as animated and potent, not only shaped by history but also shaping it. In the world all around them, in their physical environment, in the ecology

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of forests and fields, in the productive spaces of their farms and gardens, and in the many in-between places that are mixtures of all of these, the Jarai find themselves surrounded by the product of human activity mixed together with the work of spirits (yang) and ghosts (atâo) and of the vital force of ecology or of life itself, a force they might refer to as prăn, the breath of life. They see history, too, in the traces left behind by previous social and ecological formations. Yet just like the forests of the hill country, these histories and their meanings are constantly changing, subjected to creative reimaginings, put to new uses, or indeed smashed to pieces by the successive waves of violence that from time to time overtake the lives of these people and this place. Kwĕn’s encounter with the bong yang plant thus illustrates several of the concerns central to this book. Foremost among these is an effort to portray the lives and experiences of the residents of the small village of Tang Kadon in their own words and from their own perspective. Tang Kadon, the village Kwĕn hails from, is a cluster of longhouses in the hill country, located just a few kilometers inside the Cambodia-Vietnam border. Its residents are members of the Jarai ethnic minority. The stories villagers there tell of their past provide new insights into regional and world history. They reimagine and sometimes contradict conventional narratives about the experience of colonialism, for instance, or the Vietnam War, or the Cambodian genocide, to name just a few of the significant historical events experienced in the village over the past century. Historian E. P. Thompson called such accounts of the past “history from below,” but the term is elevationally inaccurate in this case, since the residents of Tang Kadon are highlanders. Think of them as “histories from the hills” instead. These are more than oral histories. They are part of the very landscape of the hill country itself. Farm fields and gardens, forests, rivers and hills, ecologies and locales: the terrain itself serves as a medium for memory in the highlands. In the Jarai telling, the environment and its many components also take on active roles as participants in historical processes. The principal subject matter of this book is thus the changing landscape of the highlands— a series of transformations resulting from changing social formations and changing relationships between humans and the environment—presented from the perspective of Jarai narrators and foregrounding their experience and understandings. Recent years have seen an efflorescence of writing about history, place, and nature in Cambodia and Southeast Asia. This new scholarship joins a much larger literature on landscape and memory in the social and environmental sciences and humanities. Disturbed Forests, Fragmented Memories 

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contributes to this emerging multidisciplinary conversation in several ways. The book’s approach begins from the recognition that, ironically, much writing on landscape and memory to date leaves the landscape inert, a blank canvas upon which humans inscribe meaning. In contrast to this overly anthropocentric rendering of landscape, the stories narrated here follow Jarai cosmology in emphasizing the agency of the natural world, its participation in the production of life, and, therefore, its contribution to processes of social change. Embracing the potentialities of nature in shaping history provides a point of departure for rethinking which stories have the power to instruct and provide guidance. Like the landscape itself, though, histories from the hills are only ever partial: to understand the past through its remnants in the present requires not only coming to grips with the fractured nature of the past, but also celebrating the virtues of this incompleteness. Where the past lives on in the present, it does so only in pieces. Previous ecologies are overgrown, and the forces of obliteration and oblivion leave behind only fragments from which present understandings are constructed. Multiple forms of disturbance are at play here—not only the ecological disturbance that shapes succession and species composition in the forests of the northeast hills, but catastrophic disturbances, social and material in their nature, that uprooted people and moved them around on the land, displacing them relationally from each other and from their environment. Processes of disturbance shape the remains of the past, which lives on now in fractured form. The constellation of stories that make up Disturbed Forests, Fragmented Memories, arranged as it is from bits and pieces of the past, retains something of the process of disturbance and repair that formed them. Many of the stories related here were told in small bursts, or emerged in conversation over many days. Their narrators assumed a great deal of knowledge on the part of listeners. No one had the whole story, and different narrators told the same story using different facts, or used the same facts to reach different conclusions. The pieces of this book, its chapters and sections, reflect this fragmentary subject matter and retain something of the impressionistic ways that this material is often related. Some are more whole than others, some are almost disintegrated, others are more complete. The logics of landscape change considered here also differ in significant ways from those that predominate in much scholarly work on the historical transformation of rural farming societies. Processes of commodification, agricultural intensification, primitive accumulation or accumulation by dispossession, the establishment of private property rights in land, and the forms of social inequality and marginalization that these processes entail have 

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arrived only recently in Tang Kadon. Much writing about landscape in the fields of critical human geography, political ecology, and the environmental humanities explains changes in the land in terms of the imposition of capitalist social relations. Yet for much of the past century, capitalist social relations had not yet taken hold in Cambodia’s northeast hill country, although, to be sure, the effects of an expanding capitalist world system were felt there. It has therefore been important to seek explanatory frameworks beyond the categories of capitalism or neoliberalism to account for changing socioecologies. One way of doing this has been to take seriously the kinds of explanations offered by the Jarai residents of Tang Kadon, who see the work of powerful spirits in all such processes. Another important consideration is the role played by processes of state territorialization, such as those occasioned by the imposition of national borders in the early twentieth century and by the securitization of the borderland in the context of communist revolutionary activity at midcentury. Additionally, it has been important to recognize that the extractive logic of the resource frontier—a phenomenon that is generally invoked in discussions of the expansion of capitalism—has structured relationships between the people of the northeast hills and their environment for centuries. If the history of Southeast Asia can be written as a story of the shift from a mode of political organization based on control over people to one based on control over land, the resource frontier has operated throughout this entire transformation, predating the arrival of capitalism by more than a century. Finally, it is important to recognize the role that various kinds of violence have played in shaping the socioenvironments of the hill country, including the violence that residents of the northeast hills experienced during the wars and conflicts of the past hundred years.

,  The Annamite mountain chain runs north-south along the length of Vietnam, forming the Central Highlands (Tây Nguyên in Vietnamese) in the area along the borders of southern Laos and northeast Cambodia. Where the mountains extend west into Ratanakiri and Mondulkiri Provinces they form Cambodia’s northeast hill country, a sparsely settled zone of forests and small villages that has traditionally stood at some remove from the rest of the country. As in other parts of Southeast Asia, the highlands here are home to upland ethnic minorities who distinguish themselves from their lowland neighbors through the forms of livelihood they pursue, and through their

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religious, linguistic, and cultural practices. The inhabitants of the region’s more densely populated lowlands and port cities practice so-called “world” religions—Confucianism and Buddhism on the mainland, Islam in much of island Southeast Asia. The societies of the lowlands are more socially stratified, their economies traditionally based on maritime trade and on the production of lowland “paddy” rice in inundated pond-fields. In contrast, highland people have held animist religious beliefs—in Thailand and Vietnam many today are evangelical Christians, although conversion to Christianity has been slower in Cambodia—and their livelihoods have depended on trade in various forest products and a few agricultural commodities, and on the cultivation of upland rice and a great diversity of other crops in a characteristic form of extensive agriculture known as swidden farming. Today, Cambodia’s Jarai, Tampuan, Brao, Kreung, Kavet, Bunong, Kacŏ, and other highlanders number around one hundred thousand people in all, a small fraction of the country’s present national population of  million. The northeast highlands remained heavily forested and sparsely settled well into the twentieth century, protected by their relative inaccessibility and their forbidding terrain and owing to the abundance of fertile lands elsewhere. It is only in recent decades that highlanders have seen their relative autonomy begin to erode, as migrants from the lowlands arrived in large numbers to settle one of the country’s last remaining frontiers. The end of decades of war and civil strife has aided this process, as has the rapid transformation of the regional economy. Newly integrated into national transportation and information infrastructures, the region has seen successive booms in global commodities, including timber, coffee, cashews, rubber, and cassava. While highlanders have made the most of the economic opportunities these shifts have afforded—the integration of smallholder cashew production into upland agricultural schemes demonstrates the dynamism of these farming systems—they have also experienced displacement and social and political marginalization in lands that were once their almost exclusive domain. Tang Kadon Village sits at the eastern edge of Ratanakiri Province, just a few kilometers to the north of the Sesan River. The village’s forest land extends right up to the Cambodian border with Vietnam, which is formed where the Satai River meets the Sesan. Residents of neighboring villages include members of the Jarai and Kacŏ ethnic minorities. To the northwest is the traditional territory of Brao-speaking groups, who live in both Cambodia and Laos, while Tampuan territory lies to the south and west of the Jarai (see map of focus area, p. xvii). Beginning in the s, the Cambodian state sought to transform the remote high lands through policies encouraging national

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 . Ritual items for the yang. Tobacco, cooked rice, buffalo meat, and rice beer in a brass bowl set on the carved newel post on the steps of a longhouse. Placing these ritual items outside the house proper is meant to ensure that the spirits remain at a safe distance from the revelers within. Photo by the author.

integration and the settlement of this frontier region by ethnic Khmers. Since that time, the provincial capital of Banlung, the former provincial capital of Lomphat, and the district capitals, market towns, and settlements along the main roadway have increasingly been populated by Khmers. Before the twentieth century, much of what is now Ratanakiri Province was under the control of Lao principalities, and many residents speak Lao or have Lao heritage. There are furthermore small enclaves of migrants from Burma who are occupied in gemstone mining, and the descendants of Chinese traders live in small trading posts along the Sesan. In recent years, as more Vietnamese migrants have arrived, and as Vietnam has invested heavily in infrastructure development and commercial enterprises here, the neighboring country has increasingly come to dominate the economy of the region. As is the case throughout the highlands of mainland Southeast Asia, these ethnic distinctions are complex. Most highland people speak more than one local language and intermarriage is common. While they are often considered distinct ethnicities, the various language groups of the highlands have never been based on the kind of cultural uniformity or forms of social cohesion that might justify this understanding. In their oral history or their 

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practice of religious ritual, for instance, the Jarai of Tang Kadon might share more in common with their Kacŏ neighbors than with Jarai living eighty kilometers away in Vietnam. Language, ritual practice, and various social norms differ from village to village, even as other practices or beliefs are translated across language barriers. French explorer Pierre-Paul Cupet, who spent time in Plơi Ketang (from which Tang Kadon and several other villages have broken off in intervening years), described this phenomenon toward the end of the nineteenth century. At the time, France was incorporating the northeast hills into French Indochina as part of Cambodia; colonial rule would last until Cambodia was granted independence in . While the French generally referred to the highland groups as “tribes,” Cupet observed that this word “evokes a principle of authority over the whole group and implies a solidarity between its elements” of a sort that simply did not exist. The French nonetheless harnessed their administrative policy to the ethnolinguistic categories they had developed within the Orientalist scholarship of the day, and the region’s postcolonial states inherited and elaborated on this legacy. The somewhat ironic result is that over time those same social categories have become consolidated as meaningful ethnic identities, meaningful as well to those who today consider themselves to be Jarai, Brao, or Kacŏ, and who advocate for their rights as marginalized Indigenous peoples.

    Even in this brief depiction of the ethnic and geophysical particulars of Cambodia’s northeast hill country, one glimpses the ways that the landscape is caught up in the specifics of the social order, and vice versa. The concept of landscape is not one that most Jarai would recognize. Jarai terminology relating to the landscape tends to focus on the distinct zones of village (plơi), swidden field (hwa), and forest (glai), zones that have great significance within Jarai cosmology. Even so, the concept of landscape formation is useful for understanding the world as the Jarai experience it. A landscape is both observed and lived in—it consists of the surroundings that we experience as our world. The term refers to the world around us, the world as we perceive it. It also implies a form of habitation. And, as a concept, landscape refers to a set of biophysical phenomena and the relationships among them, which is to say, an environment or ecology. Even urban landscapes are ecological formations, although the enduring nature/ culture divide that structures much thinking in the social sciences often prevents us from seeing them in this way. 

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For anthropologists and geographers, the concept of landscape is useful because it brings together three important fields of inquiry: ecology, representation, and materiality. Landscapes as environment point to the interrelationships among living things, and suggest the importance of ecological function to the production and sustenance of life on Earth. As representational forms, landscapes derive analytical purchase from the interpretation of the meanings that they are made to hold. Finally, analyzed from the perspective of their material properties, landscapes alert us to the ways that the material world conditions the production of human and nonhuman lives, and structures the experience of social life. Here there is space to explore how landscapes and their elements act as agents within reconfigured accounts of “the social.” The landscape has been an important focus of inquiry in the environmental social sciences since the work of geographer Carl O. Sauer in the early twentieth century. Writing against determinist models, Sauer argued for an understanding of what he called the “cultural landscape,” a hybrid conceptualization that saw landscape as the product of society acting upon and transforming the natural world. Subsequent geographers adopted Sauer’s notion, arguing that particular cultural landscapes could be understood as representative human-mediated environments unique to particular “culture groups.” The influence of this work lives on in contemporary social theory. Much work on the relationship between landscape and social memory, for instance, suggests that the practices through which the past is remembered collectively find expression in the ways that landscapes serve as sites of commemoration, moral instruction, and identity formation. Critical geographers influenced by Karl Marx and Henri Lefebvre and interested in exploring the role of power and ideology on the social production of space transformed these approaches to landscape, emphasizing the extent to which landscapes are the outcomes of contestation and struggle. One could not understand how landscapes are seen and interpreted by those who view them, these authors argued, without also exploring the relationship between cultural production and material practice. According to this line of argument, landscapes and their representation were shaped by and reflected the political and economic logics of the societies that inhabited them. Landscapes, in this sense, are cultural productions, but it is the relationship of cultural expression to dominant forms of social relations that is a key determinant of what landscapes are made to mean. This relationship, furthermore, is not limited to the unidirectional imposition of meaning on the land. By representing a set of social relations as natural, as existing in the natural world, landscapes perform ideological work too, much in the 

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same way that the commodity form does ideological work by erasing the relations of production that go into its making. That landscapes are one of the primary products of capitalist development’s transformative powers is readily apparent to anyone who drives through the productive landscapes of cornfields and oil rigs in the American Midwest, or takes in the consumptive landscapes of Tokyo’s Shinjuku District or the Las Vegas Strip, or attempts to make sense of the trashed waterways of Louisiana’s Cancer Alley or the transit of the Dakota Access Pipeline past the Standing Rock Indian Reservation. The highly differentiated nature of these landscapes owes a great deal to the potential for creative destruction that lies at the heart of capitalist production. However, capitalism is not the only story of social formation at work on the land—there are many others. The imposition of modern bureaucratic rationality, in the service of governance or conceived of as a form of domination, is one such story. The efforts of state planners have not been limited simply to the observation of populations, the mapping of locales, the collection of data about environments and their inhabitants. Rather, state projects have long sought to transform landscapes themselves, bringing them into conformity with the exigencies of administrative efficiency. Degradation and disaster, as well as the silent violence of incremental damage, have characterized these efforts to replace zones of social and ecological complexity with more legible landscapes—landscapes that can be easily surveilled by authorities and “improved” by experts. A closely related story is that of state territorialization. In Southeast Asia, as elsewhere in the world, state efforts to impose territorial sovereignty have relied on measures to control natural resources. Territorialization is therefore “a deeply embodied process that involves the transformation of both subjectivities and landscapes,” in the assessment of geographer Emily Yeh. In an insightful study of development policy in Tibet, Yeh demonstrates how the Chinese government’s efforts to secure the incorporation of Tibet within the People’s Republic of China, and to naturalize the association of the Tibetan people with the Chinese state, have been enacted through transformations of the very landscape of the region itself. Numerous examples exist of similar projects of state territorialization involving the modification of the landscape and its representation as a certain sort of state space. The production of formal garden landscapes in seventeenth-century France, for instance, was underwritten by a desire to inscribe the state into the French landscape and thus into the consciousness of its inhabitants. This effort formed part of a larger project of demonstrating the power of the state 

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through the transformation of nature, reflecting an ideology that equated political order with nature’s lawfulness.

   The landscape, as environment, as nature, as forest and farms, roads, rivers, rock, soil, topography, and geophysical milieu, is produced through the social relations of humans with each other and with the natural world. At any given historical conjuncture the environment of Cambodia’s northeast hills makes material the social and ecological relations that prevail there at that time. Yet landscapes shape history even as they are embedded within social life. Entangled together, landscape formations and social formations change in tandem. Along the way, elements of previous ecologies remain in place, if only as fragments of former worlds. In this way the landscape of the northeast hills today constitutes a form of lived history for those who inhabit it, one that is nonetheless fractured, partial, subject to reworking and also to erasure. In Cambodia the nexus of landscape, place, and memory has come to take on new significance in the wake of the violence of the late twentieth century. For Khmers reckoning with the past, people’s relationship to the land, structured by the tenets of Cambodian folk religion and notions of the land’s potency (boromey, Kh.), serves to convey a sense of continuity with the past that is embedded in the landscape and forms part of a resilience system and coping mechanism. Where war and revolutionary practice meant a radical restructuring of socioecologies, the remaking of relationships between landscape and society has also become a central dimension of efforts to reestablish the Khmer moral order. Throughout mainland Southeast Asia, the landscape has often served as a site for the interplay of official, often nationalistic, practices of memorialization and vernacular practices of collective representation of the past. The region’s wars have transformed its landscapes, reshaping environments and transforming the land use, livelihoods, and ways of living that can take place in them thereafter. In the process, remembrance of the past takes on new significance as people grapple with its legacy in the present. Regional writings on these issues provide nuanced interventions into a large and complex conversation about landscape and memory spanning numerous scholarly disciplines. This is a tradition of writing that seeks to locate within landscape the many varied meanings that attach to place and nature and, through an analysis of these meanings, to understand the ways that the past is understood, contested, and repurposed by those who view 

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or experience landscapes today. The emplaced production of social identity is a key process animating the collective representation of the past: as people invest places with meaning through acts of remembrance and commemoration, this line of inquiry suggests, lieux de mémoire take on a role in the formation of individual and collective identities. The memory of war and violence is a particularly salient feature of the processes through which landscapes are made meaningful. Landscapes provide a means through which remembrance exceeds cultural representations in the form of art, literature, music, and the like, and inheres in the material remains of conflict and in the temporal and structural transformations of social life wrought by war. Inquiring into the ways that American landscapes have themselves been produced by the experience of the Vietnam War and are made to play roles in processes of collective remembrance, historian and media studies scholar Marita Sturken observes that “cultural memory is produced through objects, images and representations. These are technologies of memory. Not vessels in which memory passively resides, so much as objects through which memories are shared, produced and given meaning.” For Sturken and other writers examining the material dimensions of collective remembrance, landscapes, as technologies of memory, serve as a means of expression of subjugated knowledges, and allow for the crafting of oppositional or counterhegemonic histories. The landscape itself has not usually been considered an actor in these processes—it is conceived of as an object of human action, not a subject in its own right. The result is that in popular and scholarly discussions, landscapes of memory are often portrayed as passive: they appear in these accounts as inanimate canvases, assigned meaning only through human action. Ironically, approaches that disregard the living properties of the land, its dynamism and its potential for movement, change, and growth, tend to leave the landscape inert. Seen in this way, landscapes are merely mnemonic: they serve as reservoirs only for the kinds of meanings that humans might choose to assign them. To experience Cambodia’s northeast hill country alongside its Jarai residents is to recognize the landscape as animated and potent, not only shaped by history but also shaping it. In recent years, scholarship has begun to catch up to Indigenous cosmologies and models of agency like those held by the Jarai. Most fields of knowledge and practice relating to the environment, from natural resource management to conservation biology and beyond, are premised on deeply anthropocentric rationalities, indicative of the utilitarian ethos of the industrial economies from which they emerged. The more that anthropocentric approaches to the environment reveal themselves to 

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be complicit in threatening the very existence of life on Earth, the more necessary it becomes to re-imagine relationships between humans and their worlds. Seeing landscapes as assemblages that bring together the agencies of numerous different actors, only some of whom are human, and observing how the collective and individual components of landscapes produce outcomes in the world, helps us to rethink the human-centric vision of ecology that we have inherited. The notion that the environment itself exercises agency in what are nominally “human affairs” in fact emerges from a long tradition in ecological thought. American naturalist Aldo Leopold made just such an argument in his seminal  essay on “the land ethic,” noting that “many historical events, hitherto explained solely in terms of human enterprise, were actually biotic interactions between people and land. The characteristics of the land determined the facts quite as potently as the characteristics of the men [sic] who lived on it.” The importance of this insight lies in its potential for destabilizing historical narratives built on the displacement of marginalized peoples, and on the production of ignorance about inconvenient ecologies.

    I have suggested looking in a strange place for marginal histories: in the landscape of the northeast hills, and in the collected elements that compose the landscape, which is to say, in farms and gardens, upland forests and the floodplains of rivers, in old rubber groves and newly converted plantation lands where cassava grows in corporate rows, and in the cratered hills that once sustained aerial bombardment from American aircraft. Looking for history in the forest and on the road thus formed a kind of method for me when I conducted research for this book. To study history as it is inhabited by the residents of the northeast highlands, I spent much of my time traversing the landscape with acquaintances and friends. Jarai men in particular travel a great deal, walking in the forest to fish and set traps and hunt and collect resources (a type of walking called hyu glai); riding bicycles or motorbikes from village to village to engage in trade or attend funerals, weddings, and other ceremonies; or visiting district towns (the capitals of administrative districts) to purchase goods they cannot find in small local shops. I accompanied my friends on these trips. And I often spent time working with people or just visiting with them out at their farms. It was during these shared experiences on the road or outside of the village that I would learn of events that had occurred in those places or would be alerted to the special significance of some or other particularity. 

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What is present on the land, or indeed what is absent, can be made to tell a story. Take răng gơnem as an example. The Jarai recognize a class of medicinal plants they call jơrao, many of which are in the ginger family (Zingiberaceae). Common varieties of jơrao like ginger (Zingiber officinale) or turmeric (Curcuma longa) are plentiful in the farms of most families, who use them in food as well as for simple cures. But other varieties are deemed too powerful to be cultivated casually. These would be found only in the farms of traditional healers who know how to use them or, in many cases, would be planted in hidden locations. Among these various jơrao there is a variety of galanga root (possibly Kaempferia galanga) known as răng gơnem in Jarai and referred to as bratiel in Khmer. Among the Jarai and neighboring groups, the plant is infamous, one of the most powerful plants used for casting spells (bang) to cause harm or death to others. Walking with my friend Kơsor Tang through his cousin’s farm field one day, I spied a ginger plant, and we paused to discuss it. Soon our conversation turned to the various types of jơrao, which led me to ask Tang about răng gơnem and whether there was anyone in the village who could show it to me. “You must have heard about that from the Brao,” Tang replied, referring to the neighboring ethnic minority group. “They accuse Jarai people of using bratiel, but we don’t have that here. We want all people to come and work with us—Khmer, Vietnamese, Barang [Westerners], we welcome them to come and work together. The people who plant that jơrao, they’re reclusive, they don’t want others to come near. Their hearts are closed to the outside. You will never find that plant in Tang Kadon Village.” As in my walk through Banlung Town with Kwĕn, the case of răng gơnem provides yet another illustration of the ways that landscape makes material a set of social relations. In our walk we had almost literally stumbled upon a revealing insight about how the Jarai and their neighbors view each other, an insight brought to light by the question of where a plant does or does not appear upon the landscape. For Tang, there was an entire moral geography implicit in this question, a geography that mapped to ideas about ethnicity and international relations, and opened onto a conversation about the kinds of development futures that ought to be considered desirable. But how to make a method of stumbling upon revealing insights? One must walk to stumble. Moving through the landscape, alone or with others, alert to its possibilities—this embodied practice opens up different understandings of people and place than one might gain from, say, looking at a map. In an evocative essay on walking in the city, Michel de Certeau makes a similar observation about ways of experiencing New York. From elevated viewpoints, he argues, the totality of the city is on view; it becomes the place 

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where “the tallest letters in the world compose a gigantic rhetoric of excess.” Against the synoptic view, those who walk the city’s streets down below transform its semantics, rewriting its meaning through their own “walking rhetorics.” Walking in the city served as method and fascination also for Walter Benjamin, for whom the flaneur, the characteristic Parisian consumer and stroller of the city of the nineteenth century, served as a guide for the excavation of the city’s meanings in the twentieth. Benjamin brought an archaeological sensibility to his engagement with the Parisian cityscape: the catalog of commodities he was assembling for his final, unfinished project on the Paris arcades provided him with material openings onto a past that lived on in the form of unfulfilled hopes for the future. What walking in the city was to Benjamin or Certeau, walking in the forest is to the Jarai of Cambodia’s northeast hills. To walk with them there is to engage in a kind of observational tradecraft, inculcated through years of living with the land, in which the landscape—animated by fragments of the past and populated by presences that remain active upon it—provides the materials for the making of stories, the narrating of histories. In our walks together, taking in the landscape, my Jarai friends and I were each in our own way practitioners of a multimodal ethnographic practice, ecologizing, historicizing, and mythologizing as we went along. This kind of attention to the materialities of landscape and the remnants of past worlds that it contains alerts us to the contingencies of historical change. Where the past lives on in remains and traces, these fragments have an important role to play, decentering hegemonic histories of nation and people, highlighting the experiences of marginal and subaltern groups. Where the past lives on in pieces, walking in the forest becomes a method for piecing together the past.

, ,      The formation of landscapes in Cambodia’s northeast is enacted through numerous different processes, among them broad political and economic rationalities such as state territorialization, the imposition of bureaucratic rationality, and more recently the emergence of capitalist modes of production. These processes take place within specific historical conjunctures, themselves occasioned by the coming together and then dissipation of various political, economic, and other forces. Throughout these changes, the twinned logics of obliteration and oblivion play an important role in shaping the





landscapes that the people of the highlands come to inhabit. So, too, does violence. Obliteration, in the form of smashing, blasting, razing, felling, and burning, has become one of the more powerful ways that historical processes have effected material transformations of the northeast hills. Events like bombing or aerial defoliation mark the landscape in ways that remain observable for decades and may endure in memory for far longer. The practice of cutting and burning the forest for swidden agriculture obliterates the ecology that preceded it, at least at the scale of the farm field. In the old, high dipterocarp forests, the crowns of the great trees are strung together with lianas, and their root systems remain tangled on the surface of the soil where nutrients accumulate. Occasionally a powerful storm will take out swaths of these trees. This is obliteration as catastrophic disturbance, opening the way for new ecological succession. Each subsequent arrangement of components on the land replaces that which came before, redeploying traces of former ecologies in the production of new lived realities. Oblivion is the frequent companion to the emergent coming together of new ecologies. Even as the mark left by catastrophic events serves to record those events in collective memory, soon those traces fade, submerged under the productivity of new environmental assemblages that replace the old. Implicit in these processes are acts of violence. Violence, in various forms, has played a significant role in the lives of the Jarai residents of the northeast hills. Specific historical moments in the highlands can be distinguished in part by the characteristic forms of violence that shaped them. An accounting of these would minimally include the violence of the precolonial period when slave raiding and intervillage warfare represented a form of threat and sometimes a form of power on a newly opening frontier; the violence of the bloody Japanese coup de main of , when the French were momentarily pushed from their position of regional supremacy; the violence of the First Indochina War; the sporadic flare-ups of revolution and counterinsurgency in the mid-twentieth century; the violence of the United States–Vietnam War (also called the Second Indochina War); the violence of the Cambodian genocide of the s; and the state-backed violence that has supported the settling of Cambodia’s northeast frontier in recent years. Internecine warfare, armed insurgency, war, genocide, and state-backed suppression have shaped the lives of the residents of the northeast highlands throughout the past two hundred years. Writing violence, however, presents a particular challenge to the historiography of Cambodia and the region. A focus on violence in popular representations exoticizes the country and its





people, making it difficult to understand much else about Cambodia and its history. Popular and scholarly interest in the question of violence in Cambodia is understandable, given the country’s experience of genocide in the late twentieth century. In April  communist revolutionaries known as the Khmer Rouge seized control of the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh, forcing all of the residents of the city to evacuate. The new regime was utopian in its vision, radical in its measures, brutal in its treatment of its own people. Under the leadership of Pol Pot, the populace was organized into large agricultural cooperatives and made to work with little rest and little food. Seemingly overnight, the country was transformed into “a giant prison camp,” as even the most intimate confines of family and personal life were subjected to control by the state. The northeast had fallen under communist control several years earlier. Khmer Rouge soldiers moved the upland farmers to lowland river valleys, where they were put to work growing inundated paddy rice. They suffered enormous hardships. When the regime was finally ousted in January , its disastrous policies had resulted in the deaths of more than . million people from starvation, illness, and execution. The Cambodian genocide claimed the lives of more than  percent of the country’s population, making it one of the bloodiest episodes of the twentieth century. The Cambodian genocide has had a profound effect on the way that the country’s history and culture are understood. Questions raised when the horrors of the regime were first unveiled remain fixed in the public imagination: How had this happened? Who was to blame? Among these questions, one strain of inquiry asked how a country of “smiling Buddhists” could have given rise to such atrocities. Surely there must be some hidden menace “behind the Khmer smile,” as a popular book suggested at the time. Present-day discussions of the country’s many social ills often look to the past, and to the experience of the Khmer Rouge regime, for explanation. This raises a complicated set of questions. On the one hand, the effects of the Khmer Rouge regime were profound and long lasting, and indeed still shape life in Cambodia today, some forty years later. On the other hand, overattention to this dimension of the country’s past, which suggests a “culture of violence” that shapes life there, condemns Cambodia to a postwar from which there seems to be no escape. This state of affairs continues today, even when the vast majority of its residents, born in the years since , have no personal recollection of life under the Khmer Rouge. As a result, a distinct temporality shapes popular and some scholarly writing of Cambodian history. The mid-twentieth century appears in such 



accounts as “the prewar years” or as a “prelude to a crisis.” The years after  inevitably appear as the “aftermath” of war (see chapter  for a discussion of this term). There is a beginning, a middle, and an end here, an arc of history that distorts the actual contingent processes through which social transformations have taken place. These are narrative framings that predominate also within Cambodia, where remembrance of the Khmer Rouge regime is a powerful political and cultural resource, drawn on by political parties, development organizations, multilateral institutions, and others to provide legitimacy for their projects. When I began research for this book, I, too, was influenced by this way of conceiving of Cambodian history. Yet as I learned to speak Jarai and came to know people in the northeast hills, it became apparent to me that the residents of Tang Kadon Village and their neighbors did not conceive of history in this way. They did not speak about the past in terms of before, during, and after the Khmer Rouge regime. They did not of their own accord deploy notions of crisis and recovery as interpretive structures for narrating their past. Indeed, when I asked them to describe their experiences of the recent past, my interlocutors would often switch temporal moments in disorienting ways. They would, for instance, leave off telling a story about the recovery of rice seed after the war in order to pick up the story of the village’s founders some  years earlier, who had arrived from the east fleeing enslavement and sought rice seed with which to begin farming. These fragmented and disorienting narratives destabilized the teleology of disaster and recovery that I had arrived with, forcing me to either ignore or else come to terms with marginal histories that would otherwise go unremarked. Highlanders I spoke with, then, did not generally describe the years leading up to the Khmer Rouge regime as a prelude to a crisis, nor did they speak of the postwar as a moment of recovery. Yet these temporalities are worked into many dimensions of Cambodian life today, influencing the ways that appeals for development assistance are made, for instance, and serving as a legitimating narrative for the present political regime’s bid to retain power. In fact, highlanders can also deploy these narrative structures in political rhetoric or within specific contexts—narratives of violence and recovery can be elicited if one asks questions in the right way. There are several reasons why this interpretive framework is not more widely adopted by the Jarai and their neighbors. Many highlanders had initially embraced the revolution, for instance, and that history may shade their attitudes toward the period. Furthermore, highlanders’ treatment at the hands of the regime, while marked by violence and extreme hardship, was in some respects more lenient than elsewhere in the country. 



Underlying all of this, however, is a more profound problem. Narratives of disaster and recovery present the violence of the Khmer Rouge regime as an aberration, as a falling away from the otherwise steady forward march of modernization, development, and improvement. Today the legacy of Khmer Rouge violence plays a foundational role in development discourse in Cambodia: development agencies present themselves and their projects as an antidote to the primordialism of Cambodia’s violent past. Yet as Zygmunt Bauman has argued with respect to the Holocaust, the Cambodian genocide must be seen not as a turning away from the possibilities of modernity, but rather as one possible, if extraordinary, culmination of them. For Cambodia’s highlanders, the experience of violence—at the hands of the state, at the hands of foreign powers, at the hands of their neighbors from the lowlands and from other highland ethnic groups—has been an intermittent but enduring reality during the entire period of history that they record in their oral tradition and retain within living memory. The Khmer Rouge regime stands out for the profound transformation of social relations it sought to effect, for the depth of suffering it caused, and indeed for the extent of the interventions into existing socioecologies that it undertook. However, from the perspective of highlanders with whom I spoke, it must be seen within the larger context of their historical experience. There was a familiarity to many of the actions taken by the Khmer Rouge regime in the northeast hills. Their policies—moving highlanders down to river valleys and putting them to work growing inundated paddy rice—showed a remarkable continuity with state projects in the highlands throughout the previous century. The fractured histories that villagers tell, and the emphases they place on phenomena that might otherwise be considered incidental to the “great” events of the past century, force a rethinking of the narrative framework of crisis and recovery that guides much writing about Cambodia, widening the scope of inquiry and deepening the temporal horizon.

 This ethnographic study is based on more than a decade of work with Jarai communities in Cambodia, beginning in  and , when I spent two summers studying Khmer in Phnom Penh, meeting with various governmental and nongovernmental organizations, and exploring the countryside. The principal language I used in the field was Jarai, which I learned between  and  when I lived in Tang Kadon Village for long stretches of time, and which I continue to visit today. My wife, who worked in Phnom Penh, gave birth to our first child in , so I alternated stays in the village with 

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periods in the city, during which I was able to reflect, transcribe, and annotate my field notes and work on my field dictionary. Having returned to the United States after more than two years in the field, I made repeated trips to Tang Kadon in every subsequent year, and I remain in touch with friends in the village these days through cell phone conversations and, increasingly, through social media. I was not a neutral presence in the village. I had arrived there with a permission letter from a high-ranking official in Cambodia’s powerful Ministry of Interior. The residents of the village had no choice but to let me stay with them. During my time there, I lived in a small house built for me at the instruction of the village chief, a man named Seio Duăn. He also suggested that I take my meals with Rơcom Kwĕn, who was in line to become chief and assumed that role during my stay. I became a part of Kwĕn’s family, working with them in their farm fields and eating with them at their hearth. My position at Tang Kadon was thus entirely compromised. As a guest of the chief, sent by the same ministry that is in charge of Cambodia’s police force, I was institutionally tied to a certain configuration of state power within the village. Add to this the fact that I was a white man and a citizen of the country that had spent a good portion of the mid-twentieth century dropping bombs on the part of Cambodia where I was now working, and you will get a sense for some of the hurdles that stood in the way of establishing “rapport” with the people whose stories I hoped to hear. Aware of the challenges of my positionality, I did what I could to seek out the perspectives of many different residents, spending time among the village’s different political factions and social groupings. Alcohol helped, and the northeast hills are a place where alcohol is consumed in great quantities. By my second year working in the village, it was evident that friends felt free to express to me their outrage over national politics and their concerns over more local abuses of power, including by the village’s political leaders. We were thus able to work with the asymmetrical power relations we were stuck in. Gender likewise presented a serious challenge. Women hold a good deal of power in Jarai society, enough that young Jarai men often chafe at their relative insignificance in matters of family politics. Jarai society is in no way prim when it comes to gendered behavior; women and men engage in bawdy humor and irreverent banter in equal measure. I tried to work around the barriers gender presented, often unsuccessfully, although I did manage to become close to many of the women in my “family.” I was also very aware of women’s important role in farming and made a concerted effort to learn from them. Even so, gendered divisions of social and productive life meant 



that I spent far more time with men than with women in many social settings, and those experiences are reflected in the stories I heard and in the material I present in this book. Much of the research presented here is based on activities I undertook at Tang Kadon and on my travels with members of that community. In addition to social visiting and participation in household and village ceremonies (activities that occupied far more of my time and effort than I had anticipated), I recorded numerous oral histories, which I transcribed and translated with the help of Rahlan Beo, a brilliant Jarai man in his midthirties who worked for me and became my principal instructor in Jarai language and culture. Beo observed me quite closely, developed his own ideas about what dimensions of Jarai life ought to be “in” the study, and pushed me to recognize dimensions of Jarai history I would otherwise not have been able to see. With Beo, I also undertook a series of conventional surveys and measurements of the farming system. During  and , we measured the annual rice harvest within a few weeks after the entire harvest had been collected. For several years, we also measured all of the farm fields under cultivation in the village, walking the perimeter of individual fields with a GPS receiver and creating a geographic database using ArcGIS software. Only a limited amount of the mapping work we did appears in the present study, but it has informed my understanding of the farming system and of recent processes of environmental change. Finally, while I spent most of my time in Tang Kadon and in the six or seven villages in its immediate vicinity, my efforts to understand Cambodia’s northeast hills took me far afield. I conducted research in the French colonial archives at Aix-en-Provence and was able to visit the Maison Asie-Pacifique in Marseilles, which holds a partial archive of the personal papers of Jacques Dournes, the French ethnologist and missionary who lived and worked with Jarai of Cheo Reo (now Ayun Pa) in Vietnam for decades during the s and s. In the archive, I located and scanned Dournes’s personal copy of his field dictionary, copiously annotated, its pages filled with hand-drawn illustrations. Disturbed Forests, Fragmented Memories follows a roughly chronological order. The first chapter provides a general introduction to the landscape and to Jarai culture and the nature of environmental relations in the northeast hills. The second chapter is the farthest back in chronological time, examining the landscape and social relations of the northeast hills in the nineteenth century. The third chapter describes forms of representation of the highlanders by lowland peoples and outside observers, and discusses highlanders’ 

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responses to these characterizations. Each of the remaining chapters is grounded in a specific historical conjuncture, presented in chronological order, even as the narrative moves back and forth between accounts of events in that moment and people’s reflections on those events in the present day. Landscapes, as social and ecological formations and as potential actors in the shaping of history, occupy a central place in the book. So, too, do the stories of Tang Kadon’s Jarai residents and their highland neighbors. These stories elucidate dimensions of the region’s history and interpretations of the social order that, for ideological reasons or owing to the marginalized position of their narrators, seldom find expression in popular or scholarly writing. They speak to broad concerns in anthropology and the environmental humanities, too, and illuminate dimensions of current debates over landscape, violence, memory, and the role played by plants, animals, and other features of the landscape in the constitution of social worlds. I invite readers to bring these debates into the text in greater measure in the many places that afford such readings. I have refrained from imposing too heavy a theoretical burden on these histories. Each of us understands the world from within his or her own theoretical framework. Insofar as possible, I have sought to place mine in the service of these stories, rather than the reverse.

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

 

Cambodia’s Northeast Hills

T

 journey from Banlung, the capital of Ratanakiri Province, to Tang Kadon Village took two full days in . The first day was a motorcycle ride along the dirt road that led east from Banlung to the Vietnamese border and then on to Pleiku. During the wet season, the going was slow. It seemed the road’s principal purpose was to serve the logging trucks that transport Cambodia’s timber to Vietnam. Antediluvian monsters of Soviet or Chinese make, their cabs consisted of just an exposed seat and a steering wheel and a stick shift lever and some pedals, no actual sheet metal to speak of, no doors, no roof. The timber trade was nominally illegal, and mostly the trucks drove at night. But sometimes you would see them stuck in the road. Crews of men hauled on metal cables trying to free the iron beasts where they lay groaning in the heat. The men fed lengths of lumber down into cavernous holes under the wheels, trying to get some traction. The trucks left behind craters in their wake—potholes like small ponds, meters across and filled to chest height with opaque brown liquid, viscous and hot in the sun. A filigree of narrow paths wound along the edges of these hazards, an overlay of barely transitable single tracks laid down by riders of small Korean motor scooters, local people whose clothes somehow maintained the impression of having just been washed as they wended their way through the muddy terrain. At the worst spots, children from nearby villages hacked out alternate routes along the side of the road and erected makeshift tollgates out of rough-hewn logs and branches. Then they stood by and charged you a couple of hundred riels for passage—about ten cents, or the price of a couple of cigarettes. You could have made a relief map of just the road—its surface was three-dimensional and out of all proportion, in ways we do not associate with roads. The road had its own topography, a terrain produced by the same economic and social forces that shaped the surrounding countryside, by the 

big players who owned the machines, and by countless individual actors whose stories played out on its surfaces each day. After hours of riding, you would take a left turn to head north at the mining settlement of Old Borkeo, where descendants of Shan migrants from Burma worked extracting gemstones from narrow tunnels dug straight down into the dirt. From here the road was narrower and less transited. It wound past a series of ethnic minority settlements, first Tampuan and then Jarai villages, until it finally arrived at a small port on the Sesan River. This is the administrative town for Andong Meas District, a place locals refer to as O Kop, naming it after a stream that feeds into the larger river here. O Kop is just a few kilometers downstream from the old Lao and Jarai village of Bokham. Back in the first half of the twentieth century, Bokham was the site of one of the most remote posts of the French colonial administration. Although some residents still remember it, the ruins of Bokham have long since faded into the forest. The road at O Kop is lined with small stores selling provisions, a few mechanics’ shops, some restaurants, and, near the hospital, a couple of “pharmacies” stocked with unregulated medicines. Most of the shop owners are recent arrivals, part of a wave of migrants from Kampong Cham Province, southwest of here, where land is scarce and opportunities are few. To them, the northeast highlands represent a frontier, a remote and wild land populated by uncivilized people, or phnong (Kh.), a term some Khmers still use to refer to highlanders whom they see as slow to adopt modern Khmer ways. There are also a couple of small Jarai enclaves at O Kop, old villages that were once the principal settlements here and now sit on the margins of the market shops and businesses set up by newcomers. Sometimes I would see acquaintances of mine from Tang Kadon, in town in O Kop on some errand or other. In the wet season, when the going was slow and the journey took two full days, I would spend the night there, at the house of Kơsor Bim and his wife, Rahlan Yô, Jarai friends with ties to Tang Kadon Village. Bim worked at the hospital, and Yô operated a small shop out of the improvised shack they had built at the edge of the road in front of their property. In the morning I would leave my motorcycle with Bim and walk down to the waterfront to wait for the ferry—really just a canoe with an outboard motor—that would take me across the Sesan. From the north side of the river it was a three-hour walk, mostly uphill, through swidden fields and forests, to get to Tang Kadon. Today the whole trip from Banlung takes only a couple of hours; there is a new bridge across the Sesan, and the roads are paved almost all the way there. But in , back when I first started visiting the village, you felt the work of geology under your feet ’  



as you walked, the forces of nature at work in the towering dipterocarps that swayed in the wind all around you.

 The Mekong River flows south from the Tibetan Plateau, cutting a course through steep bedrock channels in the northern highlands of Myanmar, Thailand, and Laos, sweeping through the Khorat Plateau and pushing on farther still to the Tonle Sap basin, dropping down into the alluvial plain of Cambodia at the cataracts of Khone Falls. From its entry into Cambodia at the falls, the river flows south past the town of Stung Treng, where it is joined by the Sekong, Sesan, and Srepok Rivers, tributaries that drain Cambodia’s northeast highlands and the Boloven Plateau and the Kontum Massif as well. The great river rolls south, past Kratie to Phnom Penh, where it is met by the Tonle San River, the spur that connects the Mekong to Cambodia’s great lake. This meeting of the Tonle San and Mekong is the hydrological hookup that enables the remarkable annual flood cycle—the reversal of flow of an entire river—that figures so prominently in the ecology and cosmology of Cambodia’s lowland rice-farming society. The great lake, formed by a depression in the vast lacustrine floodplain of the lower Mekong basin, drains into the Mekong like a normal tributary during the dry season months. But come May, as the Mekong begins to rise, the Tonle San backs up and changes its course, flowing westward toward the lake, which fills, its surface area growing from twenty-five hundred to fifteen thousand square kilometers in a few months’ time. Only in November does the river reverse its course again, rolling south and east once more into the Mekong and from there on to the Mekong delta and out into the South China Sea. From the flat bottomlands along the left bank of the Mekong, where the river enters Cambodia on its way past Stung Treng and Kratie, the land rises gradually eastward. Lowland plains give way to rolling hills that slowly ascend to the steep ridges of the Annamite Mountains at the Kontum Massif in Vietnam, where maximum elevations reach twenty-five hundred meters or so. From there the land plunges steeply down to the narrow coastal fringe along the ocean. Cambodia’s Ratanakiri Province is more hill country than mountain—its highest peaks, which are found to the north of the Sesan River along the border with Laos, do not exceed  meters or so, although ,meter peaks can be found just across the border in Laos and Vietnam. The most notable geologic feature of the northeast hill country is the basaltic plateau that extends from the Labansiek rubber plantation in the middle of the province all the way to Vietnam. At elevations of between two hundred 

 

and four hundred meters above sea level, the plateau comprises much of the terrain between the Sesan and Srepok Rivers, and also includes the hill country north of the bend in the Sesan that is the focus of this book. The basaltic plateaus of the southern Annamites, including the Pleiku and Darlac Plateaus to the east, the Boloven to the north, and the Haut Chlong to the south, are some of the most desired lands in the hill country. Produced by volcanic activity during the Pleistocene, their soils are of newer origin, and are less weathered, than the surrounding acidic sandstones. Dark red and deep gray in color, these latosols and regurs hold moisture well and have good drainage qualities. Along with climatic and ecological factors, the rich plateau soils make the land suitable for farming and support broad expanses of the semievergreen and evergreen forest formations characteristic of this zone. The monsoon climate, characterized by distinct wet and dry seasons, produces some seventy to one hundred inches of rainfall annually between the months of April and October, while the dry season months from November to March see less than two inches (five cm) each. In contrast, daily temperatures remain more or less constant throughout the year, with average daily highs of  degrees Fahrenheit (° C) and lows of  degrees (° C), a product of the region’s low latitude (. degrees north) and its relative uniformity of elevation. Gradations in altitude, differences in soils and parent materials, climate, and hydrology all play a role in the ecology of the northeast hills. Ecologists recognize a number of different forest types and vegetation communities that characterize the landscape of the northeast. The poorer soils of the plains and flatlands to the west give rise to a sparse, dry forest type, called forêt claire in the French literature—a deciduous dipterocarp forest with a tree canopy only five to eight meters high and an open understory dominated by grasses. Elsewhere one finds expanses of grassland savannas and savanna forests, some of them associated with anthropogenic fire regimes. And in the more mountainous terrain to the north and east, at elevations of between six hundred and eight hundred meters, cooler temperatures and moister conditions support montane evergreen forests rich in lianas and arborescent ferns; mist-like conditions in these forests allow orchids and other epiphytes to thrive. Humid forests like these lie within walking distance of Tang Kadon and neighboring villages. Until quite recently, the countryside here in the foothills of the Annamites had the appearance of a vast extent of mixed deciduous and semievergreen forest. The emergent canopies of these tall, multilayered forests are dominated by dipterocarp trees like Dipterocarpus alatus and Shorea vulgaris, and by species of Ficus, whose buttresses spread out over the forest floor. In the understory one finds other species of ’  



dipterocarp, as well as trees like Irvingia malayana, recognizable by its dimpled bark, and Lagerstroemia calyculata, a fire-resistant tree that can become dominant, making up  percent or more of the large trees in these forests. Soils, climate, elevation, and other geophysical factors contribute to the distribution of forest types in the northeast hills. But so, too, does human activity. Notwithstanding the long dry season, the deep soils of the basaltic plateaus—which retain enough moisture to allow dense subtropical forests to grow there—also favor the settlement of small-scale agriculturalists whose livelihoods depend on the use and management of those forest environments. The terminology used by natural scientists does not go far enough in acknowledging this dimension of the production of the landscape and its ecology. For much of the past century, ecologists studying the region have distinguished between forest types that appeared untouched by human hands and those clearly produced by recent human activity. An influential  analysis, for instance, used the term thickets (hallier, Fr.) to refer to the portfolio of land cover types produced by the “itinerant cultivation” of upland swidden farmers. These “anthropic” vegetation types were credited with interrupting the natural progression of ecological stages and with suppressing landscape formations such as climax forest that would otherwise, it was assumed, occur naturally. Thus even the most scientific treatments of the ecology of the hill country reveal a deep-seated ideological perspective: the nature-culture divide characteristic of Western engagements with the natural world structures this partitioning of the landscape into primary forests and secondary forests, thickets and farmland. In this accounting for ecological variation, the human presence is associated mainly with degradation, with the production of “thickets” and other ecological zones presumed to be less diverse and less ecologically productive as a result of human intervention. Such accounts fail to recognize the important role that human action has played in the production of seemingly natural formations. Conversely, anthropic forms, by no means devoid of “nature,” remain important to ecosystem function. In fact, human settlement has shaped the vegetation of the highlands for thousands of years. A recent study of the sediment record of highland lakes in Ratanakiri helps to illustrate this point. Variations in charcoal and pollen concentrations in a series of core samples drawn from sites across the province provide evidence of a significant shift that took place between twentyfive hundred and thirty-five hundred years ago, when the frequency of fires



 

increased significantly. This shift is important because fire frequency provides the best indicator for distinguishing between human-controlled fires and fires that exhibit less direct human influence. More frequent burning also reduces the intensity of fires, resulting in less damage to forests and contributing to the preservation of dense forest formations. The shift in fire regimes thus likely indicates the turning point at which human influence helped to establish the vegetation pattern that was still visible in the landscape at the turn of the twenty-first century. The ecology of the hill country is thus the outcome of histories of human use, including anthropogenic fire regimes and assemblages of agroecological practices, that date back thousands of years. Even in terms of its ecology, the landscape and its inhabitants must be considered dialogically and processually. The forested hill country is neither a passive background against which human stories can be grounded nor a domain of nature upon which human settlement has impinged. Rather, over the course of millennia, nature and culture, ecology and anthropogenic change, have shaped each other.

     From the north banks of the Sesan River, the narrow footpath and sometime motorcycle track takes numerous twists and turns as it winds up hills and through forests on its way to the Jarai settlement of Plơi Ket, Tang Kadon’s immediate neighbor to the west and the village that now serves as the commune center. People call it the khum (Kh.; the subdistrict or commune center), and there are now a few Khmer-owned shops along the road here, and a small schoolhouse that also serves as the meeting place for the commune council. Except for this school and a one-room health post donated by a Spanish nongovernmental organization (NGO), the only visible evidence that this place is a center of local government is a small formal-looking sign encased under an elaborate roof. The sign displays a portrait of King Norodom Sihanouk, his face radiant against a blue background, alongside an engraved stone tablet that lists distances to the villages of the commune. To have engraved those distances in stone is a revealing gesture of governance, one that speaks of the aspirations of the state and the limits of its capacities. In fact, the villages here are mobile and fissiparous entities, dividing in response to internal social dynamics and changing their locations when illness or untoward events make clear to their inhabitants that the spirits of the land now stand in opposition to their residence there. State efforts to

’  



 . Driving into the subdistrict capital, now a burgeoning market town. Photo by the author.

hold these villages in place, and to inscribe their locations into maps and ledgers, have long run afoul of local realities. In the rainy season of , a walk of less than an hour would take you from the khum to Tang Kadon. A patchwork forest surrounds the village, plots of cashew trees interspersed among secondary forest that closes in around the settled area. One cannot see a horizon outside the village, just farmland and brush in the near field of vision that gives way quite quickly to forest. A few swidden fields are visible to the right of the road as you enter the village from the north, charred lengths of felled trees crisscrossing fields where maize, rice, bananas, and tobacco feature prominently. The village itself sits to the east of the road, on your left if you are arriving from the khum. It appears as a series of brown and gray longhouses (sang glong) arranged around an open patch of packed red earth, earth that is now moist and crisscrossed by a network of small footpaths leading from one house to another. It is the planting season; most residents are out in their fields, and the village is quiet. In the longhouse on your right some activity is taking place. A four-foothigh porch of roundwood logs serves as a landing and entryway, extending out from the main structure of the building. Steps hewn from a sturdy log form a stairway up to the landing, beneath which a pig lies sleeping in a cool 

 

puddle of mud. Nearby, chickens peck at remnant bits of grain or search for insects in the dirt. On the floor, in the sun, a pound of unhusked, recently harvested rice has been spread out to dry in flat baskets of woven bamboo. In a few hours the woman who lives here will pound this rice with a heavy pestle in a large mortar, swinging her body in rhythm to remove the husks, the pestle dropping in measured thuds. One of the baskets is almond-shaped, and she will use it, the point held away from her body, to winnow the rice, tossing it expertly up into the air to separate the lighter chaff and bran from the grain. Presently, however, she is inside, tending to other obligations. The porch is occupied by her ten-year-old son, who stands dressed in a dirty green shirt. Between the thumb and forefinger of an outstretched hand he holds one end of a six-foot length of thread. To the other end he has tied a beetle. The insect is substantial, its body shiny and metallic, bright greenblue wings covering a yellow abdomen. The boy tosses the beetle up into the air and it takes flight in a burst of color and buzzing energy, while the boy watches, enraptured, as it flies in circles and loops around him. At this time, the main village of Tang Kadon consists of nine longhouses arranged in a long rectangle oriented from north to south (map .). Scattered along the narrow dirt track to the west of the village are a few small and dilapidated shop houses owned by recently arrived Khmer settlers. There are, furthermore, two Jarai households that have “broken” their longhouses, and are now living in the Khmer style, as the Jarai say—that is, they have established single-family houses set apart from the multihousehold dwellings. One of these, the house of Kơsor Tang, sits within the circle of the Jarai village, while the other, Seio Hai’s house, is down by the road near the Khmers. At the center of the village is a small building with split bamboo walls under an array of tin roofing tiles. This communal house is known as the gông and is used for village meetings and sometimes as a school. Mostly, though, it serves as a hangout for teenage boys, who joke and jaw and smoke and play cards and sleep there, leaving their parents in peace. The longhouses themselves are impressive buildings, twenty-five feet wide and over two hundred feet long. Elevated five feet high on sturdy posts, they are built of roughhewn hardwoods, their walls woven panels of split bamboo. Great roofs of thickly thatched grass known as lang (Imperata cylindrica) extend the length of these houses. One long side of each house faces in toward the center of the village. This is the front of the house, accessible from two or three wood staircases, each of which leads up to an exterior landing of round logs that feeds onto an internal reception area called a hiao. The main family groups within the longhouse each have their own hiao, a public space used as a work area and as a place to hold ceremonies and receive ’  



North to Plơi Ket, the subdistrict center 12

B

1 2 11

3 A 4

10

5

9

6

8

KEY Longhouses

7

Shop houses

of recently arrrived Khmer settlers

Water pump/ Washing area

N

Narrow well/ Pump handle

50 m

South and east to the Vietnam border

 . Tang Kadon Village in . Matrilineal descent groups (phung) predominate in each longhouse as follows: Kơsor (longhouses , , , half of ); Seio (, , ); Rahlan (, half of , , ). Houses  and  are those “broken off” from longhouses by Kơsor Tang and Seio Hai, respectively. A indicates the communal house (gông); B is the site of the village’s cemetery. Map by Aaron Reiss.

guests. The space of the longhouse is divided lengthwise along the ridgeline of the roof: the front half is a hallway that runs the length of the house, joining together the different hiao and providing access to the bedrooms that are arranged along the back side of that long hallway. Sometimes small cooking areas extend off of the hallway as well, either at the very ends of the house or protruding out toward the center of the village. Tang Kadon’s Jarai residents number some  people arranged into fiftytwo households, or khul, that vary in size from a single individual to as many as  people. For the Jarai, a khul is a family group who farm together and who consume the produce of their collective work together at a shared hearth. Jarai longhouses are made up of numerous khul who live together in a single structure. Strictly speaking, a household in this sense could refer to just the widow Seio Nol, who has chosen to tend her own small farm field up on the Kadon Stream rather than join together with her closest relatives. Or it could refer to Rahlan Hap and his wife, Seio Byil, who farm at the very 

 

edge of Tang Kadon’s land, near Plơi Dal. In addition to their seven children, Hap and Byil live with Byil’s great-grandmother, Seio Sa, a frail lady who everyone estimates must be over one hundred years old. The arrangement of the village’s residents in these houses tells much about the Jarai social order. As with the surrounding landscape, for the observer who knows how to read the signs, the appearance of the village offers clues to the relative fortunes of its occupants. The dilapidated longhouse of Kơsor Liah, for instance, is clearly home to some of the village’s poorest families. The house has few exterior walls; there are no split-bamboo slats to cover the floor, which consists mostly of round logs, dangerous to traverse; and the roof has never been completed since the building of the house in . The building’s unfinished appearance is mostly a question of labor; housing materials are available in the forest, but Liah and her children are overwhelmed. Liah is a fifty-year-old woman with seven children. Widowed at thirty, her poverty and marginal position in village affairs made it difficult for her to remarry after her husband died, or to find spouses for her children. To date, only one of them has married. In contrast, the largest longhouse, the Seio house at the south end of the village, is mostly well maintained, and each khul replenishes its individual section of the roof quite frequently. In front of the Seio house, a series of carved posts called gong kă mark the sites where buffalo were tied for sacrifices made by the house’s residents in recent years. Only the wealthy can afford to sacrifice buffalo, so gong kă serve as markers of distinction, demonstrating not only that those who reside in the house uphold their obligations to the spirits but also that they are wealthy enough to do so. Anthropologist Jacques Dournes has written that just as one or two families of plants predominate in many of the forest types of the Annamite Plateau, “so too in almost every Jarai village there is one dominant clan, and two or three others that are less widely represented.” The clans he refers to are matrilineal descent groups that the Jarai call phung. Across the whole Jarai territory, encompassing areas of northeast Cambodia and Vietnam’s Central Highlands, there are seven principal phung. Only five of these are present in the northeast hills, the phung Seio, Rahlan, Kơsor, Romam, and Rơcom. Each of the longhouses in the village pertains to one of these groups. Children are born into the phung of their mother, but the identity extends beyond one’s immediate relatives to all individuals in the group. Marriage or sexual relations between members of the same phung are considered incestuous. Jarai men must therefore marry out of the longhouse of their birth, and into the homes of their wives. Were this model to be completely upheld, all children and all women in a longhouse would pertain to the same phung, ’  



while all adult males would be members of phung distinct from those of the longhouse where they live. In practice, this is mostly the case. By and large, longhouses are composed of groups of mothers, daughters and sisters, their husbands and children, their grandmothers, and female cousins and aunts along with their immediate families. It is said that a Jarai man enters a marriage “owning nothing but the clothes on his back.” This is so because heritable property (drăm) passes from mothers to their daughters. Marriage norms structure social and property relations, and have important implications for social life. Following marriage, men play an active role in increasing the family’s wealth through trade, obtaining household property such as livestock or items of ritual importance like metal gongs and ceramic jars. Men establish trading relationships and consecrate alliances (pơtuơh jiang) with men in other houses and especially in other villages, creating networks of fictive kinship that run transversely to the matriline. But property acquired through this trade is held within the wife’s phung and is passed down only to the female children. This system of property relations helps to explain why the Jarai seek to keep their daughters and grandchildren close at hand. For example, if a man’s wife dies, he is expected to marry one of his deceased wife’s available, unmarried sisters, or else return all property to his wife’s kin and pay a substantial fine to sever the relationship. The institution of sororate marriage ensures that the couple’s property will stay within the matriline and that the children will remain in the same longhouse, under the continuing authority of their aunts and grandparents. Many Jarai also express a preference for having daughters over sons for the same reason. Whereas sons are destined to leave the house upon marriage, daughters and their future husbands provide assurance of continued labor on the farm and continuity in the trusteeship of family property. Marriages within villages are likewise valued over marriages to outsiders. “He stole our corn!” (Ñu glĕ kơtor!), relatives will say when a man from another village takes a woman of Tang Kadon as a wife. Today the phrase is used to refer to increasingly frequent cases of Khmer outsiders taking Jarai wives. At a time of rapid change, many Jarai are concerned that when Khmers marry in to the village, they seek access to what remains of villagers’ land.

   The village with its longhouses is a site of densely settled conviviality. This is especially apparent in the period following the harvest, when the largest rituals and celebrations take place. Yet for almost half the year, the village 

 

stands nearly deserted. People’s lives change with the seasons, and seasonal labor demands require the presence of all family members out at their swidden fields during the annual farming cycle. A visitor would be hard-pressed to find residents at home in their longhouses during this time. Like the village, farm fields, too, are places of intimate coexistence, sites dense with meaning and history. There are many things to love about a Jarai swidden field. There is the heterogeneity, the profusion of different plants distributed throughout the field, bamboos along the edges, rice in its many varieties growing throughout, sesame and tobacco and maize planted among the rice, gourds strung together by vines that creep along the ground, cassava in neat lines along the paths through the field, peppers and herbs near the field house (tông) at the bottom of the hill. Then, too, there is the sociality of the field, which is a locus of communal labor and coordinated social action of all kinds throughout the year. Those who come together in the field include groups of young men who clear the forest, the family that plants and tends and lives at the field, the aunts and cousins who help bring in the harvest and celebrate with a shared jar of rice beer at the end of the day’s work. The activities undertaken throughout the year also require human sociality with the spirits of the land and place, who are invisible to our eyes, yet live together with people in social bonds that are celebrated in calendric agricultural rites. The progression of these rituals throughout the year suggests another quality of the swidden field, its temporal character. Ecologically speaking, the swidden cycle is a disturbance regime, one that creates its own narratives within the landscape. The opening of a gap in the forest canopy, the alteration of soil structure and plant communities during the period of active farming, and the dynamics of forest succession characteristic of fallowing, all form phases of this diachronic process. The swidden landscape is host to a series of biotic communities that come together for a time, only to be replaced again by new arrivals as the forest gradually regrows. The swidden, then, is dynamic. The swidden is land in motion through time. The swidden brings together a great many things—human labor, knowledge and ingenuity, the endowments of the soil and climate, energy, and myriad ecological processes. Over time, these things and their relationships to each other change. And if the swidden is an assemblage on the move through time, a Jarai household is (among other things) a production unit in motion through space, farming in one or two places for a few years and then moving on. It is these movements, these comings together and these partings, that make the swidden what it is. The field in its processes of becoming is an emergent form, and this dynamic character of the swidden imparts a sense of narrative to ’  



the land itself. Farming is a story that unfolds each year, and over longer cycles, in the hills that skirt the village of Tang Kadon. Visits to the farm field of Rahlan Phuơn up in the area known as Del Hollow (Klung Del) made the temporal and spatial dimensions of Jarai farming come to life for me. Phuơn is an older man, soft-spoken, a grandfather and respected elder in the village. Because I had established a formal alliance with his son, I called Phuơn “father” and was welcomed as a member of his kin network when I visited him at his farm. My ally, or jiang, was Phuơn’s son Kơsor Twek, a deputy village chief in his midforties. Twek was the first person to welcome me to the village when I arrived there, an initial encounter that would lead to a friendship between us. About a year after I began living at Tang Kadon, Twek proposed that we pơtuơh jiang, that we form an alliance, formalizing our relationship. We consecrated the bond through an exchange of sacrifices. At a ceremony at his house, Twek sacrificed a chicken and “poured beer” for me (pơtuơh ia) in an event attended by close friends and immediate family members. Several months later I reciprocated, fulfilling my obligation to him. From then on I called him jiang when I spoke to him and when I referred to him in conversation with others. Twek’s family members became my jiang family, too, so that I called Phuơn “ally father” (ma jiang) or simply “father.” From the time we established our alliance, I spent extended periods visiting with Twek and Phuơn, especially out at their farm fields, which sat on a flat, forested stretch of elevated land that looked north toward the mountains in Vietnam. Phuơn was a useful man to know, for many reasons. He was the appointed spiritual leader (khoa yang) of the village, respected for his knowledge of Jarai ritual, and responsible for directing large village ceremonies. He and his wife, Kơsor Phem, were also well respected by other villagers for the productivity of their fields. Villagers did not attribute this success to the evident hard work that the family put into farming, however, or to the favorable conditions of the land where they farm, although these factors were acknowledged. Rather, success in farming is a sign of the favorable disposition of the yang, the spirits of the land, forest, and crops. This model of agency helps to explain the attitude of Phuơn and his family members toward the various offerings and ceremonies they performed throughout the year to propitiate the spirits. These events involve copious amounts of drinking and are sometimes raucous celebrations, but they are taken seriously. When I asked people about the labor they put into agricultural production, they would often include ritual work, the work of propitiating the spirits, in their accounting. The history of Phem and Phuơn’s fields in Del Hollow was a typical one. In  the village had just moved to its present location on the Kadon Stream 

 

from a site farther to the south. The following year, Phuơn and a few other men sat in the reception area of the newly built Kơsor longhouse, discussing the forests surrounding their new village home. Phuơn remarked on the wooded hollow a little over a kilometer to the north of the village. The site looked interesting to him, from an agricultural perspective. For one thing, the trees there were big, an indicator of the land’s vitality. “It is almost a glai gơmong,” he offered, referring to a forest type distinguished by the large trees growing in it. While the evergreen forests that occur on steeper slopes present difficulties for farmers and are usually not selected as swidden sites, a glai gơmong is particularly desirable. “Everyone wants to farm in a glai gơmong” was how Phuơn described it to me later. With trees so large, one would not expect to see Imperata grass growing in the understory, and indeed there was none. As in other swidden landscapes, in the northeast hills Imperata is an early succession colonizer of farm fields after they have been fallowed; its presence is a sign of land that has recently been used for agriculture. The Jarai refer to forest cover types where this grass is still present as kơsor, as fallow land, and will not farm it; the eventual disappearance of Imperata from the forest understory signals that the forest can be cleared and the cycle can begin again. The Jarai also prefer to farm land that is not too steeply inclined (hŏng), and on this count, too, the site at Del Hollow was favorable to farming. The landscape there was relatively flat (tul), taking the form of a shallow depression at the bottom of which natural springs could be relied on for fresh water. The absence of sandy soils (kơnah tơkaih) throughout this area had been one of the attractions of the new village site, and the soils of Klung Del were true red soils characteristic of the plateaus, soils the French call terres rouges and the Jarai call “rice planting soils” (kơnah pơdjuh). Among those discussing the prospects of farming at Del Hollow with Phuơn in that first year after the relocation of the village was a young man named Rahlan Sen. Sen had married into Phem and Phuơn’s house, the Kơsor longhouse, and Sen’s wife, Kơsor Bem, had recently given birth to their first child. The young couple were now ready to begin farming swidden fields of their own. Following the conversation in the longhouse, in January  Sen joined Phuơn and several other men for a ceremony up in the forest. Taking a small jar of rice beer with them, which Sen carried in a basket on his back, the men walked in single file through the forest as the heat of the morning sun settled in. They did not speak, but rather listened as they walked, their ears attuned to the calls of the white-crested laughing thrush (Garrulax leucolophus), or cim blang, whose cries are omens. They had not heard the bird call in the village before they set out, and they were relieved ’  



now that they did not hear the bird call on their left side as they traversed the forest. Either occurrence would lead them to cancel the journey and search for farmland elsewhere. A sequence of cries alternating from right to left and back again, in contrast, is a positive sign. But this they also did not hear. Arriving at the hollow, the men cleared the underbrush from a small patch of forest using a bush knife (hră). As the youngest member of the party, it was Sen’s responsibility to serve beer to the others. He tied the jar to a small sapling in the new clearing and brought water from the nearby spring to fill the jar. The jar contained a fermented mash made from cooked rice and rice husks, which imparts a sweet flavor to the water when the jar is filled, and also an alcoholic kick. As water passes through this mash it is transformed into rice beer, which the Jarai call pai phun, a constant feature of all Jarai ceremonies and feasts. Sen inserted two long bamboo drinking straws down into the mash. When the men drank, they drew the liquid down through the mash, causing the level of water at the top of the jar to gradually sink down. It was Sen’s job to refill the jar with fresh water, cup by cup, returning the level to the rim at the end of each man’s turn. As the organizer and senior figure of the expedition, Phuơn distributed short lengths of bamboo to the men, inviting them to come and invoke the spirits of the land. This they did together, speaking simultaneously but not in unison, murmuring and repeatedly touching the short sticks to water at the top of the jar, then daubing a few drops on the rim, inviting the spirits to drink and entreating them to cause no harm to those who would farm here. For the rest of the afternoon they settled in to drink, converse, and consume the food that they had brought. By evening the jar had lost its potency—it was weak, bah, and the men emptied out the mash onto the ground in the clearing they had made, spreading the remnant rice husks over the exposed soil with a broom improvised from a handful of branches. That night they slept in the village, and monitored their dreams. Dreams are liminal visions conceived in the night. The night’s inversion sees human life suspended, while the dead awaken and spirits move among us. The spirits and the dead, yang and atâo, create effects in our world. They see us, but we cannot see them. It is during the night, when they are most active, that we have access to their world through our dreams. It was in a dream, for instance, that humans learned the counting system of the dead, whose language differs from our own. Moing, maing, yaing, yĕ, mĕ, mŏ, kŏ, tang, vang, voic. These are the numbers they use, one through ten. When sickness or misfortune strikes a village, residents declare the village prohibited, kŏm, and close it to outsiders. Sometimes they move the village 

 

completely. Dreams provide the signs for these actions. A dream of an airplane flying low over the village is particularly bad. Dreams are especially important for farming. In late March or April, dreams can tell you when the time is right to burn your swidden field. Dreams of black buffalo (bâo dju) mean the burn will be complete; dreams of white buffalo (bâo miyă) are a warning that the field will not burn. As Sen, Phuơn, and the others slept, they were on the alert for dreams about water. Dreams of clear water (ia dơgeh) portend well when selecting a field. Dreams of cloudy, inert water (ia tơkol), sluggish streams, and stagnant swamps bode ill. Muddy waters send clear signals: do not farm here. That night, Phuơn dreamed of swimming in water, a presage of abundance and purity, a good sign. He shared his dream with Sen and the others the next morning, as they walked back to Del Hollow to investigate the site (lăng hwa) once again. Was there any sign that animals had dug or scratched or eaten the rice husks they had spread out on the cleared patch of ground? There was no sign of this. The rice husks, now mostly dry, remained scattered in the regular pattern into which they had been swept the night before. For now, the men could interpret this outcome to mean that the spirits were favorably disposed toward their use of this land.

   In the dry season at the beginning of the  agricultural year, Phuơn and Sen began the series of operations required to transform the standing forest of Del Hollow into productive swidden fields. After selecting the field, the major activities to be performed during the agricultural cycle included slashing brush (koh), felling trees (druom), burning (cuh), planting (pơdjŭ), weeding and tending the field (cik), and harvesting (bwă) (figure .). The initial work of clearing the field was carried out by the two men, along with other men in their immediate families. Planting takes place when newly exposed soils have been moistened by the onset of rains, and is a combined effort of men, who use dibble sticks to create an even pattern of holes across the extent of the farm field, and women and children, who follow in the men’s path, casting a mixed assortment of seeds into these holes with expert hands (figure .). Weeding and tending the fields throughout the season is often the work of women; during much of this time men can be found hunting and fishing in the forest, setting traps along the edges of their swiddens, or staying up late into the night guarding their fields from predators. Early maturing rice varieties are harvested beginning around August, and by late November much of the rice harvest is in. ’  



 . Schematic diagram of the annual agricultural cycle. The first month of the Jarai agricultural calendar corresponds to February in the Gregorian calendar. This model follows the traditional Vietnamese lunisolar calendar. The calendar is highly simplified; the planting and harvesting of different crops occur at different times and overlap with burning, weeding, and other activities. The most important rituals of the agricultural calendar, numbered – in the diagram, are as follows: Ceremony Explanation  ngă yang bôm hwa at proposed swidden site, prior to selection  ngă yang druom kơyau at swidden, upon felling  ngă yang chuh hwa at swidden, upon burning  ngă yang ple djŭ at swidden, upon carrying rice seed to field and planting rice  ngă yang daih djoh at swidden, upon first fruiting of rice  ngă yang pơ˘ djiao hwa in village, when maize first becomes edible; first harvest ceremony  ngă yang dĕk daih at the swidden field or in the village (if sacrificing livestock), upon harvest; the “soul of the rice” ceremony

These major phases of the agricultural cycle are all marked by ceremonies during which the yang are propitiated. With their granaries full, the dry season months are a time of relative abundance for the people of Tang Kadon, when many of the most important ritual events take place. These include weddings, the consecration of alliances, and the large funeral ceremonies that draw participants from neighboring villages and even from Vietnam. The end of the harvest is also the moment when families perform the “soul of the rice” ceremony (ngă yang dĕk daih), perhaps the most important of the calendric rites, when one or more buffalo will be sacrificed if the harvest has been particularly good. Historically, population densities have been quite low and land has been essentially freely available to village residents in the highlands. With land in abundant supply, upland agroecology comprised a set of extensive resource use practices. Thus the productivity of the swidden system was a function not only of the cultivation of land but also of a whole range of activities including hunting, fishing, foraging, and trade in forest products of various kinds. It is only recently, as the land frontier has come to an end, that the social and economic cost of clearing and farming additional fields has risen, forcing villagers to intensify and invest additional labor and capital in their existing fields. When Phuơn and Sen were creating their swiddens in , it was labor, not land, that was the limiting factor. The ability to obtain labor at key moments during the agricultural cycle determined the amount of land that a household could successfully farm. Larger households, those from wealthier families, and those who were owed the most obligations by others were able to mobilize labor effectively at these times. In this way, social relations came to be expressed in the size, position, and extent of cultivated fields across the landscape of Tang Kadon. The initial phase of land clearing is one such moment of high labor demand, but it is during the harvest that these demands are greatest. To negotiate these needs, households make use of reciprocal labor exchanges with other households (ngă bwă pơlih). Those in the village with little or no land also hire out their labor at harvest time, receiving a payment of a certain amount of unhusked rice for each day worked (ngă bwă sem daih). Although this practice is well established, as is inequality of various forms in highland villages, in recent years the arrangement has become more frequent as land has become scarce and the fortunes of many villagers have declined. During a good harvest, members of multiple families will form bands of harvesters of ten or more individuals who rotate through the fields

’  



 . After her husband has made holes with a dibbling stick, a woman casts several different types of seed into the holes. This method of polycropping results in fields where different cultivars grow together, in this case rice, tobacco, sesame, eggplant, peppers, gourds, and other crops. Photo by the author.

of all participating households (ngă bwă pơhrơ˘ m). In this arrangement, the field’s owner will provide not only a meal but also a jar of rice beer once the harvest is all in, giving the harvest a festive air. This annual cycle of agricultural activities dedicated to selecting, clearing, planting, tending, and harvesting an individual field represents only the first part of a longer multiyear swidden cycle that begins with the conversion of a plot of forest land to agricultural use, its cultivation for a given period of time, and its fallowing and gradual reversion to forest. The cycle is renewed when the same land is converted to agricultural activity again years later. In any given year, a Jarai family would typically tend three or four plots in varying stages of the multiyear swidden cycle. Each year or so, then, the family will convert one new plot of forested land to farmland, and will fallow an old field at about the same rate. The changes in the use of a plot of land over the course of this cycle are accompanied by changes in the claims made on its resources by villagers. Until very recently, the Jarai and neighboring highlanders have not viewed land as private property. Conceptuall y, human use of the land has been determined by the powerful spirits who reside in rocks, trees, bodies of water, and 

 

other landscape features, whose disposition toward human activity was understood to determine who was able to farm where. Families nonetheless do make certain claims of exclusivity to the lands they farm. Clearing and planting a swidden field is understood to confer the right of use of that land to the household that has performed these operations, a right that extends throughout the period of active cultivation and well into the fallow period. Fallows are managed for numerous resources. Farmers may, for instance, continue to hunt and trap animals lured to fallows by remnant cultivars or fruit trees that have been encouraged to grow there. Rights to the produce of a swidden also continue after fallowing, as villagers return to these sites to harvest tubers and perennial cultivars that continue to produce crops. As crop plants are shaded out and the fallow matures through the stages of forest succession, farmers abandon their various claims to that place. Before being selected, cleared, and cut again, prior users’ claims on it will have expired and the land will have returned to an undifferentiated status as forest in a certain stage of regeneration. This gradual abandonment of rights to a farm field has traditionally been accelerated by the movement of the village to a new location within the village territory. These moves occurred every ten years or so, on average, occasioned by an illness or misfortune in the village that indicated the displeasure of local yang. Relocating the village had the effect of making available for agriculture forested lands that had previously been too far away from the village to merit cutting. At the same time, moving the village placed old fallows out of reach of easy walking distance, decreasing the frequency of villagers’ visits to older sites and weakening any remaining claims on land or resources.

   When environmental social scientists document changing patterns of land use and changing human ecologies, they often do so using the language and methods of systems science. This is true of assessments of the sustainability of swidden farming. Analyses of agricultural intensification and of the processes through which extensive practices like swiddening are replaced with more intensive forms of cultivation often model the various constraints and opportunities faced by farmers and use these models to show how and why these systems develop and how they change. Differences in the periodicity of cultivation and fallow regeneration are key considerations in this kind of assessment, and help to show how this logic works. In the past, farmers at Tang Kadon allowed forests to regenerate for ’  



as many as ten or twenty years, or indeed for much longer. Aerial photographs of the village, taken in  by the Service Géographique de l’Indochine, indicate that long fallow periods were certainly plausible. The photos reveal a landscape that is a patchwork of forests, fields, and fallows, with cultivated farmland located closest to village sites, while large forest reserves remained available for subsequent cultivation. The forested lands of the hill country were more than adequate to support the relatively small population of farmers who lived there. Prior to recent modifications of their farming system, farmers at Tang Kadon and in neighboring communities grew rice and other cultivars in their swidden fields for between three and five years before fallowing. This lengthy period of active cultivation, although common on the soils of the plateau in Ratanakiri, is unusual for the region. In fact, swidden systems vary greatly among upland farming communities of the southern Annamites. Georges Condominas, in his classic ethnography of the Mnong Gar of the upper Đô`ng Nai watershed, for instance, describes a rotational system in which the entire village moves through its territory in unison, cultivating a given location for one year at a time before moving on, and returning to that location ten to twenty years later. In contrast, in a  study in western Darlac Province in South Vietnam, farmers were observed to cultivate fields for three to five years, fallowing them for only eight to ten years. Studies of sustainability that imagine the swidden system as a kind of model seek to calculate the human carrying capacity of upland areas, for instance, or to predict how and when changes will occur. Calculations like these are based on factors such as the availability of land and labor and the constraints and opportunities afforded by soil, climate, and ecology. By incorporating such things as rates of human population growth, the yields of various crops, predation by pests, and the contributions made to household economy by forest products, one could soon derive a sort of algorithm to explain the whole system. A model such as this might suggest that in the area of Tang Kadon a family of five requires about twenty-five hectares of land, perhaps three hectares under active cultivation and the rest in reserve in various stages of regeneration—some five hectares per person, on average. Extending this logic across the highlands, one could then incorporate into the model the availability of different kinds of soils; the geographic availability and arrangement of different drainage conditions; the elevation, aspect, and incline of farmland; and many other similar factors. The resulting algorithm could conceivably be called on to produce estimates of how large a population an area could sustain, and to predict under what conditions and how long 

 

it might take for fallow periods to become shorter, as populations increase and land grows scarce, until the system becomes unsustainable. While such systems thinking has its uses, the productive system is also profoundly a product of economic, historical, and political processes that are not well accounted for in these representations. One needs to think land use change conjuncturally. Thus, the moment in which Phuơn and Sen were establishing their swiddens at Del Hollow was structured by a particular set of historical conditions that had important effects on the availability of land and on the number of people interested in using it at that particular time. For farmers at Tang Kadon, this was, in fact, a moment when villagers were returning to swidden farming in the uplands after a hiatus imposed by years of war and insecurity. The condition of the land and the possibilities it offered to farmers were shaped by this particular historical conjuncture, and the same has been true of the various systems of land use that have predominated in the northeast hills at various moments throughout the past century and indeed long before that. The form of living on the land that people of the hill country have pursued has varied greatly in relation to the social and political dynamics of their time. It is in this way that ecology, agriculture, and social life conspire to shape the landscape and that history comes to be written on the land.

’  

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 

Slaveholding Chiefs on the Resource Frontier

K

ơ Me was a Christian. In theory he had given up worshipping the spirits and now abstained from drinking and smoking tobacco. And yet here he was, on the hiao of his kinsmen’s longhouse, surrounded by drunken men, a bamboo pipe in one hand and a cup full of distilled rice whiskey in the other. He looked down at the whiskey, and complained to his drinking partners that they had assigned him too large a portion. Not that he expected them to remedy the situation, of course. He grimaced, raised the dirty plastic cup to his lips, and downed it all. All, that is, except for a final, bitter half mouthful that he carefully expelled from his mouth down through a crack in the flooring, leaning over and releasing the liquid to the ground below “for the spirits.” This he followed with a hawked loogie of mucous and spit, not all of which fit through the crack, so that, for the sake of politeness, with his thumb he pushed the remaining material down, leaving a wet mark behind on the rough boards. If Me was drinking today, it was because a young daughter of the house was sick. It was one thing to attempt to reject the spirits when it came to one’s own affairs. It was another thing altogether to deny the request of his family that he come and participate in a ceremony to heal the young girl. All around him, men were drinking and smoking and carrying on. From the back of the seating area the music of a gong ensemble throbbed and pulsed and suffused the air and the house and their bodies—kinesthetic, hypnotic, intoxicating. Scrawny Boon the bachelor, drunk and odd, a pathetic figure in the eyes of many of those assembled, was wailing along with the gongs, howling a song of his own devising that he made up on the spot. Some of the others laughed at Boon and at his improvisations, but they clapped their hands in time nonetheless, encouraging him, and one or two even stood up and danced. Kơsor Me, usually a reserved man, now looked at his drinking 

companions with a glint in his eye. “Shall we?” he asked. One of them, a wiry older man with a commanding presence, was game. This was Seio Duăn, the former chief of Tang Kadon Village, who had only recently stepped down from that role. “Eh Beo!” Duăn shouted, to get his son’s attention across the din. “Eh Beo, we’re going now. Prepare the lips!” Duăn’s son Beo had married into the Seio longhouse, the house where the ceremony was taking place. He was thus in a position to do something about the impending raid that Me and Duăn and their group were planning to undertake. For a raid it was, in reality. As Me and Duăn stood up, along with five or six others who had been drinking with them, the rest of the crowd on the hiao watched them, saying, “Oh, are they going to do it?” and “There they go, then” and things of that nature. The men playing gongs at the back of the room left off their tune, and Boon was convinced to stop his wailing. Meanwhile, Me grabbed a burden basket, a hreio, and put it on his back, then slung a tom-tom drum over his shoulder. Another man distributed a set of gongs to the members of the group. The largest of these went to Duăn, who called out a tune to the others, naming the notes in order, singing them with a nasal inflection, each note corresponding to the tone of one of the gongs: “de-tol-te-do-te-dol-do-de.” The men quickly picked up the tune, then proceeded out the front of the hiao and onto the landing, down the stairs and out into the village, with Kơsor Me at the head of the line. Basket on his back, tom-tom tucked under one arm, he pounded out a rhythm on the taut skin of the drum (figure .). All the while, he cavorted and struck jaunty poses, looking for all the world like a man possessed. It was midmorning on a hazy October day, and the members of the Seio longhouse had been drinking since dawn. This was their third straight day of feasting, and no one had had enough sleep. Signs of the past days’ events were all around. Tobacco ash and rice husks littered the seating area. A large rack of buffalo ribs hung from a post out on the landing, drying in the sun. All buffalo sacrifices take place over three principal days, each day named for a specific phase of the sacrifice. On the first day, “tying day,” or hrơi amơt, one or more buffalo are brought in from the field and tied to ornamented sacrificial posts erected in front of the house. The second day is “cutting the body day,” or hrơi jah drui, when the buffalo is killed, a day of great feasting. On this day the meat of the sacrificed animal is prepared for consumption, and portions are distributed to guests and relatives, to settle old obligations and to create new ones. Meanwhile, the buffalo’s head, singed in a great fire during the first stages of butchering, is placed on the crossbars at the top of the tying post, left there to look out upon the revelers, its burned lips curled  

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 . The raiding party heads out into the village. Photo by Kevin Morris.

back, revealing great brown teeth. Today, the third and final day of the ceremony, the head itself would be consumed. Fittingly, this day is called “eating the head day,” or hrơi cat kŏ. Now having reached the ground, the raiding party marched in single file to the gong kă, the sacrificial posts. There sat the grizzled buffalo’s head, its mouth a frozen grimace, its eyes still staring. The men circled round and round the posts, playing gongs all the while as Me the Christian beat his drum. A group of celebrants gathered there, among them Duăn’s son Beo, Beo’s father-in-law, Hĕp, and many close relatives of the sick girl, Dui, including her mother and grandmother and Hĕp’s sons and sons-in-law. Now they lit home-made beeswax candles and pressed them into place atop the posts. Several family members held bowls full of uncooked, husked rice. As they prayed, they tossed handfuls of the white grains at the blackened buffalo’s head, praying for the girl’s recovery and for the spirits to be satisfied by their offerings. When all this was over, a young man named Rahlan Hiok brought forth a long wooden pole and, with a somewhat hesitant thrust, knocked the buffalo’s head to the ground. Were the head to land facing west, they would 

 

 . Carrying the head of the buffalo up the steps of the longhouse. Photo by Kevin Morris.

know that the yang were satisfied and the girl would be healed. Yet through some kind of blunder, the nervous young Hiok’s blow went awry and the buffalo’s head fell unusually, knocking a horn against the post on its way down. It landed, pointing to the northeast, in the dirt at the base of the post. “No, no, you’ve done it wrong,” exclaimed Beo, jumping in as the dust settled. “The head can’t hit the post when it falls!” Before there was any time for debate, he scooped up the buffalo head from the ground and placed it back atop the post, leaving Hiok feeling mortified, but sparing Hĕp’s family the frustration of carrying out an unsuccessful ceremony. Grabbing the pole from Hiok, with a firm blow Beo sent the blackened head spinning to the ground, where it landed face up, staring indisputably to the west. Beo carried the head back to the landing in triumph (figure .). With a knife he stripped some meat from the buffalo’s cheeks and lips and chopped it coarsely, mixing it together with fresh hot peppers and a packet of monosodium glutamate purchased from the market. The host family would use this potent dish to exact a toll on the raiding party, which had been playing gongs and circling all the while. Led by Kơsor Me, the members of the procession lined up at the foot of the landing, and one by one they climbed up the stairs. As each man reached the top of the stairs, Beo grasped the man’s head with one hand and with the other forced open his mouth, pushing in a  

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 . Feeding the lips. A young man forces a member of the raiding party to eat a mix of peppers, spices, and meat. Photo by Kevin Morris.

handful of the chopped cheeks and lips and spices. The men coughed and struggled and tried to swallow. They spit to rid their mouths of the heat of the peppers, which was amplified by the monosodium glutamate. They laughed through tears of pain and were laughed at in turn by the onlookers sitting on the hiao (figure .). When the entire procession had undergone this ordeal, wiry old Duăn entreated the gong players to resume their playing. At the head of the line Kơsor Me pounded wildly on his drum, now making short cries, now lunging at the seated revelers. Having paid their dues, the raiding party would make their own impositions on the residents of the house. The other raiders adopted the same aggressive stance as Me, and thrust themselves at bystanders and whooped and shouted as they marched from hearth to hearth. Up and down the length of the longhouse they went, barging into reception area and interior hallway alike. At each stop, they demanded “payment” from the residents and refused to leave unless their efforts at extortion were rewarded with food, tobacco, or alcohol. “We have come to tax you!” the men shouted. Or they said to the people, “Come on now, pay your fine!” Each time they received payment they gave a great shout, crying out “whooo!” in triumph, and placed the goods they obtained into the basket on Me’s back before moving on. Finally, when they had extracted a payoff from every household, 

 

they made their way with much clamor back to the corner of the hiao where it had all started, laid their instruments to one side, and proceeded to enjoy the spoils of their plundering. They ate roasted buffalo meat, and poured shot after shot of rice whiskey, and smoked cigarettes and pipefuls of tobacco deep into the night.

  For the Jarai of Tang Kadon, no healing ceremony involving the sacrifice of a buffalo is complete without a raid such as this. The “lip feeding” ceremony (ngă yang cem vĕm) commemorates a time in the not-so-distant past when the Jarai were feared by their neighbors as fierce warriors, slave traders, and sometime bandits. The ceremony is rife with symbolism. Take, for instance, the raiders’ demands that their victims pay “fines” or “taxes.” Even as they are quite clearly engaged in banditry, the raiders claim for themselves the kinds of official collecting duties normally reserved to states. This imagining of bandits as state agents and vice versa offers up an implicit critique of the state, even as the ritual enacts a carnivalesque inversion: often defined by their supposed statelessness, here the Jarai identify themselves as agents of the state. A valorization of banditry, the ceremony speaks volumes about Jarai understandings of their past and its meanings to them in the present. The precolonial moment to which the raiding ritual refers was critical to the formation of the northeast highlands, and contributed significantly to Jarai portrayals of themselves as raiders and rulers. Approximately two hundred years ago, Jarai settlers first moved westward into the Sesan River valley and the surrounding hills from points farther east in present-day Vietnam. Many current residents trace the arrival of their ancestors to this period, which helps to explain why this historical conjuncture looms so large in the Jarai oral literature of this place. One account in particular resonates strongly with the residents of Tang Kadon today. The story, “Seeking Help from Dŭ Hrĭn, Whom the People Revered” (Ing dŭ Hrĭn, rang i), is usually performed as sung or spoken epic poetry (hri or kơloi akhan, respectively), which Jarai male and female narrators recount from memory, reciting and embellishing for hours at a time or even for several evenings in a row. The song of Hrĭn describes the travails of the Tang Village founders, who left their homes in the east out of fear of enslavement. Tang Village, sometimes written as Ketang in French colonial sources, is the original village from which present-day Tang Kadon and several other villages broke off in the intervening years. Arriving in the hill country where the Sesan River meets the Satai, the village’s founders came seeking the protection of Dŭ  

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Hrĭn, a local “slaveholding chief” (khoa lơngai) who was just then becoming powerful. Their fortunes now tied to those of their patron, the village founders were soon caught up in the same practices of raiding and internecine warfare they had fled back east. The founding myth is thus, at one and the same time, a story of deliverance and a valorization of the masculine exploits of adventurers, hunters, bandits, and warriors. The story provides a useful perspective from which to understand social formation in the northeast hills in the early nineteenth century, for several reasons. First, it focuses attention on the ways that alienation and extraction operated on an early resource frontier. The story, read alongside other historical accounts, provides a good description of how the Jarai became established along the middle Sesan, enmeshed in an extractive economy based on hunting and sometimes on taking slaves, and shows how their roles within a rapidly transforming economy were made possible by a specific set of forces that came together at just that time. Scholars tend to think of resource frontiers in terms of the expanding skeins of capitalist exploitation—the conversion of existing livelihoods and ecologies into commodities, bolstered by new social imaginations and by the use of violence. The resource frontier depicted in the story of Hrĭn and his band of raiders was based on similar logics and had similar effects, but this was a precapitalist frontier, predicated on forms of servitude and dependence rather than on the establishment of markets for land, labor, and resources. Second, the story raises important questions about the extent to which highlanders like the Jarai were motivated by a desire to evade state control. This is the expectation raised by James Scott’s important thesis on “Zomia,” the upland area of montane Southeast Asia that acted as a “zone of refuge” for peoples fleeing the state and its impositions. The theory would see Jarai highlanders as a “stateless” people, anarchic in temperament and driven by a desire to avoid the exigencies that states impose on their subjects. While many aspects of Scott’s argument are well fitted to the Jarai, the Jarai remembrance of Dŭ Hrĭn as a political actor with ties to the Siamese monarchy suggests that they were interested less in avoiding states than in positioning themselves to benefit from them. The existence of the Jarai on the frontier was made possible because of their relationship with the state, not in spite of it. Third and finally, Jarai projects of self-fashioning, made material in commemorative practices like the “lip feeding” ceremony and in the mythicohistories that attach to figures like Dŭ Hrĭn, often run counter to the ways that they and other highland people are represented in the media and popular culture today. Present-day representations portray highlanders as Indigenous peoples whose close attachments to nature have been severed by the 

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impositions of an agrarian frontier gone rogue. There is much truth to these accounts. Today industrial-scale plantations, land speculators, and a flood of migrants from the lowlands have marginalized Cambodia’s highlanders and forced them off of their traditional lands, an outcome made possible through no small amount of frontier violence. In response, highlanders have begun to voice their opposition to these developments using the language of Indigeneity and human-rights discourse. Yet Jarai cultural practices and oral history tend to emphasize a past in which the founders of Jarai villages and their descendants were not victims, but were themselves important actors on the resource frontier, involved in the uncoordinated extension of Jarai influence into the Sesan River valley.

        In the hill country north of the former French administrative post of Bokham, near the confluence of the Sesan and Satai Rivers, tales of Hrĭn and his brother Toiñ circulate widely, recounted by Jarai residents and by their ethnic Kacŏ neighbors, who claim Hrĭn as one of their own. When it is told in Tang Kadon, the story can be divided into three parts. The first part describes how the founders of Tang Kadon Village fled enslavement in what is today Vietnam and were offered protection by a local man of prowess, Dŭ Hrĭn, in the area that now forms Cambodia’s northeast hills. The second describes the exploits of Hrĭn’s brother Toiñ, a hunter whose relations with the yang conferred on him exceptional powers. The third and final part tells of the rise and fall of Dŭ Hrĭn himself and of the relations he had with foreign monarchs. The most complete version of the story I heard was related by Seio Duăn, the former village chief of Tang Kadon. Born in , Duăn grew up during a time when one’s ability as an orator was a mark of cultural achievement, and he was a confident and engaging narrator. While he did not sing (hri) the tale, nor recite it as a formal akhan, he borrowed language and usages familiar from those forms, the pattern of his speech from time to time falling into the familiar cadences of Jarai poetic recitation. He told the story surrounded by a small audience of adult men of the village (kha plơi), who listened to him and from time to time interrupted, seeking clarification or adding their own commentaries and interpretations. Because the story is so well known to most residents of the area, Duăn frequently left out key details. These were only pointed out and explained to me subsequently by Rahlan Beo, his son, who helped me with translation. Duăn began with the village founders’ flight from enslavement in the East, or Ngŏ, a term that indicates both a cardinal direction and a geographic  

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area. “They left from the east, out of fear that Druơng would attack them. He had begun taking slaves,” Duăn recounted. “The chief Druơng, you see? The Jarai of Druơng Mountain, to the east [were poised to capture them]. . . . It was all purely from the east that people left to come here! It has been that way continuously until today.” One of the emerging chiefs of that period, Druơng had become so well established as a slave trader that even today a mountain in Kontum Province bears his name. For the village founders, the flight from slavery did not mean the pursuit of an unqualified freedom, however. Rather, they sought to place themselves under the protection of a local power holder, or khoa, as the Jarai refer to men of import. That is, they sought to become clients. The obvious candidate to serve as their patron was yet another khoa, and this early episode in the saga turns on the founders’ quest to find someone with power enough to protect them, someone who would not simply sell them as slaves. The first possible patrons they found were Rơcom Chơm and Rơcom Chwa, two brothers who are often referred to simply as Chơm-Chwa in local lore. “The masters of Plơi Ket they were, of the Rơcom phung, the same seed together as Piĕn,” our narrator informed us, using the common metaphor of the seed or cultivar as a symbol of the matriline to make the connection between Chơm-Chwa and the current chief of Plơi Ket, Rơcom Piĕn. Chơm and Chwa were themselves recent arrivals from back in Ngŏ, the East. Upon arrival in the Bokham area, they had established themselves as war chiefs (khoa bla) and assembled a band of followers whose version of warfare (blah vang) consisted of intervillage raids and reprisals undertaken to obtain wealth and capture slaves. The other potential patron was the chief Hrĭn, a khoa residing in the Kacŏ village of Plơi In, who, along with his brother Toiñ, was quickly gaining renown for his exploits. Indeed, the founders of Tang Kadon, having heard of his power, had come specifically to offer themselves to Hrĭn, and they were en route to Plơi In to seek his protection when they stopped off near Plơi Ket and were lucky enough to meet Hrĭn’s father, a man named Breio. At Breio’s urging, the founders stayed put, for, as he warned them, Hrĭn would surely make slaves of them if they continued. Rather, Breio brokered an arrangement between his son Hrĭn, the chiefs Chơm-Chwa, and the village founders that would allow them to live in the area of Plơi Ket unmolested. Before Duăn had quite finished narrating this first part of the tale, his son Beo asked about the founders’ first days in their new home: “When our ancestors arrived here, it was the people of Plơi Ket who fed them? Who shared rice with our people?”

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“Yes, that’s right,” replied his father, “the people of Plơi Ket shared with them, shared their rice seed and took care of them.” When Beo asked these questions of his father, he asked, too, if it was true that the people of Ket had “gathered rice in the skin of a buffalo” (leng daih, kơli bao) for the founders of the village. This phrase, which is usually used in the telling of this history, refers to the tradition of making a collection of rice seed, stored in a buffalo-skin bag, to provide assistance to those in need. By pointing out that Plơi Ket provided this crucial assistance to Tang Kadon in those times long ago, Beo emphasized a fact with no small relevance in the present day, a moment at which tensions over land between Tang Kadon and Plơi Ket were running high. In fact, the story of Plơi Ket’s generosity, with its discussion of the custom of “gathering rice in the skin of a buffalo,” is often invoked for its relevance to the present day. It is a story of a people running from violence, and a story of seed sharing, and as such it brings to mind villagers’ recent experiences of forced relocations during wartime, and of the role of seed sharing in reestablishing productive lives in new locations. The practice of gathering rice in the skin of a buffalo is an instructive reminder of the importance of compassion and mutual aid—deeply held moral values among the Jarai and their neighbors. Just as stories of dislocation, migration, and flight from violence characterize much of the Jarai experience as they represent it today, so too Jarai tellings of the past emphasize acts of largesse, selflessness, and the provision of shelter to those who are on the run. And just as the narrator had used the imagery of the seed or cultivar to demonstrate a genealogical continuity from that time to the present day, so too the notion that the crops grow ing in the hill country have their origins in that original gift of seed helps to establish a continuity with the past.

   The world that the story evokes, a world of powerful patrons, their rivals, and their clients, raises a question of constant fascination for residents of the northeast hills: From what source did chiefs like Hrĭn or Chơm-Chwa derive their power? Jarai oral history provides both material and spiritual answers to this question. Because the power of Dŭ Hrĭn and his brother Toiñ would eventually eclipse all others, bringing the neighboring villages under their sway, it was to these two men that Duăn now shifted his attention, focusing first on the exploits of Toiñ, here depicted as a bold and brazen trickster, and then turning the discussion to Hrĭn himself.

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Duăn reminded us of the arrangements through which the brothers were able to gain wealth and power by hunting. They hunted “at the request of others,” he explained, sponsored by middlemen with connections to downstream markets in Kratie and Stung Treng, where valuable wildlife parts, skins, ivory, and other forest products were sold to the Siamese. “They sold it to Siam?” asked one of the listeners. “They sold it all to the Siamese,” Duăn replied. “Find an elephant, shoot an elephant. Find a tiger, shoot a tiger—for tiger bones, you know, to sell.” It was through their trade relations with the Siamese that Hrĭn and Toiñ were able to obtain modern firearms, a factor that set them apart from their rivals in neighboring villages. Toiñ in particular was known for his prowess as a hunter. He would set out on months-long journeys, accompanied only by his personal attendant (hlun kơnung), a Lao. They would leave the village with baskets full of rice and head up into the hills. Hunting alone, each man with his own gun, they would meet up again after weeks or months on their own. “Right over there, on that hill right there, they shot a rhinoceros,” Duăn offered, pointing up toward a hill on village land to the northwest, visible to us from where we sat. “A rhinoceros back then had a very high price. But they did not hunt only near here. They traversed all of the forests of the area,” he continued, “even as far as Hruơk Mountain, the mountain of the yang Hruơk, over in Kontum Province now.” The most significant episode in Toiñ’s saga takes place on the remote mountain of the forest spirit Hruơk. The story begins with Toiñ hunting by himself, on the trail of a large white elephant that constantly evades him, vanishing just before he is able to fire a shot. Finally, the elephant disappears into a sheet of rock on the side of a mountain. Or so it seems. Investigating more closely, Toiñ discovers a passage through the rock wall and realizes it is the entryway into a village of yang. He calls out, seeking permission to enter. “Hello?” he shouts. “What village is this? Who’s there?” “Hruơk!” a voice called back from the village, “I am Hruơk.” It was the yang Hruơk who responded to him. Our narrator reminded us that this was Hruơk Mountain where Toiñ had been hunting, and the spirit village itself was called Hruơk Village. The yang sent his children to fetch the visitor. “This village isn’t closed, is it? It’s not kŏm?” Toiñ shouted back to Hruơk, afraid they might kill him. “We know who you are,” the children said to him. “Your name is Toiñ.” Well, how could they not have known who he was? Toiñ traversed this whole mountain range, walking the forest (hyu glai). Of course he would be known to the yang. The children brought Toiñ to their father’s longhouse, and tied the elephant nearby, for it had been Hruơk’s elephant all along. That 

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evening, Toiñ drank with Hruơk on the hiao of his house, while the yang’s daughter came to look after them and serve them rice beer. The two conversed from dusk to dawn, drinking from a ña jar, an ancient kind of jar. Toiñ was a strong drinker. He could drink all night long. But by the morning, he was quite drunk. “Uncle,” he said, “how about you give me that elephant of yours?” “Oh, that’s my daughter’s elephant,” replied his host, Hruơk. “It’s not allowed.” The yang even asked his daughter, but she refused. Not to be denied, Toiñ stood up and loaded his gun. “Stepping down off the landing, he did it,” our narrator related. “He shot the elephant. Dŏ´p! The elephant fell. . . . Now, that’s what you call shooting with a gun!” Our narrator, Duăn, took obvious delight in recounting the details of Toiñ’s audacious act. “Bah, this elephant is dead now,” Toiñ said to himself. “What is one to do, hmm?” So he went and cut off the elephant’s tusks. Up on the landing of the longhouse, Hruơk watched all of this take place. When it was over, he spoke angrily to Toiñ: “You’ve got the ivory you came for. Now get out of here! Go home.” “Oh,” the brazen Toiñ complained, “these tusks are too massive. I can’t possibly carry them on my shoulders.” And so the yang’s daughter carried them for him, for she had the strength of the yang. She carried them all the way back to Plơi In. “It was not just that Toiñ had dared to take the ivory, you see,” our narrator Duăn divulged with glee. “He had taken Hruơk’s daughter, too! As for the elephant, that elephant’s ivory . . . it was that ivory that they took to Thailand to sell. And it is because of that ivory that Toiñ’s brother Hrĭn died.” The story of the elephant and the encounter with the yang Hruơk is only the first of several episodes in the legend of Toiñ that Duăn told to us that night. Subsequent tales describe how Toiñ’s marriage to the forest yang conferred upon him his own supernatural powers, further enhancing his abilities as a hunter, and elevating his prestige and wealth. As a story of a wily hero who breaks social norms and obtains fame and fortune through an act of his own will, the legend of Toiñ is a fable, elements of which link it to the larger genre of Jarai akhan. Many of these mythical histories recount the exploits of hero-adventurers, their encounters with powerful yang, and their accomplishments in love and war. At the same time, numerous details help to place the story within a specific historical moment, and provide glimpses of the Jarai world during that moment. Perhaps most importantly for the Jarai audience, for whom these stories are not taken as fictions or parables, but are rather understood as factual knowledge of the past handed down directly from their forebears, the story helps to set the stage for an account  

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of the rise and fall of the great leader Dŭ Hrĭn. It was to this history that Duăn now turned.

       “How to tell you the story of that man?” Duăn wondered aloud, when asked about Dŭ Hrĭn. “To begin with, he was wealthy [pơdrŏng]. He had his wealth from hunting,” he explained, warming to his theme that Hrĭn was a selfmade man. Throughout his narration, Duăn would play up those aspects of the legend that conform to Jarai ideals of life on the frontier, emphasizing Hrĭn’s cunning, his relations with powerful allies, and his ability to command others. “He wasn’t chosen by others to be a khoa. He did it on his own. He had soldiers, a whole platoon, thirty men. All of them had guns. Guns from Siam, which he had purchased.” “He had guns?” came a question from the audience. “He had ancient guns, you know? The old Thai guns, rifles and flintlocks, phao kĕp and phao phông. They didn’t have modern weapons, like those of the French or Americans.” Back then, explained Duăn, the Siamese had a government, the Siamese had power over this region. The Siamese monarch was the jiang of Dŭ Hrĭn—his sworn ally. Hrĭn and his men used these arms to conduct warfare, to take possessions. “It was brigandry [plon],” Duăn went on. Hrĭn didn’t overstep merely out of spite, though, our narrator explained. He had rules, too. “Many times, he had conflicts over debts owed to him. For unpaid debts, he would take the rice the people had harvested. And slaves, hlun, he’d take them, too. In Plơi Kopheak, in Voeunsai District—his slaves are living there today!” Here Duăn meant to imply that present-day residents of that village in Voeunsai District are the descendants of Hrĭn’s hlun. That they have maintained their identity as “slaves” for two centuries is not unique: several nearby villages are said to be inhabited by hlun. One might expect the residents of Tang Kadon to sympathize with slaves and their descendants, since their own ancestors were nearly enslaved too. And yet the reverse is true. Partly because they view their ancestors’ deliverance from slavery in heroic terms, and partly because the village founders themselves were eventually linked to the slave trade, villagers today show little sympathy for the victims of that trade. Instead, they identify strongly with Dŭ Hrĭn, and exhibit a fascination with the nature and sources of his power. In a humorous and characteristic narrative twist, Duăn explained that Hrĭn’s rise to power was the result of a case of mistaken identity.

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From the moment of his rise, Dŭ Hrĭn was blessed with power, Duăn told us. The yang came for him, and took him, and invested him with power. In fact, it was a different Hrĭn whom they had been seeking, another man with the same name. One day, when Dŭ Hrĭn was walking in the countryside, he met some yang in the forest, and he asked them where they were going. “We’re looking for Hrĭn,” they said to him. “For Hrĭn?” he asked. “That’s me. I’m Hrĭn. From across the Ia Drai.” “Well, if you’re Hrĭn, come with us,” the yang said. “Our elders sent us to find you.” With this, the yang took Hrĭn to Hruơk Village, Plơi Hruơk, the village of the same yang Hruơk whose daughter had married Toiñ. And from there they took him to the peak of Hrŏ Mountain, which is nearby, where they blessed him, and fortified him with power. After that, when people laid hands on him to try to kill him, they could not. His soul had become a garden wasp (hong đăng) now. People tried to catch it, but they couldn’t. Ordinary people couldn’t do a thing to him—they tried to kill him, but Hrĭn wouldn’t die. He was hard to kill. According to the story, the secret of Hrĭn’s power lies in the transformation of his soul into a hong đăng wasp. To understand the mechanics of his invincibility, one must have a clearer understanding of the Jarai conception of the soul. The term bơngăt, which refers to a reflection or mirror image, also signifies “the self, the permanent being, the vital principle” of all living things for the Jarai. The term most closely corresponds to the Western notion of the “soul,” but it is one that is invisible rather than discarnate, dual rather than immanent within the body. As Jacques Dournes writes, in the Jarai conception the human is “a living double—an outward appearance that we perceive, and a personal self,” which is the bơngăt. All living beings— including plants and animals—have this double composition. “In normal life, the bơngăt resides within a person’s body. During states of unconsciousness such as sleep, fainting, or death, the soul travels away from the body— travels which constitute the material of dreams.” Hrĭn’s double, his bơngăt, having been transformed into a small wasp through his encounter with the yang, no longer resided within his body, making it impossible for him to be killed by “ordinary” or “insignificant” people—that is, by people who lacked the supernatural ability to find and destroy his soul. The power conferred upon him by the yang went hand in hand with his purported relations with the Siamese monarch; it is these ties to powerful outsiders—one temporal and one spiritual—that allowed Hrĭn to rise in status to occupy a place of power within the precolonial moment, a position he maintained for some years. Hrĭn would meet his end, however,

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when faced with a more powerful adversary, a “Kôla” sorcerer in Bangkok whose supernatural abilities allowed him to find and destroy Hrĭn’s soul. Among Duăn’s listeners, this inquiry into the nature of Hrĭn’s soul immediately prompted a discussion of his eventual demise in Siam, a crucial piece of the story that ties together many of the disparate threads of the convoluted tale—from the form of his supernatural power to the ivory obtained by Toiñ during his transgressive encounter with Hruơk, to the story of Hrĭn’s fall from power and his relations with foreigners in general, and with the king of Siam in particular. Recall that Hrĭn’s brother Toiñ had returned from Hruơk Mountain, his new wife transporting the tusks of the white elephant that Toiñ himself could not carry. Hrĭn had sent that ivory on to Bangkok, to the Siamese monarch who was his jiang, his sworn ally and trading partner. In the Jarai telling of the exchange, a misunderstanding ensued: the Siamese king failed to send payment, or perhaps assumed the ivory was offered in tribute rather than for sale. While the nature of the dispute is forgotten, what is remembered is that Hrĭn himself traveled to Bangkok to clear up the misunderstanding. It was there that he ran afoul of the Kôla sorcerer, who was a member of the Siamese court. In his dreams, the sorcerer hunted for the wasp-soul of the highland chief, navigating east to Hrŏ Mountain, where the yang had invested Dŭ Hrĭn with power. Even as Hrĭn in his physical form was present in the court of Bangkok, seeking payment for the ivory he had sent, his bơngăt was up on this mountain “pursuing romance” and had even taken a second wife. His wasp-double was nestled in a flower on the mountainside, seeking sustenance, when, in his dream-travels, the Kôla placed a curse (koh kŭn) on it. Hrĭn’s soul having been extinguished in the east, his body, too, soon died in the west. The great chief, who had been so hard to kill, was dead. It is told that Hrĭn’s retainers transported his corpse back to Plơi In in present-day Cambodia, where he was buried by his slaves and by the many people who were indebted to him. For years following his death, his retinue continued to guard his dead body. Every night for eight years they danced in a circle around his tomb, moving in the chwang style all night long, arms interlocked, feet kicking in unison. As Duăn, narrating the story, said simply, “People revered him [rang i].” As for Hrĭn’s brother Toiñ, there are several stories about his death. Some say that he died not far off, and they identify a nearby hilltop thought to be the site of his tomb. In Duăn’s telling, after bringing back the white elephant’s ivory from the forest, Toiñ and his young wife returned to Chĭ Hruơk, to the village of the yang, and were never heard from again. It is unknown whether he died at all.

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     The Hrĭn story contributes to knowledge of Jarai history through the clues it provides regarding the Jarai westward expansion during precolonial times. That the Jarai are relative newcomers to the middle Sesan valley is reflected in local legend, in the records of colonial explorers, and in the writings of historians of the region. In Jarai oral literature it is not only the founders of Tang Kadon Village who were newcomers to the Bokham area. Hrĭn’s father, the Jarai Breio, is also described as a newcomer, originally born in a village in the east. “And thus has it been until this day,” notes the narrator, reflecting the overwhelming sentiment among people in Tang Kadon that Ngŏ, the East, represents the origin of Jarai identity and culture. The Jarai in northeast Cambodia recognize that they inhabit a recently settled frontier. In a subsequent discussion with Seio Duăn about the specific historical moment of Hrĭn’s rise to power, he placed it “before the Thai era,” a dating that other villagers also endorse. Here the “Thai era” refers very broadly to the period during the nineteenth century when the Siamese exerted influence in the region, prior to the Franco-Siamese War of . Seeking to recoup losses sustained during wars with Burma in the eighteenth century, in – the Siamese annexed the Lao principality of Champasak as part of an effort to consolidate power, expand trading networks, and recruit manpower. The following decades saw the creation of new administrative territories, or muang, along the Mekong and Sekong Rivers, and witnessed an increasingly onerous extraction of tribute from local rulers. Dŭ Hrĭn’s access to Siamese arms, along with his supposed trading relationship with the Siamese court, places his rise to power within the trajectory of the Siamese expansion, and suggests that the events related in this oral history, including the founding of Tang Village, the parent village of present-day Tang Kadon, took place in the early nineteenth century. Other bits of lore attaching to Dŭ Hrĭn associate him with this period. For instance, some assert that Hrĭn had played a pivotal role in arranging the Siamese presence in the uplands to the east of the Mekong. An elderly Jarai man in a neighboring village recalled that “it was on account of Dŭ Hrĭn’s relationship with the Siamese ruler” that a column of Siamese troops passed through the Sesan region from farther north in Laos, on their way to capture and then raze the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh. “They advanced through Laos,” he told me, “and cut down in our direction, collecting tribute and taxes. They were walking in a single line.” This recollection corresponds to the Siamese campaign of –, which involved a naval force and two land  

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HN BA

G LA

N

N

I

HA

UA

Sea

RA

Sesan R.

Lomphat

JA

T

P AM

AR

AO BR Kontum

Sekong R.

a hin h C

SE

DA

NG

Sout

Mekong R.

Quinhon

ED

E

Srepok R.

Ba R.

G

Ban Don

Bé R.

Nhatrang

MN

ON

Mekong R.

 .   Movements of the region’s ethnic groups in the eighteenth (above) and nineteenth (next page) centuries. Based on maps by Bourotte, “Essai d’histoire des populations montagnardes,” and on Maître, Les jungles Moï, – . Maps by Aaron Reiss.

columns, one of which advanced on Phnom Penh from Champasak, passing to the east of Stung Treng. Siam governed its northeast territories through the co-optation of local princely lineages, and imposed burdensome annual levies on the new dependencies. As the late nineteenth-century observer J. M. Bel wrote, “Attapeu is a Laotian colony, founded in order to drain the gold from the kha country and take away slaves for the profit of the Siamese government.” Bel used the Lao term kha (not to be confused with the Jarai word meaning “old” or “elder”) to refer to the highland people, a term that also carried the pejorative sense of “slave” or “barbarian.” Attapeu was required to pay nine hundred ticals of silver, and six hundred ticals of gold annually, “the latter amount corresponding to the obligations of the khas,” according to French historian and explorer Henri Maître. To fulfill Siam’s demands, local Lao rulers required their clients to pay them tribute in the form of slaves, who were sold in Attapeu and other commercial centers throughout the region to 

 

NG

Sout

AR

DA

HN

SE RA

I

Sesan R.

Quinhon

ED

Srepok R.

E

Lomphat

JA

M

AN

Kontum

J A a J r ra H ar ap i od a roi n g

TA

PU

BA

AO BR

HA

G

Sea

Sekong R.

N LA

a hin h C

Mekong R.

Ba R.

G

Ban Don

Bé R.

Nhatrang

MN

ON

Mekong R.

obtain gold for the payments to Siam. An important effect of the expansion of Siamese power into the area was a drastic increase in the demand for slaves, which bolstered the fortunes of local slave-owning chiefs, or khoa lơngai, like Hrĭn. This complicated situation provides the context for the movement of Jarai into the middle Sesan valley. Jarai oral history of this time supports the assessment of French observers that the early nineteenth century was a moment of rapid westward expansion of the Jarai. French missionary Abbé Charles-Émile Bouillevaux, in his account of an early exploratory voyage in the mid-nineteenth century, wrote: “Cambodians [are needed] who would escort me and protect me against Jarai brigands, savages of the boldest sort, who, according to my fearful guides, penetrate further by the day into these areas.” Like all such contemporary observations, the comment should be read within the context of French designs on the region: depicting the Jarai as brigands served the interests of the mission civilisatrice. In Maître’s telling, the extension of Siamese suzerainty over the Lao principalities led to an increase in demand for slaves, a demand that was filled in part by the Jarai, who were spurred on to engage in intervillage warfare in part to sell captives in regional markets. “The state of anarchy, which,  

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during the entirety of the Siamese occupation, desolated the hinterland, had strange repercussions for certain of the frontier tribes,” Maître wrote. “The three great bellicose families, the Ta-Hoi to the north, the Sedang in the center, and the Jarai to the south, saw their looting instincts singularly encouraged by the events that were transpiring in their immediate vicinities. . . . [T]hus, their incursions became veritable expeditions and, in turn, they pounced on the weakest tribes, taking slaves that they would go on to sell to Laotian and Cambodian bands.” Maître detailed the territorial movements of the highland groups, describing the conflict between the Jarai and their neighbors—the Halang and Bahnar in the east and the Tampuan in the west (maps .a and .b). Maître argues that the Jarai “reorganized the ethnographic map of the Sesan . . . to their singular profit.” Over the course of a century, the Jarai dislodged their immediate neighbors, forcing them back as they drove westward along the Sesan, past the confluence with the Satai River. These ethnoterritorial machinations provide the historical context for the present-day arrangement of ethnic groups in northeast Cambodia today. While these assessments are convincing in their general outline of the movements of ethnic groups and the underlying political and economic realities that shaped them, several notes of caution must be sounded with regard to the way these explanations depict the Jarai. The first relates to the notion of the “tribe,” which predominated in French discourse, and which was poorly suited to the realities of highlander social organization. The people described as “Jarai” shared a linguistic affiliation and broad cultural characteristics, beyond which they would have had very little sense of a shared ethnic identity that might serve as the basis for conflict. Raids carried out by Jarai speakers were very often carried out against other Jarai-speaking villages. As the story of the village founders demonstrates, the Jarai were as likely to be victims as perpetrators of slave raiding, and the entire organization of the system took place within complex networks of patron-client relations and tributary relations. Moreover, it is to recognize that the understandings of French authors like Maître were shaped by French designs on the region at the time when these histories were written. Depictions of the highlanders as violent and unlawful served French interests well, providing a rationale for projects of pacification. Because eradicating the slave trade would become a principal justification for French intervention and the establishment of a French protectorate in the region, it was in the French interest to overstate the extent of the trade in human lives.

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Furthermore, the world that French observers were reporting on was rapidly transforming, owing in large part to the French presence itself. French interventions throughout the eighteenth century had drastically reshaped the region, one outcome of which was the constitution of the highland periphery as a “tribal zone,” a zone of conflict at the edge of empire where warfare and emerging social identities form in tandem with the formation of the state. French authors were to varying degrees blind to their own role in producing the chaotic world they witnessed. Their sympathies were furthermore shaped by the specific networks of relationship and alliance within which colonial power was enmeshed. Thus, for example, in the late nineteenth century the French Catholic mission at Kontum had provided arms and military training to the Bahnar inhabitants of the region, assisting them in their conflicts against their Jarai and Sedang neighbors. Relations of alliance and the notion that some groups were more sympathetic to French interests than were others colored the portrayal of some groups as victims and others as aggressors.

       When Jarai narrators today tell the story of Dŭ Hrĭn, they do so in part because their remembrance of Hrĭn’s rise to power resonates strongly with their present-day reality, a time of violence and dispossession on a resource frontier. Today’s frontier is a zone of rapid change, where extractive processes, projects of improvement, and capitalist penetration appear to confront a wildness born of the region’s remoteness and the independent character of its people. Frontiers are places where state control is incomplete, allowing them to be imagined as zones of lawlessness and of freedom simultaneously. Frontiers, too, are places of violence. One explanation for this is that violence is made possible by the absence of the state: where laws and policing powers are ineffective or cannot reach, illicit activity flourishes, with no check on the use of violence by its practitioners. Often, however, frontier violence is itself born of state-backed efforts to wrest control over places and people thought to be unruly. Today and in the past, frontier violence in the northeast hills attached not only to processes of state expansion but also to the exploitation of resources—timber, land, and mineral wealth today and the forest products and enslaved people of Hrĭn’s time. Today and in the past, too, frontier violence has been closely tied to practices of resource making. The natural endowments of a place do not exist as resources until they are first made to

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fit into a social and economic system that gives them value. One must first reconceptualize the integral components of one’s world as potential commodities before the process of extracting them can begin. The making of resources out of nature is therefore not only a technical exercise but also an epistemological project. For new forms of possession to be made in processes of frontier expansion, previous ecologies must also be unmade. Commoditization on the frontier requires imagining out of existence the relationships that bind people, life-forms, and landscape together, in order to imagine into existence a world that is available for the taking. In this sense, the social imagination plays an important role in the making of frontiers. The essence of “frontierness” as a quality of a place or of a project depends on the ways that collective imaginings allow for the remaking of social and ecological relations. The idea that Hrĭn’s time shares some “frontierness” with the present day raises interesting questions. For one thing, we tend to imagine the frontier as temporary, as a phase in an imagined civilizing process when a place undergoes a transition from unruliness to a more settled social order. So it is remarkable to see how each new resource boom reinvigorates imaginaries of the northeast hills as wild and unsettled. Another question concerns the extent to which frontier dynamics necessarily involve the extension of capitalist social relations into places where they did not previously exist. Much writing about frontiers has looked at them as projects of capitalist penetration, premised on the need to civilize a hostile or “repugnant” natural and social environment in the name of progress and development. Yet these were not the principal forces producing the resource frontier of Hrĭn’s time, a frontier that was noncapitalist or perhaps precapitalist in many of its dimensions. Anthropologist Tania Li suggests that the transition from “market-asopportunity” to “market-as-compulsion” serves as a sort of acid test for the existence of capitalist social relations. The test requires more than simply the private ownership of the means of production by capitalists, who must necessarily accumulate in order to generate profit. Individuals, having no other livelihood options available to them, must also be faced with the necessity to sell their labor. In the sparsely populated hill country, the existence of the land frontier mitigated against the establishment of markets for either labor or land. To be sure, European involvement in the region and an expanding capitalist world system exerted an influence over events in mainland Southeast Asia in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Yet while the forces of the early state and the market played a role on the frontier, the economic compulsion that drives people to sell their labor was notably absent, and the extension of social relations of the sort Li describes had not yet occurred. 

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    If the Jarai settlement of the northeast hills took place within the context of a noncapitalist frontier, how, then, was that frontier organized? To better understand its functioning, it is useful to direct attention to the two classes of commodities upon which it most depended, forest products and human life, and to place them within the context of the forms of social organization that did exist at that time. Because practices of extraction and trade linked highlanders to each other and to larger collectivities, an examination of the items that circulated between highland and lowland worlds helps to make those relationships material. In , some fifty years or so after Hrĭn’s time, the French naval officer Charles Mourin d’Arfeuille published an account of his travels to Stung Treng, the town where the Sesan, Srepok, and Sekong Rivers flow together down out of the hill country. The explorer describes this entrepôt on the Mekong as a hub of the slave trade and as a zone of contact between highland and lowland societies. He notes that merchants there spoke Lao, Khmer, and Vietnamese, and engaged in “an active trade with the savages,” his use of this latter term reminding today’s reader of the prejudices through which such accounts were recorded. The items for sale in the market included “salt, dried fish, different varieties of mam [a kind of preparation made from salt and fermented fish], rice, iron, steel, heavy brass, red, blue, yellow, and brown glass beads, white porcelain, tobacco, [and] betel nut,” along with cotton cloth, Chinese porcelain cups, and brass and copper pots. As for items sold by the highlanders, Mourin d’Arfeuille mentions first elephant tusks and rhinoceros horns. Both of these, he explains, were, in fact, contraband items, prohibited for sale “because the King of Siam reserves for his personal use these two products.” Highlanders also sold “buffalo horns, beef, deer antlers, skins of wild ox, buffalo, deer, black and tan bears, and tigers, as well as tiger bones, resins, oils, wood, wax, honey, pangolin skins, peacock tails, buffalo, slaves, and gold dust.” In his catalog of items available for sale in the market at Stung Treng, Mourin d’Arfeuille also mentions “capsule rifles for export, of one or two shots” and “single-shot flintlock rifles.” These likely correspond to the specific varieties of rifles mentioned in the history of Dŭ Hrĭn. The story’s narrator refers to phao kĕp and phao phông, gun varieties of Siamese manufacture held by Hrĭn’s “platoon” (the narrator uses the modern Khmer military term kangtoap). The term phao means “rifle” in Jarai, and kĕp is likely a borrowing of the Thai term kaep (แกป), ๊ itself borrowed from French, meaning “percussion cap,” a weapons technology introduced in the early nineteenth  

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century. Hrĭn’s possession of these weapons helps to explain his position of supremacy in the highlands—firearms provide the key to Toiñ’s success in the hunt and to Hrĭn’s success in battle—and also serves as a marker of his reputed jiang relationship with the Siamese monarch. However unlikely it is that the Thai ruler—perhaps King Rama II at that time—would have consecrated a personal alliance with a strongman from the Lao hill country, Hrĭn’s purported alliance places him within a chain of patron-client bonds linking him to the center of political power. It is a detail illustrative of the model of patronage-based dependency through which the extension of Siamese power into the hill country was realized. Munitions played a significant role in Siamese territorial advances into the northeast in the nineteenth century. Not only did the Siamese obtain high-quality European weapons through their advantageous position in global trade, beginning in the eighteenth century, but they were also leading producers of firearms in the region. Firearms thus form one of the key elements of this particular historical conjuncture: the production of the frontier was contingent upon the availability of these arms, their flow through nested hierarchies of rule, and their distribution to local power holders. Jarai hunting and collecting was also closely tied to the expansion of Siamese influence at this time. The prohibition on the purchase of elephants that Mourin d’Arfeuille observed in Stung Treng represented an extension into this region of a royal monopoly on the elephant trade that Siamese rulers had imposed throughout the extent of their territory. Elephants were highly valued for their use in warfare, and ownership of elephants contributed materially and symbolically to the construction of the Siamese state. White elephants in particular, such as the one that Toiñ is depicted as having pursued, were considered sacred and highly desirable. The royal chronicles are replete with stories of their capture. This narrative element of the song of Hrĭn thus deepens the association between the tale’s heroes and notions of royalty and stateliness. Much as animals are said to have done for Hrĭn and his ritual ally the Siamese monarch, for the Jarai they serve an important role in establishing alliances and ritual relationships between humans, and between the human and spiritual worlds. With the exception of horses and dogs, among the Jarai domestic animals are raised for the purpose of sacrifice, and thus serve as the material basis for establishing social relations with yang, the spirits. They also serve the purpose of consecrating alliances between individuals: both marriages and jiang alliances are effected through the exchange of sacrifices. Within Jarai cosmology and ritual practice, individuals entertain “relations,” and may establish formal alliances through ritual, not only with humans 

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and spirits but also with plants, animals, and all soul-bearing beings. Dournes remarks on the ways that hunting wildlife is a culturally embedded form of social relation for the Jarai. He explains how the Jarai conceptualize the hunter journeying in the masculine territory of the forest as balancing a set of dyadic relations between two partners, the hunted animal and his own spouse. The social nature of this relationship constrains the hunter within an array of prohibitions, even requiring of him that he not refer to his prey by name “out of politeness, and as a mark of respect.” It is these forms of social relationship that processes of commodification necessarily transform, even as they also rearrange and interrupt biological and ecological reciprocities. The violence of frontiers, in capitalist or noncapitalist form, consists in part of the alienation they produce. One way of thinking about alienation is that it is a process through which components of the landscape are separated from their lifeworlds, removed for the purpose of exchange elsewhere. In the case of the Jarai hunter, for whom the hunted animal represents both a member of society and a partner, ecological and social alienation are closely tied.

  If the commodification of wildlife enacted alienation through the severing of social relations between hunter and prey, the commodification of human life presented a far more fraught endeavor. The literature on slavery in precolonial Southeast Asia has emphasized the complex and varied nature of the institution, which involved the transformation of human lives into property and, at the same time, saw those lives bound to the lives of others in a form of interpersonal relationship that was a constitutive institution of society at this time. In the mid-nineteenth century French explorers and missionaries were keenly interested in the issue of slavery, the abolition of which would serve as a justification for their presence in the region. Reports from this period often framed the abominations of slavery as an argument in favor of French intervention, and, as noted before, these writings must be read against the grain, taking into consideration the geopolitical contexts that motivated contemporary observers. Even so, along with legal codes, inscriptions, folktales, and moral didactic texts known as chbap (Kh.), explorers’ accounts and contemporary analyses of slavery and dependency have prompted subsequent scholars to inquire into the role that various forms of bondage and servitude played in constituting society in precolonial mainland Southeast Asia. An early observer was Étienne Aymonier, the French explorer, linguist, and historian of Cambodia and Laos. His portrayal of the role of slavery in  

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the economy of the northeast hills in the mid-nineteenth century resonates with Jarai oral-historical accounts. “The people of this province grow rice and various crops,” he wrote. “They gather wood resins in solid and liquid form, and make boats; they hunt wild elephants and other animals, and export ivory and the horns of cattle, wild ox, and rhinoceros; they hunt a great deal, and they hunt each other.” He recounted the brutal slaving raids carried out on highland villages by armed bands of lowland people as well as by groups of highlanders themselves. Aymonier wrote ethnographically about these raids, basing his accounts on information collected from those who observed them firsthand. Raiding parties comprised between  and  men, armed with bows, spears, and rifles, organized under the direction of an expedition leader, “a man reputed to be fearless and invulnerable, called the kvan.” Surrounding the intended village by night, the raiders attacked in the daytime. By Aymonier’s account, women and youths were the intended targets of the raid; all others who resisted were killed. Yet as other observers have pointed out, in fact these raids were not intended to take lives but were, ironically, designed to keep as many people as possible alive in order that they could be sold. A meticulous observer, Aymonier made note of the value of goods against which prisoners might be traded in the various commercial centers of the region, writing that “the price of savage slaves varies greatly depending on the location, and on the abundance or scarcity of goods offered in trade.” Away from the markets, “a boy might be worth five to six buffalo, a girl, six or seven buffalo,” but along the Mekong in markets from Stung Treng to Bassac, “the boy will be resold at a price of four to five bars [of silver], the girl five or six bars.” In this region “two buffalo would be valued at one silver bar, or fifteen Mexican piastres,” he noted, making reference to the two dominant forms of currency at the time. Some thirteen years earlier, describing the slave market at Stung Treng, explorer Mourin d’Arfeuille wrote that slaves there were “prisoners of war, stolen from a nearby village, or were individuals who could not pay their debts.” At that time, an enslaved person would have been valued at a rate of between fifteen and twenty buffalo. “I speak, of course, of healthy people, young and vigorous,” he wrote. The institution of slavery was not merely an unfortunate attribute of social life at this time, but was rather a bulwark of precolonial society at a time when political power in mainland Southeast Asia was based on control over people, rather than on control over territory. In the absence of national boundaries and territorial state sovereignty, political centers exerted power over mandala-like zones of influence, their power more concentrated at the center, more tenuous at the extremes. These political centers extracted wealth 

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through the imposition of obligations on dependents and maintained alliances through tributary relations with other centers of power. The realities of the landscape partly determined this political logic: where low population pressure and ample forestland provided individuals with the option to flee the state, measures were necessary to keep people in place. States could not sustain themselves without populations that could be taxed and from whom labor and grain could be extracted. The greater the population under a ruler’s control, the greater his power. The region’s principalities, kingdoms, and nascent states fulfilled their need to exert control over manpower and wealth through complex systems of patronage, indenture, and bondage—obligations of personal dependence that tied individuals to each other in hierarchical arrangements. These enchaining personal ties also included the “extreme forms of dependence” that together were labeled “slavery” by French observers. This political system served to structure society even in the remotest hinterland. The efforts of the founders of Tang Village to find a khoa who could protect them, the tension at the core of the village’s origin story, demonstrate the extent to which patronage shaped the social order. Highland cultures have generally been considered egalitarian in comparison with the rigidly stratified societies of the lowlands, where even forms of personal address are modulated “upward” or “downward” to establish the relative status of speakers. And yet the ethos of traditional Jarai society is perhaps best understood as “aristocratic” rather than egalitarian, dominated by the rich (pơdrŏng) and the powerful (prŏng). Multiple forms of bonded servitude existed within highland society. War captives might be retained as attendants rather than sold, or individuals might lose their freedom as punishment for a crime or to repay a debt. Even the physical arrangement of Jarai villages reflected the breadth of statuses of their inhabitants. Dournes describes villages in the mid-twentieth century still arranged spatially along a strict East-West axis. The East, or Ngŏ in Jarai, was considered the socially elevated “high” side, and was the domain of the village founders, the rich, and the most important families; in the center resided their allies and clients; and the West housed “the poor, emancipated serfs, and strangers.” The Jarai language accommodated a variety of free and unfree statuses. Thus the term khoa lơngai, for instance, when applied to Dŭ Hrĭn, identified him as a “slaveholding chief.” The most basic term, hlun, has generally been translated as “slave,” although Dournes, recognizing the complexity of social arrangements it referenced, preferred to use “serf” as a translation. The term literally means “naked” in Jarai, and this implication of the slave or bonded individual as one reduced to bare life, stripped away of all culture  

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and identity, provides a good indication of the relatively coherent set of attitudes toward hlun that continue to prevail in Jarai usage. The mention by the narrator of the Hrĭn story that “Hrĭn’s slaves still live in Plơi Kopheak today” nicely captures that sentiment—the stigma of slavery has still not worn off, two centuries later. This is not to say that the Jarai today embrace the institution of slavery or the internecine warfare associated with it. Far from it. While some elderly residents of Tang Kadon remembered that servitude of various forms had existed in their grandparents’ generations, they disavowed any personal history of these practices within their own families. Many suggested that the abolition of slavery had been the most worthwhile contribution of the French to the region. However, the complex history of the institution and its role in the Jarai settlement of the northeast hills help to explain why rituals such as the “lip feeding” ceremony continue to have relevance to the residents of Tang Kadon today. As the Jarai and their highland neighbors increasingly find themselves pushed aside in the context of present-day struggles over land and resources, it is perhaps not surprising that tales of Hrĭn and his brother Toiñ continue to circulate, reminding listeners of a time when the Jarai were themselves important actors on the frontier, in command of “platoons” of armed men, invested with near invincibility by the yang, and engaged in relations of trade and alliance with the paramount rulers of their day.

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 

The Jungle Girl and the Wild Man

I

 January  a young woman was discovered by Jarai villagers as she attempted to steal food from a logging crew working in a clearing in the forest near the town of Borkeo, some fifteen kilometers to the south of Tang Kadon. The woman, who appeared to be in her midtwenties, was captured and placed in the custody of the police. Strange rumors began circulating about her, and these were soon picked up by the local and then the international press. In media accounts, locals described the woman as walking on all fours, like a monkey. Unable to speak any known language, she muttered strange phrases, grunts, and cheeping noises. Within a day of her capture, Borkeo’s police chief himself, a Jarai man named Sal Lou, claimed the young woman as his long-lost daughter Rơcom P’nhieng, who had disappeared into the jungle some nineteen years earlier when she was only eight years old. He took her into his house, gave her food and clothing, and kept her under close watch. Soon, reporters and camera crews were descending on Jarai territory from all over the world to see the girl, and to interview the police chief. For several days the story of Cambodia’s “jungle girl” took the world by storm, presented in media coverage that was by turns disturbing, exploitative, and fantastical. Stories in both the Cambodian and international press emphasized the young woman’s wildness, her animality. Her father described her as scuttling along the ground like a monkey, her eyes “red like tigers’ eyes.” According to one account, the police officers guarding Sal Lou’s house were said to have floated the idea that she could be kept in a cage and displayed to visitors who would pay to see her. Officials and others interviewed by the media referred to her as a “half-animal girl,” and reports emphasized the monkey-like aspects of her behavior, her preference for eating fruits and vegetables over meat, and her seeming lack of any human language ability and thus of “culture.” 

The “jungle girl” story took several twists and turns in the days following her capture. The young woman’s arms showed signs of scarring, indicating that she had been bound with rope and confined. According to villagers, at the moment of her capture she was in the company of a naked, long-haired man bearing a sword, who had quickly escaped into the forest. The media now also devoted attention to this mysterious figure, with Fox News reporting that villagers planned “to hunt the ‘wild man’ who may have kidnapped and held [the woman] hostage.” Speculation about the woman’s long-haired companion was especially fierce among online enthusiasts of cryptozoology, the fringe science that looks to the fossil record and to folklore to identify unknown species of animals, seeking to uncover remains or, even better, living “specimens” of these relic species, which practitioners call “cryptids.” Soon after the jungle girl story broke, Loren Coleman, an influential modern-day practitioner, suggested on his blog that Cambodia’s “feral woman” had likely been held hostage by a Người Rừng, a fabled cryptid hominid believed to inhabit the upland forests of Vietnam’s Annamite Mountains. In Tang Kadon, just a few kilometers away from where all this was taking place, reception to the story was somewhat muted. The news was carried on the radio stations that often played in the background in people’s houses, so I asked some residents what they thought of the reports. One person suggested to me that the woman was speech- and hearing-impaired, or gơmlo. Several people reminded me of the various instances in which groups of people who had fled into the forests during the American Vietnam War or the Khmer Rouge period were only just now emerging from hiding. Another person suggested that the young woman was mentally ill. No one engaged seriously with the idea that she and the man with her—if he even existed— were anything other than human beings. From time to time in the intervening years, the news media would check in on the story of the jungle girl. The young woman was never able to acquire language, and continued to exhibit signs of psychological distress. By  the situation had grown dire. Reporters for a Cambodian English-language newspaper visited the police chief’s house, only to find the woman now confined to a locked, unlit shed in the backyard. Sal Lou and his wife claimed they were unable to properly care for her and did not have enough money to seek psychological treatment. Now in her thirties, the captive woman still refused to wear clothing and frequently tore out her own hair. And then, in July of that year, a man from across the border in Vietnam arrived to claim the “jungle girl,” who, he said, was his daughter Tak. In ,

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at the age of twenty-three, the young woman had disappeared into the forest in neighboring Gia Lai Province after suffering a mental breakdown. The man produced documents relating to her birth and disappearance, and was able to demonstrate that he was, in fact, her father. With the involvement of local authorities, she was escorted back to Gia Lai, where she lives today. As the story of the Cambodian “jungle girl” captured public attention, it was the familiarity of this tale, not its novelty, that resonated with global and domestic audiences. Stories of feral children and mysterious wild men, neither fully human nor fully animal, constitute a narrative genre familiar in many cultures. The contours of the jungle girl story conformed to this genre from the very start. Media representations and the accounts of local residents, the words they used, the facts they emphasized, the conjectures they volunteered, all allowed the story to resonate with audiences around the world, even as it fitted within folkloric traditions of northeast highlanders and their lowland neighbors. The story that emerged, simultaneously miraculous and sad, reminds us of the allure of the exotic, the power of wildness as a representational form.

       For centuries, exoticizing myths about the highlands have circulated among the societies of the Southeast Asian lowlands and among the Western colonial powers that viewed the hinterland with fascination and apprehension. The “jungle girl” story is only the most recent in a long tradition of “discoveries” that play upon the fantasies and fears of outside audiences, a tradition that includes a veritable bestiary of feral children, lycanthropes, and half animals and half humans of all kinds. These myths say more about the belief systems of outsiders than they do about highlanders. Understanding the logic of these representations is nonetheless important, if only because beliefs about the highlands as zones of wildness and indeterminate humanity provide outsiders with contextual frames that serve to justify civilizational projects, offering a rationale for outsiders’ often violent interventions into highland lives. Folklore and myth have long portrayed highlanders as forest-dwelling people whose intimacy with nature is indicative of their remove from civilization. These representational practices locate highlanders within the landscape, in this case marrying the physical landscape of the northeast highlands to a conceptual landscape of wildness and savagery. Moral and civilizational imaginaries here attach themselves to geography, to topography and elevation, to forest cover and landform. In this sense the identity

      

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that lowland peoples assign to highlanders is a landscape identity—an identity entangled in the forested hill country highlanders inhabit. The capture of the young woman, and the escape of the supposedly wild man who accompanied her, took place quite literally “at the edge of the forest”—the fraught space of transition that Cambodia historian David P. Chandler has identified as the archetypal site of encounter between cultivated land (srok, Kh.) and forest (prei, Kh.). These are key symbolic domains that signal the boundary between domesticated and wild space, between order and disorder, civilization and savagery, governed space and space that is ungovernable. Thus the term srok also means “administrative district,” and refers to space governed by the proper arrangement of things. In contrast, prei, the forest, is conceived of as a place of lawlessness and moral indeterminacy. Historian Penny Edwards notes that for Khmers, prei stands as “a symbol of all that [is] wild, lawless, and beyond the boundaries of human control.” As a moral code, the dichotomy between srok and prei can also be ambiguous. In some contexts, forests are sites of moral awakening, revitalization, and enchantment, and thus play a role in the constitution of society and individuals. The srok/prei binary aligns with the familiar dichotomy between “culture” and “nature.” Scholars have tended to locate nature-culture dualism within the modernist and capitalist sensibilities that emerged from the Enlightenment in western Europe. With respect to the terms srok and prei and their significance to Khmer orderings of the world, the divide they signal between settled agrarian civilization, on the one hand, and the perceived disorder of noncultivated spaces, on the other, is common to Southeast Asia, and maps not only to the nature/culture binary but also to the distinction between lowland and upland. The sparsely settled uplands of mainland Southeast Asia, remote from the more populous “state societies” of the lowlands, are known not only for the vast expanses of dipterocarp forests that flourish there but also for the people who inhabit those forests, people who appear “ungovernable” to the rulers of this region. From this perspective, highlanders’ religion and culture, their forms of social organization, their livelihood practices, and other aspects of highlander life seem to provide evidence of their lack of civilization, of their backwardness and savagery. Traditional cosmologies of power in the region—conceived of as mandalas, “galactic polities,” or as emanations of concretized power radiating from concentrated centers to diffuse peripheries—likewise assign moral and civilizational categories to the landscape, a moral mapping of settled centers of power in the lowlands and unsettled places of disorder in the upland peripheries. 

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      When news of the “jungle girl” broke, I was still establishing myself at Tang Kadon Village. I was finally conversing in Jarai, and I had begun to know people in the various villages north of the Sesan. One day I was fortunate to ride across the river from O Kop with my friend Kơsor Tang, and we set out together on the three-hour walk up to the village. Tang was one of my better friends. A strong proponent of “development,” Tang had become wealthy as one of the first villagers to plant cashews, back in the late s when Vietnam’s processing plants were paying high prices for the ungainly nut, and middlemen roamed the hill country encouraging local farmers to enter the market. Self-confident and given to profound observations about the state of the world, Tang also liked to have fun. He would come find me at celebrations in the village, spying me in a crowd and signaling to me with a hooked finger raised to his mouth, inviting me to join him in drinking at the jar. During our walk, Tang asked me to explain better what I was doing in Cambodia. Like many people in the village, he had a vague idea that I was interested in agriculture. But I had not set up any test plots or introduced any new agricultural technologies, so I did not conform to his expectations of the kinds of things that foreign “experts” generally did. My language skills had not permitted me to fully explain myself during the initial meetings I had held with village elders (kha plơi). I explained to Tang that I wanted to learn the history of the village, the ways that villagers had experienced the difficult years of the late twentieth century, and how they had changed their livelihood practices in accord with the different demands put on them by different political regimes. Taking all this in, Tang proposed that I was there to study “the Jarai people,” and said he was glad for this. “We have little power,” Tang told me. But Tang urged me as an American to “tell the big people” about the plight of the Jarai, who were losing their land as Khmer settlers moved to the hills. Tang’s clearheaded assessment of the difference in power and wealth that divided us was by now familiar to me—my relationships with my friends in the highlands all involved inequalities. But I was reluctant to suggest that I could speak “for” him or his people, or to imply that in doing so I might be able to improve things there. Our conversation recalled to me the problems of power and representation inherent in the practice of ethnography, problems at the heart of the so-called “crisis of representation” in the social sciences. It was an issue that would come up on numerous occasions during my fieldwork, perhaps never more often than when the legacy of Americans’       

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role in the region was under discussion, and my friends and I could see ourselves reflected in this complicated history. Tang himself seemed untroubled by these complexities. He observed, happily, that when they do not come as soldiers, outsiders come to the northeast hills as experts, instructing highlanders in ways to behave and improve their lives. Recognizing my interest in learning from him, Tang told me he was glad someone would want to hear the Jarai side of the story. Suddenly, as would sometimes happen with Tang, his face darkened and he became serious, pausing, considering his words. “You know,” he said at last, “the Jarai people do not have tails [Nă nuih Jarai bih hmao ku ô].” I was taken aback. Did Tang suspect me of harboring Orientalist fantasies? His words took me by surprise, but they should not have. For centuries, outsiders have come to the northeast hills searching for “wild men” and, sometimes, sometimes even searching for men with tails. As I would come to understand, these opinions that outsiders had of them, as wild people, perhaps not even fully human at all, had enormous import to residents of the highlands— they mattered in ways that highlanders were themselves very aware of. The myth that the southern Annamite Mountains were populated by a “race of men with tails” is one of the most enduring representations of highlander otherness in the region. A brief catalog of some of these stories provides a useful insight into the way wildness has been mapped onto the highlands. Stories of men with tails had circulated in the accounts of European explorers of the Indies at least since the time of Jan Struys, who in  reported having observed a man with a tail at first hand, in Formosa. As Indochina was increasingly the object of French imperial desires, a number of observers reported on the existence of tailed men believed to inhabit the Annamite hill country. In an  report about the travels of the ship Henri, for instance, Captain L. Rey of Bordeaux described a story he had heard from a French missionary who claimed to have encountered “a race of men with tails, in the southern country of Siampa”—that is, in Champa, the former kingdom in southern Vietnam with close linguistic and historical ties to the Jarai. The missionary spoke from personal experience, observing that “these extraordinary beings, called moys or wild men,” possessed a tail of “about eight inches and a half,” a fact that he was able to confirm based on “his own ocular examination.” As to the humanity of the moys (usually written moïs, the Vietnamese term translates as “savages” or sometimes “slaves”), the ship’s captain reported that “although [they were] endowed with speech, as well as with the human figure, the [missionary] seemed, I thought, to conceive them to be only irrational animals.”

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Reports such as these are a constant throughout centuries of writing about the highlands. In  Father François-Isidore Gagelin, a missionary with the Société des Missions étrangères de Paris, reported hearing similar tales about highlanders in Cambodia. “All the world assures me that these savages have a tail,” he wrote, and although he considered these reports “a ridiculous fable,” he dedicated himself to investigating it in person. His writings record his efforts to debunk the myth, and the arduous evangelizing mission he then undertook among them. Unable to convince the highlanders to study the faith with him, three years later the abbé was dead, executed by strangulation, the first victim of an anti-Catholic edict issued by the emperor Minh Mang. By the end of the nineteenth century, the purported existence of men with tails in the highlands of French Indochina would come to play a role in European discussions of evolution and the search for the “missing link” between humans and their hominid ancestors. In  French anthropologist Paul d’Enjoy announced in an article published in an academic journal that he had discovered a population of men with tails (hommes à queue) in Vietnam’s Central Highlands. In the article he reported on an exploratory journey he made from Bien Hoa, in Cochin China, north toward Cambodia. Passing by a “moï” village hidden in dense forest, his party came upon a group of the village’s inhabitants at work collecting honey on the outskirts of the settlement. Surprised by the sudden appearance of the foreigner and his retinue, the villagers fled into the jungle and disappeared, but not before d’Enjoy managed to take one of their members hostage. According to d’Enjoy: “[The] captive had enormous ankle bones, pointed as the spurs of a cock. His skin was brown, but more tanned than black. . . . Head carried high, he appeared a bronze statue. But he had a tail, like a monkey.” Like the “jungle girl” story that it preceded by more than a century, d’Enjoy’s account attracted international attention. In spite of, or perhaps because of, the unlikely nature of the account, news of the “discovery” of tailed men in the highlands of Indochina spread quickly through both the English- and French-speaking world. Notices and extracts of d’Enjoy’s account appeared in major American and French newspapers and scientific journals, in articles that blurred the lines between fantasy, myth, and science. Several commentators ridiculed d’Enjoy’s claims. The craniometrist and anthropologist Sigismond Zaborowski, for instance, wrote a damning critique in the Bulletin of the Anthropological Society of Paris. But d’Enjoy’s reported discovery was also given credence by revered institutions and influential opinion-makers. The journal Nature reported the story at face value,

      

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 . William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal ran a fifteen-inch-high version of this image in an  story on Paul d’Enjoy’s “discovery.” The headline read: “The Missing Link Found Alive in Annam: A Race of Men with Tails Seems to Prove the Theory of Evolution.”

observing, “As this somewhat sensational account has been published by our esteemed contemporary l’Anthropologie . . . we must treat it with respect; and we hope it will not be long before these tailed men are carefully described by a trained scientific observer.” One significant public figure to take up the case was Georges Clemenceau. A statesman who would later become prime minister and a principal architect of the Treaty of Versailles, Clemenceau publicized d’Enjoy’s purported discovery, urging that stories like these filtering in from the colonial world be investigated for the insight they might provide into Charles Darwin’s theories of evolution. Indeed, it was within the context of contemporary debates over human evolution that d’Enjoy’s report was taken up and debated. In sensationalizing the story, the press, too, played up the evolutionary angle. “‘The Missing Link’—a Man with a Tail—Found in IndoChina” was the title of a story that ran on the front page of the New York Sun. “The Missing Link Found Alive in Annam” a headline announced in 

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William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal. More than one American newspaper ran the story accompanied by a line-drawing depicting the “man with a tail” as a hairy monkey-man (figure .). The explanatory frameworks that Europeans elaborated to account for the forms of human difference they encountered in colonial settings did not emerge in isolation from the knowledge systems of their colonial subjects. Rather, in Southeast Asia as elsewhere the development of new raciological and evolutionary perspectives drew on local understandings, beliefs, and attitudes. Educated people’s views regarding the humanity of the highlanders were ambivalent. This ambivalence is captured in the opinion of one late nineteenth-century Vietnamese observer, who commented that the highlanders “are not men, but neither are they monsters.” In their dealings with the remote highlands, the French had adopted the attitudes and terminology that lowland peoples used to characterize highlanders—referring to them using the local terms kha, phnong, and moï, which meant both “savage” and “slave” simultaneously. The same borrowing could be found in the construction of “scientific theories of racial hierarchy,” historian Mathieu Guérin notes; in that project too, “the French relied on the image [of highlanders] held by the Laos, Cambodians and Vietnamese.” Rumors that the highlands were home to tailed humans circulated widely among the inhabitants of Indochina’s lowland civilizations and were also recorded in the folklore of the foothills and highlands themselves. The popular belief that highlanders could be considered “Khmer daeum” (original Khmers), or the living ancestors of the Khmer people, likewise reinforced European evolutionary discourse about the highlanders. Orderings that in some cases located highlanders in an indeterminate position between animal and human were thus not purely European fabrications, but represented the outcome of a coproduction of knowledge that took place within the colonial setting and referenced beliefs that extended far back in time.

     D’Enjoy’s purported discovery of men with tails in the highlands was a noteworthy episode in a folkloric tradition that has shown little sign of abetting in intervening years. The wars of the twentieth century, which brought French and American soldiers into intimate contact with the landscape and peoples of the highlands, produced numerous stories of encounters with wild men, neither fully human nor fully “animal.” These encounters became a trope of veterans’ war stories, were reported to the media during the conflict, and were published after the fact in veterans’ newsletters and the       

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publications of various combat units’ associations. The violence of war, the social production of landscape, and the elaboration of landscape identities all came together in these stories. These narratives illuminate a larger popular and military discourse that linked the highlanders to nature within the context of war. A National Geographic article on the plight of the Montagnards during the American Vietnam War provides a good example of the production of this discourse. The article is sympathetic to the Montagnards, who were perceived as allies to the American cause, and describes them as smiling innocents whose “way of life seems as old as time itself.” The trope of the highlander relationship to nature is first made evident in the striking cover photo, which depicts a youth in a river, grasping a large fish between his teeth in the manner of a bear in a salmon run (figure .). The trope of highlander animality is further reinforced in a subheading in the text that references a highlander legend and asks, “Which are monkeys—and which are men?” The wars of the twentieth century saw a steady stream of reports by outsiders who claimed to have encountered animal-like humans in the highlands. Jules Harrois, a combatant in the First Indochina War, recounted one such event, which he said took place in , to Rizières et djebels, the newsletter of the Association of Combatants of the French Union. Harrois reported that during a march in Kontum Province, the column of Jarai, Sedang, and Bahnar soldiers under his command surprised an homme sauvage in the forest, a being who was “neither human nor monkey.” The unit’s Jarai sergeant informed the Frenchman that this type of creature was well known to the highland peoples of the region and that “unlike monkeys, it is the object of dietary prohibitions among all the tribes.” Harrois added, somewhat cryptically, that the “simple fact of having encountered it filled all of the men of the column with joy.” Two decades later, during the American Vietnam War, Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett related a similar story. Burchett was one of the most well-known Western reporters to advocate for the communist cause in Indochina, and in the s he traveled extensively with the armed forces of the communist National Liberation Front. His account of those travels, narrated in a self-effacing tone that nonetheless allowed his keen wit to shine through, was published as Vietnam: Inside Story of the Guerilla War. Burchett included an additional chapter in the French translation, one omitted from the original English version, that described his efforts to track down wild men inhabiting the mountains of the Vietnam-Cambodia borderland. Burchett begins his account with a story told to him by his liaison and guide in the National Liberation Front, a Vietnamese officer named Minh, 

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 . In  a National Geographic cover article described the plight of Vietnam’s Montagnards during the war. The trope of highlander animality has a long history in Western depictions. Photo by Howard Sochurek.

who in the previous year had commanded a detachment sent to survey a route to Cambodia through the mountainous borderland near the Mnong village of Dak Mil. After days spent trekking through the forest with no sign of human presence, Minh’s patrol encountered a fresh human footprint, and thereupon captured a humanlike “creature,” his body covered in hair. Unable to communicate with their captive, who uttered only chirping sounds, the unit attempted to take him to the nearest base. According to Minh, the creature soon fell sick and died, much to the regret of his captors, who buried him in the forest. Fascinated by this report, Burchett, by his own account, convinced the Front’s unit with whom he was traveling to seek out residents of the Dak Mil area to confirm the details. Having made a detour of several days to satisfy his interest, and after coming under fire from US helicopters, Burchett was finally introduced to two Mnong combatants from the border area, who confirmed for him the existence of the humanlike creatures in the highlands. One of the two even reported to him that he, too, had encountered these hairy beings firsthand. When Burchett later sought to corroborate this discovery with a specialist on the “tribes” in Saigon, he reports, the specialist       

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explained to him that the highland societies had managed to keep the mountainous zones inaccessible to the French and Vietnamese alike, and were themselves only recently living “in the stone age.” It would therefore not be surprising to find, in the most remote locations, “populations still lower on the evolutionary scale.” The highland jungles had resisted the incursions of civilizational and colonial projects for centuries. During the wars of the twentieth century, the forested uplands served as redoubts for nationalist and communist revolutionaries. Counterinsurgency efforts of the French and Americans and their Vietnamese allies engaged with the highlands as bastions of resistance to colonial modernization in its various forms. It is thus not coincidental that within these efforts the question of whether these forests might also harbor primitive humans or some other evolutionary throwback rose to the fore. The production of discourse on the highlands as a zone of wild humanity furthermore exhibited a recursive logic. In their encounters with the remote highlands, Europeans and Americans were influenced by the stories they heard from those with whom they worked, informants and collaborators who generally hailed from the lowlands, although highland myth also supported similar interpretations. Outsiders wrote about the highlands mostly secondhand, sometimes in scientific journals or in seemingly authoritative reportage. But these accounts, which channeled the desires of the international audiences to whom they were directed, fed back into the local setting, substantiating or reinvigorating local apprehensions and fantasies about the upland zones.

  “Discoveries” of wild people in the highlands continued to be cataloged throughout the twentieth century and remain alive today, cropping up in stories like that of the so-called jungle girl and of the wild man who was reported to have been seen with her. In some ways, stories about the discovery of wild men in the highlands distract from the lived reality of the people of Cambodia’s northeast hills. These are not highlanders’ stories about themselves, after all. And yet the people of the hill country are quite aware of the rumors that circulate about them. My friend Tang’s comment that the members of his community do not have tails shows the extent to which Jarai self-fashionings take place in relation to understandings of them held by outsiders. These understandings have significant material consequences for highlanders, too, when such premises are used as the basis for interventions

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into their lives. Civilizational projects, such as the mid-twentieth-century “Khmerization” campaign pursued by Norodom Sihanouk’s government (and described in chapter ), seek to eradicate the perceived backwardness of a region understood as wild and ungovernable, the inhabitants of which are constantly called upon to defend their very humanity. Today, many different forms of advocacy and social action by highlanders, including the pursuit of Indigenous rights, are premised on the need to respond to perceptions of them as primitive. In recent years, the emergence of the concept of “Indigeneity” has played an important role in highlanders’ struggles for self-determination in the face of numerous threats to their land and livelihoods. These efforts are complicated somewhat by the fact that many Jarai people share some of the basic tenets that underpin lowland cosmologies. Jarai folklore, for instance, like that of many highland groups, contains various accounts of different kinds of human-animal hybrids, and furthermore assigns personhood to animals. Stories circulate about different kinds of wild beings inhabiting the Annamite forests. It is not just outsiders, but highlanders themselves, who embrace these stories. Jarai cosmologies also overlap in some not insignificant ways with the spatial orderings of power held by lowland societies. Center-periphery models that see forests and hill regions as removed from the “pure centers” of power in Southeast Asia are adopted by highlanders as well, in modified form. For instance, many Jarai would agree that the conceptual ordering of inhabited space involves a gradient from the feminine zone of hearth and vil lage, outward through the domesticated zones of gardens and farm fields, to familiar nearby forested areas, and finally to the great expanses of forest that are known to be places of danger and enchantment, sites of masculine pursuits of warfare and adventure. For the Jarai, forests are understood as zones of encounter with animate nature and the spirit world, and are thus esteemed. Yet it is also not unusual to hear the Jarai themselves use negative terms to refer to people deemed too close to nature, and therefore too far removed from the sociality of the village. The inhabitants of Tang Kadon Village, for instance, might speak derisively of their neighbors, saying, “The people of that village? They live in the bush! [Nă nuih plơi nun? Ñu dŏ nam bôm!].” Much as the discourse of lowland societies portrays settled agriculture as an index of civilization, so too agriculture plays an important role in Jarai conceptions of what it means to be human or to have culture. The mythic history of the origins of swidden agriculture among the Jarai provides a useful example. In the story, it is Yă Bôm, a powerful yang, or spirit, of the forest,

      



who teaches the Jarai agriculture and, in doing so, removes them from their previous, animallike existence. When my friend Kơsor Hloĭc narrated the story for me, in a cadence that resembled Jarai verse forms (although he did not sing or chant the lines), he began it with these words: Hra kha dim Môuy dim butao ngă hua, Butao ngă cam ô, Dŏ tă, dŏ thătn, Bô hmao sang, bô hmao tong ô, Dŏ hla cim brim.

They say that in the old days Back then we didn’t know how to make swiddens, We had no idea how to farm, We lived in a disorderly way, We didn’t have houses, we didn’t have granaries, We lived like the animals and the birds.

Jarai cosmology thus interprets agriculture—in this case, shifting agriculture—as a step in a civilizational progression, one that leads away from an existence of animality in the forest. This progress was not altogether without its drawbacks, though, from the Jarai point of view. Often, the preagricultural phase of existence in the forest is portrayed as one of abundance and plenty, when human labor was unnecessary.

, ,   Landscape is a representational as well as a material terrain. Different landscape formations symbolize differently, in ways that both structure and are structured by history, memory, and culture, and by the forms of social life associated with different arrangements of people on the land itself. Movement through the landscape of the Annamite highlands is movement through territories of meaning. To travel uphill, to travel from srok to prei, from field to forest, is to travel from a zone of civilization, culture, and humanity to one of savagery, nature, and animal life in the minds of some of the region’s people. Practices of social imagination that place mountains, forests, and their inhabitants at some remove from full civilization, from full humanity, must be thought of, at least in part, as representing a project of dehumanization. Like all such projects, these orderings of the world both emerge from violence and are enlisted in its production. “When an ethnologist meets in any district with the story of tailed men, he [sic] ought to look for a despised tribe of aborigines, outcasts, or heretics, living near or among a dominant population, who look upon them as 

 

beasts, and furnish them with tails accordingly.” These are the words of British social anthropologist Edward B. Tylor, written decades before Paul d’Enjoy reported having captured a tailed man in the Annamite highlands. They remain a guide for understanding the significance of stories about the wild men who are believed to inhabit the jungles of the Annamite highlands today.

      



 

Rubber, Rule, and Revolt

A

 a Vietnamese café next to a mechanic’s shop in Banlung, I fell into conversation with an older man who spoke surprisingly good English. Lean and no longer as strong as he had once clearly been, his remaining hair now white, Y Don was a member of the Edé ethnic minority, born in a village just outside the town of Buôn Ma Thuột in what is now Vietnam. He had been a soldier most of his life, fighting wars of counterinsurgency as a member of a highlander military unit, first with the French and later with the Americans. In the late s, Y Don helped to found the highlander armed resistance movement later known as the Unified Front for the Liberation of Oppressed Races (Front uni de lutte des races opprimées, or FULRO), an ethnic separatist group that sought autonomy for the minorities of the Central Highlands. While Y Don survived the conflict, spending time in Oklahoma and later in a prison camp in Malaysia before returning to the region, his wife and children were killed by the Communists. So, too, were many of his comrades in arms. Y Don and I became friends, of a sort, and in subsequent encounters I asked him about the origins of FULRO, and of its precursor, the Bajaraka movement. His answer was simple, although the history it alluded to was not. “The French came to plant rubber,” he said, “and they brought the Vietnamese with them. These were our lands. There were no Khmers here, and there were no Vietnamese in Darlac or Pleiku or Kontum. We could not stand to one side and watch them destroy it all.” The French established rubber plantations in Indochina at the beginning of the twentieth century, and by the time of the rubber boom of the s the commodity had transformed the colony’s economy and politics. That decade saw an influx of colonists into the Central Highlands of what was then Annam, and witnessed the emergence of a pattern of resistance and sabotage 

by highlanders, who were dismayed to see their lands confiscated and their forests destroyed. This dynamic of colonization and response would remain in place for decades, and is still evident today. Y Don recounted for me his own experience seeing teams of Vietnamese workers clearing forest for a plantation near his home in Buôn Ma Thuột in the s. Dismayed, infuriated, he and other youths of the area began meeting in secret, planning an attack on the workers, only to be dissuaded by their elders. Several of those youths would later join the armed ethnonationalist movement. The emotions that Y Don experienced were familiar to the residents of Cambodia’s northeast hills. Rubber was slower to arrive to this area. While the French established plantations south of the Srepok River in the territory of the Bunong and Stieng as early as the s, it was not until  that the first major effort to plant rubber in Ratanakiri Province would begin. When it did, it was met with fierce resistance. I spoke with a Jarai man who participated in the unrest of that time, and he summed it up this way: “Before they planted rubber here, that was the last time we were free. Since then, all we have known is struggle.” In the mid-twentieth century, plantation rubber (Hevea brasiliensis) played a central role in the efforts of the royal government in Phnom Penh to securitize the northeast hills, which were then perceived of as a place of wildness—a disorderly and uncivilized borderland incompletely integrated into the Cambodian nation-state. In , following Cambodia’s independence from France, Prince Norodom Sihanouk sought to overcome the perceived deficiencies of the untamed frontier. His signature “Khmerization” campaign, launched shortly after he assumed the role of head of state, consisted of a far-reaching program of internal colonialism, led by the military and backed by unstinting use of state-sanctioned violence. The twinned logics of state territorialization and economic development underwrote the campaign, a central feature of which was the creation of a large, state-run rubber plantation in the middle of Ratanakiri’s fertile basaltic plateau. The inscription of a new order on the landscape was thus part and parcel of the imperative to bring a recalcitrant frontier to heel through administrative means and through the imposition of the plantation form. The s and s, often romanticized as a golden age in postcolonial Cambodia, saw an ongoing crisis of insurgency and war occurring just across the border in Vietnam, at a time when the First Indochina War was coming to an end and the Second Indochina War was just beginning. In this context, the country’s northeast border, once deemed a remote hinterland, increasingly came to be thought of as a zone of concern. Conceived of as a “sensitive space,” the periphery’s insecurities now produced anxieties for the center. , ,  



Sensitive spaces such as these trouble deeply held notions about the integrity of the national geobody. Most closely associated with borders and enclaves, where the coherence of the nation-state comes to be posed as both a cartographic and ideological question, sensitive spaces are at once the subject of intense scrutiny and, quite often, of intense neglect. They are also trouble spots that seem to invite recourse to violence and repression. Because colonial powers sited state borders in Southeast Asia in the sparsely settled, mountainous buffer zones between lowland states, border areas in the region frequently align with resource frontiers. Resource extraction, agricultural expansion, resettlement schemes, and military securitization are common features of these zones. Where extractive frontiers and state-led agrarian expansion take place in sensitive zones of instability, the potential for frontier violence is great. Just this sort of intersection was at work in Cambodia’s northeast hills during the turbulent s, as the region slowly descended into war. The Sihanouk regime’s policy of establishing plantation rubber in the northeast hills was not merely an economic development strategy, although the income-generating potential of the commodity held an allure for the government. It was the plant’s ability to transform entire landscapes, and the opportunities for surveillance and control this transformation afforded, that explains rubber’s attraction. For rubber, when incorporated into the schema of a rubber estate, offers itself up as a spectacular, state-signifying ecology. Plantation rubber imparts an unnatural feel to the land. The trees of a plantation are arranged with scientific rigor in systematic, unvarying regularity, planted in rows and columns like an account ledger. When you drive past, the rows form optical illusions. One second the trees appear perfectly aligned, square to your point of view. The next second it is the congruence of the diagonals that takes precedence. Like a military parade, the uniformity of the arrangement is itself spectacular, a seeming proof of the prowess of human accomplishment, the imposition of engineering and mathematics on a disorderly world. The forces of market efficiency help to produce this effect. But the rectilinear aesthetics of rubber are heavily freighted. Rubber’s allure is this orderliness, its ability to make manifest in spectacular form the imposition of humankind’s power over an unruly nature. No doubt this aspect of the commodity’s profile helps to explain why governments have so often relied on rubber as a tool of statecraft and as a symbol of state sovereignty. Where rubber is grown as a plantation crop, it necessitates an entire social order, one based on strict control over labor and highly centralized forms of



 

authority. These social arrangements are reflected in ecological transformations enacted on the land, in the erasure of existing ecologies and their replacement with highly simplified systems. In Southeast Asia as elsewhere in the world, plantations make for legible landscapes, not only allowing for the surveillance of those whose lives are lived out in its regular rows, but also structuring their ability to act. The plantation form is thus well suited to projects of discipline, an entirely imported socioecology deemed amenable to centralized control and to the interests of power. The Khmerization campaign and the effort at state territorialization it represented had a transformative effect on the northeast highlands. The tactics deployed by the Cambodian state to secure the countryside were familiar. But they had unintended, if foreseeable, consequences. The fact that the campaign did not result in a more secure countryside was due, in large part, to the heavy-handed nature of the state’s efforts—efforts that were resented by highland residents and served to alienate them from the regime. Highlanders’ aversion to rubber and to the form of rule it represented extended their long-standing refusal to be incorporated into Cambodian state society. Highlanders’ recollections of this period are sometimes ambivalent. Nonetheless, they share an understanding that state policies during this period were directed against their interests. As they were faced with an end to their freedom, collective opposition to these policies initiated a new phase of struggle for many highlanders, one that took the form of revolutionary activity in some cases. It is not insignificant that a changing landscape was implicated in this shift.

Ơ     To see this period from the perspective of the Jarai at Tang Kadon Village, and to understand something of their relationship to the Cambodian state at this time, it is useful to briefly consider the way that people today remember Ơe Gun. “Grandfather” Gun was an outsize figure in the history of the village, well remembered as the leader who split the village (pơ˘klah plơi) off from its parent village in , taking his followers farther up into the hill country to a site on the Ia Jarai, and leaving behind the village on the Sesan that would come to be called Tang Se. Although he died decades ago, Ơe Gun still looms large in the memory of the people. Another way that Ơe Gun is remembered is as the village’s first proponent of “development.” I was informed of this by Kwĕn, the current village chief, during a conversation about a controversial plan he favored to sell a parcel

, ,  



 . A man invites a guest to drink at the jar during a ceremony. Photo by Kevin Morris.

of the village’s land, a plan that was embraced by some because it would allow for the pursuit of “development” in the village. Jarai in Cambodia use the Khmer term aphivoat to mean “development,” and the word is as ideologically loaded in Khmer as it is in English. The term, which also means “progress,” holds out the promise of well-being in a modern world, yet many of the practices undertaken in the name of development have had negative repercussions for highland people. Seeking support for his own version of development, Kwĕn reminded me of the accomplishments of the lionized former village chief. “Don’t you know that Ơe Gun built the road?” he asked me. I told him I hadn’t known that. “Oh yes. He worked with the French to build the road to Borkeo,” Kwĕn informed me. “Of all the people of Tang Kadon, he loved development the most.” That Ơe Gun should be remembered as a leader who brought development to his people is both telling and ironic. Villagers recall him as a man of great wisdom and moral courage, and often use him as a standard against which to measure the failings of present-day chiefs. Yet Gun faced many of the same challenges in his time that today’s me phum must contend with. Selected by the administration, the village head served as the representative of the state within the community, even as he—and in Jarai villages the 

 

chief selected by colonial and postcolonial regimes has always been a male— was called upon to represent his community in state affairs. Where the state imposed obligations on villagers, the chief found himself forced to uphold rules and strictures he himself likely opposed as a member of the community. Villagers recognize the ambivalent situation these imposed authorities contend with, and they generally rate the performance of their me phum based on his ability to shield the village from harm and to soften the blow of the most onerous impositions. In the mid-twentieth century, the impositions of the colonial state took the form of corvée labor requirements levied on villages and used for the construction and maintenance of large public works projects such as building roads and bridges. These compulsory labor obligations were a principal source of open rebellion among highland villages, and the Jarai of Cambodia’s northeast highlands were particularly adept in avoiding them. Nonetheless, it was the village chief ’s role to ensure that the village labor requirements were fulfilled. It was in this highly compromised role that Ơe Gun “built the road” along with the French authorities. The system of compulsory labor known as the corvée had been officially extended to northeast Cambodia in . French policy required all males over age eighteen to provide between ten days and two weeks of labor, known as prestations, which was the principal form of taxation imposed by the government. In theory, this work was paid. French administrators and Cambodian officials were able to impose additional requirements, known as réquisitions, which were also paid but which were of potentially unlimited duration. This gave officials great latitude. Not surprisingly, the system was rife with abuse, as there were, in theory, no limits on how long individuals would be forced to work away from home. During the rubber boom in Cambodia in the late s and s, the colonial state deployed corvée labor in the highlands in the development of the Snuol and Memot rubber plantations in Kratie and present-day Mondulkiri Provinces. The government devoted great effort to opening these territories to plantation agriculture, using state funds for the construction of infrastructure and offering various kinds of assistance to French planters and settlers. Labor that was nominally intended to support public works was thus often used to support privately held plantations. These processes of “enclave development,” which ironically relied on unfree labor to promote the development of market capitalism, saw state and private interests aligned in the transformation of the landscape of the northeast hills. Refusal to submit to colonial authorities and refusal to assent to compulsory labor obligations were a central feature of highlander resistance to the , ,  



colonial state during the first half of the twentieth century. When in the s armed Mnong and Stieng highlanders carried out a series of deadly attacks on French border outposts, Governor Maurice Pagès observed that the administration’s frequent practice of “providing moï labor to large rubber companies without serious control over its use has led to certain abuses, inducing the moïs to fear that our advance will translate to quasi-serfdom for them.” The Jarai were perceived by the French and by some of their highland neighbors as the fiercest and most resistant to rule among all the upland minorities of the Central Highlands. French administrators writing on the eve of the Second World War had identified the Jarai territory in the Cambodia-Annam borderland as constituting a last zone of rebellion (insoumissión) against French authority. The legacy of Jarai resentment toward obligatory labor remains deeply embedded in their perspective on life and work even today. The word coolie, originally a Hindi term, which had come to refer to unskilled labor within the broader colonial context in Asia, was incorporated into the Jarai language as kuli, meaning one who works for others. The word remains an epithet for the Jarai today: to perform any kind of paid or servile labor for others, ngă bwă kuli, is considered shameful and low, a fate reserved for the poor. At the end of World War II, when French rule was reestablished and road building and other public works projects resumed, the Jarai remained staunchly opposed to the compulsory use of their time and labor. This opposition continued to fuel active resistance well into the postindependence years of the Sihanouk regime. Ơe Gun served as village chief, and thus as the village’s chief labor recruiter, throughout this postwar period, including during the time of Sihanouk’s Khmerization campaigns, when compulsory labor demands spurred intense disaffection on the part of highlanders toward the regime. It is not difficult to imagine the pressures that were put upon the village chief by the administration and by villagers themselves. The absence of animus toward him in contemporary remembrance suggests his skills as a khoa, as a man of prowess in the Jarai tradition. It also reflects a certain form of nostalgia for the colonial era that is not uncommon throughout the region. Ơe Gun’s role in village affairs, his history, has thus been pieced apart: those pieces that fit the uses of present-day narrators are burnished and made to outshine the others. When Kwĕn suggested to me that Ơe Gun was an early proponent of “development,” he held on to one or two fragments of the past, presenting them as evidence that he hoped might help to justify his own, equally compromised role as the village’s appointed chief today.



 

 During the s and s, revolutionary activity surged along Cambodia’s borderland with Vietnam, a situation the newly established independent government in Phnom Penh inherited from the colonial regime. Resentment against the French administration’s assaults on their lands and labor had spurred highlanders to numerous acts of resistance throughout the northeast hills, and motivated some to join the armed anticolonial groups collectively known as Khmer Issarak, or Free Khmers, fighting for Cambodian independence. Villagers today recall that the forests in the s were home to a great number of “forest soldiers” and members of the struggle (in Khmer, kangtoap prei and neak tausu, respectively) aligned with different resistance groups. In the northeast, thousands of Issarak fighters joined the communist struggle under the tutelage first of the Indochinese Communist Party and later the Vietnam Workers’ Party. By the early s, Khmer and Vietnamese Communists moved freely throughout eastern Cambodia. The deterioration of the security situation in the northeast hills was part of a phenomenon that French strategists at the time referred to as the “rotting away,” pourrissement, of territory controlled by the state. The term is an evocative one, signaling the discarnate materiality of the colonial state itself. What did the notion of pourrissement reflect if not the unsettling notion that the geobody was not quite the substantive image it projected of itself on maps, flags, and other representations? Pourrissement was of particular relevance in the highlands and the borderlands, land areas that were also questions, long after their official boundaries had been fixed in space. In Cambodia, a series of large-scale maps produced by the government in  help to make this point. The maps portray Issarak activity throughout the country, with areas where Issarak moved unimpeded indicated in pink. Along with much of the rest of the country, all of Stung Treng Province, including present-day Ratanakiri, appears in communist pink, under the designation “insecure.” The forested northeast hills, when viewed from the perspective of lowland Cambodian society, were traditionally characterized as a zone lacking in civilization, a place of wildness where even the humanity of the region’s inhabitants was open to question. From the perspective of the nascent government in Phnom Penh, the northeast highlands had also come to represent a zone of indeterminate allegiance to the nation-state. Anxiety attached to these insecurities, and to the landscape of the borderland itself. Were the residents of this zone fully part of Cambodia? Were they even fully human?

, ,  



Khmerization as a civilizational project was intended to force both of these questions. The regime’s efforts to more firmly secure the hinterland would have lasting repercussions. Central to the campaign was an effort to remake social relations through the physical transformation of the landscape itself, an approach made most clearly apparent in the creation of the large Labansiek rubber plantation initiated in the late s. A project of state territorialization in the guise of commoditizing frontier development, the project sought to deploy land as a machine of social transformation, with a view toward radically restructuring social relations in the hill country. The histories that came to be written on the land in this case were not the passive residues of past conflicts. Rather, where projects to effect new forms of social relations were directed at the productive relationship between society and the land, the land itself took on an active role in the production of society. In some respects, the Khmerization campaign represented an extension of tactics previously deployed by the French administration in pursuit of similar goals. These had included demands for highlanders’ submission (soumissión) to French authority, the establishment of rubber plantations as part of a strategy of enclave development, and the imposition of corvée labor requirements for public works projects. This was the reality of the map in the national archive, painted in broad swaths of pink. This was the reality of pourrissement, the “rotting away” of the national geobody that so concerned French war planners and strategists. And, after Sihanouk gained independence for Cambodia in , after the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu in , this was the reality that Sihanouk inherited. The Geneva Accord of  saw the removal of most armed communist forces from the hinterland for a time. Then, Viet Minh and many Issarak fighters were regrouped to Hanoi. But revolutionaries would make their presence felt in the northeast hills again quite soon. Sihanouk inherited, too, many of the assumptions, strategies, and tactics for addressing this reality that the French had developed. The government of the now independent nation-state launched the Khmerization campaign in the late s and pursued it throughout the following decade. The effort to bring the northeast highlands more firmly into the Cambodian ambit combined multiple approaches. On the one hand, the government sought to entice the highlanders to modernize, and invested a great effort in bringing schooling, medicine, and other trappings of the modern administrative state to the remote hinterland. On the other hand, the government imposed its version of modernization—by which it meant the adoption of Khmer ways of life—with an iron fist, prohibiting many cultural 

 

and livelihood practices that Khmers deemed backward, but to which highlanders attached great significance. The heavy-handed efforts of the state met the most resistance where they threatened highlanders’ livelihoods or where excessive force was used, as was frequently the case. The campaign began with a sweeping program of administrative territorialization. In  and , the government created the new provinces of Ratanakiri and Mondulkiri, calving them off from the existing provinces of Stung Treng and Kratie, and placing them under the direct administration of the Cambodian army. As part of this administrative effort, the government began relocating highland villages to the sides of roads and transitable waterways, providing for easier administration, control, and surveillance of the population. In essence, this meant moving highlanders down from the relatively inaccessible hills where their swidden farms were located. The heavy-handed effort would come to affect thousands of residents. This policy, which was applied only selectively by the Sihanouk regime, perhaps because of the difficulty involved in prohibiting the villages from simply picking up and moving back to the hills, was a direct extension of the French approach to administration of the highlanders, and would be pursued by subsequent regimes regardless of their ideological leanings. The colonial era had not deposited much in terms of infrastructure in this remote borderland—what remained in Ratanakiri were some military posts and Route Coloniale , the often-impassable road linking Stung Treng to Pleiku and Binh Dinh. This was the colonial regime’s main route into the highlands and was the road that Ơe Gun had been helping to build. The Sihanouk regime sought to quickly build up a transportation and communications network, a series of schools and medical facilities, and other components of the modern administrative state, including the establishment of a new provincial capital at Lomphat on the Srepok River. The new construction— built almost exclusively of brick and cement in the symbolically freighted style of the royal state—was expensive, inefficient, and poorly suited to the needs of the hinterland. Another dimension of the state’s effort was the clearing and planting of a state rubber plantation at Labansiek, in the middle of the new province, to the west of the Jarai on the territory of the Brao and Tampuan minorities. The plantation was to occupy eighty thousand hectares, and was sited on the prime red soils of the plateau. Once fully operational, Labansiek would require a full-time labor force of one thousand—no small challenge in the sparsely settled highlands, especially because highlanders had ample lands available to clear and farm on their own, and found work as coolie laborers odious. , ,  



The government pursued several strategies to meet the heavy labor demands required not only by the plantation but also by public works projects. The first approach was to import Khmer colonists to settle the northeast frontier. The regime’s plan envisioned relocating as many as twenty-five thousand ethnic Khmers to Ratanakiri to clear the land and work on the rubber plantation, and furthermore to clear the surrounding forest for the possible cultivation of tea, coffee, and rubber. Were it to have been enacted as planned, government-backed transmigration at this scale would have represented a de facto project of ethnic cleansing. And while the program did not achieve its migration targets, heavy-handed efforts brought Khmers from the lowlands in great numbers. Hundreds of Khmer families migrated to designated resettlement areas, including new villages erected from whole cloth on highlander land. A military colonization scheme brought three hundred families to the military base at Banlung, the present-day provincial capital, where they were provided with three years’ salary, a house, land, and other enticements. The expansion of army posts and bases and an increase in the number of military personnel also augmented the population of ethnic Khmers in the province. No fewer than three thousand colonists were settled in the province under the aegis of the labor transmigration program. A second approach to labor recruitment was a renewed imposition of compulsory labor obligations on highland villages. While some international observers reported that forced labor did not exist in Cambodia at the time, in fact the new regime recruited labor from highland villages through the offices of the me phum of each village. In this capacity, as he had done during the colonial period, Ơe Gun as chief of Tang Kadon Village contributed to the “development” of the new province by managing the supply of laborers from the village for the construction and maintenance of roads and bridges. In continuance of their rejection of the state’s impositions throughout the twentieth century, highland villagers resolutely objected to the renewed compulsory labor regime. Unpredictable and onerous, statebacked labor recruitment interfered with their own livelihood pursuits and wreaked havoc with the reciprocal labor exchanges through which highlanders mitigated the exigencies of the annual agricultural calendar. A final component of the Khmerization campaign took place on the cultural front, or rather on two fronts. On the one hand, the regime sought to establish for national and international audiences, as well as for highlanders themselves, the place of Cambodia’s highlanders within the national order. On the other hand, the regime sought to force highlanders to adopt Khmer ways and conform to Khmer social and cultural norms. One example 

 

of the first approach can be found in Sihanouk’s introduction of the term Khmer Loeu, meaning “upper Khmer,” as a collective ethnonym to be applied to the highland people. The term, which was widely adopted, was meant to emphasize that Jarai, Bunong, Brao, Tampuan, and other highlanders who resided in Cambodia indeed shared a common national identity with the Khmer majority. Making the case for highlanders’ national belonging, in  Charles Meyer, a French adviser who served as Sihanouk’s personal secretary, published an article in Études cambodgiennes asserting that an eternal amity had existed between the Khmer nation and the highland people, as evidenced, for instance, by the customary exchange of tribute between the Khmer ruler and the Jarai Pơtao (the so-called Kings of Fire and Water). Meyer’s article was largely a work of propaganda, apparent in his suggestion, for example, that relations between the Jarai and the Khmers were “essentially founded on mutual respect.” Meyer went so far as to suggest that highlanders had historically been the victims of slaving raids initiated by the Siamese and other outside powers and that the Cambodians had stood with the highlanders in resisting these incursions. Such historical revisionism in the service of imagining Cambodia as a place safe for ethnic difference did not square with the second set of cultural initiatives launched by the government and directed at the highlanders themselves. These consisted of measures designed to force highlanders’ integration into Cambodian national culture, meaning the culture of the country’s ethnic Khmer majority. These efforts included the construction of numerous monasteries in the administrative centers of the northeast, intended not only to serve new ethnic Khmer arrivals but also to encourage highlanders to become practicing Buddhists. The administration likewise ensured that newly constructed schools provided education in the Khmer language with curricula focused on Khmer-centric Cambodian history and culture. Additionally, highlanders were discouraged from practicing animist rituals and from wearing traditional clothing or adornments, such as the weighty ivory earplugs that were a hallmark of highlanders’ self-presentation. They were instead encouraged to wear pants, sarongs, and blouses, and were similarly instructed to build their residences in the Khmer style, that is, individual dwellings for each nuclear family and immediate kin, rather than the rambling multifamily longhouses that predominated throughout the Jarai highlands. While these policies were not widely enforced, the message they conveyed to highlanders was clear, and that message was only amplified by the heavy-handed way in which the military administered Ratanakiri. By , a now clearly disenchanted Meyer would write that Cambodia’s leaders “had , ,  



committed a grave political error in treating the Phnong or Khmer Loeu as second-class citizens, as invalids, as backward people whom it is fitting to ‘civilize’ by Khmerizing them.” The error contributed to the alienation of the highlanders from the regime.

     Highlander resistance flared up in response to the impositions of the Khmerization policies. Of particular concern to the residents of the newly created province was the taking of land for the rubber plantation, which required the removal and displacement of whole villages. Compulsory labor obligations also inspired intense resentment. Highlanders took up active resistance against the regime, burning newly cleared and planted rubber fields and engaging in armed clashes with the ever-present Cambodian army. In several cases, highlanders armed with crossbows were gunned down by heavily armed soldiers. For the Jarai living along Cambodia’s border with Vietnam, resistance emerged from deeply felt resentment against the regime’s heavy-handed efforts. Above all, even beyond the taking of land—an issue that did not affect remote Tang Kadon—villagers I spoke with about their discontentment pointed to the actions taken by Cambodian soldiers who were sent to quell unrest and force highlanders to comply with new policies. The soldiers not only treated highlanders with disdain, but regularly used unwarranted, excessive violence. Several Jarai residents of Andong Meas District recalled highlander efforts against the administration at the time and expressed sympathy for the decisions that many were making to join the resistance fighters then massing in the jungles of the northeast. Among those I spoke with, there was widespread agreement that the people were moved to take action by the army’s indiscriminate killing of villagers, by soldiers’ forcible taking of food and livestock, and, perhaps most importantly, by the numerous incidents of rape of highlander women and girls by soldiers in Sihanouk’s army. As an older resident of Tang Kadon explained to me, the Jarai people (nă nuih Jarai) embraced development (aphivoat, Kh.), they embraced education and modernity, and they would have welcomed some aspects of Sihanouk’s campaign. But, said the man, “taking our land is not development. Destroying the forest is not development. Killing people is not development. And destroying our culture is not development.” The same man also pointed out to me that whereas the Sihanouk regime sought to force the Jarai and other highlanders to “become like the Khmers,” in fact communist Montagnard 

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cadres from across the border regularly provided instruction to village residents at clandestine meetings, teaching them to read and write using the romanized Jarai script that was far more prevalent in Kontum and Pleiku. Like other villagers, this man suggested that in teaching the Jarai literacy in their own language, the cadres demonstrated their support for Jarai culture and identity. Spontaneous actions against the new Khmer presence in the northeast erupted throughout the s. Many actions also showed signs of instruction by communist forces who sought to turn villagers against the regime. One example of this influence was to be found in the so-called “anti-Jackie” riots that took place throughout Jarai territory in Cambodia in  on the occasion of Jacqueline Kennedy’s November visit to the country, during which she was received by Prince Sihanouk and visited Angkor Wat. In remote Ratanakiri, Jarai villagers protested in the province’s administrative centers, accusing Sihanouk of “selling out to US imperialism.” As a recently released Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) report from the period noted, and as numerous discussions with highlanders themselves confirm, the core of Jarai resistance to the regime was centered on the abuses of the Cambodian army. References to US imperialism, or indeed to Jacqueline Kennedy, in the slogans and signs of Jarai protesters at these rallies revealed the guidance of communist organizers. The following year a more sustained revolt broke out among the ethnic minorities in the northeast. Highlanders were involved in a series of actions, refusing to perform compulsory labor, protesting, destroying rubber trees, and killing Cambodian soldiers to exact revenge for a rape. A band of Jarai wielding muskets forged by local blacksmiths attacked a military transport near Borkeo. And two hundred Kreung villagers wielding sticks marched on the subdistrict center at Post Poy, demanding the withdrawal of government soldiers. An army unit was sent to the village in response. Arriving in the midst of a wedding ceremony, the soldiers fired into the gathered crowd indiscriminately, killing between twenty and thirty villagers. At the same time that highlanders were engaging in protests and resistance, the forces of the Communist Party of Kampuchea, named the Khmer Rouge by Sihanouk, were increasingly active in the northeast hills. That some residents of the hill country were eager to join them may be explained in part by the increasing toll that Sihanouk’s campaign of repression was having on highlander communities. Revolutionary leaders Pol Pot, Ieng Sary, and Son Sen had fled the regime’s crackdowns on leftist organizations in Phnom Penh. Throughout the early s, Pol Pot worked from a base of operations known as Office , located in Tây Ninh Province in South Vietnam. In  , ,  

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 . A Jarai man from Vietnam’s Gia Lai Province, visiting relatives for a funeral ceremony. Photo by the author.

Ieng Sary, who worked to build the revolutionary organization in the northeast throughout the decade, established a base of operations on the O Tabok Stream, some ten kilometers to the northwest of present-day Tang Kadon Village. The other major base of operations, known as K- (ក-), was located north of the Sesan River at the Vietnam border, quite close to the present-day location of the village. In , with resentment against Sihanouk’s army at a boil, the revolutionaries launched a series of coordinated attacks, part of a widespread highlander uprising, which forced the army to temporarily evacuate military posts at Borkeo and Voeunsai. The revolt took place within the context of the ongoing war in Vietnam, and against the backdrop of rising ethnonationalist sentiments and the emergence of the FULRO armed separatist movement seeking autonomy for Montagnards in the Central Highlands. In a statement about the  uprising in Ratanakiri, Sihanouk suggested that Cambodia’s highlanders had fallen under the malign influence of outsiders; after all, highlanders had for centuries “jealously guarded their isolation,” and thus they could not be expected to all of a sudden want their own state. 

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Concerned by the uprising and by the resistance to his program of internal colonialism, Sihanouk gave his general Lon Nol carte blanche to suppress the revolt. The brutality of the response—which involved indiscriminate violence, the razing of villages, and the wanton killing of villagers believed to have resisted—served to “generalize” the rebellion, as Charles Meyer observed. As the ranks of Cambodia’s revolutionaries swelled with disaffected villagers, the Khmer Rouge began prying control of the northeast from the government in a series of attacks on the regime’s centers of operation in Ratanakiri Province. In , for instance, some forty Khmer Rouge fighters attacked Post Poy, the army post that had been involved in the wedding massacre; revolutionary forces fired a series of bazooka blasts into the post’s barracks, killing most of the thirty government soldiers stationed there. Soon other army positions would begin to fall.

  Sihanouk’s Khmerization campaign of the s was born of a desire to securitize the northeast hills and to remake social relations there through a restructuring of the relationship between land and society, re-ethnicizing the landscape to ensure the integrity of the nation-state in the process. Just as French efforts to demarcate administrative boundaries in the early twentieth century had significant impacts on highlander livelihoods, so too the gazetting of new provinces to territorialize the remote hinterland resulted in significant disruption and unintended consequences. Like the French administration before it, the Sihanouk regime looked upon highlanders’ practice of swidden agriculture contemptuously, viewing it as a wasteful use of resources and as a primitive form of production. A book produced by the Ministry of Information lamented that within the past two centuries, “several tens of thousands of hectares have been laterized and permanently destroyed by the slash-and-burn cultivation of semi-nomadic farmers” in the northeast highlands. Government development efforts were thus designed with the intention of eliminating swidden farming. In  the Agence Khmere Presse reported on the governor of Kratie’s visit to experimental agricultural stations that were then developing techniques to encourage sedentary agriculture, preventing highlanders from cutting new swiddens, and “thus putting a stop to the destruction of forests.” Also like the French, and in keeping with long-standing desires of Southeast Asian states to have their populations close at hand for purposes of administration, conscription, labor recruitment, and taxation, the new regime took issue with the highlanders’ “nomadism.” Following a visit to Ratanakiri , ,  

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at this time, Sihanouk observed that the highlanders were “comparable to Gypsies, in that it is difficult to fix them in place.” Highlanders’ propensity to move around within a terrain that was itself resistant to pénétration by the state stymied the government’s designs on the uplands. In a  editorial in Réalités cambodgiennes, the French-language newspaper for which the head of state served as editor in chief, Sihanouk expressed the administration’s belief that the highland population opposed “the regrouping [of villages] that would allow it to enjoy the social advances offered [by the regime]: schools, hospitals, etc.,” and accused the highlanders of “preferring instead to wander nomadically in the forest as in the past.” The main problem, the administration reasoned, was underpopulation. With over two hundred thousand hectares of red soils suitable for rubber production, the solution was to build roads, establish plantation rubber, and promote development in order to ensure that a large number of settlers would make productive use of the land. “It is hoped,” the editorial continued, “that many settlers will go there, and that the example of their prosperity will encourage the mountain people to become more stable and to benefit more from the government’s efforts.” Indeed, upon establishing the Labansiek plantation in , Sihanouk had argued that the Khmers who would settle there would act as “guides” to local populations, instructing them in how to comport themselves. They would serve as living examples of “Khmer superiority,” thus carrying out a nationalist mission civilisatrice that would surely provide advantages to their “Montagnard compatriots.” The Khmerization campaign shared much in common with a long history of state programs in the region designed to secure highlanders in place and forcibly integrate them into national society through “development.” Programs of “forced settlement and engulfment” of upland people by lowland ethnic majority populations reflect long-standing strategies of lowland states in their efforts to gain control over their upland peripheries. The Khmerization campaign in Cambodia thus followed directly from similar efforts undertaken by both the French and the Communists in what is today Vietnam. In Annam in , for instance, the French administration had proposed a colonization scheme that involved providing incentives to decommissioned French soldiers to settle the highlands and establish plantations there. The program was based on the assumption that the economic benefits to be gained by making the land productive would be widely shared, allowing the French to win over the highlanders’ loyalty to the administration. Yet any goodwill the effort in Annam might have produced was squandered by the colonial regime’s abuses of the compulsory labor system and other heavyhanded interventions into highlanders’ lives. In the Democratic Republic 

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of Vietnam, the communist state likewise sought to force the issue of national integration of highland ethnic minorities and to ensure the integrity of the national border by moving ethnic minorities from the hills to the midlands, where they would be integrated with lowland peoples who had also been resettled. The North Vietnamese state launched a series of initiatives with names such as “Campaign to Sedentarize the Nomads” and “Campaign for Fixed Cultivation and Fixed Residence,” which were founded, partly disingenuously, on the incorrect assertion that highlanders were “nomadic.” In Cambodia, as elsewhere in the region, rubber was often at the center of government efforts to impose order on the hinterland. What is striking about these and many other efforts to territorialize “non-state” spaces through the imposition of plantation agriculture is the extent to which government planners and military strategists appear not to have recognized, or at least to have assiduously ignored, the kinds of destabilizing resistances that these programs set in motion. The plantation holds out the promise of an orderly and easily controlled landscape, its straight rows of trees seeming to provide visual evidence of a thoroughly rationalized socioecology. And yet because plantation agriculture is often imposed on zones of low population density, where residents have relatively easy access to available farmland, these areas are poorly suited to supply the labor necessary to make the state’s vision a reality. Planners have turned to labor transmigration programs to address this deficiency. Importing labor from elsewhere, often in some form of indenture, provided a labor pool that was without recourse to other options, but it also stoked the resentments of laborers themselves and of the local populations whom plantations had displaced. Thus while state planners may have imagined the plantation form as a zone of surveillance and control, plantation rubber in fact offered numerous advantages to communist revolutionaries in Vietnam and Cambodia. As historian Michitake Aso has observed, plantations provided revolutionaries with shelter from American B- bombing raids during the Vietnam War, because pilots had been urged to avoid damaging the French economic interests that the plantations represented. Sited in the sparsely settled upland zones on both sides of the Cambodia-Vietnam border, the plantations were also ideally placed within reach of the Ho Chi Minh trail, the network of paths and bases the Communists used to supply troops and matériel to the war effort in the south. That plantations were in fact amenable to co-optation by resistance forces is well illustrated by the case of the Central Office for South Vietnam (COSVN). A strategic bulwark of communist activity, tasked with coordinating North Vietnam’s support for the efforts of the National Liberation Front, , ,  

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as South Vietnam’s communist insurgency was called, COSVN was one of the most important command centers in the communist war effort. For these reasons it was an alluring target and a focus of intense preoccupation for American war planners, who saw capturing or destroying COSVN as the best way to disrupt the North’s support for the war in the South. Throughout the mid- to late s, COSVN was located in the Memot rubber plantation, in Cambodia’s Kampong Cham Province. By the time combined American and South Vietnamese forces made an assault on the plantation and on other base areas inside Cambodian territory, however, COSVN had been moved. What the troops found upon taking Memot was a massive abandoned compound of log bunkers and thatched huts, arranged along a network of bicycle paths and bamboo walkways “sprawling for miles, and completely invisible from the air.” In the case of Sihanouk’s Khmerization campaign in the northeast, the establishment of plantations and the repression that their creation ushered in only served to further alienate local populations and to provide revolutionaries with a powerful recruiting tool. The Labansiek plantation in Ratanakiri became the fulcrum of revolutionary activity in the province. The violent repression that came to be associated with the plantation, and the threat it presented to highlander ways of life, allowed communist revolutionaries to portray themselves as the people’s allies in a confrontation against the injustices of the regime and its imperialist backers. The establishment of rubber on the landscape and the forms of authoritarian developmentalism that accompanied it were key factors driving highlanders into the hands of communist revolutionaries. Another was the devastating American-backed bombing and invasion of Cambodia.

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 

Ecologies of Invasion

W

 I first arrived at Tang Kadon, the village chiefs instructed a young man named Hok to cut timber in the forest with which to build a small house for me. Using a chainsaw he had borrowed from his uncle, Hok felled a medium-size tree, proceeding quite gingerly. I assumed that his nervousness owed to his fear of being caught with an illegal machine. The police required chainsaws to be registered, a policy that was nominally put in place to protect the environment, but which in fact ensured that merchantable timber remained available for the police themselves, as it was they who oversaw and coordinated the illegal logging of the forests here. Hok assured me that the police were not an issue—his uncle had worked out an arrangement with them. “No, it’s this,” he said, pointing at an oddly shaped, bulging lump in the bole of the tree. He feared that there might be a bomb in there, left over from the war. This seemed unlikely to me—I had not heard of bombs incorporating themselves into growing trees, although it is not uncommon for unexploded ordnance to become entangled in their roots, transforming those trees into deadly hazards. That a swidden farmer like Hok might be afraid of trees is a striking indication of the potent force of war memory, and a reminder of the way that war transforms landscapes and landscapes transform war. During the American Vietnam War in the Central Highlands, militarized threats— punji sticks, booby traps, mines, unexploded ordnance, the impassable ground-cover of uprooted trees, shrapnel, and barbed wire—became part of the very terrain. The jungle itself, booby-trapped, treacherous, and known differently by different parties, was produced by combatants as a field of action even as it structured the experience of war for all participants. In Cambodia’s northeast hills, the forest today remains an amalgam of nature and threat, now mediated also by memory. 

  I took long walks with my friends through the forests that surround Tang Kadon Village, and it was on these walks that I learned the most about village history. There was something about the act of visiting the location where an event had transpired that brought the event to life, as if those who had taken part in it still lived on in some way. It was not only my desire to learn about history through the landscape that enabled these encounters. When my Jarai friends spoke about the past, they did so in ways that suggested that for them the past is never dead—it lives on in the world. Jarai understandings of past and present, and of life and death, do not align squarely with the way Europeans and Americans see these things. The Jarai believe that the dead live on as atâo, as ghosts but also as animated presences, after death, invisible to us but still active in the world. In a similar way, past events remain present around us. Several times during my research I was surprised when a friend asked if I might use my camera to solve some mystery or other. A woman had left her money tied in a bundle on a tree by the river, and when she returned, it had been stolen. Couldn’t I film the place where it happened, so that we could see who the thief was? Friends asked me, too, if my camera could see the dead. It was in the forest that you could most clearly see how history had come to be written on the land. Sometimes I would be invited along on a trip with men who were on their way to fish or to harvest rattan with which to build a new granary. Other times I would make a special request, asking if someone could take me out to the Satai River, where I could see the international border and look across to the other side. During the dry season it was a simple thing to walk and swim the shallows, to cross over into Vietnam. My friends guided me through thick brush and tangled lianas, or through glades of tall trees whose crowns shaded out the forest floor, suppressing undergrowth and making travel easy. Sometimes we traversed faint paths. Other times the woods we wandered were so familiar that no path was necessary. Each place in the forest was known from long experience, and indeed all the various locations we traveled had significance and meaning. The forest was alive with memory. In one place, old funerary statues stood watch under the shade of high-reaching canopy trees. The hardwood carvings were weathered. How had they not rotted away over the many decades that the forest had grown up around them? Perhaps it was proof of the power of the dead. In another location, one dry April, my friend and jiang Kơsor Twek produced a lighter and casually lit the underbrush on fire as we walked through it. He told me it was to clear out the unhelpful plants growing here. 

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 . A man carries bananas from his swidden field in the forest. Photo by the author.

As we walked on, he told me he had played here as a boy. Without mentioning it, he had taken us on a detour to an old grove of dipterocarp trees where his father used to collect resin, back before the war when the village was close to here. When there is illness or misfortune, when dreams alert residents to the desires of the spirits, or when any of a number of untoward or ill-omened events occur, the residents of Jarai villages will pick up and move to a new location. These moves within the larger village territory are no small undertakings. The rules require that all structural elements of the great longhouses be left behind at the old site. For the new village, trees must be felled for posts and beams and floor platforms. Bamboo must be gathered and split and woven into walls and flooring. Imperata grasses must be cut and dried and thatched for roofing. New farm fields must be cleared and planted. Nevertheless, moves have occurred with great frequency in the past—more than once per decade, on average, during the twentieth century. In my walks with friends through the forests surrounding Tang Kadon, we often came across old village locations, known as ngol in Jarai. Each of them has a name. Generally, they are named after the stream next to which the village was sited. When people discuss the various periods of the village’s history, they use the location of the village as a marker of time, saying, for   

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instance, “This happened when we were living at Ngol Yengsang,” that is, when the village was sited on the Yengsang stream. With Kơsor Twek and with my friend Romam Han, I visited ten of these sites, almost all of the ngol to be found in the environs of the present-day Tang Kadon Village. My travels through Tang Kadon’s forests, through its past, turned up numerous stories—accounts of life in earlier times and stories of the exploits of this or that villager, or indeed of encounters between villagers and the supernatural beings known as yang who inhabit and animate these woods.

    I went to visit Kơsor Twek at his farm on the Ia Bla to the east of the village, where the mountains of Vietnam loom off in the distance. Twek and his neighbors have cut their fields from a broad expanse of forest. Here the farmland slopes gradually up from the stream, and ends in a fringe of trees and scrub at the top of the ridge. Between the stream and the forest’s edge, all has been cleared and planted, low-lying cashews at the bottom of the hill, sesame, tobacco, maize, and rice in the more recently created fields toward the top. All has been cleared, that is, except for a shock of trees that juts out in the midst of Twek’s farm field—a -square-foot stand of forest in the middle of acres of farmland. The day I arrived, I found Twek working the edges of that anomalous cluster of trees. He stood shirtless and covered in sweat, a bush knife (hră) in his hand, his torso streaked black where the charred branches he carried had marked him. He was clearing brush from the edge of the copse, removing it to small piles that he then set alight, and as those piles burned all around, he assessed the copse’s edge and sighed, exasperated, or perhaps it was a kind of mock exasperation. This was common with Twek—that he would laugh about his predicament, not with irony but with complete sincerity. “Oh, jiang,” I addressed him as I walked up. He smiled, happy to see me. “You look frustrated. What’s the matter?” He sighed again, still smiling as he looked from burning piles to the shaggy forest. “The dead,” he said. “It’s the dead, jiang.” It is not just the spirits known as yang who inhabit the forests of the northeast hills, but also atâo, the dead, who live there. Villages produce dead people, and the living bury the dead in the forest at the village’s edge. Thereupon those forests may no longer be cut; they must be left to grow freely. This is why one finds funerary statues under the tallest patches of forest in areas where villages once stood. When a village site is abandoned, the village burial ground (kơnah đơl atâo) becomes its own forest type, a forest of the dead, a 

 

glai atâo. This is an ecological formation and a social world at the same time, a forest animated not just by memory but by human presences, too. It was just such a socio-ecological formation that Twek was dealing with, here in the middle of his agricultural lands, where the forest of the dead was shading out his crops and taking up space he might otherwise use for farming. Twek told me there were jars and statues and tombs (pơsat) inside the darkness under those trees. He invited me to enter the copse and poke around, no harm would come to me. So I did. Just past the tangled edge, where vines and shrubbery crowded the light, I found a decaying statue that resembled the antennae of an insect or perhaps elephant tusks, a familiar funerary form, and large shards of ceramic jars emerging from the ground where they had once been placed at the head of a tomb. It was a graveyard, but whose? Twek was able to supply the answer to that question. We sat drinking water in his field house (tông) while he explained it to me. Twek’s wife, Seio Mơn, roasted sweet potatoes at the hearth while we spoke, and from time to time she would comment, clarifying some detail or other. In fact, the graves were those of the villagers of Plơi O, which had for much of the past century been located just across the Satai River, in Vietnam’s Pleiku Province. Kin relations and a long shared history joined the residents of the two villages. In the mid-s, however, the war made life in Pleiku extremely hazardous. Heavy bombing pummeled the Vietnamese side of the border during that period, as Twek explained. The bombing campaign he referred to is known as Rolling Thunder, the sustained air war launched by Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration following a February  attack on the US air base in Pleiku by the National Liberation Front, the armed communist insurgency also known as the Viet Cong. Nine months after that attack, the first major battle between American forces and the Viet Cong took place in the Ia Drang valley, some twenty-five kilometers to the south of Tang Kadon on the Vietnam-Cambodia border. According to Twek and Mơn, the residents of Plơi O were terrified by the constant bombardment. The war by this time had completely transformed Jarai villages in South Vietnam. Even as the North Vietnamese Army and the Viet Cong sought to engage villagers in the struggle for liberation, the CIA, the US Special Forces, and other branches of the American and South Vietnamese militaries were quite active, pursuing a widely resented resettlement program and arming and training highlander militias as part of the Civil Irregular Defense Group program. For the villagers at Plơi O, a turning point in the war came when American aircraft began a series of aerial defoliation missions along the border to the north and south of Route , throughout Jarai territory in the borderland on the South Vietnam side of the Sesan   



River and the Ia Satai. The heaviest impact of these missions was felt between February  and the middle of . The villagers of Plơi O despaired to see their crops and forestland destroyed, Twek told me. The village, really no more than a hamlet of some thirty-five people, fled to Cambodia in , seeking refuge with the residents of Tang Kadon. After a meeting between the elders (kha plơi) of the two villages, the fleeing villagers were invited to make camp on the Ia Bla, an echo of the generosity that the founders of Tang Kadon themselves had received when they, too, arrived from the east, fleeing enslavement in the early nineteenth century. For the villagers of Plơi O, it would prove to be a fateful move. For two years they engaged in rudimentary swidden farming on the soils of the Ia Bla catchment, here where Twek’s fields now stand, growing rice and other crops, and spending long periods in the forest, hunting and trapping game and foraging for honey, wild fruits, bamboo shoots, and other resources. This mode of existence, living from the bounty of the dense upland forests, was increasingly the norm throughout the highlands; exposed swidden fields had become targets for bombardment and spraying. Even as the new arrivals began establishing themselves here, the war took a new turn. In March  the US and South Vietnamese armies launched a concerted campaign of aerial bombardment against base areas used by Vietnamese communist forces within Cambodian territory. American pilots targeted locations throughout the northeast hills, concentrating on roads and on the border itself. In  a bomb dropped by an American B- completely destroyed the temporary village of Plơi O, killing all of the villagers who had sought refuge there. At some point following the worst of the bombardment, relatives from the original Plơi O came to claim their dead. Unable to find bodies to bring back across the river, they buried what remains they could find in what is now Twek’s farm field, placing ceramic jars at the heads of the tombs and erecting funeral statuary. As the war raged on, grasses, shrubs, and trees rose up around the remains of the dead. Given the troubling history of this small cluster of trees in the middle of my friend Twek’s swidden field, it is not surprising that it serves as a marker of the past and as a memorial to the dead. This place is shaped by the events that occurred here, and by the meanings that have attached to it. The site is thus a sort of mnemonic landscape feature: even as it memorializes, it continues to play an active role in the lives of those who inhabit the landscape, providing them with moral instruction, much in the way that landscape sites infused with history have become “forests of struggle,” places that require attention to the past and its meanings, throughout all of Cambodia. When 

 

 .

A man at Tang Kadon Village. Photo by the author.

Twek and Mơn tell me about the history of this small copse, the presence of the dead acts upon them even as it provides them with a means for narrating and thus interpreting the past. This glai atâo is doing a great deal of work on this landscape, work that is all the more significant for the ways that the glai, the forest, acts materially and physically in the world. Anthropologists concerned with questions of materiality and the forms of agency exercised by nonhumans have introduced terms such as distributive agency, or entangled agency, to inquire into the ways that nonhuman entities possess qualities such as vitality, willfulness, and recalcitrance. The capabilities and powers of things disrupt our human-centric notions of the social, placing “things” within an ecology of matter. This approach brings ecology back into social-scientific analysis of meaningful interrelationships, and it is all the more powerful for the way it aligns with Jarai explanatory frameworks applied to the natural world. From the Jarai perspective, it is not so much matter as it is the spiritual potentialities of nature and living things that act upon the world, although rocks, water, the wind, and various materials and forces that we might call natural are all animated in the Jarai view. The scene I encountered in Twek’s field illustrates how the forest, as forest, and as a socio-ecological formation, acts upon the world. In his appraisal of the edge of the glai atâo in his swidden field, Twek used his capabilities   



as a farmer and as a Jarai person to consider how he should treat the small cluster of trees. It would have been more efficient, from the perspective of agricultural productivity, to do away completely with the tangled patch of forest and graves. But Twek did not conceive of the situation in these terms. Rather, he faced a dilemma of what should be burned, and what should be left, and where the edge should be, and how thoroughly he should intervene to balance a set of objectives and requirements as he understood them. There were aesthetic as well as moral questions involved—the landscape should look a certain way, it should include certain plants arranged appropriately in relationship to each other. The copse was replete with memory and with meaning; it had a representational force that acted upon Twek. But it was also animated by the presence of the atâo, the dead, who resided in the forest and who required respect. Finally, it was also very much alive, it was growing, as it had been since the victims of the American bomb had been buried in this spot. Likewise, of course, Twek’s swidden field was itself alive, both with the crops he had planted and with incidental species that were either desired or not desired based on their usefulness. And all the plants themselves furthermore possessed bơngăt, what we might call souls, and thus at the very least must be understood to have a certain vitality that is in a way comparable with that of humans, who also, of course, have bơngăt. The multiple vital presences with which Twek was necessarily required to negotiate make of the landscape not so much a productivity problem to be solved, as a set of relationships to be managed and attended to. Like all glai atâo, the small copse on Twek’s land is maintained as standing forest out of respect for the dead who lie there, in accordance with Jarai norms. However, just because Twek actively refrains from removing vegetation from the cemetery does not mean there is an absence of management here. While the cutting and burning of glai atâo for agricultural purposes is prohibited, numerous productive uses are made of various resources within the small stand of forest, and a series of active and passive management operations are performed on the site, governed by prohibitions and culturally held norms regarding the use of these spaces. Even as Twek wants to avoid angering the dead, he has no desire for this clump of trees to expand too far into his productive land. And so he uses a bush knife to cull weeds and small volunteer saplings from around the edges of the copse. In slashing, felling, and burning his fields, he was called upon to make decisions about where the edge of the glai atâo ought to be located. In a recent burn, the dead trees at the edge of the small forest were consumed along with the slashed piles, so that now the small stand of trees seems to be separating into two smaller 

 

parts. To my untrained eye, the forest of the dead appears even more unruly than Twek’s sprawling swidden field.

  Landscapes are not simply representational. They do not so much reflect the symbolic orderings imposed upon them by this or that cultural group as they embody the relationships that have produced both the physical environment and the meanings that attach to it. It is this relational, rather than representational, dimension that suggests the temporality of the landscape: the landscape is the past that we as people inhabit. One could find no better place to explore the temporality of landscape than the hill country of the lower Annamite Mountains. French anthropologist Georges Condominas’s study of farming and ritual life among the Mnong Gar highlanders of Vietnam, We Have Eaten the Forest, is the most famous depiction of this hill country and its inhabitants. And justifiably so; the book is a testament to the enduring power of living with others as a way of knowing the world. The opening lines illustrate how the temporality of landscape structures life in the highlands: “Hii saa brii . . . (‘We ate the forest of . . .’) followed by a place name is how the Mnong Gar, or Phii Bree (‘the Men of the Forest’), designate this or that year. These slash-and-burn seminomads of the Central Highlands in Vietnam have no method whereby they log the passing of time other than by referring to the wooded areas they clear and burn off in succession to make their annual plantings.” To “eat” the forest is to cut, burn, and cultivate it as part of the swidden agricultural cycle, and in this way Condominas introduces the extraordinary notion that the Mnong Gar tell time through reference to the landscape and their place in it. “Thus the same year will be given a different name by each village,” he continues, “for in that period each will have ‘eaten’ a section of its own domain.” The year that Condominas documents in the book is , which in the reckoning of the Mnong Gar of Sar Luk Village was known as “the year we ate the forest of the stone spirit Gôo.” The Jarai of Tang Kadon also speak of consuming the forest in this way, using the term bŏng glai, literally “eating the forest,” to refer to the way that fire used in the swidden process consumes the forest. And like the Mnong Gar, they locate moments in past time largely through reference to where they were farming during a specific year, often in combination with mention of where the village itself stood during that time. Thus when speaking to a friend, one might identify the year in which an event took place by suggesting that it occurred “the season I was farming the Ia Bla bottomlands, when the   



village was sited on the Yengsang Stream.” This is how walking through the forest becomes a form of travel through history and memory. To visit a ngol, an abandoned village site, is to be in the presence of the past, to encounter it materially, to exist among the events that occurred there, among the spirits who inhabit the place and the dead who are buried there. This method of reckoning time, naming the years after the place where one was then farming, is sometimes thrown into disarray by extraordinary events, events that exceed and overwhelm the quotidian frame of reference. Thus, for instance, the Jarai of Tang Kadon refer to  as “the year that Ơe Gun founded the village.” They might refer to another year as a year when they left a certain site on account of sickness. Today, people also use the modern Gregorian calendar to track time—they translate back and forth— although it is not as common as you might expect. Among the extraordinary events, those that overwhelm the normal frame, one in particular stands out, named, as it is, for a seminal event in the history of the village. It is “the year the Americans burned the village,” or thŭn Mi chuh plơi in Jarai. This is exactly what happened—a shocking and world-changing moment for the villagers, a moment that ushered in a period of insecurity and also of despair. The extraordinary nature of that moment is captured not only by the special name given to the year when this happened, but also by the name given to the place in the forest where it occurred. One can, as I did, visit that location, walk back through the forest and through history to see it, although nothing much remains of the village that used to be there. Recall that former village sites known as ngol are usually named after the stream where a village was sited. Thus the village that is today known as Tang Kadon was previously located on the Ia Yengsang, and the old village site is still known as Ngol Yengsang. One also finds in the forest Ngol Jarai, Ngol Bla, and many others besides. There is one ngol, however, that is not named after the stream upon which it was sited. Instead, it bears the name Ngol Mi Chuh, the Village the Americans Burned.

   When Richard Nixon took office as president of the United States in January , the American War in Vietnam posed a series of daunting problems for his newly appointed national security team. Principal among them was the use of territory in neighboring Laos and Cambodia by the North Vietnamese Army and Viet Cong to transport weapons, troops, and matériel and to provide other forms of support to insurgents in the South. By , large numbers of Vietnamese communist troops operated from a series of base 

 

N

Khe San

604

L A O S

Hue HO

Mekong R.

611

127

CH

607

IM

Da Nang

IN

HT

112

RA

612

614

IL

Champasak

Attapeu

T H A I L A N D

Siem Reap

609 229 202 701

Srepok R.

V I E T N A M

Tonle Sap Lake

238 Mekong R.

Tonle San R.

740

Kampong Cham

h

a

lf

il

an

d

252

S

ea

251

a

490 487

MEKONG D E LTA

483

236 Ba R.

707

B a s s a c 470 R.

Of

226

n

T

u

124

Da Lat

351 203 360 B é Phnom Penh 36 3 352 Đồng RO R. RT PO 354 366 E 359 N a i L 356 IL V K R. OU 706 AN SIH 302 709 367 Saigon 704 Mekong 202 R. 372 400 E UT

G

S O U T H

S e k o n g 702 R. Sesan R.

C A M B O D I A

128

613

So

u

th

C

h

i

KE Y Base areas of communist forces Base area 702

482 50 km

Including Tang Kandon and neighboring villages

Suspected location COSVN Demilitarized zone

 . The Ho Chi Minh Trail and the Communist Base Area System, also showing the Sihanoukville Port Route. Communist forces used this network of trails and bases to provide troops and matériel to the effort in South Vietnam. Based on maps by Tran, Cambodian Incursion, , –. Map by Aaron Reiss.

areas or sanctuaries along the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Cambodia (map .). Seeking to destroy these sites, including the strategically important Central Office for South Vietnam (COSVN), in March of that year the United States launched a series of bombing raids on Cambodian targets. Over the next eleven months American aircraft would drop , tons of bombs along Cambodia’s eastern border with Vietnam. All the while, the raids were kept secret from the American people and from the US Congress. National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger would later claim that the areas targeted in this first phase of the massive bombing of Cambodia were “unpopulated.” The campaign was not a bombing of Cambodia, he said, but rather “a bombing of North Vietnamese in Cambodia.” Likewise referring to the target area, Nixon asserted that “no Cambodians had been in it for years. It was totally occupied by the North Vietnamese.” These were lies. The Ho Chi Minh Trail stretched across Cambodia’s northeast highlands, where communist revolutionaries had been active for decades. Tang Kadon and neighboring villages were firmly located within the network of transit, information, and material flows that together constituted the logistical system of the trail. In fact, the hill country north of the crook in the Sesan River where it met the Satai corresponded to Base Area , a strategically important zone of operation for the Communists. Camps and facilities in the heavily forested hills were used by the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army to support operations across the border in Pleiku and Kontum. At the same time, this area was home to numerous Jarai and Kacŏ villages. The populations of these villages were now forced to negotiate numerous perils, from the threat of bombardment to the presence of warring factions encamped throughout the forest. While American aircraft had been bombing the area sporadically since the early s, the aerial bombardment that began in  was of a different order of magnitude (map .). Villagers recall skies filled with airplanes and helicopters, as the forests filled with the sounds of bombing and gunfire all around. With encouragement from revolutionary soldiers who were then massing in the forests, villagers learned to dig bunkers, or lung, in the red soils of the hill country, and they soon moved their possessions and their lives underground. They did less cooking, for fear that smoke would attract attention from above. When they did cook, they did it underground. Reluctant to farm in exposed swiddens, they also spent more time foraging. Food shortages were common and resulted not only from the interruption of normal life, but also from the demands revolutionary soldiers made on them for rice and other food.



 

S at a i River

Chong

Peng Muy

V I E T N A M Tang-A

Chai Ket

Sesan River

Chai Toic In Ta Lao

Ka-Nat O Kop (Andong Meas)

Kak Ka-Nong Sesan River

Malik

Nhai Kachut Loeu

Nhang

Kachut Kraom

Loum

Tang Kadon

Dal

Lom

Bokham

C A M B O D I A Katae

Pa Dal 5 km

Ka Tang N

Krieng

 . Location of all bombs dropped on the study area between  and , based on data from the US Air Force. Data courtesy Taylor Owen and the Cambodia Genocide Project of Yale University. Map by Aaron Reiss.

In , the same year that the temporary village of Plơi O was destroyed, a number of other villages and settlements near Tang Kadon were bombed. Twek’s father, Phuơn, told me about some of these events. “That was the year my son was born,” he said, meaning Twek, my close friend and ally. Learning that Twek had been born in the midst of the assault brought home to me the story Phuơn was telling. I was only three years older than Twek; he and I both had infants of our own, and I imagined Phuơn and his wife, Phem, trying to raise their newborn baby, their first, with the machinery of war at work all around them. Phuơn told me about Tang-A, a neighboring village, and about a group of families there who were aligned with a local leader named Blơng. Phuơn referred to this group as Blơng’s group or settlement, krom Blơng in Jarai. They were a hamlet of sorts, located to one side of the larger village, and they   



lived in a warren of connected underground bunkers. The bunkers reproduced the living arrangements and social order of the longhouses from which they were derived. All thirty members of the group were taking shelter in these bunkers when an American bomber approached from the east. Using the Khmer letter and number combination for a B-, Phuơn called the plane “Bei ha-sup bpi.” The plane dropped its payload of bombs directly on Blơng’s hamlet. All thirty people were killed, a number I heard from others in other tellings. Not only were they killed, but the bombs destroyed them so completely that nothing remained. “You couldn’t even find a bone,” was Phuơn’s terse observation. The American air assaults were code-named Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, Dessert, and Snack. The Menu campaign, as it was known, was nominally intended to turn back the Vietnamese communist forces massing along the border, but it had the opposite effect, pushing them deeper into Cambodian territory. Soon, an estimated fifty thousand of them were making use of Cambodia’s eastern border region. As the threat from across the border grew, the political situation within Cambodia became increasingly unstable. Following a coup d’état in March 1970, General Lon Nol replaced Sihanouk as head of state. This was the same general who had been charged by Sihanouk with suppressing the revolt in the northeast during the Khmerization campaign, and who had done so with brutality. Two months after the coup, Nixon ordered a ground invasion by American and South Vietnamese troops to “clean out” the border sanctuaries of the North Vietnamese Army and take the elusive COSVN. A series of operations directed at selected targets within Cambodia brought thirty-one thousand American troops and nineteen thousand troops of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam into Cambodia. For Tang Kadon and surrounding villages, the relevant phase of the incursion was Operation Binh Tay I, a coordinated effort of the First and Second Brigades of the US Army’s Fourth Infantry Division, the Third Battalion of the US th Infantry Division, and the Twenty-Second Division, Fortieth Regiment of the South Vietnamese army (map .). On May , , units of these divisions were heli-lifted from the army’s New Plei Djering camp in Vietnam’s Pleiku Province. Their destination was a series of landing zones in Base Area . According to the US Army’s Combat after Action Report, the initial efforts of these units to establish and secure positions in the rolling hills were met with a concerted response of enemy antiaircraft fire, despite “intensive preparatory fire by US tactical air” support. But once the infantry had established themselves, Viet Cong forces dissipated and offered little resistance. The invasion force spent the next several days in searchand-destroy missions directed at enemy installations in the area. 

 

S at a i River

FSB CURRAHEE 1st BRIGADE, U.S. 4th DIVISION 2nd BRIGADE, U.S. 4th DIVISION

Sesan River

Ph Abeng V

C

Present Day S e s a n Tang Kadon River

KEY

FSB INVASION

Ph Ban Chut Ph Ban Tang FSB CONQUEST Hinlat

Binh Tay I objective area by unit

Ph Ban Pon

Ph Tang Se Ph Tong

Ph Pakap Ph Malik

New Plei Djering Base (approx. 12 km due east)

Ban Phi

Fire support base (FSB) Village

I E T N A M

FSB VALKYRIE

Ph Ta Lav

M B O D I A

Ph Ban Nay

A

Ph Tan

Ph Ban Phinay

Ph Ba Kham

Ph Suoy

Ph Ban Nhai

Ph Pu Yi 40th ARVN REGIMENT

Ph Kate Vat 5 km

Ph Pana O

Ph Kampa

N

Plei Mlou

 . The Binh Tay I invasion. Based on maps by Tran, Cambodian Incursion, , and Berry, Twelve Days in May, . Map by Aaron Reiss.

Owing to obligations elsewhere, within ten days of beginning the operation the American units were withdrawn, to be followed by their Army of the Republic of Vietnam counterparts some days later. The operation north of the Sesan had lasted less than two weeks and was deemed to have produced rather insignificant results given the suspected presence of over one thousand enemy troops in the area. Noting an “absence of enemy contact and a scarcity of supply caches uncovered,” a monograph by the US Army Center of Military History indicated that “a tally of results provided the following statistics”: “On the friendly side,  were killed and  wounded. The enemy incurred  killed and  detained. Our forces seized  crew-served and  individual weapons. They also confiscated or destroyed  tons of rice and burned down , huts and other surface installations used by the enemy.” One participant in these operations was Captain William Ohl II, commander of the Delta Company of the Third Battalion, th Infantry of the st Airborne Division, known as the Screaming Eagles. Delta Company operated out of the Currahee Fire Support Base. In an interview with the st   



Airborne’s internal newspaper, Ohl described the location where his unit discovered a cache of arms and grain as “the classic NVA [North Vietnamese Army] village.” As the newspaper’s write-up went on to explain, “The hooches, measuring  feet long and  feet wide, were built of heavy one foot timbers, thatched roofs, and sides constructed of interwoven bamboo stripping.” Trails through the area were heavily rutted by bicycle traffic; bamboo bridges six feet wide and up to twenty feet long spanned the many streams of the hilly country. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the way these events are presented in combat after-action reports and in the military press differs greatly from the way they are remembered by the inhabitants of Tang Kadon. The “intensive preparatory fire by US tactical air” support mentioned in the documents was experienced by villagers as a massive and terrifying aerial assault. The “classic NVA village” described by Captain Ohl was in fact a Jarai village, and the “hooches” he mentions were heavy-timbered Jarai longhouses, twenty feet wide and forty feet in length. Where the reports discuss the destruction of caches of provisions and “huts and other surface installations used by the enemy,” the inhabitants of Tang Kadon recall returning to their village after weeks spent hiding in the forest, only to find their longhouses burned and their rice granaries destroyed. For much of the next three years, villagers lived in the forest, in temporary shelters, growing little rice and relying on forest resources for their sustenance.

   At Tang Kadon there are two women who serve as midwives (pơdjiâo) for most of the births in the village. One is Kơsor Liah, a poor woman whose husband died in  and who lives in a roughly built house with her children. Liah herself is quiet and self-assured. Her children are now in their midtwenties, and all but one are unmarried, owing in part to their poverty. The other is Seio Mlil, an unmarried woman in her sixties who wears her hair quite short and shouts joyously when she talks. Mlil has a goiter, smokes large green hand-rolled cigarettes (lon hot) almost constantly, and laughs at her own jokes. The two women are frequently found together, often in some context or other relating to their role assisting with births in the village. They also have shared a number of life experiences that have brought them closer. When they were young and unmarried in the s, the Khmer Rouge sent them to work on mobile labor squads called kong chalat (Kh.), which took them away from their families for long periods of time. They were being trained to be a new kind of Cambodian. 

 

Today Liah and Mlil are known to be skillful and experienced (jual) as midwives. Their role includes not only delivering babies, but also conducting many of the rituals associated with birth. It is their job, for instance, to perform the bluh mơngai ceremony (“blow into the ear”) seven days after a child is born. The ritual requires mixing a bit of liver from a sacrificed chicken into rice beer and blowing some of the mixture into the ear of the newborn child, conferring to it the ability to hear and thus to know. Afterward, the midwives remove a Y-shaped piece of cartilage from the back of the sacrificed chicken’s head, divining the child’s future (chuo cim) through examination of a small tendon attached in the center of the Y. Like a life, the tendon should not curl or curve, nor should it veer too far left or right, but should just point straight ahead. After auguring the child’s future, of course, those gathered consume the jar of rice beer and the chicken too. To compensate the midwives for their assistance with the birth of his son, a first-time father named Rahlan Nĕt killed a pig one day for the two women. An all-day ceremony involving jars of rice beer and abundant quantities of distilled rice whiskey ensued, a celebration of the baby, the parents, the midwives themselves, and the spirits who exert such a profound influence over human life. For a long time I had been trying to convince Liah and Mlil to sing some of the revolutionary songs they had learned during their time on the mobile work squad. They had always demurred. But if they had some whiskey, they suggested, then perhaps they could be convinced. Seeing that the time was right, I asked, and they assented. The alcohol had diminished Liah’s reticence somewhat, and had amplified Mlil’s gregarious nature. Mlil now began shouting orders, calling for us all to assemble. “Sit, sit, sit. Come and sit! [Leng, leng, leng, angkuy leng!],” she exclaimed. She called to her nephew to fetch her a lighter, and when one could not be found, she lit her green lon hot with a burning length of wood from the fire. This she brandished as it glowed and smoked, exhorting us all to gather around, exuberant in her intoxication. “Jonathan wants us to sing a song from the old days!” shouted Mlil. “A song about the Mi [Americans] from before. Well, I’ve got one. That’s it! I’ve got one. We fled for our lives. It was on account of his brothers!” “It was his parents,” Liah corrected her. “Yes! His parents,” Mlil assented. “His parents put us to flight. Jon wasn’t a man yet! Oh, he wasn’t old yet.” This uneasy, only partly ironic accusation was not so unusual. Several times when I spoke with people about the war, they would suggest that I personally had been involved. On one occasion, seemingly from nowhere, my friend Hai spent much of an afternoon telling everyone at a social gathering that my father was “big” in Washington, that   



“he wanted to kill us” during the war. This was not a true statement, but it had a structural logic to it; it was true and not true at once. “Tell your father I’m still alive,” Hai said to me with a wolfish grin, “if you don’t think he’d come and try to kill me again!” Back at the gathering with the midwives, Mlil was getting herself prepared. “Oh, someone bring me a lighter!” she shouted. Both her lon hot and the firebrand had gone out. “When I have a lighter we can start to sing, oh sister, oh my younger sister.” Here, with this invocation, “oh my sister,” one hears Mlil’s pattern of speech conforming itself to the cadence of song. Even before Mlil manages to light her tobacco, Liah, the stronger singer, begins to sing. She uses the call-and-response form known as ayin-ayon in Jarai, in which two singers trade improvised verses with each other. So Liah and Mlil sing, trading the lead back and forth every two lines or so. The tone is nasal, the tune is lamenting, the verses affecting when sung in the original Jarai. Chuh o bui nŭ ta chuh o Jim chuh Cim chuh bih phui bŏng bih bŏng bơi Sang, chuh sang Mi ta sang chuh sang Chăng ta a Mi chăng ta chăng

O chuh Mi chuh chơ˘ sang ta— chuh Mi chuh la o Mi tot Mi la! Jeh taih jeh he o mĭ ma taih jeh, jeh ta O lung nam lung chơ˘ Mi mơt, lung nam lung O luy e teh e . . . luy mut nam lung,



They burned our pigs and chickens, Diệm burned them They burned all our animals, the fire ate them, consumed them all The houses, they burned the houses, the Mi burned our houses We remember the Mi, we remember, we remember O they burned, the Mi burned our houses— burned, the Mi burned them, oh those American pricks! They broke the jars, oh father and mother, broke the jars, our jars In the bunker, oh down in the bunker, would the Mi enter, down into the bunker? Oh they smashed them . . . and threw them away,

 

mă teh e luy

down in the bunker they threw them away

Drăm mơk bih Diệm tui bui nŭ bih

All our possessions, Diệm took them, pigs and chickens Diệm ate them, and took our knives and tools Rice, our rice granaries, the Mi burned them, our granaries the rice in our granaries, oh mother, our granary rice I want back our possessions, the ones Diệm carried away, the pigs and chickens Diệm ate, that’s what I want iii . . . That day, that black day, when Diệm carried all our possessions away!

Diệm bŏng tŏng hra bih Diệm tô Daih, tông daih, chơ˘ Mi chuh, daih, tông daih la, o mi daih tông daih Yop, kâo jiang dram mơk ta bih Diệm hrui, bui nŭ bih Diệm bŏ’ng, ha nun va iii . . . Hrơi, tăm hrơi, dơm mơk bih Diệm hrui!

By the last verse, Mlil’s intoxicated exuberance is tinged with a grief that soon overwhelms her. She sings loudly, relishing the biting lines of her song. She is as ever full of bluster, and we in the audience have not noticed until this last moment that she will soon be unable to go on. “You sing now,” she instructs Liah. “I want you to sing now, younger sister.” But having said that, Mlil continues to sing, her verses wailing and disorganized, the sentences falling apart into meaningless phrases and words. Two friends sitting next to her begin thumping her on the back, an action used to help cure those who are overwrought with drink. “Get me a !” she screams, tears pouring down her face, as her friends—still thumping her mightily—haul her off to lie down.

    Nothing Ever Dies is the title and premise of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s poignant book about the Vietnam War. That the war should have brought death to so many, while the war itself lives on, is an irony that is not lost on the residents of Tang Kadon. “All wars are fought twice,” Nguyen writes, “the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.” In the highlands, where the battlefield and the landscape are one, to live within the landscape is to live

  



within memory. Memories of the war are everywhere. In the names of old villages and in the locations where those villages once stood. In the trees that tower above old burial sites. The war lives on as the dead live on, potent and unpredictable. Their present, now long gone, has never been fully extinguished. During the war, the landscape, the terrain upon which the “enemy” maneuvered, indeed nature itself—all were targeted for destruction. The forces of modern warfare were unleashed on the land. It is therefore no surprise that today the landscape does not show mere “scars” of war upon its surface. Rather, the landscape itself has transformed in both its meaning and its material form. Yet it is not simply the magnitude of the war’s effects upon the land that is remarkable. It is also the ubiquity of the war. It lives on in the smallest things. Even the weeds herald the presence of the past. I first became aware of this on a cool afternoon. It was the planting season, dense clouds covered the sky although no rain had yet come. I was helping Rahlan Bien in her swidden field. Better to say I was trying to help. Very likely my presence there implied a bit more work for her, since she had to prepare the field for planting and also attend to me and my many questions. I “lived” with Bien’s family, which is to say I took my meals with them in their longhouse, since I had my own small house where I slept and worked. She was used to my questions and more patient in answering them than most villagers. On this day, I was asking Bien about the war, while she worked the weeds at the edge of her field with a bush knife. In passing, she mentioned that during the war the Americans had dropped flowers (bơnga) on the village. I assumed that I had misunderstood, and asked for clarification, but she insisted. “During the bombing, flowers fell from the sky.” It was an alluring image; in my mind’s eye I saw the familiar shape of a B-, its bomb hatches open, releasing a payload of flowers on the countryside below. Bien quickly interrupted my reverie. “The plant got caught on the runners of the helicopters, and when they flew here it fell off. We never had that plant here before,” she said, pointing with her bush knife at a thick clump of green leaves and bright purple flowers. “Now I can’t get rid of it.” Laughing at the irony of discussing the plant with an actual American, Bien told me that ridding her farm of it was a continual struggle, and she suggested that although the American bombing of Cambodia took place decades ago, in a certain way the Americans never fully went home. Her assertion that she remains engaged in an active struggle with the memory of war, and with its expression in the vital profusion of plant life, reminds me of my friend Twek’s 

 

efforts to prune the forest of the dead (glai atâo) in his swidden field, and resonates with much recent research into the wartime concept of “struggle,” which today has come to be associated with making a living from the land in postwar Cambodia. As for Bien’s weed, the plant in question is Mimosa pigra, a spiny plant that establishes itself at the edge of scrub forest in disturbed areas like roadsides, swidden fields, and village clearings. In English, it is called “creeping sensitive plant” because its pinnate leaves will close on themselves when touched. The Jarai of Tang Kadon call the plant drơi Mi, bringing together a word for thorn (drơi) with the Jarai and Vietnamese term for American, Mi. So, for the people of Tang Kadon, the name of this plant is “American thorn.” This naming practice is shared by the Jarai’s neighbors, the Kacŏ, who just call the plant “Americ.” This folk taxonomy reflects the local historical account of the plant’s introduction in the northeast hills, where it is believed to have arrived along with the Americans during the invasion. In fact, the plant’s origins are in the Americas, but it has for a long time been well known elsewhere in Cambodia, even among highlanders in the immediate vicinity of Tang Kadon. The Bunong in neighboring Mondolkiri Province, for instance, use the plant to treat fever and inflammation, and use it in an infusion they spray on nervous buffalo to calm them. In  Jacques Dournes, the eminent ethnographer of the Jarai who was also a Catholic missionary and a skilled ethnobotanist, documented Jarai knowledge of Mimosa in Cheo Reo, a center of Jarai culture over one hundred kilometers to the southeast of Tang Kadon in Vietnam. There, the plant is called drơi kơsung. By Dournes’s account, at the time of his writing, the plant was newly introduced to the region, having arrived only a generation before. When introduced plants outcompete existing species, disrupting the customary stages of ecological succession, we call them “invasive plants,” and an entire discipline of invasion ecology has grown up around their management. The territorializing behaviors of such plants are reflected in the representational practices that surround them. Thus the language of invasion ecology is the language of war and conflict. In popular discourse, invasive species are said to inflict damage on local populations. We say that our forests are “under attack” from intruders. We perform risk assessments and assign threat levels to the most aggressive exotic species. Nonnative plants retain their ethnic identities as they travel. Think of “Africanized” bees, Eurasian Milfoil (Myriophyllum spicatum), and Oriental bittersweet (Celastrus orbiculatus). We seek to extirpate these invaders, exhibiting toward them a sort of ethnic absolutism.   



When the Jarai refer to Mimosa pigra as “American thorn,” they assign to it the same sorts of ethnicized apprehensions. The discourse of Jarai folk taxonomy thus parallels the Western scientific discourse of invasion ecology. The forms of ecological knowledge through which the Jarai apprehend plants like Mimosa ensure that the environment of the northeast highlands is replete with meaning. Plants, like other features of the landscape, do not simply exist as a priori facts. Rather, they are formed as the product of specific historical conjunctures. A series of historical forces come together in the production of Mimosa: it is produced relationally and comes to embody a set of social relations linking different human groups to each other and to their environment. The war stories that associate Mimosa pigra with the American bombing and invasion also attach to the flowering plant known by the scientific name Chromolaena odorata. The Jarai of the northeast hills likewise identify Chromolaena as a newcomer to their environment that arrived when it was dropped from American aircraft during the war. Older villagers insist that the plant was completely unknown to them in their youth, even though the perennial shrub is now almost ubiquitous. Today Chromolaena is the dominant early fallow succession species in the Jarai swidden cycle, and can be seen growing luxuriantly in disturbed sites throughout village land at Tang Kadon. Jarai in Cambodia call this plant hruơk hŏ, a combination of hruơk, meaning “leafy plant,” and hŏ, a borrowing from the neighboring Kacŏ, for whom the term means “airplane.” So for the residents of Tang Kadon, the plant is called, in essence, “airplane weed.” Villagers at Tang Kadon told me that across the border in Vietnam the name for Chromolaena is hruơk se. They explained that the Jarai there are farther from the Kacŏ, and thus do not share words with them. Se is a shortening of the Jarai word sepol, meaning “airplane.” Thus the Jarai of Pleiku also refer to Chromolaena as “airplane weed,” although there was some disagreement on this translation; se is also a term meaning to “weed out” in Lao, and some believe the term hruơk se used in Vietnam to be a compound of Jarai and Lao, essentially “leafy plant to be weeded out,” or, really, just “weed.” Here again, consulting with Dournes’s ethnobotany of the Jarai of Cheo Reo yields interesting results. Dournes does provide hruơk se as the name of Chromolaena odorata, and he notes that it is known by the Jarai there to be a recent arrival to the region. However, the term for airplane among the Cheo Reo Jarai is not sepol as it is farther north and west in Jarai territory, but rather rodeh por, so in Cheo Reo the name hruơk se does not mean “airplane weed.” But Dournes does describe a plant in Cheo



 

Reo that the Jarai call hruơk rodeh por, or “airplane weed.” This is Gynura lycopersicifolia, another plant that appeared on the scene about a generation prior to Dournes’s research, and one that is also in the dandelion family (Asteraceae), like Chromolaena. Gynura, he writes, “was rapidly given the name airplane weed, and it is the case moreover that all the dialects of the region, through a sort of popular consensus, understand the origin of this plant to be associated with the arrival of the first airplanes.” The concept of “airplane weed” thus appears to have been applied semiindependently to two different plants, Gynura lycopersicifolia and Chromolaena odorata. In both cases, the term airplane weed may be understood to index not only the flying machines themselves, but also the colonial enterprise that airplanes so powerfully symbolized. In the case of both “airplane weeds”—Gynura and Chromolaena—as well as in the case of American thorn (Mimosa), local apprehensions about newly arrived weed species came to be associated with apprehensions about newly arrived foreign powers. It is not only among the highlanders of Vietnam and Cambodia that one finds this folk narrative about “airplane weeds.” On the island of Sumatra, both Banjarese and Dayak groups ascribe the first appearance of Chromolaena odorata to the Second World War. According to folk history, the plant was sown from the air by Japanese warplanes. Thus the plant is known in this area as kumpai Jepang, meaning “Japanese grass.” There is no documentary evidence to support the claim that the plant was sown by the Japanese. However, the causal link is not altogether specious: a number of the physical transformations made to the landscape by Japanese activities in Sumatra created conditions that favored the spread of Chromolaena. As the discourse on “airplane weed” reveals, folk taxonomy indexes culturally produced sentiments and attaches to larger historical narratives. Throughout the region, common names for Chromolaena odorata provide insights into the historical processes that were significant to the plant’s introduction. In English, the principal common name for the plant is “Siam weed.” Similarly, the French refer to the plant as l’herbe du Laos, that is, more or less, “Lao weed.” Lao, however, refer to it as nya falang, and ethnic minorities refer to it as flang bô sè, that is, “French weed” or “New French weed,” respectively. The nomenclature is revelatory: colonized peoples mark the weed as a problem introduced by the colonizers. However, for the British and the French, the weed—which makes more difficult the advancement of certain forms of agricultural productivity—marks a problem of administration in a zone of colonial influence. The Jarai use of the term airplane weed to

  



describe Chromolaena odorata must be seen in the same light. While the plant is widely believed to have arrived in the highlands as an outcome of the American intervention, its presence there also serves as a metaphor for the American effort in the highlands as the Jarai perceive it. Jarai folk taxonomy thus commemorates the American bombing and invasion of Cambodia in the names given to Mimosa pigra and Chromolaena odorata—American Thorn and Airplane Weed. However, it would be a mistake to understand the role these plants play as merely representational. Even if it were possible to imagine them existing outside the conditions of their arrival in the highlands, still the two species would not exist as mere empty signifiers, waiting to be filled with meaning. Rather, their ecology structures the way that meaning is made, and in this sense the plants are themselves participants in the social encounters through which they are produced. Their ecology is deeply implicated in their epistemology. Take Chromolaena odorata as an example. The species is a consummate colonizer of disturbed landscapes (figure .). In upland Cambodia, the association of Airplane Weed with the war is linked metaphorically and materially to the war’s role in creating the conditions under which Chromolaena was able to spread quickly. In fact, there is a close correlation between warfare, ecology, and the spread of Chromolaena odorata in the region. The projects of imperial powers are particularly well suited to spreading foreign weed species, and the spread of exotic plants has been an important ecological effect of processes of conquest worldwide. Studies of the spread of Chromolaena odorata in Asia bear this out; since World War II, the plant has initially appeared in military bases and ports as a first step in its spread to more remote zones. Just as wartime land-use regimes were favorable to the establishment of Chromolaena in Sumatra, justifying folk histories of its arrival structurally if not empirically, so too the conduct of the American Vietnam War created conditions that favored Chromolaena in the Annamite highlands. The contribution made by war to the plant’s spread may be attributed to the biological properties of the plant itself, to the transformations of the landscape that modern warfare produced, and to the forms of social organization associated with war and conquest. Biologically, Chromolaena is known to colonize disturbed landscapes, requiring direct sunlight to establish, and thriving in forest edges and clearings. The plant produces a high volume of very small seeds that germinate easily and grow rapidly with high success rates following ripening. These and other physical characteristics of the plant are conducive to dispersal not only by wind but also by vehicles, which is one of the principal ways that Chromolaena has spread worldwide. 

 

 . Chromolaena odorata, known as hruơk hŏ, or “airplane weed,” overtakes an abandoned tomb in a Jarai cemetery. Photo by the author.

Warfare of the sort enacted upon the northeast hills created a landscape particularly well suited to the establishment of Chromolaena. The removal of forest and shrub cover to create clearings for landing zones and forward strike bases, for example, created the kinds of physical conditions that most favor the plant. The cratered and deforested landscapes described in many accounts of the bombing of the highlands during the Vietnam War conform almost perfectly to the catastrophic disturbance regimes associated with early succession colonization by Chromolaena. Among the many lasting effects of aerial bombardment are the compaction and mixing of soil strata. This effect, dubbed “bombturbation” by military geographers specializing in war’s edaphic aftereffects, is characteristic of postwar landscapes in the Annamite highlands. The opening of gaps in forest cover, the destruction of much of the existing seed bank within disturbed sites, and the high levels of annual rainfall (well above fifteen hundred millimeters annually) all favor the establishment of Chromolaena. The forms of social organization put in place by the war further contributed to the spread of Chromolaena. The war put people into motion in the service of military and strategic goals. Supply chains for the transport of troops and matériel served as extended social networks linking remote outposts to regional bases and to distant metropoles, in effect eliminating   



the barrier of distance between remote ecological zones and allowing for the flow of genetic material between them. The transit of vehicles across these disparate spaces provided a vector for the transmission of seed. The Jarai suggestion that Chromolaena odorata, like Mimosa pigra, dropped down from the runners of American aircraft thus points to one of the most important ways that the war may have contributed to its spread: the transit of military vehicles, equipment, and personnel provided a means of dispersal, moving seeds from places where the plant had long grown to newly disturbed areas amenable to its establishment. It is therefore as certain kinds of ecological beings that Airplane Weed and American Thorn have established themselves in the landscape of upland Cambodia, both materially and within a system of representation and meaning. Their ecology helps to explain why they are implicated in specific sorts of narratives, how they have come to embody the historical conjuncture that produced them. The American Vietnam War had a profound transformative effect on the northeast hills and indeed on the entire region, upending ecology and society alike in far-reaching ways. So thoroughgoing was the transformation wrought by the war that its persistent influence continues to form the everyday material of people’s lives. Suffusing the most mundane domains of language and human activity, the war creeps into consciousness the way pioneer species creep back into zones of ecological disturbance after a fire. Just as contending with the legacy of war represents an ongoing struggle for the farmers of the northeast hills, so, too, contending with these species represents an important and consuming challenge for them as they pursue their livelihoods. These naming practices are no less significant for being so commonplace. Part of their importance lies in the alternative they provide to official histories. The difference between the “facts” contained in combat after-action reports and the remembrance of looting and destruction that is recorded in song or in folk taxonomy reminds us of the wide range of possibility of what might count as fact, and of what facts might count, when it comes to understanding the history of the war and its implications. It is in this way that histories from the hills help highlanders make sense of their world, and help others of us understand their perspectives.



 

 

Revolution in a Rice Field

I

 April , following years of armed insurgency, the Khmer Rouge took control of Cambodia’s capital, Phnom Penh, evacuating the city and forming the new state of Democratic Kampuchea. Under the leadership of Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge regime put in place a series of measures that aimed to create a new society through the destruction of class distinctions, the smashing of enemies of the state, and the comprehensive state-organized collectivization of labor, agricultural production, and family life. Consumed with national chauvinism, the revolution became increasingly paranoid over time. A seemingly endless series of purges followed, destabilizing the regime, which was finally ousted when Vietnam, its feared and often reviled neighbor, invaded Cambodia and installed a new government. In existence for fewer than four years, the Khmer Rouge regime was responsible for the deaths of nearly  million people from execution, starvation, and illness. It was one of the twentieth century’s most extreme cases of mass murder and genocide. The Khmer Rouge revolution was not only a social revolution but an agricultural one as well. The regime’s assault on difference was not limited to attacks on ethnic and national others. It came to be expressed in the pursuit of uniformity in agriculture too. Seeking to entirely reconceptualize the practice and organization of agrarian life in this largely rural country, revolutionary planners reengineered the Cambodian rice field itself, introducing radical changes to the practice of growing rice and transforming the Cambodian countryside in the process. The far-reaching project was an extreme act of high-modernist hubris, one with dire consequences. Food insufficiency was foremost among these: chronic food shortages and starvation were leading causes of death in Democratic Kampuchea. By the time the Khmer Rouge were finally ousted, in January , widespread famine 

threatened Cambodia. Another consequence was the precipitous dediversification of the farming system. In a matter of only a few years, the regime’s work threatened to extinguish the diversity of cultivars, crop varieties, and local knowledge that ensured the resiliency of Cambodian agriculture— diversity that farmers there had developed over millennia. The combined project of social and agricultural engineering undertaken by the Khmer Rouge was profoundly ideological. The pursuit of uniformity in agriculture, the “annihilation of difference” that was enacted not only upon the Cambodian people but on the landscape too, was a product of deeply held convictions about the primacy of state power and “scientific” centralized planning. There was an aestheticized, almost fetishistic quality to the top-down transformation of the landscape the leaders of Democratic Kampuchea sought to impose. The regularized grid of irrigation channels and standardized rice fields the regime cut from the land, arranged in -meter intervals, was a paean to the powers of uniformity. To force nature into submission, the regime spared no efforts. The energy expended was enormous, the toll of suffering immense. How was the Democratic Kampuchea regime experienced by the people of Tang Kadon Village and their neighbors? It is a story that can be understood by taking a close look at the Khmer Rouge effort to reconfigure the Cambodian landscape and people’s relationship to the land. To fully appreciate the changes that took place at the time of the revolution, one must look closely at Khmer Rouge understandings of history, for the regime’s approach to agriculture was closely informed by its reading of the past and the meaning of the past in the present. The regime married the collectivization of agricultural production to heavy-handed policies intended to boost the productivity of the Cambodian peasant farmer, the result of which was not only food shortages but also the reduced complexity and vitality of the agroecological system, and a decline in the underlying diversity of seeds, cultivars, and agricultural practices. These stories remain visible in the Cambodian landscape today. The regime’s reworked rice fields, for instance, appear in satellite imagery as strangely uniform green tiles, unnatural in their regularity. Farmers have now carved up the old fields into smaller plots, acquiescing to the requirements imposed by nature, but the old outlines remain visible. The dediversification occasioned by the Khmer Rouge intervention has also had a lasting effect. It came to be expressed in the species composition of Cambodia’s agricultural landscape, where the absence of diversity now signals the presence of the past. These are stories conveyed by silences—the cultivars, landraces, heirlooms, and traditional varieties of plants no longer present on the 

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land recall the violence the Khmer Rouge enacted and the impoverishment of ecology that was its result.

 I used to spend a fair amount of time down at O Kop, the small port town (kampong, Kh.) on the Sesan where I would wait for a ferry to get across the river on my way up into the hill country. At the edge of town, three brick and stucco buildings that once served some municipal purpose stand slowly decomposing. Built in the Sihanouk era, they sit idle, their red-tile roofs flecked with green-black growth. Beyond these midcentury relics the road passes across a small bridge and turns to sand at the bottom of a wash. To the left is the Jarai village of Ding, and to the right, across from the village entrance, there is a small compound—a clearing and a house of rough timbers with a bench out in front and a motorcycle resting in the shade. This is the house of Romam Kren. I first met Kren at a shop in town. The afternoon was hot, and I was drinking Vietnamese-style iced coffee in one of the small restaurants along the river. Yellow-white condensed milk stuck to the bottom of the glass. Kren was walking along the road when he saw me and entered the shop to introduce himself. In his midfifties, portly, and eager to meet a foreigner, Kren was solicitous, and outgoing, too. He had an entrepreneurial side to his personality, and this surely helped explain why an NGO named Protect Our River had appointed him as its local representative, a fact he was quick to insert into our conversation, only a minute or so after he first approached me. “Are you here for the environment [parethan, Kh.]?” he asked me. In a way, I was. After explaining to me that he himself was an environmentalist, Kren invited me back to his house to chat. I followed him to the small settlement—his wife’s village—on the outskirts of O Kop Town, and to his house across the road from that unassuming cluster of houses. It turned out that he had been born in Plơi Ket, the village next door to Tang Kadon. Like many residents of O Kop, Kren gave the impression of being wealthier and more worldly than his relatives in the hills across the river. Soon into our talk, his cell phone rang. “My cousin,” he informed me before answering. “He’s a district governor in Banteay Meanchey Province.” I could not help but overhear their conversation, and I was surprised that they spoke primarily in Khmer, discussing political news. It was only when the subject turned to village affairs that they reverted to speaking in Jarai. “I’m hosting a large pơthi,” Kren told me after he hung up, referring to the funeral ceremony they were organizing. “Unfortunately, I am very poor.” He     

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asked if perhaps I might be interested in supporting him in some way. I was not, but we kept in touch, and from time to time I would visit him in town and keep up to date about his work with the NGO. I was struck by Kren’s seemingly endless efforts to improve his situation. He was enterprising in a way that I recognized in many Cambodians I had met. These were individuals who devoted their energies to bettering their circumstances, no matter the limited opportunities that seemed available to them. Kren wished to impress on me that he could read and write in Jarai. He had learned it from members of the resistance (neak tausu, Kh.) in the forests of the Dragon’s Tail region, the remote, mountainous stretch of forested land in the far northeast that had been a Khmer Rouge stronghold. There he had studied with Jarai cadres from Vietnam and a Brao from Laos, and he had learned to read and write in Jarai, Lao, and Khmer. He had been a teenager, and at the time he believed in the revolution. He did not become a soldier, but studied diligently in the forest and performed different menial tasks as part of his work there. He still studied letters today, he told me, pointing to several books on a desk in his house. These days he also took part in various trainings and other opportunities available to him through his association with the NGO. The same effort he had put into educating himself in the Khmer Rouge period he now invested in other activities designed to better himself and his position. A few months after I met Kren, his name came up in discussions about land sales at Tang Kadon. Kren claimed to own land along the border between Plơi Ket and Tang Kadon, and when he tried to sell it a conflict erupted. Villagers at Tang Kadon only became aware of the proposed sale when village police from Ket were seen escorting Kren and a group of well-dressed investors from the provincial capital through forest land that was also claimed by Tang Kadon. Soon the village of Tang Se also got involved. This had been its village land too, from back before Tang Kadon and Tang Se split in the middle of the previous century. Tang Se now also claimed the land in question; at the very least, it wanted in on the deal. It was a characteristic example of how history and memory are continuously reworked in present-day articulations of land and society. Arrangements that long ago seemed finalized were once again in play. Kren’s role in all of this was suspect. Several years earlier he had been accused of presenting himself to Vietnamese investors as a representative of the community of Plơi Ket, taking payment and then disappearing to Banteay Meanchey to visit his cousin. Now it seemed he was at it again. Ironically, the man who had introduced himself to me as an environmentalist was a central

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figure in a shady land deal. Soon, though, the picture grew far more complicated. That week, my neighbor Hlôt came by my house to talk. “Your friend Kren is trying to sell my land,” Hlôt told me, clearly angry. I was surprised he knew of my relationship with Kren. “He’s no good [Ñu sat],” Hlôt exclaimed, his tone accusatory. He waited for me to agree with this statement, and after a pause I commented that no one should sell land that didn’t belong to them. “That’s not it,” Hlôt replied. “He is truly bad [Ñu sat jitjat]. He killed a lot of people.” Kren’s backstory unfolded for me then, as first Hlôt and then other villagers recounted to me a history that was well known in this part of the hill country. When the Khmer Rouge regime took power in the northeast in the early s, communist soldiers relocated the Jarai villages from the hills north of the Sesan down to the floodplain along the river, combining three or four villages at a time to create cooperatives, or sahakaw in Khmer, the collectivized agricultural settlements and labor camps where the highlanders were put to work growing paddy rice. The Khmer Rouge made Kren second-in-command of the cooperative (kanak sahakaw, Kh.) at Mo Bei (or “M-”), the agricultural settlement just up the river from Mo Buon (M-), the cooperative where Tang Kadon had been placed (map .). Kren was then quite young, no older than nineteen or twenty. Today he is reviled as an incompetent and immoral leader. By all accounts, Mo Bei was the worst of the cooperatives along the river. Many people died there, and many of those deaths are today attributed to Kren, who is said to have been a capricious leader—he “had too much power” and was not “straight,” villagers today recall. Hlôt provided me with a single example that affected him personally. Kren accused Hlôt’s cousin of stealing a buffalo from the cooperative and providing it to the Vietnamese. The accusation was baseless, Hlôt said, retribution for a perceived slight. Hlôt’s cousin narrowly escaped death: he was granted a reprieve when higher authorities stepped in and relocated him to a mobile work team. Others corroborated Hlôt’s account. Many of the things I knew about Kren now began to appear in a different light. I learned that the reason his house was located across the road from his wife’s village was that he had been banned from living within the village circle. He was an exile. I also discovered that Kren’s cousin in Banteay Meanchey Province had been a central figure in the Khmer Rouge regime. He was among the Jarai from Ratanakiri who were recruited into the Khmer Rouge to serve as members of Pol Pot’s personal bodyguard. Given the aliases Phi Phuon and Chheam, Kren’s cousin served as an aide-de-camp to Pol Pot. Like other Khmer Rouge

    

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Ket Chai Tang-A Nhang Choi Peng Muy Le Chong Podol Kotang

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S at a i River

Sesan River Pochuh Phĭ

Ta Nong Kă Nhai Sang Klah Ta Lao In

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Tang Se Dal Kachut Tang Kadon Glong Yol Pi

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 . Khmer Rouge–collectivized agricultural settlements known as sahakaw. Multiple villages were grouped together and resettled from locations in the hills to the floodplain of the Sesan River. Map by Aaron Reiss.

leaders, Kren’s cousin had skillfully maneuvered through the postwar, maintaining influence and power through successive regimes. His decades in western Cambodia perhaps helped to explain why he and Kren spoke Khmer by default. I was struck by the fact that I might never have learned of Kren’s past were it not for the messy intrigue at Tang Kadon that had stirred resentments anew. I was struck, too, by the fact that Protect Our River had so seriously miscalculated. The NGO appeared to have no grasp on local reality or the history that was so well known to residents. Its representative for community-based conservation efforts was a man who had allegedly condemned members of the community to death. “It happens a lot,” my friend Hlôt said, a comment that took in not only the NGO’s misunderstandings of local contexts, but also how difficult it was for anyone to negotiate the country’s complicated history. 

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    In the months after the Americans burned their village, in May  the residents of Tang Kadon lived in dispersed encampments in the forests near the old village site. That same year, Prime Minister Lon Nol withdrew the Cambodian army from Ratanakiri, evacuating soldiers and their families by airplane from Borkeo and from the provincial capital of Lomphat. By July  Lon Nol had effectively ceded control of the entire northeast to Cambodia’s communist revolutionaries. Yet bombs continued to rain down on the forests of Andong Meas District for the next several years, and villagers remained in the forest, struggling to eke out a precarious existence. In  Khmer Rouge soldiers armed with AK- machine guns rounded up the villagers from their forest encampments and resettled them to a site in the foothills just north of the river, where they were organized as a small agricultural cooperative consisting of just the single village of Tang Kadon. Less than a year later cadres moved the villagers again, relocating them along with all the other villages in the area to a series of large cooperatives sited along the floodplain of the middle Sesan. The cooperatives were composed of combined Jarai and Kacŏ villages and were assigned letter and number combinations: M-, M-, M-, and so on (i.e., ម-១, ម-២, ម-៣, etc., in Khmer). These are pronounced, in Khmer, as Mo Muy, Mo Bpi, Mo Bei, and so on, and that is how people today refer to them. The letter Mo, or ម, stands for mondol, meaning “center” of population concentration. Created two years before the fall of Phnom Penh, the sahakaw in the northeast were some of the first experiments in collectivization undertaken by the regime. Tang Kadon was one of four villages relocated to Mo Buon (M-), a stretch of flat bottomland (jaol in Jarai; veal in Khmer) located just north of the Sesan. Villagers there were assigned to mutual aid teams (krum pravas dey, Kh.) to carry out collective agricultural tasks, worked in united front gardens (chamkar renakse, Kh.) to provide food for the war effort, and saw the family- and household-based organization of social life disassembled and reorganized along communitarian lines. Food was prepared and consumed communally, farmland and livestock now pertained to the cooperative, and a central committee headed by the cooperative chief (me sahakaw, Kh.) allocated labor and made numerous other decisions that affected even the minutiae of daily life. The Tang Kadon villagers, now living together at the Mo Buon sahakaw with the residents of three other villages, were initially set to work constructing a large array of inundated pond fields at a site on the floodplain known previously as Jaol Tông. The work included clearing land, raising bunds—as     

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the mud walls farmers use to retain water in inundated fields are called— and digging ditches and installing a series of gates and canals for the management of drainage in the new fields. Although Cambodia’s Jarai farmers had knowledge of lowland wet rice agriculture and incorporated some swamp rice varieties in their agricultural system, the intensive agriculture they were made to practice at Mo Buon was unlike anything they had experienced before, as was the scale of the undertaking. The residents of the cooperative would spend the next four years farming paddy rice under the watchful eye of the regime. The people of Mo Buon were given different roles based on their age and ability. Particular attention was focused on youths, who represented the regime’s best hope for forming a new kind of person, one stripped of the class distinctions of the past. It was thus that unmarried youths were taken from their families and assigned to labor gangs (kong chalat, Kh.), and were moved from place to place to work on construction and waterworks projects. Many young men were also recruited into the army. Highlanders who had allied themselves to the revolution in its early years were given leadership roles, and several youths with ties to Tang Kadon were recruited into the Communist Youth League and were slated to become party members. The cohort of residents at Tang Kadon who today hold prominent roles in village life were in their late teens during the early s. My friend Mang is one of this group, and like others of his age he had married just before the move to Mo Buon. His first child, a son, was born when he and his wife were still living in the forest. Five months after the move to the lowland cooperative, their son died of fever. Having married prior to collectivization, Mang was not made to join a kong chalat. His age-group made up the core of the agricultural labor force at Mo Buon. Others, like Kwĕn, who is today the village chief, were too young to be drafted into a mobile work gang. With other children, Kwĕn was assigned to perform discrete tasks, and spent much of his time with other youths, collecting forest resources and grazing livestock. Several young men described having been recruited to work as “boys,” komah (Kh.), in the Khmer Rouge military camps, where they fetched water and firewood and performed various kinds of errands. These were roles that might eventually lead them to become soldiers. Life at Mo Buon was difficult. Food shortages were common, the quality of food served was poor, and individuals were called on to work long hours with little rest. Frequently, youths who were sent off to work in kong chalat were not seen again in the villages, and indeed many never returned. Families were separated for a number of reasons, and this experience is today remembered with great sadness. Villagers today also recall how difficult the 

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 . A woman who experienced the Khmer Rouge era stands with her grandson, who did not. Photo by the author.

transition was from a life of relative freedom and varied pursuits to an existence on the sahakaw where life was regimented and lived at close quarters. “Under communism, we were slaves [hlun],” people will say, interpreting the recent past through reference to their longer historical experience. Before they were moved to Mo Buon, village residents had buried most of their valuable possessions—jars, gongs, and other items that had survived the American bombing and invasion. Now, owning perhaps only a spoon and a bowl, they deeply resented the prohibition on personal property at the cooperative. Individuals’ mobility was sharply curtailed. While some social visiting occurred within the confines of Mo Buon, residents could no longer travel freely. Some report having made unauthorized visits across the river to relatives in Vietnam, although this became increasingly perilous as tensions between Cambodia and Vietnam escalated. Drudgery, suffering, and fear were commonplace at the sahakaw.

   Moving the highlanders to the lowlands, concentrating them in easily surveilled settlements, and putting them to work growing paddy rice in the style of lowland Cambodian peasants—these looked to the Jarai at Mo Buon very much like the kinds of policies the state had pursued in the highlands at     

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least since the colonial period. Many highlanders had initially welcomed the Khmer Rouge revolution as an alternative to the oppressive rule of the Sihanouk and Lon Nol regimes. They were sympathetic to the arguments of revolutionary cadres who visited their village and pointed out that it was the Americans, the allies of the Cambodian government, who were responsible for the bombings that wreaked such devastation in the northeast hills. Yet it soon became apparent that the policies of Democratic Kampuchea extended and intensified many of the enforced “modernization” policies characteristic of Sihanouk’s Khmerization campaign a decade earlier. The Khmer Rouge had gained control of the northeast highlands early on in the revolution, and there was an experimental quality to collectivization in the early years. Following the fall of Phnom Penh in April , however, the regime became more doctrinaire in its efforts to force the upland ethnic minorities to assimilate to Khmer culture. Highlanders were prohibited from wearing their traditional clothing and from practicing traditional forms of adornment and bodily care. Cultural practices such as filing and blackening teeth, or wearing elephant ivory plugs in their earlobes, were now prohibited. Speaking traditional languages was also nominally prohibited. While the rule against speaking minority languages was enforced in towns, it could not hold up at Mo Buon. “Almost every night we would receive instruction in politics [niyobai, Kh.],” Seio Duăn told me. “We would receive lectures about communism and the revolution and world affairs. They spoke to us in Khmer, and nobody understood a word of it.” The former village chief laughed at the irony. “Nobody could speak Khmer!” Prohibitions on traditional religious practices introduced uncertainty and fear into highlanders’ lives. The brewing of rice beer, which had been allowed in the early days of life at the cooperative, was curtailed. Household and village-level agricultural rites were also prohibited, as was playing gongs or otherwise invoking the spirits (ngă yang). Villagers were instructed to conduct burials without ceremony, and the secondary “abandonment of the tomb” celebration (pơthi) was disallowed. Various practices involved in mourning the dead (gơnuh), normally required of the spouse of the deceased, were likewise now forbidden. The enforced secularization of highlander life had far-reaching effects, as highlanders’ causal explanations of the workings of ecology and agriculture were grounded in beliefs about the relationships that bound humans, spirits, and the animated being of plants and animals together through ties of alliance and reciprocity. The management of livestock at Mo Buon helps to illustrate the dread inspired by prohibitions on ritual activity. Traditionally, the Jarai raised domestic animals—chickens, pigs, and cattle—for the 

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purpose of sacrifice. Livestock has traditionally been considered less a source of food than a means of propitiating the powerful yang, although of course the consumption of meat was a welcome epiphenomenon of ritual practice. Domestic animals played important roles within networks of sociality, as symbols of status and as the currency of interpersonal relationships. In contrast, at Mo Buon livestock were slaughtered for food. It was up to the cooperative chief to decide when to do this, and no ceremony was made for the yang. “This scared everyone—it was kŏm jat,” Duăn told me, meaning that it was expressly proscribed within traditional Jarai cosmology. The term kŏm, meaning “ritually prohibited” or “taboo,” refers to such things as forbidden foods, and to actions sanctioned by the belief system. It also describes a state of existence that is contrary to the natural order and to the demands of the spirit world. At Mo Buon, by Duăn’s account, the Jarai essentially found themselves forced to live in a constant state of kŏm, of ritual prohibition, transgression, and taboo. This state of affairs—the experience of life lived in violation of the cosmological order—is today interpreted in a characteristically ambivalent way. The Jarai of the northeast hills have not developed a unitary framework to explain what happened at Mo Buon. Rather, people access several contested narratives to make sense of past events. On the one hand, for many villagers the prevalence of sickness, hunger, and death at the cooperatives confirms the notion that Khmer Rouge–era transgressions against spirits and the dead had thrown the world out of balance. Others assert that the Khmer Rouge era demonstrated to villagers that many of their beliefs were false or superstitious. My friend Tang explained to me why he refused to sacrifice a buffalo at his dead wife’s funeral: “During the Khmer Rouge we didn’t do any sacrifices, and what happened? Nothing!” When I asked him about the high death toll at that time, when numerous villagers succumbed to fever and other symptoms usually associated with supernatural causes, he scoffed at the notion that spirits had anything to do with it. “The yang didn’t kill us” he said, “we killed ourselves.” When Tang himself died unexpectedly only a few months after burying his wife, most villagers remarked on his refusal to sacrifice a buffalo at her funeral, and interpreted his death as evidence of his faulty understanding of the past, and as a confirmation that the spirits remain a powerful force in their lives.

 -    The regime of Democratic Kampuchea took a very particular form in the northeast highlands. And, while highlanders’ experience of Democratic     

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Kampuchea was by all accounts devastating, on average the regime’s treatment of highlanders in the northeast was less harsh than elsewhere in the country. One explanation for this seemingly preferential treatment turns on the role that the forests of the northeast had played in the early days of the revolution, providing Khmer Rouge leaders with a place to hide, and with one of their first bases of support. The revolution’s leaders had lived through the US “Menu campaign” bombing alongside the highlanders, and they had long-standing ties to communities there. Pol Pot and others who formed the revolution’s inner circle were well known to villagers in Andong Meas District, where the revolution’s main center of operations was located in the late s. Another reason for the relatively forgiving conditions in the northeast during the initial years of the revolution has to do with the early entry of the region into the zone of Khmer Rouge control. Agricultural collectivization took place very early in Ratanakiri, and there was more room for accommodation when the revolution had not yet established firm control over national territory or the apparatus of the state. These factors contributed to the willingness of political leaders in the northeast to use leniency when interpreting orders from angkar loeu (Kh.), the “upper organization” or “center” of the Communist Party of Kampuchea. Indeed, it was possible for local leaders to refuse to fulfill directives altogether. Geographer Ian G. Baird recounts the case of Kham Teuang, a Brao deputy chief of Ta Veng Kraom Subdistrict in the early s, who selectively enforced orders from the party center. He required villagers to eat communally only when outside officials were visiting, for instance, and reinterpreted the party’s dictate “Don’t eat until you are full” as “Eat until you are full.” Informed by their own upbringing within Cambodian culture and influenced by European readings of Cambodian history and culture, Khmer Rouge leaders also exoticized the highlanders as fierce noble savages, and imagined them to be ideologically pure “primitive communists” in the Marxist sense. Ideologically motivated preconceptions had important consequences for the residents of the northeast hills, especially at the outset of the revolution, when key decisions were being taken as to how to dispose of different classes of people. Whereas city dwellers and perceived members of the bourgeoisie were assigned a status of “new people” by the regime and were singled out for harsh treatment and for instruction by the “old people” of the countryside, highlanders were granted the status of “base people” or “full rights people” and were treated with greater leniency as a result. Preconceptions about highlander identity affected the treatment they received in other ways too. The reputation of the Jarai for being the most 

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warlike of the tribal groups was, for instance, a factor in the selection of Jarai revolutionary soldiers to serve as members of Pol Pot’s personal bodyguard. Ieng Sary, a founder of the Khmer Rouge and so-called “Brother Number Three” in the senior ranks, made this sentiment explicit, commenting, “With a Khmer soldier you never knew how he’d react. But a Jarai would make sure I was safe no matter what it cost.” According to historian David P. Chandler, Khmer Rouge leaders Pol Pot and Ieng Sary claimed “to have been inspired by the spirit of people who had no private property, no markets and no money.” In Pol Pot’s view, the highlanders were “very revolutionary” and “very communal” (padevat nas and samuhaphiep nas, Kh.) in their outlook. One result of the regime’s favorable opinion of the highlanders was that fewer people in the northeast appear to have died there, compared with other locations in Democratic Kampuchea. In an early examination of the question of whether the Khmer Rouge regime had committed genocide, historian Ben Kiernan argued that, like other ethnic minorities in Cambodia, the highlanders had suffered a disproportionate death toll compared to ethnic Khmers. Such a finding would support an “ethnic cleansing” interpretation of the Cambodian genocide—an interpretation that has validity when applied to other groups. Kiernan’s early assessment was based in part on reports of a “plausible estimate” that the Democratic Kampuchea “death toll [was] around  percent” of the highland population in Ratanakiri, although he did not endorse that high number. New research on the northeast argues against these findings. The most probable accounting is that of human rights researcher Sara Colm, who found that between  and  about thirteen thousand individuals died from all causes. This equates to approximately  percent of the estimated  population, a rate far lower than the rate of “surplus deaths” (to use the terrible language of genocide accountancy) found in other regions. The qualitative experience of life during the Khmer Rouge period varied greatly, not just between the northeast and other areas in Cambodia, but even between individual cooperatives along the Sesan. To be sure, life was difficult, and despair was a common feature throughout the country. Villagers at Tang Kadon relate numerous stories that illustrate the depths of this despair. They recount the story of a woman from the Mo Bei cooperative, for instance, who lost her sanity and buried her newborn child alive in a shallow grave in the forest. A young Brao couple happened by at that moment and heard the infant girl’s screams—it is not clear how they came to be in this forest, which is located at some distance from Brao settlements—and brought her home and raised her. “Today she is alive” a friend told me, “and she has children of her own.”     

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Many of the policies of the Khmer Rouge regime caused despair in the highlands. As elsewhere in Cambodia, throughout Ratanakiri the authorities organized mass weddings at which as many as twenty couples might be married in a single ceremony. Couples were encouraged to quickly produce children to meet the regime’s goal of creating a  million–man army with which to defeat the Vietnamese in the future. At Mo Buon, the cooperative committee was responsible for arranging marriages. In one case, a young couple secretly married without seeking permission. As villagers tell the story, the “organization” (angkar, Kh.), and thus the authorities of the Communist Party of Kampuchea, soon discovered that a secret wedding had taken place, and ruled that it was not allowed: the marriage must be dissolved. In the days following this decree, the two young lovers disappeared from the cooperative. Their family members believed that they had run away together, and worried what would become of them. Soon thereafter, a group of children who were sent to the forest to collect fruit for the cooperative came across the bodies of the two youths. They had committed suicide together, hanging themselves in the forest. For all the hardships they endured, villagers at Tang Kadon insist that the leadership of Mo Buon was benign relative to other locales. There is near universal support for Seio Cheng, who is said to have been an exemplary cooperative chief. A Jarai from Plơi Muy, Cheng had taken Ơe Gun’s eldest daughter as his wife, and had thus married into the most prominent longhouse in Tang Kadon Village. Just as Ơe Gun’s skillful role as an intermediary between the colonial administration and the village had earned him a lasting reputation as a just leader, so too Cheng is understood to have done well within a compromised position. “He loved his people,” one hears when Cheng’s name is mentioned. “He didn’t let his brothers and sisters die.” People today point to the fact that only one resident of Mo Buon was put to death during the entire period, although many others died of sickness and disease. In contrast, Romam Kren, the young deputy chief of the Mo Bei sahakaw, is today reviled for the numerous deaths he is alleged to have either directly caused or allowed to occur on his watch. If the Khmer Rouge were relatively sympathetic to the highlanders, based on their conception of highlanders as supportive of the revolution, the leaders of the regime were nonetheless determined to impose on them a fully Khmer-centric vision of modernity, a project that required eliminating the many perceived deficiencies of highlander culture, or indeed eliminating cultural difference altogether. Observations in a  party document demonstrated the resilience of narratives that portrayed highlanders as lazy and agriculturally backward. While the land of the northeast offered productive 

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possibilities, the report noted, “The only shortcoming is that the people are not used to working the land.” Interviewed three years later, Pol Pot would boast of the regime’s success in modernizing the backward highlanders, suggesting that where the “national minorities” (chunchiet pheac taic, Kh.) had previously been miserable, “now one cannot distinguish them from the other people. They wear the same dress and live like everyone else.” There is a strong argument to be made that Khmer Rouge policy and practice constituted an ethnocide of the country’s highland minorities. Such an argument does not require highlanders to have been killed in greater proportions than other ethnic groups. French anthropologist Georges Condominas proposed the term ethnocide to describe the forcible acculturation and destruction of Montagnard culture occasioned by the US intervention in Vietnam. Many of the practices he identified as contributing to ethnocide— forced relocations, the imposition of “modern” productive practices, the elimination of customs and beliefs deemed to be archaic—were implemented by the Khmer Rouge regime. Indeed, these same practices, and various components of the ideology that informed them, were characteristic of the regimes of Lon Nol, Norodom Sihanouk, and French Indochina too.

“      ” The Khmer Rouge regime sought to eliminate cultural difference and to enforce a uniform vision of modern personhood and national belonging on the highlanders, one that was exclusively Khmer. The pursuit of uniformity, and of “purity,” extended well beyond the regime’s ethnic vision, to the very landscape itself. The agricultural production system played a pivotal role in the forced assimilation of highlanders: the imposition of collectivized wet rice agriculture was designed to impose uniformity not only on productive practice but also on the land. This misguided effort resulted in the precipitous dediversification of the agricultural and ecological system, and represented an assault on agrobiodiversity and on the multiplicity of agroecosystems that had previously distinguished the Cambodian countryside. The pursuit of uniformity was thus not limited to ethnocide; it extended to ecocide too. The destruction of the environment, the regimentation of the landscape, and the elimination of diversity that this entailed together formed a deeply ideological project, one with lethal consequences. The productivity of the landscape and its ability to support human life depended on the very diversity that the regime undertook to eliminate. Before addressing the ideological vision at the heart of this transformation, it is necessary to take a step back and examine the Cambodian landscape in the years before     

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the revolution. The regime’s modernist aspirations were directed at a landscape that had come into being over thousands of years of experimentation and adaptation by Cambodian farmers. To understand Cambodian agriculture at midcentury, one could do no better than consult with geographer Jean Delvert’s small masterpiece of human geography, Le paysan cambodgien, published in . In it, Delvert describes in minute detail the variety of practices and types of farming to be found across the Cambodian landscape, each adapted to the specific needs of place and ecology, each a testament to the knowledge and ingenuity of the Cambodian peasant. According to Delvert, the traditional system was everywhere particularized, and the result was a profusion of diversity. One indicator of that diversity was the wide range of rice varieties that farmers across Cambodia managed. “To each variety of paddy—sticky paddy, floating paddy, directly sown Vossa [rainy-season] paddy, heavy Vossa paddy, light and medium Vossa paddy, light dry-season paddy—correspond numerous subvarieties which differ by their size, shape, and color,” Delvert wrote. “Each variety has a popular name which is related to the shape of the grain or its color, or is simply a poetical name—Flower of Popel, Young White Girl, Areca Flower.” The list goes on. Delvert based his account on his own research and on numerous studies of rice diversity across Cambodia. A survey conducted in , for instance, cataloged the wet season rice varieties of Kampong Cham Province. In the single district of Choeung Prey, the survey identified over sixty named varieties of rice divided among late-, medium-, and early-maturing types. Other research identified similar circumstances in other parts of the country. Based on fine-grained observation and a comparison of rice-farming practices across the breadth of Cambodia, Delvert was able to account for the many different factors that contributed to the great diversity of rice varieties. He described, for instance, the “close relationship” between the landscape and such things as the shape of rice fields and the varieties planted in them. “The rice fields are sometimes regular,” he wrote, “square or rectangular, with narrow ridges and little land wasted. They may, however, have various shapes, square or circular, with numerous ponds.” Delvert understood this distinctiveness from the farmer’s point of view. “When the angles of the rice field are rounded, much space is lost, but the work of the plough is easier” he wrote. “The irregular rice field is the rule in Siem Reap, Pursat, Kompong-Chhnang, Kompong-Speu, Kandal and Takeo.” The farming practices Delvert described, the range of conditions within which they were practiced, and the multitude of locally specific rice varieties

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that this system both relied on and made possible, together demonstrate that Cambodian rice agriculture of the prewar period was shot through with what we would today call “agrodiversity.” This term encompasses both the managed biodiversity within the system, such as the diversity of crop varieties, of germplasm and genetic material, as well as the variety of ecological factors, management practices, and forms of knowledge that sustain the profusion of biological forms. The diversity of agroecosystems is a key indicator of their health and a determinant of socioecological resilience. Delvert’s study focused on the agriculture of Cambodia’s lowlands. The diversity of Cambodia’s uplands was likely much higher. The diversity that both inheres in and is produced by the extensive farming, fallow, and forest management practices characteristic of the northeast highlands owes to a number of factors. Highland farmers typically farm across a variety of sites simultaneously, a portfolio strategy that allows them to mitigate risk. Variations in micro-site conditions such as soil fertility and composition, rainfall, drainage, slope, aspect, and exposure to sunlight all call for specific crop varieties, and for farming practices adapted to each locale. Thus, for example, unusually high rainfall during the growing season might favor flood-tolerant crops planted in the swamp-like wetlands that the Jarai call chrowp, but might result in lower yields on swiddens sited at higher elevations where varieties adapted to dry conditions are often planted. Fallowing and the management of fallow forests for a variety of resources also contribute to diversity across the landscape. Through fallowing and fallow management, farmers essentially incorporate multiage stands of trees and a variety of ecological zones within the larger agroecological system. Whereas intensification in the more densely populated lowlands places an emphasis on yield per unit of land area and thus on specialization and efficiency, the lack of such pressure in the highlands allows for the management of diversity across an extensive landscape. That the prewar farming systems of the Annamite hills harbored great diversity is illustrated by numerous studies. A study of Maa’ agriculture in Vietnam, for instance, recorded no fewer than fifteen named varieties of rice in a single plot of farmland managed by one family. Likewise, a single Brao village in Cambodia in the s was found to manage  economic plant species and thirty varieties of rice. Ethnobotanical research undertaken by Jacques Dournes in the s among the Jarai of Cheo Reo (now Ayun Pa) in Vietnam not only revealed a great diversity of rice varieties under management—in one publication he recorded thirty-three varieties of Oryza sativa—but also documented Jarai knowledge of an enormous

    

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variety of economic plant species in various stages of domestication and management. Jarai farmers there cultivated seven named varieties of chili pepper (Capsicum frutescens) and eight named varieties of eggplant (Solanum melongena), planted or used fourteen varieties of banana (Musa paradisiaca) and twelve varieties of sugarcane (Saccharum officinarum), and recognized and harvested numerous edible species of oyster mushrooms (Pleurotus spp.), including one that was fluorescent.

 The agricultural policies implemented by the Khmer Rouge when they took control of Democratic Kampuchea were inimical to the multifarious, locally specific forms of knowledge and practice Delvert had identified and the highland farming systems embodied. The agricultural cooperatives established by the regime transformed not only relations of production, but practices of production too. Cambodia’s agricultural sector would be the key site for the “Super Great Leap Forward” (mohaa loot ploh moha achar, Kh.) that the regime sought to put in place. This grand vision was premised on an ambivalent view of history. On the one hand, the regime insisted that it was enacting a complete and radical break with the past. Declaring that two thousand years of history had now come to an end, revolutionary leaders insisted that Cambodian history had started anew on April , , the date upon which they took control of Phnom Penh and established the new state. This revolutionary temporality today finds expression in the popularly held notion that the Khmer Rouge declared “Year Zero” in Cambodia. It is likewise evident in revolutionary leader Ieng Sary’s pronouncement: “The Khmer revolution has no precedent. What we are trying to do has never been done before in history.” On the other hand, while the revolution marked an irreversible break with history, its leaders were nonetheless fixated on the past, and on the wonders of Angkor in particular. The capital of the Khmer empire beginning in the ninth century, Angkor’s spectacular ruins inspired a monumental fervor in the regime, and the temple of Angkor Wat served as a symbol of Cambodian nationalism on the flag of Democratic Kampuchea, as it had done on the flags of previous instances of the Cambodian state. In a speech in , Pol Pot asserted, “If our people can make Angkor, we can make anything.” Revolutionary leaders marveled at the ingenuity of those they considered to be the founders of the Khmer nation. “As we look at Angkor,” the leadership noted in a radio broadcast, “we are struck by the fact that the whole area was a large city crisscrossed with straight roads and canals in a magnificent 

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system”—a system that had been “flawlessly planned, and built with great precision and care.” This emphasis on Angkor’s straight roads and canals aptly demonstrates the mix of modernist aspiration and chauvinist nostalgia that together informed Khmer Rouge conceptions of history. In the view of the regime’s planners, increasing rice production to three and even seven tons per hectare would be the key to recuperating the greatness of the Khmer empire. Khmer Rouge understandings of Angkor turned on their belief that the kingdom had risen to power through its highly proficient system of water management. Party slogans drove home the message, asserting, “If you have rice, you have strength” and “You need water to grow rice, just as you need rice to wage war.” The party line was “Independence— mastery—self-reliance.” This second term, mastery (mchas kar, Kh.), is a keyword that provides insight not only into the regime’s political outlook but also into its understanding of the human relation to nature. Party documents emphasized the importance of mastery over nature, and especially over water. A  planning document noted, “In order to gain mastery over water, there must be a network of dikes and canals as the basis. There must also be canals, reservoirs, and irrigation pumps stationed in accordance with our strategy.” Party slogans for mobilizing workers promoted the importance of “total mastery over water at all times” and urged the Khmer people to become master of the country master of the earth and water master of the rice paddies and fields, the forests, and all plant life master of the water problem, the annual floods master of nature.

This effort to establish mastery over nature itself reveals the deeply ideological and highly modernist underpinnings of the regime. Revolutionary ideology emphasized progress and embraced the productivity that could be gained through centralized planning processes, through the heavy-handed intervention of the state, and through the elimination of peasant agricultural practices that were deemed backward and inefficient. In fact, traditional Cambodian rice agriculture was a marvel of human inventiveness and adaptability, highly attuned to local ecological conditions. The receding flood agriculture practiced by Khmers in the Tonle Sap basin relied on the retention of water left behind as Cambodia’s great lake ebbed and flowed. A multitude of small-scale alterations of local topography enabled farmers to take advantage of the system’s productive potential.     

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Elsewhere, different combinations of irrigation and rain-fed agriculture were used. Everywhere, individual farmers addressed their resource-management strategies to the particulars of the terrain that they had come to understand through generations of experimentation and through the development of culturally mediated knowledge of their environment. The placement of fields, the layout of irrigation channels, the arrangement of bunds—all of this was finely calibrated to the specific topography and hydrology of individual locales, in each instance reflecting a series of decisions made by farmers in negotiation with the land. For Democratic Kampuchea’s agricultural planners, however, it appeared that Cambodia’s farmers were ceding too much in these negotiations. One might even interpret the characteristically idiosyncratic arrangement of farm fields throughout the country as evidence of nature’s mastery over the Cambodian peasant. Seeking to reverse that dynamic, the regime restructured the practice of rice agriculture at the sahakaw. Like the straight roads of Angkor that Pol Pot had so appreciated, the grid system of the new agricultural cooperatives would establish human mastery over nature once and for all. “Let us not be defeated by nature!” was how one party slogan had it. The hubris of this vision and its devastating consequences mark it as one of the great failures of high-modernist aspiration—an extreme example of “state simplification” gone awry. The construction of large irrigation systems was a central component of agricultural modernization under the Khmer Rouge. Building dikes, dams, drainage channels, and the like was a principal occupation of the massive work brigades assembled from the population of the new cooperatives and overseen by Khmer Rouge cadres (figure .). The land reclamation effort imposed a standardized model for the arrangement of fields and other features on the land. For the most part, this model was not modified to take site conditions into account. Canals were dug to create a one-kilometer-square grid, inside of which a finer grid of ditches was dug at intervals of two hundred meters. Within this matrix of ditches and canals, a rectilinear arrangement of farm fields was established. Each field was square, one hundred meters to a side, a total of one hectare per rice field. The system also incorporated reservoirs, pump stations, and mechanisms for river and stream closures that used diversion gates to channel water into the canal network. The hydrological restructuring of the countryside was married to a radical redesign of the rice field itself. In places where the new model was implemented, a massive reparcelization effort eliminated the highly particularized system of small fields that Delvert had described, and replaced them with a

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 . “New look and new method of work.” Khmer Rouge propaganda image showing agricultural fields and irrigation works. From the English-language brochure Democratic Kampuchea Is Moving Forward.

single standard. The Khmer Rouge rice field, one hundred meters to a side, was established in series so regular that later commentators inevitably referred to the appearance of the countryside as a vast checkerboard. Within the new rice fields there were further efforts to effect regularization and uniformity. The most radical change was to the system of transplanting. Whereas transplanted rice was formerly planted out in alternating rows, some thirty to forty centimeters from stalk to stalk, the new arrangement was rectilinear, with the plants placed only eight to ten centimeters distant from one another (figure .). The transformation of the Cambodian rice field, attuned more to ideological purity than to the constraints of ecology, did not result in higher agricultural productivity. The large fields were seldom level, and within a single field there could be great variation with respect to soil qualities and drainage conditions. Deeper water at one end of a field resulted in flooded rice, while in other parts of the same field water was insufficient. Initially, each field was planted with a single variety of rice, drawn from existing local stock. However, when yields in the first year of implementation did not meet with expectations, agricultural planners substituted three new varieties developed in collaboration with Chinese advisers working at a research station in Battambang. These improved varieties did not fix the productivity problem. Indeed, efforts to improve rice production in Democratic Kampuchea were almost a complete failure. Instead, the emphasis on high-yielding     

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 . Rice agriculture before and after the Cambodian revolution. The traditional arrangement of parcels was replaced with a grid of one-hectare-square fields embedded within a network of irrigation dikes and canals (top). Cambodian peasants traditionally planted out rice seedlings at a distance of thirty to forty centimeters, arranged in staggered rows; the new Khmer Rouge system required transplanting seedlings into a tight grid of rectilinear rows and columns with only eight to ten centimeters separating individual plants (bottom). Images hand drawn by the author based on figures  and  in Martin, “La riziculture et la maîtrise de l’eau.”

varieties contributed to the rapid dediversification and destabilization of the agricultural system. In Ratanakiri, which formed part of the Northeastern Zone in Democratic Kampuchea, efforts to transform rice production did meet with some success. After the capture of Phnom Penh, Khmer Rouge cadres relocated thousands of lowland Khmers from the Southwest Zone to the northeast hills, where they were organized into large mobile work gangs numbering one thousand individuals or more. These teams worked together with highlanders to create numerous large irrigation schemes. In some parts of the hill 

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country these schemes worked quite well, in contrast to other places in Cambodia. In some locations the regime also experimented with swidden farming. This was not the case at Mo Buon or the other sahakaw along the middle Sesan. The rice fields there were cut to the same grandiose proportions as elsewhere in Cambodia. Villagers recall that the fields were not level, and the system of canals and gates used to control water did not work. In spite of a great investment of labor and time, the new system produced less rice than had been hoped for.

 War preceded the regime of Democratic Kampuchea and war followed its dissolution. Much was lost during these years. Perhaps ironically, one of the best places to inquire into what was lost is to look at what was left behind. Democratic Kampuchea was an autarkic, closed society. Trade and commerce had ground to a halt as the regime directed all its energy to rural production. It would seem surprising that anything at all of the mounded dirt walls and failed dikes and reservoirs has remained on in the form of ruins. Yet just as the regime had found inspiration in the monumentalism of the Angkorean past, so too Democratic Kampuchea had embarked on a civilizational project of monumental proportions. With the regime gone, many of the components of the system it had been trying to build were abandoned and left to crumble. In a recent study of processes of ruin and ruination in Argentina’s Gran Chaco, anthropologist Gaston Gordillo argues that the traces left behind by prior “pasts” play a role in the construction of the affective landscapes of the present. The destructive histories of the past are productive of rubble, and those who live among that rubble are thus participants in the “afterlife of destruction.” Cambodians today live among remains both material and immaterial. The decaying waterworks that litter the Cambodian countryside are of the first variety. Most Khmer Rouge irrigation schemes were poorly designed. But even those that functioned did so only within the context of the social order that produced them. Their operation and maintenance depended on the mobilization of mass labor, which in turn depended on the forms of discipline the regime had put in place. In this sense the schemes were true socioecological assemblages—the regimented appearance of the landscape was itself a function of the regimented ordering of society. The social order that enabled those irrigation schemes to function had collapsed by the end of . As a result, when people went back to work at the smaller scale of the household or even as members of mutual aid groups under the     

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new forms of socialism instituted by the post–Khmer Rouge state, they did so among the remains of the old system. Concrete structures left in place would need to be worked around or destroyed, broken down, and removed. Wooden structures quite often broke, decayed, and washed away. Mounded dirt walls and elevated roads built by labor gangs stretched out across the landscape, broken, useless, but still visible beneath the vegetation that would soon overtake them. Canals and ditches, retention ponds, and gates and pumps—all had to be repurposed or, as was more likely, abandoned. Witnesses to a modernity that was never realized, they stood by silently, freighted with meaning. If the material apparatus of the Khmer Rouge project has been gradually disassembled or overgrown, its signature pattern has nonetheless remained etched into the Cambodian landscape. People live their lives framed within the lines that were left behind. The rice fields of Mo Buon were abandoned for decades after the end of the regime. When people returned to their old village sites, they picked their way among the Khmer Rouge–era fields on their journey up into the hills. Elsewhere in the country, the large checkerboard squares have become the topography within which new rice fields have been established. Satellite imagery demonstrates these effects in ways that remain hidden at ground level. Even the most cursory observation of Cambodia’s rice lands on Google Earth reveals the patterned regularity the regime left behind. Zooming in on imagery from near Trav Phaem, where the system documented by historian Marie Alexandrine Martin was inaugurated, one can still see the outlines of -meter-square fields, fields that are in turn arranged in a foursquare pattern within a -meter grid of ditches. Today the Khmer Rouge rice field system takes its place among a range of landforms produced where social and ecological projects converge. Archaeologist Scott Hawken identified it as one of six discernible field-arrangement patterns present in the greater Angkor landscape. The pattern represents a spatial ruin of sorts. It is noteworthy not so much as a set of material remains left over from a previous civilizational project, but as an immaterial ecological infrastructure, an ordering of the landscape that gives shape to successive interactions between land and society. In the same way that the immateriality of lines on the land represents a set of processes through which previous pasts shape contemporary social ecologies, so too ecological absences point to the ways that legacies of violence structure productive life today. Significant among these absences are the many lost forms of diversity that are a legacy of the Khmer Rouge project. Conceived of as agrodiversity, the losses include forms of knowledge, locally 

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specific practices, specific agroecological arrangements at the site level, and a host of myriad other phenomena. The fragmented catalog of rice varieties that survived the revolution bears witness to incompletion, to past profusions that today live on as ruins. The exact measure of the dediversification occasioned by Khmer Rouge agricultural policies will never be known. Years of war prior to the establishment of Democratic Kampuchea had drastically reduced the amount of land under rice cultivation and likely contributed to the abandonment of many varieties. Lingering civil war and insecurity did not allow for study of the situation either. While numerous studies prior to the war had recorded the diversity of rice varieties managed by Cambodian farmers, no systematic study had cataloged those varieties. Even so, there is broad agreement among researchers and Cambodian farmers that the losses were significant. Where studies were undertaken, the results suggest that most communities lost numerous traditional crop varieties. One study assessed the loss of deepwater rice varieties in a single village in Takeo that specialized in this kind of rice agriculture. These are rices that grow in flooded fields; different deepwater rice varieties grow to different lengths, calibrated to the different flooding depths attained through water management in different fields. Traditionally, the village used sixteen different deepwater rice varieties. However, between  and , deepwater rice was cultivated in only fifty hectares of the village’s thirty-two hundred hectares of deepwater rice fields. Only one of the village’s traditional varieties was planted during these years. The remaining varieties were lost. This study and others like it illuminate a further way that Khmer Rouge planning resulted in catastrophic dediversification. As Delvert and others had noted, Cambodian farmers practiced a number of different types of agriculture. The main types of wet season rice farming included upland rice, deepwater rice, and rain-fed lowland rice. This last category could itself be broken down into the planting of early-, medium-, and late-maturing rice varieties. By , the percentage of Cambodia's agrarian land devoted to deepwater rice farming was less than half of what it had been in . In the same period, the percentage devoted to early- and medium-maturing varieties had increased. Fields devoted to early-maturing rice had occupied only  percent of the country’s rice lands in ; by , they accounted for almost  percent. These shifts in emphasis were the direct result of Khmer Rouge policies. The regime had prohibited the planting of deepwater rice entirely, even in zones where it was the dominant form of rice agriculture. The often-repeated desire to obtain multiple yields in a single agricultural season helps explain the emphasis placed on fast-maturing strains. Thus it is not only individual     

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rice varieties that were lost; entire classes of rice production were suppressed in order to favor those that would result in greater annual productivity. The abandonment of whole classes of rice farming meant the abandonment of the rice varieties associated with those agroecologies. While no data exist for upland rice, it is certain that upland rice cultivation declined precipitously relative to other forms of agriculture during this time. But dediversification was rampant even within the fast-maturing classes of rice that were favored by the regime. In numerous cases planners refused to select rice seed adapted to local conditions, disregarding farmers’ preferences, and insisting instead on the use of preferred varieties that had been selected by the regime’s agronomists. This practice amounted to a willful rejection of local knowledge in favor of the presumed expertise of modern centralized planning. In the northeast hills, the sites of the former sahakaw remained deserted for years after the end of the regime. To get up to Tang Kadon today, one must ride along an elevated road that bisects the grid of abandoned fields. Old concrete structures can be seen to one side or another of the road, their intended function increasingly unknown to those who pass by them. Farmers clearing forty-year-old forests in the surrounding landscape discover obscure ridges and earthworks and they repurpose them, planting cashews in rows that run down, up, and over old drainages and roadbeds. They superimpose new grids of landscape management over the old, even as irregularity and diversity come creeping back in.

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 

Garden-Variety Histories

T

 aftermath of war. The phrase suggests mourning, elegy, the survival of life suffused with the memory of death. Like so many resonant terms in English, aftermath is a product of the language’s agrarian roots. In its original meaning, the term refers to a second growth: a new crop of grass after the mowing, or “math,” of the first. Today the term is used more often to signal the postwar. If war’s victims are mowed down like so many blades of grass, then aftermath is what follows. It signals a moment of reflection, rebuilding, and recovery, or, in any case, that is what society is meant to experience once violence has come to an end. The changing agrarian landscape of the northeast hills in the years following the fall of Democratic Kampuchea was an aftermath of sorts, but a limited one. Returning to highland forests after years of dislocation, the residents of Tang Kadon engaged in acts of recuperation that can still be seen in the landscape today, evident in the form of the crop varieties planted in farmers’ fields. In the popular imagination and in much writing by outside observers, the story of Tang Kadon at this time should be thought of as a story of villagers putting their lives back together in the aftermath of war. This is how stories of Cambodia’s postwar are often written. But redemption narratives are hard to come by among Tang Kadon’s residents. The notion of aftermath provides violence with a narrative structure—a temporal framework of beginning, middle, and end—that is far too tidy, too inconsistent with the ways villagers remember their recent past. They lived with violence well before the official start of the war, and their suffering extended well beyond the end of collectivization. Even when villagers tell stories of the role they played in reassembling the swidden system, they do so in muted tones, forgoing heroic narratives of loss and recovery in favor of stories of everyday pragmatic action. In the northeast hills, violence and recuperation 

are projects that live entangled in the landscape, neither of them ever fully accomplished.

’  The rapid loss of diversity that occurred during the Khmer Rouge regime, and the agroecological destabilization it entailed were, if anything, more severe for swidden farmers in Cambodia’s northeast hills than for farmers in other parts of the country. When Khmer Rouge soldiers moved the inhabitants of Tang Kadon and their neighbors down from highland forests to the river valleys, putting them to work growing paddy rice in inundated fields, the upland swidden system experienced an almost complete interruption. Surveys of highland farming prior to the war were a testament to the extensive environmental knowledge of the Jarai and other minorities, and attested to the highlanders’ genius for developing and maintaining a profusion of crop varieties in their farming system. Throughout much of the highlands, the revolution brought that system to a complete halt. Following the ouster of the Khmer Rouge, successive governments prohibited the residents of Tang Kadon from returning to their village lands up in the hills, citing security concerns. This prohibition on villagers’ movement was kept in place until the early s. And yet, by  the upland swidden fields of Tang Kadon were home once again to a multitude of different crops. Individual farm fields were planted in several varieties of rice, and families managed numerous varieties across their fields. The cultivars in use differed from family to family and village to village, and this profusion of diversity held true for many other crops as well. How had this happened? How did highland farmers reassemble their farming system after the rupture of war and collectivization, and the period of civil strife that followed? Recovery as aftermath is here a story of landscape change, of linked social and ecological transformation. The recuperation of the farming system was a collective process addressed to violence as legacy, to the remnant effects of war and of the Khmer Rouge assault on nature. There is a hopeful story here, a story of farmers’ agency and of the resiliency of social and ecological systems. But farmers at Tang Kadon are unlikely to read this experience in this way. In their own accounts they emphasize the ordinary acts through which they assembled fragments of the past, putting them to use in the service of present needs. Eschewing narratives of rupture and recovery that take place at the scale of the system or of a people, they speak of individual acts and incremental changes.

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 . Young women head to the fields at harvest time. Photo by the author.

Processes of postwar “recovery” in Cambodia’s lowlands here provide a comparative frame for understanding the very different experience of the northeast hills. The reconstitution of the farming system in the lowlands was guided by the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) and other powerful international actors, and was enacted within the context of a larger relief effort that would grow into a sprawling development industry. The capital-intensive program of rice reintroduction in the lowlands was based on an “ex situ” model for the conservation of genetic diversity promulgated by multinational research and development institutions. Within this framework, research organizations, relief agencies, and aid programs developed a centralized, panoptic representation of the agricultural system, upon which they based their efforts to restore plant genetic diversity to Cambodia’s agricultural system. In this sense, even though it was focused on recuperating diversity into the agricultural system, rice reintroduction in the lowlands was fully embedded within a technoscience approach to agronomy, and was

- 

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closely aligned with the interests of the consolidating Cambodian state. That is to say, modernist tendencies informed the effort to reintroduce diversity into the lowland rice system, much as those same tendencies had contributed to the dediversification of the system under the Khmer Rouge only a few years earlier. In contrast, the recuperation of agroecological diversity in the highlands was very much a “from below” kind of affair. The effort was not centrally coordinated. There was no investment of capital to speak of. Powerful institutions did not participate in the process. Rather, the reconstitution of agrodiversity in the highlands relied on the individual actions of thousands of farmers who managed, through their extended social networks, to bring in diversity from other places where it still existed “in situ.” Farmers obtained seeds and other propagules from friends and relatives and brought them back to their highland farms. The newly recovered cultivars were then subjected to the same processes of modification and experimentation that highlanders had long relied on to produce diversity in their farming systems. Today, the postwar effort to restore the seed stock of lowland Cambodia, undertaken by IRRI and a host of relief agencies, is lauded as an early success of the international seed bank system. Unheralded—indeed almost completely unremarked—is the parallel effort enacted by highland farmers to return agricultural diversity to their fields. This is one of the great untold stories of the Cambodian crisis. It is, furthermore, a story that is told in the farm fields and gardens of the residents of Tang Kadon. Because farmers at Tang Kadon were unable to practice swidden agriculture in the hills for so long, each cultivar in their fields today has arrived only recently. Each plant has a history, and those histories are sometimes quite well known. Ask a farmer about a plant in her garden, or about a semidomesticated plant that has been left to grow in a swidden fallow, and you may hear a story about the journey that plant took to get there. As these varieties traveled from place to place, they moved across agroecological settings, across animated landscapes, across cultural, linguistic, and ritual contexts. The trajectories of individual varieties—and indeed of individual plants—are connected to the histories of the individuals who transported and exchanged them, and are enmeshed within broader social histories. The plants in farmers’ fields and gardens may thus be understood as historical documents of sorts, bearers of knowledge and history. The tending of crops and the cultivation of history coincide here. In the Jarai conception, plants (and fungi, and other living things) are also vital forces in their own right, bearers of souls (bơngăt) too, whose actions upon the land are not the mere products of human will. Plants, and the spiritual forces that 

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animate them, are participants in historical processes, their potency sometimes invoked as a way of explaining their resilience. To think of them as the Jarai do requires seeing that they act upon others even as they are themselves acted upon—they are repositories of history and participants in it at the same time. Understood as documents, as records of the past, the histories these cultivars tell are best thought of as garden-variety histories, everyday histories imbricated within larger processes of social and ecological change. Garden-variety histories are grounded in the ordinary, the everyday, the commonplace and unremarkable. When farmers at Tang Kadon recount the reintroduction of heirloom strains of rice and other cultivars into their farming system, they do not embrace heroic narratives of loss and recovery of the sort that sometimes attach to the history of rice reintroduction in the lowlands. The processes through which these different forms of plant life found their way back to upland swiddens were themselves small acts worked into the fabric of everyday life, and the histories that record them are likewise less exalted, more fragmented, and in many ways harder to see. The ordinary nature of these histories is itself significant. One way of writing the anthropology of postdisaster is to distinguish between the concepts of recovery and recuperation. Recovery conveys a sense of restitution, of radical reconfiguration to recapture what was taken, the replication of that which was lost. The IRRI team’s effort to establish a workable rice future for lowland Cambodia was steeped in notions of recovery, its principal aim being a kind of revolutionary replacement of the prewar system, albeit in ways amenable to capital, when all was said and done. Recuperation, in contrast, is a concept more open to incompleteness, and more heterogeneous both in what it brings forward into the present and in the actors and processes that effect this kind of change. The ordinary is a key dimension of processes of recuperation, implying both that which is lowly and that which is customary: ordinary as in nothing special, ordinary as in what is ordinarily done. The discontinuous and partial nature of the reconstituted ecologies of the highlands today, the emphasis that villagers place on the pragmatic action through which these ecologies have come to be established, and the fragmented forms of remembrance through which loss and what came after live on in everyday, garden-variety histories reflect the recuperative ethos that guided this collective but uncoordinated project. The reintroduction of diversity into the agricultural landscape of the northeast hills was accomplished through the ordinary actions of villagers moving seed from one place to another. The cumulative process resisted comprehensive understanding by those who participated, and was thus situated within an epistemology far - 

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different from the panoptic approach to systems thinking taken by IRRI and its allies. In the highlands, acts of recuperation were folded into the practice of everyday life, and were thus in many ways invisible to history. They remain accessible only as partial histories at best.

 Democratic Kampuchea became more unstable over time. As political leaders stoked resentment against the neighboring Vietnamese, tensions rose along the border. Increasingly concerned by the aggressive military stance adopted by the Khmer Rouge regime, socialist Vietnam began preparing an invasion of Kampuchea, seeking to “liberate” the country and place it within the ambit of Vietnamese hegemony on the Indochinese peninsula. At the same time, internal political strife within the Communist Party of Kampuchea found expression in a series of purges of local leaders and officials. Accused of collaborating with the Vietnamese, many of them were dispatched without ceremony, while others were called away “to study,” a euphemism for interrogation, torture, and execution. By , internal “sweeps” (boh somat, Kh.) had claimed much of the highlander Khmer Rouge leadership in the northeast region. Even highlanders who had been close to the revolution’s leaders during their years of struggle in Ratanakiri were called away to S-, Phnom Penh’s infamous prison and interrogation center. By , with the regime buckling from internal stresses, the Vietnamese escalated military pressure, and launched a full invasion at the end of that year. For the residents of the agricultural cooperatives in Ratanakiri’s northeast hill country, the escalation of armed conflict with Vietnam set off a series of events that would condition their lives for years to come. My friend Kơsor Tang remembered that it was in October of that year that the “upper level” (tanak loeu, Kh.) in Phnom Penh sent new military commanders to take control of Division , the unit of the Revolutionary Army of Kampuchea charged with overseeing security in the Northeast Zone. Tang recollected the horror he felt upon encountering the newly arrived chief, Tha Duơn (“grandfather” Duơn), and his deputies Tha Praw and Tha Thi. A fearsome character, Duơn had hair on his chest and an unshaved beard, signs of a certain dangerous potency for the Jarai. “He was an animal,” Tang told me. “I saw him and I was afraid.” In preparation for impending battle, the newly arrived military leaders rounded up villagers from all the sahakaw along the middle Sesan and relocated them en masse to a location on the O Tabok Stream near the Ta Veng District center. Tensions mounted as a final showdown with the Vietnamese 

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loomed. One victim of these tensions was Rahlan Hlăn, the district chief who had held political authority over the cooperatives along the Sesan between  and . He is reported to have ordered numerous people to their deaths during that time, and many people today speak of him with a mix of fear and revulsion. Hlăn soon found himself on the outs with the new military command. Accused of encouraging the residents of the encampment to go back to their old village sites, and of suggesting that the assembled Khmer Rouge forces “would never win against the Vietnamese,” Hlăn himself was summarily executed. Kơsor Tang was present when Hlăn was killed. He ran errands for Hlăn, and he told me Tha Praw and Tha Thi had first grabbed him when they came to purge the district chief. “Why are you grabbing me!?” Tang exclaimed. “I’m just doing small errands. Why grab the child? Grab the master.” Tha Thi let him go, and then escorted Hlăn at gunpoint to the edge of the forest and shot him with a pistol. Rumors circulated that after executing him, Tha Thi cut out Hlăn’s liver and threw it away (bah jaol, Kh.). In December the Vietnamese finally invaded, marching west along Route  from Pleiku on their way to capture Stung Treng. When Tha Duơn and his forces launched an attack on the column, the Vietnamese repulsed them, forcing them to retreat back to the O Tabok. There they established a defense of the large encampment, which was now home to three thousand villagers, soldiers, and their families. Villagers had been forced to leave behind livestock and much of the rice harvest from the previous agricultural season when Khmer Rouge soldiers had rounded them up. As the Vietnamese approached, food supplies ran dangerously low. When the soldiers finally ran out of ammunition, they withdrew to the west, taking with them whatever they could and eventually joining the remainder of the regime and its army in camps along Cambodia’s border with Thailand. Abandoned by Cambodian security forces and now liberated, the residents of Tang Kadon and their neighbors found themselves under the protection of the Vietnamese army, which provided rice and maintained security in the camp. Soon the Vietnamese moved the assembled villages downriver once again, this time to the town of Voeunsai. There they remained for two months, until finally, in June or July , the individual villages of the sahakaw were granted permission to reform and move back as close to their home territories as security concerns would allow. Tang Kadon was now free to move back east, but the hills north of the Sesan remained off-limits. The villagers wended their way to a site south of O Kop and north of Borkeo, along the road that Ơe Gun had “built” with the French just a few decades before and seemingly several wars ago. - 

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     In the months after the overthrow of Democratic Kampuchea, Cambodians found themselves faced with the very serious problem of food insecurity. By the middle of , international observers raised concerns that the chaotic situation in the country would lead to mass starvation. In response, international donors and relief agencies mobilized a humanitarian intervention on a massive scale. The United Nations High Commission for Refugees, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and UNICEF assumed key roles. The newly installed government of the People’s Republic of Kampuchea, now a client state of Vietnam, prohibited the aid agencies from accessing the Cambodian interior, fearing the relief effort would undermine its control over contested territory. The agencies’ response was to establish a “land bridge” into Cambodia for the provision of aid. From camps in Thailand along Cambodia’s northwest border, relief agencies distributed rice seed, tools, and other aid in large quantities to Cambodians, who arrived from the interior by the thousands to collect it and return to their villages. The response, freighted with Cold War–era geopolitical intrigue, played a significant role in shaping post–Khmer Rouge Cambodia. However, the seed rice was only distributed in time for the planting period of the  agricultural season. The intervention failed to address the immediate threat of mass starvation at the fall of the Democratic Kampuchea regime in early . Indeed, it is likely that reports of the imminent starvation of millions of Cambodians were overstated by the media at the time. In addition to limited supplies of food aid, those facing food scarcity that season relied especially heavily on forest resources to survive. The Thai border effort was the first and most significant early program of seed rice distribution to Cambodia, and was an important early source of rice germplasm for Cambodian farmers in the lowlands. The distribution of seed rice was incorporated into an ongoing food aid program, which by January  reached ten thousand individuals per day at the Nong Chan border camp. By June of that year, relief agencies had provided twenty-two thousand tons of seed rice to Cambodian farmers. Much of the seed rice provided as part of the aid program was a high-yielding variety known as IR, an irrigated rice developed by IRRI. IR had been successfully introduced in Indonesia and the Philippines by farmers occupying well-drained volcanic soils, but this variety was less well suited to the nonuniform diversity of floodplain ecosystems in the Mekong River basin, and was less easily used by farmers there. The agencies attempted to procure seed rice varieties that would be suitable to the rice-farming practices and growing conditions 

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prevalent in the areas of origin of those “walkers” who were arriving at the border camps. Relief workers took data on these and other factors for all visitors, and on the basis of this information purchased seed rice from Thai and international sources in appropriate ratios. The distribution program then provided farmers with seed rice deemed suitable to the zones where it would be planted. The government of the People’s Republic of Kampuchea in Phnom Penh, the socialist client state of neighboring Vietnam, was also engaged in various attempts to reconstitute the agricultural system. The new government had launched a broad set of policies intended to reestablish the Cambodian economy. These policies included provisions for a more moderate form of collectivized agriculture and the reintroduction of market exchange for agricultural produce. As early as , the government had brought in a number of Vietnamese experts to work on agricultural productivity and the question of rice seed stock. One focus of these endeavors was the introduction of high-yielding irrigated rice varieties developed by IRRI and obtained from Vietnam and Eastern bloc countries. This program was, however, limited to introductions at one or two demonstration villages, the best known of which was Kok Pophil, some thirty-three kilometers from Phnom Penh in Kandal Province. While experiments there obtained high productivity rates, they were most useful for propaganda purposes. In fact, the introduced varieties required capital-intensive techniques and inputs that Cambodian farmers could neither access nor afford in the cash-starved years of the immediate postwar. Even so, by the mid-s, government researchers were experimenting with several high-yielding rice varieties including IR, IR, and others at research stations and in village-based trials. Beginning in , at the government’s request, IRRI also began sending back to Cambodia some traditional Cambodian rice varieties that had been stored at its seed bank in the Philippines. In  the government launched a formal collaboration with IRRI, financed by the Australian government. Over the next fifteen years, the Cambodia-IRRI-Australia Project (CIAP) developed an institutionalized research and training program designed to restore the productivity of Cambodia’s badly damaged rice-production system. During that period, donors devoted more than  million to the project, which became the focal point for the recuperation of Cambodia’s rice productivity. CIAP was technically and institutionally grounded in the Green Revolution, the mid-twentieth-century effort to raise agricultural productivity worldwide through the development of fertilizers, pesticides, and “modern” high-yielding crop varieties. The commonly expressed notion that Cambodia - 

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had “skipped” the Green Revolution appeared to create an unusual opportunity: the crisis would compel otherwise conservative farmers to plant “improved” seed varieties at scale, overcoming the problems of slow adoption that plagued new crop introductions elsewhere. The narrative was revealing of a somewhat craven form of disaster developmentalism, echoing as it did the recently failed effort to achieve a “Super Great Leap Forward” in rice production under the Khmer Rouge. The notion that Cambodia had simply sat the Green Revolution out was also a misconception. While experiments with high-yielding varieties had been in their infancy in the prewar years, work with high-yielding varieties including IR had taken place at Cambodian research stations in the late s and early s. Even the improved variety known as “friendship rice” (srauv mittepheap, Kh.), developed by the Chinese and introduced by the Khmer Rouge, was still in use in some parts of Cambodia into the s. So Cambodian farmers were not complete novices when it came to the forms of experimentation, trialing, and other practices that constituted the Green Revolution’s stock-in-trade. The CIAP project engaged a variety of strategies to accomplish its goals. While the Khmer Rouge regime had set its sights on eliminating diversity and on forcing an unruly nature to conform to its vision of modernity, that effort is best understood as a project of rule, one that was never fully accomplished on the ground. Some traditional rice varieties were still in use in pockets across the country. CIAP collected, cataloged, and then used these existing strains of local rice varieties as part of a selective breeding program to develop new improved varieties. The program thus relied on the use of rice germplasm adapted to a diversity of Cambodian ecosystems. This was germplasm that had been conserved in situ in farmers’ fields, where it had not been eliminated during the turmoil of the previous decades. The project also relied on germplasm that had been preserved ex situ within the international seed banking system, which was one of the Green Revolution’s most important legacies. Initially, the seed banking system had not conserved much of Cambodia’s prewar rice diversity. In the late s the International Rice Gene Bank housed only fifty-five accessions of Cambodian rice varieties. In , as the region slipped further into war, IRRI sent a collecting mission to Cambodia, adding some five hundred varieties to the existing trove. Following its establishment, CIAP launched collecting efforts in the Cambodian countryside in the late s and early s, searching for rice varieties that had survived the Khmer Rouge agricultural program. These additions raised the total number of accessions to , varieties. This collection formed the basis of ongoing breeding and selection programs. CIAP released some of the traditional varieties from IRRI’s 

 

vaults directly to Cambodian farmers. However, the project’s main focus was the selective breeding of improved rice varieties. The project developed nine of these, named CAR through CAR, and made them available to Cambodian farmers along with existing irrigated rice varieties.

   In , ten years after the launch of the rice reintroduction program, Cambodia was once again producing more rice than it consumed. The country had not been self-sufficient in rice since before the Khmer Rouge revolution, and the CIAP program was hailed as a success story in the media and in development circles. Today, in various informational materials, IRRI points to the Cambodian intervention as an example of the importance of seed banking and the efficacy of Green Revolution technological advances. Accounts in popular media likewise extol the project’s accomplishments, according IRRI’s scientists a key role in the country’s recovery and presenting the project’s intervention as an uncomplicated story of a beneficial intervention by the global scientific community in the service of Cambodia’s development. While the project’s contribution to agricultural productivity in Cambodia is well established, questions remain about its impacts. One set of questions surrounds the project’s effects on social equity. When measured at a national, regional, or global scale, the productivity gains realized from green revolutions are impressive. The consumption side of the equation—more food and lower prices—appears to be a success. For producers, however, the gains are less clear. Benefits from Green Revolution technologies have generally been limited to those farmers or classes of farmers whose resource endowments, access to capital, and political power allow them to benefit. Green revolutions have not, for the most part, been successful in raising the prospects of small farmers. And for both large- and small-scale farmers, productivity gains have often been offset by declining prices for agricultural produce. In Cambodia, the use of improved seed varieties and other components of the “package” of technologies developed by IRRI and affiliated institutions favored wealthier farmers and those who produce predominantly for the market. These same technologies have often been out of reach of many poorer farmers, and the small farmers who have experimented with them have in some cases experienced decreased economic and food security. So, while CIAP’s interventions have surely improved Cambodia’s ability to feed itself, the positive benefits for Cambodia’s poorest farmers are far less clear. - 



A second set of questions surrounds the relationship of the rice reintroduction program to agroecology and to the maintenance of agrobiodiversity in Cambodia. Clearly, the existence of this diversity was crucial to the success of the project and to the post- rice recovery: it is only by collecting, cataloging, and preserving thousands of Cambodia’s rice varieties that CIAP was able to develop the improved varieties it promotes today. The IRRI seed bank played an important role in conserving rice diversity and making it available at a critical time. However, the promotion of high-yielding varieties along with other Green Revolution technological interventions incentivizes the intensive use of a few varieties of rice at the expense of hundreds or thousands of others, leading to dediversification, system-wide “genetic erosion,” and ecological instability. Advocates of the Green Revolution often invoke the language of diversity in support of the seed bank system. In Cambodia, practitioners held an ambivalent view of agroecological diversity. Toward the end of his tenure, Harry J. Nesbitt, the director of the CIAP program and a man often hailed as a savior of Cambodian agriculture, summarized the accomplishments of the rice reintroduction program. His comments are indicative of the program’s understandings of diversity and traditional farming systems. Pointing out that Cambodia in  was home to some two thousand varieties of rice across various ecosystems, Nesbitt suggested that “this large number indicates the undeveloped nature of plant breeding in the country.” These varieties, he went on, “tend to have low harvest indexes and are not responsive to improved conditions.” That is to say, while these numerous varieties had been developed over centuries of on-farm experimentation, insofar as they are not amenable to the other components of the modernization package advocated by IRRI and allied institutions, the existence of diversity here provided evidence of the country’s stagnation in the field of agriculture. The CIAP program, together with efforts by other government agencies and their partners, had a profound impact on rice agriculture in Cambodia. These effects are visible in the distribution of specific rice varieties across the Cambodian landscape today and in the techniques used to farm them. Yet as CIAP’s survey and catalog of rice varieties demonstrated, pockets of crop diversity had survived the upheavals of Democratic Kampuchea. The product of numerous acts by individual farmers, these contributions to recovery in Cambodia have received far less attention than that lavished on relief agencies and teams of technical experts. Some documentation of these processes does exist. One pathway for reintroduction involved local farmers fleeing across international borders and 

 

taking their rice seed with them. In one recorded case, ethnic Vietnamese farmers practicing deepwater rice agriculture in Prey Veng Province were expelled when the Khmer Rouge took power in . They fled to Vietnam, taking rice seed with them. In  villagers who had stayed behind, and who had survived the revolution, traveled to Vietnam to locate their former neighbors and bring seed from some traditional varieties back to Cambodia. In another case from the same area, farmers discovered abandoned landrace varieties growing as uncultivated “volunteers” near old field sites and were able to use them to produce seed. The multiple, uncoordinated actions of individual farmers stand in contrast to state-backed efforts to recuperate Cambodia’s damaged agricultural system. Not only do these two approaches employ different practices; they also differ in their political and economic logics, and in their epistemologies. In Cambodia’s northeast highlands, where prohibitions on nonsanctioned agricultural practices were reinforced by translocations to entirely new ecological settings, the interruption of swidden-based agroecologies had been severe. And yet the state-centric approach adopted by CIAP was not pursued there, surely because the region was considered marginal from the perspective of agricultural productivity. Highlanders were largely left to reestablish their farming systems on their own.

    The rice fields of Cambodia’s lowlands are repositories not just of genetic information but also of histories. They tell stories of powerful institutions and of myriad small players whose actions together composed the landscape we know today. And in the highlands? What kinds of histories might be conserved in the swiddens of Tang Kadon? Highland farmers cultivate the past when they tend their fields, bringing to bear not only powers of memory but also an agency of cultivating, of selecting, of modifying and sustaining life and memory together. And they do this in a world in which crop plants themselves—exhibiting a vitality not unconnected to their status as bearers of souls (bơngăt)—exert powers of regeneration. In the mid-s, when researchers began working in the northeast hills for the first time in thirty years, a series of reports suggested that highlanders had begun putting their extensive farming systems back together again. One study of Brao farmers in Voeunsai and Ta Veng Districts documented thirty-six named varieties of rice across two villages, and noted that farmers there cultivated between sixty and one hundred varieties of plants, not including rice, in a single one-hectare plot. - 



After about a year of working at Tang Kadon, my own list of plants used by the Jarai as food or for economic purposes ran to the hundreds. At one point in my research, I assisted biologist Peou Youleang of the Royal University of Phnom Penh as she taught Jarai youths to collect botanical specimens for the university’s herbarium. In only a few days of collecting, we identified over  farm and forest plant species known and used by villagers at Tang Kadon. A complete list would number far higher. There were numerous different rice varieties on my list. It seemed that whenever I attended a ceremony or was invited to eat at someone’s house, I would learn of a new type of rice. They tasted different, they smelled different, their grains were of different sizes and different colors, and some were easier and some were harder to pound or winnow. Visits to swidden fields turned up additional varieties, and suggested an entirely new set of criteria for distinguishing among them. From a farming perspective, the different varieties could be distinguished by characteristics such as the months when they should be harvested, the soil types they preferred, and their suitability for farming in dry conditions or in swamplands. I would eventually record twenty-four varieties of rice managed in a village of  people, divided among sixty khul, the family groups that farm together and eat at the same hearth together. The villages nearby reported dozens more. Where had these different strains of rice come from? What was the story of these and the hundreds of other named varieties of crops farmed at Tang Kadon? I initiated a survey with the help of Rahlan Beo, who worked with me, to methodically track down the origins of the various cultivars in farmers’ fields. Our method was to start with one named variety of rice, and to trace the chain of custody of that strain from farmer to farmer, following the journey it had taken from somewhere else into the swidden fields of the village. When we asked farmers where they had originally obtained certain seeds or plantings, they would often reply “I got these from my mother” or “My uncle gave these to me.” Beo explained to me that one of the rice varieties he farmed came from seed stock his father-in-law, Kơsor Hĕp, had obtained from nearby Tampuan highlanders during the mid-s. The next day we went to visit Hĕp and learn the story of the seed. Born in , Hĕp spent his youth in a country at war. In , in the final days of Democratic Kampuchea, he married his wife, Srin. Their first child, a daughter, was born in . By the time we spoke with him, he was in his early fifties, the father of three daughters and five sons, and a grandfather of five. An imposing figure, Hĕp was physically strong and so reserved that he often remained silent while visitors sat conversing on the hiao of his longhouse. When he did speak, it was in a quiet voice that commanded attention. 

 

He was not a natural raconteur, as so many Jarai men and women seemed to be. Even so, I was surprised by the brevity of his response to my question about the rice varieties Beo had obtained from him. “I got some rice seed [pơjeh daih] from the Tampuan in Borkeo,” Hĕp told me. That was it. He did not elaborate or embellish; no further information was forthcoming. It was only after Beo and I asked numerous follow-up questions that we were able to put the story together in somewhat greater detail. The year was , and the Tang Kadon villagers had recently moved to a site in Borkeo District, at the top of a hill some fifteen kilometers south of O Kop. They believed it would be a temporary village site, located as it was on the edge of a small rubber plantation left over from the Sihanouk era. In actual fact, they would remain there for almost a decade, in an area where Kacŏ, Tampuan, and Jarai villages were intermingled. In the early s this situation was complicated by the large numbers of individuals, families, and whole villages in motion after the fall of Democratic Kampuchea. On a trip to the small district town of Borkeo, Hĕp met residents of Lung Khung Village who were willing to provide him with some rice seed if he would agree to weave some rice-carrying baskets (reo) for them. He was in a good position to undertake this exchange because he had access to metal tools that were in short supply at the time, a bush knife (hră) and a smaller knife known as a thong used for cutting and stripping bamboo. He spent the next several days making the baskets, at the end of which he returned home with two baskets full of seed rice. The variety in question had a Tampuan name when he received it, but it was known to be an equivalent to the rice variety that the Jarai of Tang Kadon call daih chông—the name translates as “right side rice,” although no one really knows why. Hĕp’s story resonated with the recollections of other villagers who told me of similar requests they had made for seed at the time. One man I spoke with, Seio Hlurl, told me that the people of neighboring villages had “gathered seed in the skin of a buffalo” for the people of Tang Kadon. This he meant metaphorically. Hlurl was an older man who had narrated numerous folk histories (kơloi akhan) for me, and his use of the phrase leng daih, kơli bao was a reference to the story of the founders of Tang Kadon, who had arrived in the northeast hills fleeing slavery and who received hospitality, protection, and rice seed from highlanders already living there. This mythic tale of deliverance took on new meaning in light of the struggles of presentday villagers to overcome the hardships of the mid-twentieth century. These stories confirmed the basic mechanism through which the farmers of Tang Kadon began putting their farming system together again. Even with the village in motion, they were slowly collecting varieties of rice and other - 



 . One of the village men who collected rice varieties in the s (right), with his son and a friend. Photo by Kevin Morris.

crops as they made their way back up to the hills. These varieties either had been cultivated in very small quantities at the sahakaw or had remained in place in locations where a cooperative chief had not closely followed directives. The imposition of the sahakaw system had been uneven, and the experience of complete relocation from upland to lowland had not been the norm across the entire northeast. Villagers also made any number of trips across the border to Vietnam and Laos. These journeys usually were not undertaken for the express purpose of locating seed. During the war and into the Khmer Rouge period, families and indeed whole villages had fled across the border to Vietnam. Following the fall of the regime, Jarai villagers from Cambodia were once again able to cross over into Kontum and Gia Lai (formerly Pleiku) Provinces in Vietnam to reconnect with their relatives, trading partners, and jiang allies. In subsequent years one of the most important reasons Jarai from Cambodia would undertake these trips was to obtain gongs and ceramic jars, the highly valued trade items used in Jarai ritual. The Khmer Rouge had destroyed many of these items, and people were eager to obtain them again as they returned to their traditional rituals and ceremonies. Often people came back from these trips with seeds or cuttings or indeed whole plants pulled from the ground with their root-balls intact. 

 

Once I began talking with farmers at Tang Kadon about how they obtain rice seed and other crop varieties, it became apparent that the practice was going on all around me—there was a constant flow of plants in and out of the village. During my time in Tang Kadon, I was witness to numerous such exchanges, and was told about many more. One day, for example, I spied a planting of Lao mint, or ăc lao (Mentha arvensis), on the landing of Kơsor Twek’s longhouse. The chief of the border police post on the Sesan River had recently added cashew smuggling to his main business of shipping illegal timber across the river to Vietnam. Twek had gone to see him to arrange to sell some cashews. Having just hauled two massive canvas sacks (bao) of the nut to the post on his motorbike, Twek spied a nice-looking mint plant growing outside the post’s barracks. He asked for a seedling and was given one as a gift, and he had brought it back and planted it, here on the landing of his house. On another occasion I was walking to the village when I came upon Kơsor Plang in the road, a tied bundle of cassava (Manihot esculenta) cuttings under one arm. Previously, only three varieties of cassava were cultivated at Tang Kadon: “ear” cassava, or kơleng mngai, the edible tuber of which is small and curvy; a variety known just as “cassava,” or kơleng, which Plang refers to as “just normal cassava,” or kơleng doic; and “strong” cassava, or kơleng tang, a variety with red leaves. Plang had just obtained the variety he was carrying from the village of Plơi Bpi in Vietnam. The new variety is a bitter cassava sold for use in industrial processes and is called kơleng hñă. The name is suggestive of the way the Jarai pronounce “Bơhñar,” the highland ethnic minority situated to the northeast of Jarai territory in Vietnam. This is a speculative etymology, one that might hint at the origins of this cassava or might not. But the residents of Tang Kadon do not know the origin of the variety name, nor do they themselves recognize the word hñă to be the same as Bơhñar. They just know that when it comes to this particular cassava, “the Vietnamese love to buy it,” as Plang tells me, which is one reason why it is also sometimes just called “selling cassava,” or kơleng bwa.

   Rahlan Beo, who worked with me as a research assistant, was growing daih chông at his field. This was the so-called “right side rice” that Hĕp had obtained from Tampuan farmers in the s. Were these plants, then, the bearers of a history of recovery? Could one reconstruct the social history of the village by starting with the story of the seed? Yes and no. On the one hand, Beo had himself known of Hĕp’s journey, and he made an association - 



between the rice he was growing in his field and that moment in time. The rice indeed “signified,” and clearly the variety is closely associated with Hĕp’s journey in the minds of some people. Like many plants growing at Tang Kadon, this rice makes a connection between histories of rice recuperation and histories of the reconstitution of society after the Khmer Rouge. On the other hand, it is not really clear to anyone in the village that the specific seed Beo had planted could be linked directly back to those original seeds retrieved by Hĕp. Indeed, it quickly became apparent that the entire survey method I had devised for tracing the chain of custody of rice seed from person to person was based on an unrealistic understanding of the seed system. As Hĕp and other farmers explained to us, exchanges happen too frequently for anyone to possess all of the specific histories of the plants in their own fields. A single crop variety may trade hands numerous times, and a farmer may abandon a nonperforming variety one year, only to obtain it again from a relative in a subsequent year. Much as you would be hardpressed to remember what you ate for breakfast two Thursdays ago, the exchange of seeds was an entirely ordinary act. Certain acts, certain gifts of seed, were worthy of remembrance. But it was beyond anyone’s ability to provide an accounting of the long history of exchanges they had made over the course of the past several years, let alone decades. Describing the way farmers in the village obtain pơjeh, a word that means both seed and variety (of a cultivar), Beo tells me that when it comes to seed, “They throw it away, over and over”—“Mă lui, mă lui pơkah pơkah.” What he means is that farmers are constantly trying out new varieties, and are constantly abandoning those that do not perform. When the seed system is functioning well, the abundance of varieties found throughout the village and in neighboring villages ensures that a variety that has been tried out and found wanting can be “thrown away” without fear that it will be permanently lost. Today, Tang Kadon farmers use more than twenty different named varieties of rice, including glutinous and non-glutinous, early and late-maturing, and dry, swamp, and paddy varieties (table .). The experience of Seio Sơn and her husband, Rahlan Juơn, helps to illustrate a typical pattern of varietal use among the Jarai. This older couple, born in the late s, farm together as a khul of only two people, sometimes receiving help from children or grandchildren. Reflecting back on the experience of the village, Sơn noted that they now have access to all the varieties that were prevalent in the village before the war. Her husband agreed with this assessment, and suggested that this was the case for the whole village and beyond. They told me that in  they had planted only two rice varieties, daih tơngal and daih bak. The next year they added daih kravet, a variety 

 

 .. Rice varieties used in Tang Kadon, –

  (early maturing)

  (non-glutinous varieties)

  (glutinous varieties)

daih bak

daih ñal cheng

daih djut

daih ñal chông

daih drâo

daih ñal hoiñ

daih glă

daih ñal ieh

daih gol (swamp)*

daih ñal kơtoh

daih iao

daih ñal lăng

daih khơm

daih ñal lăng bla

daih kok

daih ñal lao

daih kravet

daih ñal lô

daih sơvan

daih ñal man

daih yin

daih ñal non

daih yintô

 

 ơ (late-maturing)

daih tơngal

  (paddy rice)

daih gol (paddy)* daih kơchĕ (commonly called daih ña)

 

: Based on direct observation and villagers’ reports. *Daih gol is used both in rain-fed rice paddies and in swampy bottomland swiddens.

named after the Kavet (or “kravet” as they pronounce it), the Brao-speaking group that lives to the east, who are recognized as the long-ago source of this strain of rice. But in , a year in which they did not cut any new swiddens, they abandoned daih bak and daih kravet. Like most early maturing or “lightweight” rices, these varieties are better suited to newly cut fields, where they can be interplanted with numerous vegetable crops. Sơn and Juơn held on to daih tơngal, a “heavy” rice that is one of only two varieties planted in the second and third year of a swidden’s use (the other is daih ñal chông). The number of plants that can be intercropped in those years is limited, and in second- and third-year swiddens one often finds daih tơngal planted together with maize (Zea mays) and with the hearty market crop sesame (Sesamum indicum). “We never throw that one away,” Sơn says of daih tơngal. Indeed, it makes up the majority of the harvest in the village (table .). - 



 .. Size of harvest of most frequently used rice varieties,    daih tơngal

      ()   ( )    ,



daih gol (swamp)

,



daih gol (paddy)

,



daih ñal hoiñ

,



daih ñal chông

,



daih drâo





daih bak





daih khơm





daih na (paddy)





daih djut





: Based on measured weight of unhusked rice held in the granaries of  out of  khul at the end of the  agricultural season ( khul were not surveyed). Varieties harvested in amounts necessitating storage only in a canvas sack (bao) are not represented.

Obtaining seed is often a matter of just asking for it from a friend or relative. Indeed, seed must be given as a gift, and it is kŏm (prohibited) for the transfer of seed to involve payment or to be subjected to formal accountkeeping. In part because of these prohibitions, the transfer of seed maps to social distance: gifts of seed most often involve partners connected by ties of kinship, friendship, or ritual alliance. However, social norms reinforce generosity in giving rice. Those who have successful harvests are expected to provide gifts of daih (unhusked rice) quite freely, a practice that not only contributes to the general availability of seed but also ensures that the bestperforming varieties proliferate. Seed can also be transferred through the widespread practice of the exchange of labor at harvest time, bwă pơlih, a practice that is likewise most common between closely related households. When a youth from one family harvests rice in another’s field, the host is obligated to reciprocate with labor at another time, and also rewards the worker with one basket of rice for each day of labor performed. As Hĕp’s account of his journey suggests, at least in times of hardship the circle of exchange extends beyond close kin to acquaintances, and in these situations the prohibition on explicit exchange of goods or services for seed is relaxed. Moments of crisis serve to push the exchange 

 

 . A woman harvests rice at Tang Kadon. Photo by the author.

of rice out of the circle of the village and kin network into circles of greater social distance; in the process, the mode of exchange moves from generalized reciprocity, in which individuals give freely, to a balanced reciprocity, a form of exchange in which the different parties keep track of and seek to ensure parity in the value of exchanged items. Ironically, “throwing away rice” is one of the principal means through which farmers maintain diversity in their seed system. As one of two principal mechanisms for seed selection, a propensity to dispose of seed is a management tool for maintaining varieties within the larger farming network, since it ensures that only the strains of a given named variety that are best suited to a locale are maintained in the system. Because farmers also consider the extent to which a rice variety conforms to the perceived identity of that rice—for instance, with regard to its color, taste, or other properties— selection allows for the maintenance of distinction between different varieties. This intervarietal selection for rice, that is, throwing away nonperforming varieties and experimenting to find the existing variety best suited to - 



specific site conditions, is accompanied by a corresponding selection process at the intravarietal scale. Tang Kadon’s farmers harvest rice by handstripping grains from rice panicles directly into small baskets they wear tucked into sashes tied around their waists (figure .). No sickles are used, and there is no further threshing of the grain. On rare occasions, prior to harvesting, a farmer will identify specific stalks of rice that appear to have fared well, having grown profusely in a specific setting, and will retain grain from those specific stalks for use as seed in the following year. More often, farmers select rice for seed after harvesting all rice of a single variety from a field and storing it in a granary. This is the principal means of seed selection, and involves winnowing the newly harvested rice to select the heaviest grains, which are then reserved for planting in the next season. These processes of obtaining, selecting, and throwing away seed are critical practices through which farmers maintain the diversity of rice and other cultivars in use in the northeast hills today. Seed exchange forms a component of the social and trading networks that link highlanders to each other and extend well beyond the immediate confines of the village. This helps to answer the question of how so many named varieties of rice and other crops are available system-wide, when individual farmers might cultivate only a few of these varieties at a given time. The exchange and transport of seed is so frequent and indeed so ordinary that nothing approaching a full accounting is possible. Yet the accretion of these acts is responsible for the rapid reestablishment of agroecological diversity throughout the highlands after the fall of Democratic Kampuchea.

  The reconstitution of Cambodia’s farming system in the aftermath of war and collectivization was remarkable. From the efforts of relief agencies, multilateral consortia, and governments to the innumerable acts carried out by individual farmers, a wide range of practices at multiple scales transformed the country’s productive landscape. While the efforts of IRRI and its partners have been heralded in the media and in international development circles as an example of the efficacy of the international seed bank system, the small acts of recuperation undertaken by Cambodia’s smallholders have gone widely unremarked. It is not surprising that farmers’ accomplishments recuperating a diverse and vibrant farming system are not fully appreciated by Western audiences as the remarkable achievement that they represent: knowledge about swidden agriculture is famously structured by a “political economy of ignorance” that reflects the interests of those in power. 

 

What is surprising is that even among the Jarai themselves, histories of rice recuperation can go unacknowledged or are expressed in partial and sometimes muted ways. The landscape today records the story of the past in the form of the cultivated plants that grow in farmers’ fields. For farmers, these crops are markers of history, and their presence in the landscape makes memory material, signifying a set of understandings about the past. Garden-variety histories, in this case, are products of everyday, ordinary action. While the cumulative effect of these incremental actions has been the rapid rediversification of upland agroecology—a transformation of startling proportions, and one that reveals the dynamism and vitality of the swidden system—in practice this outcome has remained, if not hidden, then understated. This is all the more surprising given the important place of agriculture, and especially of rice, at the center of Jarai cultural and ritual life. The ritual calendar, for instance, marks the various stages in the annual cycle of the rice plant with ceremonies that invoke the spirit of rice and consecrate humans’ relations to the plant. Likewise, the Jarai language is replete with agricultural vocabulary used to make sense of human social relationships. To refer to two individuals from the same matrilineal descent group, for instance, you can say in Jarai that the two are “of the same seed” (pơjeh ñu ha tŏ nŭn bơi). As it is throughout the region, rice is sacred and central to Jarai culture. It is at the same time ubiquitous to the point of being disposable—so much so that farmers would regularly and without ceremony “throw away seed.” There is, we might say, a surfeit of history in a Jarai farm field. One can hardly keep track of it all. Throughout the region, this practice of throwing away seed is common to farming communities that maintain high levels of varietal diversity. This notion, that seed is ultimately disposable, runs counter to the ways that acts of preservation are often imagined. Popular discourse about noncommercial farmers and their role in conserving agrobiodiversity tends to emphasize the sanctity of seed and the heroism of seed savers. The best-known proponent of this view is activist and public intellectual Vandana Shiva, who has raised concerns about the ways that globalization and the Green Revolution conspire to eliminate diversity from agroecosystems. Praising seed-saving practices by villagers in the global South and community seed banks in the North, advocates for seed saving as a diversity conservation technique valorize the preservation of seed and discourage farmers from abandoning landraces and heirloom varieties. In some ways these approaches mirror the conservation ethos of the IRRI seed-banking initiative—cataloging libraries of genetic material and preserving it, ex situ, for future use. - 



Discussions with farmers about the reintroduction of rice at Tang Kadon do not elicit the same kinds of heroic narratives that have attached to Cambodia’s IRRI rice-reintroduction project. Rather, villagers describe their approach to farming in the postwar as a form of everyday practice. Seen in this way, the reestablishment of agroecological diversity in the landscape of the northeast hills suggests a postdisaster ethos of “recuperation” as opposed to “recovery,” and aligns well with the emphasis this mode of practice places on the forms of “ordinary” action through which fragments of the past are brought forward into the present for use within processes of renewal.



 

Conclusion Fragments Shored against Ruins

I

 April  I visited Tang Kadon Village after a year away, hoping to track down the exact locations of the agricultural cooperatives along the Sesan River where villagers had been settled by the Khmer Rouge in the s. The sahakaw had been mostly abandoned after . I had a vague sense of them, out there in the landscape, now grown over with brush, used for grazing livestock or other purposes. A few families still farmed rice on some of these sites, their small houses clustered among nonfunctioning earthworks and hydraulic schemes of an earlier time. But I had never visited them, until I set off with Rahlan Beo to record their locations. Beo and I had undertaken similar expeditions in the past, searching out old village sites and abandoned cemeteries in the forests that stretch between Tang Kadon and the Vietnam border. Before marrying, Jarai men spend long periods of their youth and young adulthood in wandering, both from village to village and in the forest. Even after marriage, Jarai men would often leave day-to-day farming activities to their wives, preferring to range far and wide across the landscape, searching for resources and also for adventure. So Beo was familiar with these forests in the way that one is familiar with one’s own neighborhood. What to my eye appeared as an almost undifferentiated expanse of dipterocarp trees and liana thickets spread out across a broad basaltic plateau was for him a personally and culturally specific landscape. It was furthermore a social landscape inhabited by yang, the spirits of trees, rivers, stones, and earth, and a landscape that retained the lingering presence of past events, the memories of recent and more distant historical occurrences. It was the dry season and the roads and single tracks were much improved from even a few years before. Beo rode his small motorbike and I followed 

behind, eating his dust as he guided me through the territory of several villages, mostly sticking to the now parched bottomlands along the Sesan River. Beo knows the locations of all of the old sahakaw, arranged west to east along the river, and we reached the first several locations without incident. Today, scrub forest dominates several of these sites, but Beo can still pick out the odd features of the land that betray their history. The elevated berm that extends in a straight line was a road built to withstand annual floods. The old concrete structure to the side of the roadway was once part of a floodgate, but is now completely unused. At M- we maneuvered our motorbikes down a steep gully to a mostly open patch of dirt surrounded by a few deciduous trees that had recently dropped their leaves. I asked Beo what the place is used for now. “Nothing,” he replied. I took a few photographs, and a GPS reading, and we moved on. Beo and I referred to these old sites by their Khmer Rouge–era names as we checked them off our list. But many of them retain names from earlier times, and he used these names, too, as the context of the conversation required. The sahakaw were mostly sited in seasonally inundated flatlands, which the Jarai call jaol. These are useful features of the landscape, suitable for farming paddy rice or swamp rice varieties or for grazing livestock, and the histories of these jaol extended back well before the Khmer Rouge era. The four large fields of the M- cooperative, for instance, are known as Jaol Lŏk, Jaol Klôt, Jaol Bwok, and Jaol Dwăn, places named after owners from long ago. Similarly, the site of the M- cooperative is today more often called by its earlier name, Jaol Hrĭn, a reference to the famous chief who played a key role in the Jarai settlement of this area in the early nineteenth century. Beo explained that it was Hrĭn’s hlun, his slaves, who had worked these fields. Khmer Rouge planners had been explicit about their desire to obliterate history, and about their intentions to replace the particularist landscape of the past with a regimented modern grid. But here, in this place that is still remembered as Hrĭn’s field, regimes of violence and labor control from an earlier era retained their hold on the landscape. At M- and M- the accretion of land-use formations and historical meanings became increasingly complex. Here village control of the old sites had recently been ceded to firms pursuing new land-use strategies. Technology and capital were more evident here, where new roads and heavy machinery were changing the landscape. Beo took us along the route he knew, following the Ding Pa stream down into Jaol Dil, the wetland field where farmers at M- grew rice. This collective, to which Ket, Nhang, Tang-A, and Chai Villages had been relocated, was notorious for the cruelty of its leaders, especially the young deputy chief who had been only a very young man at 



the time, and who still plays an active role in local politics. Today the Jaol Dil is owned by the Taichu company, a Taiwanese firm engaged in commercial rice production. The company operates a small facility here, housed in a ramshackle building surrounded by a metal fence that already shows signs of wear, only a year or two into its life. A ride farther to the west takes us, after some time, to the wide open field that was once the M- cooperative. A company with links to the provincial government has obtained this land as a concession, and today the Jaol Tơlglah is in a process of transformation. Tied bundles of cassava, the first year’s harvest, stand at regular intervals across an extent of tractor-cleared and now hardened soil. Elsewhere, fires smolder among a few standing trees, the smoke signaling ongoing efforts at “improvement.” Three men, who may or may not work for the land’s new owners, regard us with suspicion as we take a photo and move on. It is when we proceed to M- that things take a turn for the surreal. The old sahakaw sits at the foot of Chĭ Bơdŭ, an isolated hill emerging from the lowland plain and an easily recognizable landmark. As we draw closer to the hill, we take a few wrong turns. The roads here are new and unfamiliar. What is worse, the forest has been wholly removed from this area, including from the hill itself. “There used to be forest here,” Beo explains, frustrated, as we turn around again. The absence of forest foreshortens and rescales distances—the hill is now visible from much farther away than it ever was, yet it seems smaller at the same time, the lack of forest cover reducing its solidity. For whatever reason, we cannot get to the hill, so we cannot make our way to the old collective. The road here is surrounded by rubber saplings planted at regular intervals. This land is part of a new plantation owned by the Hoang Anh Gia Lai (HAGL) company. The trees are one year old, and they seem to have been abandoned here. There is no one around to tend them and the ground beneath them has not been weeded. We turn left at a crossroad, and continue on, coming to yet another four-way intersection. It dawns on us that we have entered a landscape of uniform blocks, each composed of rubber saplings set out evenly in rows. Even with the Chĭ Bơdŭ hill plainly in sight, we cannot figure out how to orient ourselves, how to move from one place in this landscape to another. The forest here was formerly known to Beo: its irregularities distinguished one place from another and told you where you were. But now the semiosis has been stripped from the land. A landscape of rows and columns, a spreadsheet of ones and zeros, has replaced the old analog one, and the result is unintelligible to him. Memory, too, has been displaced from the land. We cannot find the killing fields. 



In the northeast highlands, change has come quickly. Across a fractured landscape of barren hills edged by the remnants of fragmented forests, swaths of newly exposed soil reveal the imposition of a new ecology. The pattern is by now familiar. Once the forests are cleared, saplings planted by laborers imported from elsewhere arise in grid-like formation, dotted outlines of a future geometry of power. Soon, this place will look like other places nearby, where regimented arrays of Hevea brasiliensis have already claimed broad expanses of territory, the rows of young trees mesmerizing to those who drive by on newly surfaced roads. As rubber stretches out across the northeast highlands, it displaces smallholder farming, uprooting fallow forest and farm field alike. The spread of rubber reveals the operation of capital, the work of politics, the outcome of contestation and struggle. Today, rubber is history, written on the land. For the inhabitants of Cambodia’s northeast highlands, the changes wrought by rubber have been rapid, and often devastating. As a friend at Tang Kadon put it to me, “It is as if the world had disappeared.” The powers of a new world are at work here now, disassembling forms of life and meaning that once organized this place, piecing together new ecologies from the fragments of the old. The forces of obliteration and oblivion are once again reshaping the landscape of the northeast hills. This is a violent reordering, to be sure. Throughout Cambodia, conflicts over land have erupted in confrontations in recent years. Police in riot gear do the work of the present regime, riding on the tractors of foreign rubber companies and property developers with close personal ties to the powerful family of the prime minister, clearing the way as the machines crush the homes and shops of residents. Protesters are clubbed and jailed. On numerous occasions police have fired live ammunition into crowds, killing those who refused to be displaced. While today capital asserts itself in ways that are new to this place, the layered presences that remain active in the landscape of the northeast hills speak to continuities in the mechanics of social and ecological change. To think conjuncturally about the changes now taking place is to recognize the changing form of the highland landscape as a physical expression of the political, economic, and other historical forces that operate to shape the lives of its residents and their environment. The perdurance of the past in the ecologies of the present bears witness to shifting arrangements of the social and environmental order, even as forms of fragmentation and forgetting modulate memory. It is precisely because the landscape is formed through the coming together of social and ecological processes that it serves as a repository of 



history. This book has been organized around a series of historical conjunctures, from the precolonial resource frontier of Dŭ Hrĭn’s time to the territorial contestations of Sihanouk’s Khmerization campaign, from the destructive terror of the American bombing and land invasion of Cambodia, to Khmer Rouge efforts to erase the past through the regimentation of the landscape, and on to the mostly untold story of the recuperation of agroecologically diverse swidden farming in the hills. The landscape figured prominently in each of these moments, as a terrain upon which these projects were enacted, and as a force in its own right within these historical processes. In each historical moment, the forces reshaping society reshaped the landscape too. The political and economic logic of each regime found expression in a project directed toward people’s relationship to the land, and the forms of action taken by different parties within each successive moment lived on ecologically, and in memory, into the next. Fragments of past ecologies in the northeast hills provide openings for narrating marginal and subaltern histories. The abandoned village sites known as ngol that are spread across the forested territory of Tang Kadon Village live on in the present, allowing today’s residents to speak with authority about the aggression of foreign powers. The small stand of trees that Kơsor Twek contends with in his swidden field offers a corrective to those who asserted that northeast Cambodia was uninhabited. Ngol Mi Chuh, the village the Americans burned, marks the work of “those American pricks” on the land, and on the lives of those who once inhabited the longhouses that stood there. The telling of the past enabled by traces on the land forecloses the possibility that these places were “classic Viet Minh hooches,” as the version recorded in military history might have it. Yet it is not merely the preservation of “living history” that these sites allow for. The parted-out elements of old stories provide the material for new readings of past and present. The ethos of mutual aid in precarious times that is expressed in the concept of “gathering rice in the skin of the buffalo” encapsulates the moment when residents of Plơi Ket rendered assistance to the founders of Tang Village in the early nineteenth century. Today the ethos lives on, and the phrase provides a framework for understanding the everyday processes through which agroecologies in the northeast hills were reestablished following the fall of Democratic Kampuchea. In the same way, past landscapes may also be parted out as they take on new roles in present ecologies. Plants like American thorn (drơi Mi) and airplane weed (hruơk se) perform metonymic reenactments of the American invasion of Cambodia, in vegetal form, providing observers with openings onto the past. What is perhaps most interesting about them is not their constancy, their ability to 



 . Termite trails create a track of tears on the face of this carving in a village cemetery. Photo by the author.

preserve the past, but rather their changing nature. They are more interesting for being mundane, for demonstrating the ubiquity of the war in structuring the world that residents of Tang Kadon inhabit. The specific meanings attached to them may fade or shift within contingent reworkings of landscape and society in the future, and it is this mutability that is their most instructive feature. For the Jarai of Tang Kadon Village, the land is more than a source of livelihood. Composed not only of hill and river, rock and soil, the landscape is the terrain of various social actors, the plants and animals that are also bearers of souls (bơngăt) and which might possess malignant or benevolent powers, and spirits and the dead, invisible to humans but able to produce material outcomes in the world. For the residents of the northeast hills, the landscape is also a source of stories through which to understand history and their place in it. Histories from the hills, some more fragmentary than others, some more complete, offer new perspectives on this region’s past. Official histories of the reintroduction of rice diversity narrate in heroic terms the actions of international institutions and aid agencies operating according to statecentric, ex situ models of action under the sign of recovery. In contrast, highlanders’ numerous small acts undertaken within a recuperative mode 



are recorded in the composition of their farms and gardens, in the names given to different rice varieties and in the stories that attach to them. The ordinary logics governing practices like throwing away seed demonstrate the potential for entirely different forms of knowledge and power to reconstitute vibrant ecologies. State-sanctioned projects to reorder nature and society in the highlands have been based on powerful misrepresentations. Official understandings, colonial narratives, and the structures of meaning that predominate in lowland society depict the northeast hills as a region of backwardness, an uncivilized zone of not-fully-human sociality. These are powerful stories, and their persistence has bolstered heavy-handed state interventions into social and ecological life, providing an explanatory framework upon which to base such projects as the resettlement of highland villages into more “orderly” arrangements, closer to rivers, roads, and social services, for example, projects that conveniently enable greater surveillance and control by the state. Military resettlement schemes, administrative reorderings, and the establishment of state territoriality, government-backed rubber estates, agricultural cooperatives, the promotion of inundated rice agriculture— all of these characteristic forms of intervention, and the violence with which they have been imposed, have been premised on the kinds of official histories and dominant understandings that ignore highlanders’ own perspectives on the past and its meanings. Histories from the hills, inscribed on the landscape in often fragmentary form, base themselves in different facts and narrate different perspectives on the region’s past than do histories written by more powerful groups and institutions. Reading the landscape along with the highland residents who know it the best, one gains a sense for the ingenuity with which they have negotiated the historical challenges they’ve faced. One comes to recognize how living with the land differs from imposing mastery over it, how living with the land is also a way of living with the past.







  See, e.g., Davis, Imperial Bandits; Lentz, Contested Territory; Wade, Myanmar’s Enemy Within; Guillou, “Thread of Continuity.”  A term referring to the voices mostly excluded from official and other elite archives, and thereby absent from history based on such sources, made memorable in his work by Ranajit Guha, Small Voice of History.  Nora, Realms of Memory; Schama, Landscape and Memory.  Uk, Salvage.  Scott, Art of Not Being Governed.

  Cupet, “Chez les populations sauvages,” .

  One hundred years ago the French missionary and scholar Léopold Cadière recorded similar beliefs among the Kinh ethnic majority in Vietnam (then Annam), who kept their eyes closed in the presence of this epiphyte and would not cut down a tree that was host to one, for fear that the plant’s spirit would take revenge on them. Cadière, “Croyances et pratiques religieuses,” .  Dy Phon, Dictionnaire des plantes utilisées au Cambodge, .  Hennipman and Roos, Fern Genus Platycerium.  Marx suggests that workers “confront” the products of their own labor in either alienated or unalienated forms. So, too, do people in the northeast hills encounter the human-modified natural world not only as a product 



 







 



of their own creative energies but also as formed by other agencies. See Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, –. Jacques Dournes translates pran jua as “force vital,” or “souffle de vie” in French. See Dournes, “Dictionnaire de la langue jörai,” . The term appears to derive from the Sanskrit word of the same meaning, prān. a, and suggests the profound transit of such concepts among Southeast Asian cultures. Of course, it is not possible to present these materials as the Jarai see and understand them, “in their own words.” Those words after all have been recontextualized to serve the narrative purposes of this book. Like all such texts, this one is best read as a struggle between, on the one hand, the effort to faithfully present others’ ways of seeing their world and, on the other, the recognition that even a very good approximation of that understanding is impossible, produced in the context of a compromised encounter shot through with asymmetries of power, knowledge, and experience. Thompson, “History from Below.” “Against [the] arrogant, intolerant, self-aggrandizing rational subject of modernity, critics in recent years have been trying to resurrect the virtues of the fragmentary, the local, and the subjugated in order to unmask the will to power that lies at the very heart of modern rationality and to decenter its epistemological and moral subject.” Chatterjee, Nation and Its Fragments, xi. As Anna Tsing notes, “Landscapes come into their histories through disturbance. Following stories of disturbance is one way to make landscape a dynamic protagonist and an enactment of multispecies coordinations.” Tsing, “In the Midst of Disturbance,” –. Chapter  explores the logic of the resource frontier in the northeast hills in the nineteenth century, a moment when the political order relied on “extreme forms” of interpersonal dependence and bondage. Regarding the transition from control over people to control over land as the dominant mode of political order, see Scott, Art of Not Being Governed, –. The divide between “hill and valley” in Southeast Asia is a central theme in ethnographic writing on the region, and reflects deep-seated cultural, historical, and ideological differences between the two zones. I return to this question throughout the book. Among the important works of scholarship on this subject, see Scott, Art of Not Being Governed; Leach, Political Systems of Highland Burma; Li, Transforming the Indonesian Uplands. For a review of the ethnography of upland Cambodia, see Padwe, “Cambodia’s Highlanders.” Backstrom et al., Indigenous Traditional Legal Systems, –; World Bank, World Development Indicators. Padwe, “Cashews, Cash and Capitalism.”

   –

 Cupet, “Chez les populations sauvages,” .  This process of “tribalization,” and its importance, is explained expertly in Salemink, Ethnography of Vietnam’s Central Highlanders, , –, inter alia. Patricia Pelley, Postcolonial Vietnam, investigates socialist reworkings of ethnic categories in Vietnam. Regarding the emergence of Indigenous identity as a political category in Cambodia, see Baird, “Construction of ‘Indigenous Peoples’ in Cambodia”; Padwe, “Highlands of History.”  Dournes, “Le milieu jörai”; Dournes, “Bois-bambou (köyau-ale).”  Mary Louise Pratt has pointed out that the concept of landscape has long served imperial purposes. Together with “manners and customs” approaches to ethnography, narrations of landscape helped “dismantle the socioecological web that preceded them and install a Eurocolonial discursive order whose territorial and visual forms of authority are those of the modern state.” Pratt, Imperial Eyes, . Colonial observers meticulously pruned inconvenient histories from the landscapes they portrayed, and ignored Indigenous modes of knowing and inhabiting land. Making landscape work analytically requires acknowledging those ecologies and attempting to understand how land is experienced and known by those who inhabit it.  New feminist materialist approaches that directly engage ecology and landscape include, for instance, Tsing, Mushroom at the End of the World, and Bennett, “Force of Things.”  Sauer, “Morphology of Landscape.”  Thus Denis Cosgrove has argued that landscapes and their representation are shaped by the “specifics of history and geography which variously inflect the dominant mode of production, producing . . . social formations.” Cosgrove, Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape, ; see also Cosgrove and Daniels, Iconography of Landscape.  Mitchell, Lie of the Land, ; Mitchell, “Cultural Landscapes,” .  Zukin, Landscapes of Power, –.  James Scott argues that the “builders of the modern nation-state do not merely describe, observe, and map, they strive to shape a people and landscape that will fit their techniques of observation.” Scott, Seeing Like a State, .  Vandergeest and Peluso, “Territorialization and State Power in Thailand.”  Yeh, Taming Tibet, .  Mukerji, Gardens of Versailles, .  Guillou, “Thread of Continuity”; Guillou, “Alternative Memory.”  Zucker, Forest of Struggle.  Tappe, “National lieu de mémoire vs. Multivocal Memories”; Kwon, Ghosts of War in Vietnam, –.

   –



 Biggs, Footprints of War.  Simon Schama’s Landscape and Memory is an iconic representative of this mode of scholarship in landscape and its meanings. Anthropologists and geographers have approached many of these same questions with an eye toward social theories of the production of space and place, among which the work of Henri Lefebvre has been particularly important. See, e.g., Gordillo, Landscapes of Devils.  Pierre Nora sees lieux de memoire as sites of conflict between authentic popular memory of the past and official “historical” representations of the past. Nora, “Between History and Memory.” For a useful critique of Nora and the “memory industry” in scholarly writing that followed him, see Klein, “Memory in Historical Discourse.”  Writing about the ways that the First World War came to shape the consciousness of British writers, and thus came to be memorialized in the literature of the postwar, critic Paul Fussell noted that well into the late twentieth century, “the whole texture of British life could be said to commemorate the war still.” Numerous aspects of everyday life in Britain, from characteristics of the cuisine to the country’s odd pub closing times and numerous other seemingly innocuous oddities were produced by the war, and may be understood as openings onto the past. Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, .  Sturken, Tangled Memories, .  In this sense, although the focus of much landscape-based social analysis is broadly ecological in its intentions, the effect is a kind of latent anthropocentrism. Historian William Cronon has argued that histories of the environment “remain fixed on people because what we care most about in nature is its meaning for human beings.” Cronon, “Place for Stories,” .  Laura Ogden argues that without such a rethinking, “we cannot hope to create (or imagine) sustainable futures.” She introduces “landscape ethnography” as a methodological and writerly practice “attentive to the ways in which our relations with non-humans produce what it means to be human.” Ogden, Swamplife, ,  (emphasis in the original).  In the instructive formulation of Anna Tsing, “As sites for more-thanhuman dramas, landscapes are radical tools for decentering human hubris. Landscapes are not backdrops for historical action: they are themselves active. Watching landscapes in formation shows humans joining other living beings in shaping worlds.” Tsing, Mushroom at the End of the World, ; see also Plumwood, “Concept of a Cultural Landscape.”  Thus, for instance, ecosystem science manifests an inherent contradiction. On the one hand, as a “machine theory applied to nature,” the science was crafted with a view toward human intervention and management. Golley, History of the Ecosystem Concept, . On the other hand, as a theory of the interrelatedness of living organisms, and thus implicitly of



   –

  







  



multiple forms of agency, ecology contains within it a dialectical alternative to its own mechanistic utilitarianism. Leopold, Sand County Almanac, . Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, . “What Benjamin strove to see,” writes anthropologist Shannon Lee Dawdy, “was how material culture pulsed with meaning long after the moment of production because it embodied a particular history and web of social relations spun by a restless political economy.” Dawdy argues that Benjamin’s method still offers radical possibilities for anthropology. Particularly provocative is his “suggestion of a method that requires looking for dialectical images in landscape, artifacts, and expressive culture” and the project to which that method is closely connected, a questioning of “the linear narrative of modernity and capitalism.” Dawdy, “Clockpunk Anthropology and the Ruins of Modernity,” . This is an argument made by Gyanendra Pandey, for whom fragments are also a reminder of “how much of this history we shall never be able to write.” Pandey, “In Defence of the Fragment,” . See also Chatterjee, Nation and Its Fragments. For a deeper engagement with the possibilities offered up by fragments for spatial and landscape analysis, see Cons, Sensitive Space, –. Given how closely connected they are in practice, one would expect oblivion and obliteration to share an identical etymology. That is not fully the case. Oblivion’s roots are in forgetting, whereas obliteration refers to the doing away with letters, that is, ob + littera; it is a form of erasing, an effacing of what has been written, in this case on the land. See Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.vv. “oblivion,” accessed April , , www .oed.com/view/Entry/; “obliteration,” accessed April , , www .oed.com/view/Entry/. Violence, a central analytic in political and social science, is an unstable signifier, made to fit a seemingly unending series of definitions. Here I emphasize physical and sometimes psychological harm caused to people and landscape. My focus is on political and social forms of violence, rather than on the individualized interpersonal violence of, for instance, domestic abuse and crime, although of course these forms of violence have their own political and sociological underpinnings. Hinton, Why Did They Kill?, . Kiernan, “Demography of Genocide in Southeast Asia,” –. Meyer, Derrière le sourire khmer. Keeping this facile trope alive, in  when New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof purchased girls in a Cambodian brothel, part of a sensationalized and now discredited investigation, the story ran under the title “The Evil behind the Smiles.” Numerous examples exist of this kind of writing. See, e.g., Brinkley, “Cambodia’s Curse.” A proliferation of scholarly writings about violence and its

   –





  

  

legacy, while often nuanced in approach, nonetheless sustains the trope of Cambodia as an inherently violent society. Writing in , Judy Ledgerwood and Kheang Un noted that Cambodia had become “a stereotypical land of genocide” in the popular imagination, as its people continued to be seen—and sometimes to see themselves— through categories such as victim and perpetrator, survivor, and refugee. Ledgerwood and Un, introduction to Cambodia Emerges from the Past, . I discuss these reasons in detail in chapter . Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust. Any language materials available for learning Jarai are based on the dialect spoken in Vietnam, where the majority of the Jarai live; the dialects are distinct enough to have required a great investment in working out basic vocabulary without the help of useful primers and only moderately useful dictionaries. Many Jarai in Cambodia speak Khmer, which I was able to use as a bridge to speaking Jarai. The role of women has been significantly weakened over the course of the past century, an effect of changing property relations and patriarchal ideologies associated with the course of “development” in the region. Dournes, “Dictionnaire de la langue jörai.” In my effort to avoid imposing too much of my own interpretive desires on this material, I take inspiration from Timothy Pachirat’s approach to narrating the worlds of the slaughterhouse, worlds that, like the experiences of Cambodia’s northeast highlanders, usually remain hidden from view. He writes: “The detailed accounts that follow are not merely incidental to or illustrative of a more important theoretical argument about how distance and concealment operate as mechanisms of power in contemporary society. They are the argument.” Pachirat, Every Ten Seconds, .

 : ’    Today the Jarai village of Plơi Dal occupies the site, but in , before the administrative post was established, the adventurer Alfred Coussot described Bokham as a site where a Lao village and a Jarai “savage village” (village sauvage) stood side by side. See Coussot and Ruel, Douze mois chez les sauvages du Laos, .  Mekong River Commission, State of the Basin Report , –.  Crocker, Soils of Cambodia; Fontanel, “Ratanakiri,” –; Lacombe, “Le massif basaltique Quaternaire”; White, Oberthür, and Sovuthy, Soils Used for Rice Production.  Maxwell, “Fire Regimes.”  Wharton, “Man, Fire and Wild Cattle.”



   –

 Rundel, “Forest Habitats and Flora,” –.  Fontanel, “Ratanakiri,” .  Schmid, “Végétation du Viet-Nam,” –; Schmid, Végétation du VietNam, .  Maxwell, “Fire Regimes.”  Dournes, Coordonnées, .  Dove, “Practical Reason of Weeds in Indonesia.”  In the Jarai oral tradition, the cries of cim blang serve as portents of cataclysm. See Dournes, “Sam Bam,” ; Dournes, “Dictionnaire de la langue jörai,” .  Regarding dream augury, and locally important cultural understandings of airplanes, see Uk, Salvage, –, –.  A comparison between aerial photography taken by the Service Géographique de l’Indochine in  and remote-sensing imagery from the period – suggests a landscape that had not changed significantly in intervening years, in terms of the number and placement of swidden clearings. I am grateful to Mathieu Guérin for obtaining images from the Institut Géographique National. For an excellent study based on similar comparisons, see Fox et al., “Shifting Cultivation.”  “Contrary to that which occurs in other regions where [cultivation] lasts one year, or two or three at maximum as in the case of South Vietnam’s High Plateaus, in Ratanakiri it is common for the same field to be cultivated during four or five years.” Fontanel, “Ratanakiri,” . Elsewhere in Ratanakiri, periods of three years of cultivation followed by fifteen to twenty years of fallowing were observed in the mid-s among the Brao. See Matras-Troubetzkoy, Un village en forêt. In the s, Kreung farmers (a Brao subgroup) reported three to five years of use prior to a fallow period of between three and thirty years, but averaging about seven years. Fox, “Understanding a Dynamic Landscape,” –.  Condominas, We Have Eaten the Forest, xviii.  Schmid, “Végétation du Viet-Nam.”  For a useful critique of the application of carrying capacity models to swidden systems, see Brush, “Systems of Shifting Cultivation.”

 :        This freighted symbolism brings to mind Charles Tilly’s observations on the similar logics of state making and extortion rackets. “Banditry, piracy, gangland rivalry, policing, and war making all belong on the same continuum,” he writes. See Tilly, “State Making as Organized Crime,” – . In the nineteenth-century borderlands of mainland Southeast Asia, bandits were, in fact, heavily involved in state-making projects. See Davis, Imperial Bandits.

   –



 For an in-depth analysis of the Hrĭn epic, see Padwe, “Hrĭn à l’âme de guêpe.”  The Jarai term dŭ is an honorific meaning “the deceased.”  Scott, Art of Not Being Governed, ix–x.  Baird, “Construction of ‘Indigenous Peoples’ in Cambodia”; Padwe, “Highlands of History.”  The extension of Jarai influence did not represent an effort to establish territorial control, but was rather an uncoordinated process of settlement shaped by the political and economic realities of the time.  Jarai is a Chamic language of the Austronesian language family; Kacŏ is a Bahnaric language, part of the Mon-Khmer branch of the Austroasiatic language family. See Pittman, “Jarai”; Magaspag, “Kachok Speakers.”  The Jarai of Cambodia use the term Ngŏ, or “East,” to refer broadly to the Jarai territory in Vietnam, and refer to the Jarai there as “Jarai Ngŏ,” or Eastern Jarai, although they make finer distinctions as well. In moving from east to west, the village founders followed the then prevalent migration route that led from areas deemed central to Jarai culture, such as Cheo Reo (Ayun Pa) or Pleiku, to areas on the periphery of the Jarai zone of influence. The distinction between Ngŏ (East) and Yŭ (West) formed part of a complex spatial cosmology relating to the extent of influence of the three Jarai shamanic figures known as the “masters” (pơtao) of fire, water, and wind. See Dournes, Pötao, –.  The direct translation of hlun kơnung is “family slave” or “family servant,” although the term hlun is inexact, a catchall for a wide array of relationships of personal bondage; I discuss the term in greater detail later in the chapter.  The Jarai term kŏm means “ritually prohibited.” Villages are sometimes declared kŏm and closed to outsiders.  Dournes, Akhan.  Sworn alliances are one of the principal ways that Jarai and other highlanders form extrafamilial social bonds, especially with trading partners in neighboring and more distant villages. The creation of these relationships, which also establish bonds of fictive kinship between the participants, has been an important topic in the ethnography of Vietnam’s Central Highlands. See, e.g., Kemlin, “Alliances chez les Reungao”; Condominas, We Have Eaten the Forest, chap. , “Baap Can’s Alliance.”  The Ia Drai is the Jarai name for the Satai River, a tributary of the Sesan that forms part of the present-day boundary between Cambodia and Vietnam. In Jarai, the word ia means “water” and also describes a watercourse or channel such as a river or stream.  Dournes, “Le mort, c’est l’autre,” .  Dournes, “Dictionnaire de la langue jörai,” .



   –

 Dournes, “Le mort, c’est l’autre,” . Discussing Otto Rank’s notion of the doppelgänger, Freud writes: “Probably the ‘immortal’ soul was the first ‘double’ of the body. This invention of doubling as a preservation against extinction has its counterpart in the language of dreams.” Freud, “Uncanny,” :.  The term Kôla describes migrants from Burma’s Shan states who worked in the gem mines of Pailin in northwest Cambodia beginning in the nineteenth century. Kôla traders were also deeply involved in the trade in ivory and forest products throughout northeast Siam in the nineteenth century. See Koizumi, “Why the Kula Wept.” The gem mines of Borkeo Jas (Old Borkeo), to the south of the Sesan in Ratanakiri, were established by Kôla. A small community of Kôla was also reported to reside in Bokham in . See “Lettre du Colonel Tournier,” July , , file , ANOM, RSC.  Lieberman, Strange Parallels, :; Wyatt, Thailand, –. A muang is an administrative center, or group of settlements, owing its allegiance to a single ruler, or chao.  Chandler, “Cambodia before the French,” –; see also Rungswasdisab, “War and Trade,” –.  Bel, “Mission au Laos et en Annam,” .  Maître, Les jungles Moï, . The tical was a unit of currency based on the value of fifteen grams of silver. See Varadarajan, “Currency and Mensuration in Siam.”  Baird, “Various Forms of Colonialism,” –.  Bouillevaux, Voyage dans l’Indo-Chine, , .  Maître, Les jungles Moï, .  The Halang speak an Austronesian dialect (as do the Jarai); the Bahnar and Tampuan speak Mon-Khmer languages.  Maître, Les jungles Moï, .  Historian Mathieu Guérin urges a cautious reading of French writings on slavery, which tend to equate the practice with the far larger Atlantic slave trade. In his assessment, it is likely that the number of individuals taken as slaves in the nineteenth century was far lower than sensationalized popular and official accounts would suggest. Mathieu Guérin, personal communication.  For a discussion of the ways that “tribal” warfare and state society produce each other in imperial and colonial settings, see Whitehead, “Tribes Make States and States Make Tribes.”  Salemink, Ethnography of Vietnam’s Central Highlanders, –.  The perceived “remoteness” of the frontier enables its participants to imagine that rules and norms that apply elsewhere do not apply there. As Tania Li notes, “Relative isolation is central to the dynamism of an indigenous frontier.” Li, Land’s End, .

   –



 Richardson and Weszkalnys, “Introduction: Resource Materialities,” –.  “On the resource frontier,” writes Anna Tsing, “the small and the great collaborate and collide in a climate of chaos and violence. They wrest landscape elements from previous livelihoods and ecologies to turn them into wild resources, available for the industries of the world.” Tsing, “Natural Resources and Capitalist Frontiers,” .  Geographer Derek Hall explains that the quality of “frontierness” is “an idea as much as it is an objective condition.” Hall, Land, –.  The works of Li, Hall, and Tsing discussed so far relate to capitalist frontiers; see also Barney, “‘Relational’ Resource Frontier,” . Regarding savagery and “repugnance,” see Smith, Uneven Development, –.  Li, Land’s End, –. In emphasizing compelled labor, Li references debates over the importance and nature of economic compulsion in the origins of capitalism: Brenner, “Pre-industrial Europe”; Wood, Origin of Capitalism.  The importance of analyzing a frontier in transition through a focus on the commodities flowing through it and the forms of social organization that structure it is made clear in the work of anthropologist Eric R. Wolf, for whom such analyses provided a corrective to the erasure of Indigenous and precolonial histories. Wolf, People without History, –, inter alia.  Mourin d’Arfeuille, “Voyage au Laos,” .  “Les fusils à pierre à un coup [et] les fusils d’exportation à capsule à un et à deux coups.” Mourin d’Arfeuille, “Voyage au Laos,” .  Haas, Thai-English Student’s Dictionary, .  Victor Lieberman shows how imported and manufactured weapons favored Siam in its rivalry with Burmese for regional power at the time, the same rivalry that occasioned the Siamese expansion into the Lao principalities governing what is today the northeast hills. Lieberman, Strange Parallels, :.  Bowie, “Ethnic Heterogeneity and Elephants,” .  Throughout Southeast Asia, the elephant served as the symbol par excellence of royal power. Reid, “Humans and Forests,” –.  Wyatt, Thailand, , –.  Philippe Descola uses hunters’ alliances with animals in the Central Highlands as an example of the kinds of reciprocal symmetrical obligations that mark the human-animal relationship as a truly social one. Descola’s reference is to Reungao, a Bahnar group who neighbor the Jarai, whose practices of alliance were documented by missionary ethnographer Émile Kemlin. See Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture, ; Kemlin, “Alliances chez les Reungao.”  Dournes, “Le chasseur jörai et la femme,” –n.  Tsing, Mushroom at the End of the World, .  Harmand, “Le Laos et les populations sauvages”; Aymonier, Notes sur le Laos; Janneau, Manuel pratique de langue cambodgienne.



   –

 Guérin provides an excellent account of the role of slavery in the organization of Cambodian society in the nineteenth century. See Guérin, Paysans de la forêt, –; see also Ebihara, “Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Cambodia.”  Aymonier, Notes sur le Laos, .  Investigating Aymonier’s papers in the Société Asiatique archive, Guérin verified that his accounts correspond exactly to the field notes submitted to him by Nou and Khem, two Khmer assistants sent to research the situation in .  Aymonier, Voyage dans le Laos, . This depiction of the kvan closely fits the profile of Dŭ Hrĭn, who is today referred to in Jarai as a khoa lơngai— that is, a slaveholding chief. The Jarai term khoa is likely a borrowing of the Vietnamese term quan, meaning “mandarin.” See Dournes, “Dictionnaire de la langue jörai,” .  Aymonier, Notes sur le Laos, .  Mourin d’Arfeuille, “Voyage au Laos,” –.  Scott, Art of Not Being Governed, .  Ibid., –.  Rulers throughout the region therefore assembled around themselves entourages designed to symbolically represent the varieties of people over whom their power was established. Hanks, “Thai Social Order”; Anderson, “Idea of Power in Javanese Culture.”  This is Georges Condominas’s characterization of the multiplicity of forms of human bondage during the precolonial moment. See Condominas, Formes extrêmes de dépendance.  Dournes, La culture jörai, .  Ibid., .  See, e.g., Dournes, Pötao, , . While the term serf works nicely to capture the sense that the hlun existed in an obligatory relationship that was still a social relationship rather than merely one of “possession,” the concept of serfdom also retains meanings associated with the manorial system of medieval Europe and a form of dominion over landed property that render its application to the Jarai case problematic.

 :         The press reported the police chief’s name to be Sal Lou, and I have maintained that English-language spelling for the sake of coherence. “Sal” is a rendering of Kơsor, the name of a Jarai phung, or lineage group.  MacKinnon, “Lost in Jungle.”  Samean and Wasson, “Long-Lost Daughter.”  Fox News, “Mystery Wild Man.”  Coleman, “Real Wild Woman Gone Wild.”

   –



 A group of Tampuan and Brao highlanders had emerged from hiding as recently as , having spent decades in the forest after fleeing the Khmer Rouge.  Cuddy and Seangly, “Witch Hunt in Ratanakkiri.”  Seangly and Cuddy, “‘Jungle Girl’ Swaps Wilderness for a ‘Cage.’”  Shears and Davies, “Cambodia’s ‘Jungle Girl.’”  James Scott imagines the mapping of landscape to identity, as seen from the self-regarding perspective of the inhabitants of the lowland civilizational core: “It is no exaggeration to say that the presumptive level of civilization can, from a valley perspective, be often read as a function of altitude. Those on the mountaintops are the most backward and uncivilized; those living midslope are slightly more elevated culturally; those living in upland plateaus and growing irrigated rice are, again, more advanced, though certainly inferior to those at the core of the valley state, with the court and king at its apex, who represent the pinnacle of refinement and civilization.” Scott, Art of Not Being Governed, .  Chandler, “Songs at the Edge of the Forest.”  Edwards, “Between a Song and a Prei,” .  The distinction between srok and prei is a structural binary, but rather than being a “rigidly defined moral boundary,” its valences can change or be reinterpreted. Zucker, Forest of Struggle, –.  In Beyond Nature and Culture, for example, anthropologist Philippe Descola argues that nature/culture dualism is a constitutive feature of modern industrial society. Against this bifurcated view he counterposes the alternative cosmologies of Indigenous and non-Western peoples. While he acknowledges the existence of domestic/wild binaries in Asian and non-Western cultures, Descola sees in these examples ontologies of animated nature that differ in important ways from Western objectifications of nature. Descola fails to fully convince, however, in part because the distinction he makes between the West and “the rest” is itself a problematic dualism, reminiscent of Orientalist sensibilities that plagued earlier structuralist projects.  Andrew Turton discusses the classification of highlanders (khas) in the Tai states and the perception of their ambiguous humanity. See Turton, “Introduction to Civility and Savagery,” –.  Wolters, History, Culture, and Region; Tambiah, “Galactic Polity;” Anderson, “Idea of Power in Javanese Culture.”  Clifford and Marcus, Writing Culture.  Struys, Voiages and Travels.  Rey, Voyage from France to Cochin-China, ; Rey, “Relation du second voyage à la Cochinchine,” .  Pérennès, Vie de l’abbé Gagelin, –.



   –

       

    

      

Missions étrangères de Paris, “François-Isidore Gagelin.” D’Enjoy, “Une incursion chez les Moï,” . Zaborowski, “Les hommes à queue.” Nature, “Notes,” . Clemenceau, Au fil des jours. New York Sun, “‘Missing Link.’” New York Journal, “Missing Link Found Alive.” Articles about the discovery appeared in numerous American newspapers. The New York Sun ran a full-page version of the image of a hairy wild man on its front page with the story. New York Sun, “‘Missing Link.’” Le Thiêu Phu Su, quoted in Dournes, “La culture jörai,” . Guérin, “Des casques blancs,” . Vogel, “Existe-t-il des hommes à queue”; Gaide, “Les hommes à queue.” Padwe, “Highlands of History,” –. Oscar Salemink has deftly shown how discourses of the US Special Forces link their counterinsurgency skills, and their abilities to live from the land, to their formative years working closely with the Montagnards of Vietnam’s Central Highlands, mythologizing the highlander relationship to the jungles of Vietnam in the service of a meaningful origin story for the special operations force. See Salemink, Ethnography of Vietnam’s Central Highlanders, –. Sochurek, “Viet Nam’s Montagnards,” . Rizières et djebels, “‘L’homme sauvage’ de Kontum.” Burchett, La seconde résistance, –. Baird, “Construction of ‘Indigenous Peoples’ in Cambodia”; Padwe, “Highlands of History.” Dournes, “Le milieu jörai.” Jacques Dournes recounts a similar understanding among the Jarai of Vietnam, for whom, in originary times, “animals were like men and men were like yang.” Dournes, “Mythology and Ritual,” . Tylor, Primitive Culture, . Tylor devoted numerous often insightful pages of Primitive Culture to the subject of tailed men and their significance.

 : , ,    The Bajaraka movement was named for the initial syllables of the highland groups involved, the Bahnar, Jarai, Rhade (or Edé), and Koho.  See Aso, Rubber and the Making of Vietnam; Murray, Development of Capitalism in Colonial Indochina. The Stevenson Plan, adopted by international rubber producers in  to stabilize global rubber prices, spurred the boom in rubber exploitation that began in the s. Salemink, Ethnography of Vietnam’s Central Highlanders, .

   –



 Hickey, Free in the Forest, –; Salemink, Ethnography of Vietnam’s Central Highlanders, –.  For a discussion of the Vietnamese case, see Evans, “Internal Colonialism in the Central Highlands.”  Jason Cons introduces the concept of sensitive space and provides insightful analysis. See, e.g., Cons, Sensitive Space, –.  The introduction of national borders and the creation of bounded nationstates in mainland Southeast Asia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries contributed to national self-awareness and often fixation on the geographic integrity of the bordered “body” of the nation. Thongchai, Siam Mapped.  Michael Eilenberg provides a useful analysis of “borderland constellations,” zones of multiple insecurities resulting from the interaction of frontier, border, and securitization. See Eilenberg, “Frontier Constellations,” .  As Michael R. Dove writes, such projects must be undertaken “not through the insinuation of the state into pre-existing landscapes but through the erasure of these landscapes and the construction of completely new ones.” Dove, Banana Tree at the Gate, . The plantation form is also an instrument of infrastructural violence, a term Li uses to refer both to the social transformation that the plantation imposes and to the totalizing reorganization of the landscape the plantation entails. Li, “After the Land Grab.”  The compromised, betwixt and between position of appointed chiefs or village headmen was characteristic of forms of local authority in colonial states. Writing of the “delicacy” of the headman’s position in British colonial Africa, Max Gluckman noted that the main source of the ambivalence of his situation (again, always male) was that he was “the personality in whom the domestic-kinship and the political systems intersect.” Gluckman, Mitchell, and Barnes, “Village Headman in British Central Africa,” –.  Osborne, “Peasant Politics in Cambodia,” –.  Guérin, “Des casques blancs,” –.  Murray, Development of Capitalism in Colonial Indochina, .  Pagès, “Rapport sur la pénétration en pays Moï,” . As noted earlier, moï, meaning “slave” or “savage,” was a term commonly used to refer to highlanders.  Rapport du gouverneur général, “Pénétration et organisation des régions moïs,” , file , ANOM, INDONF, p. , cited in Guérin, “Des casques blancs,” .  Nostalgia for colonialism is not as uncommon as one might think, especially given the failure of postcolonial states to deliver on emancipatory promises. A similar nostalgia exists among Javanese former coolies of the Kayu Aro tea estate in Sumatra, for whom the violence of the Dutch had



   –

  



         

been erased from collective memory, a striking divergence from contemporary accounts of laborers’ experiences. Lamb, “Time of Normalcy.” Kiernan, How Pol Pot Came to Power, –. Salemink, Ethnography of Vietnam’s Central Highlanders, , . Carte—Province de Stung Treng, , file , ANC, RSC. In a study of this period, historian Ben Kiernan recounts an interview in which Nguyen Xuan Hoang, a Vietnamese official who worked closely with the Cambodian Communists, asserted that “ out of  districts had been liberated” by the Issarak and Viet Minh by . Kiernan, How Pol Pot Came to Power, . The Geneva Accords of  mandated the withdrawal of Viet Minh troops from Cambodia, and essentially disbanded the United Issarak Front, the anticolonial political organization that had emerged from the Khmer Issarak, or “Free Khmer,” movement. Beginning in , coordination of revolutionary activity in Cambodia was centered in the Kampuchean People’s Revolutionary Party, a forerunner to the Communist Party of Kampuchea, which is commonly known as the Khmer Rouge. Kiernan, How Pol Pot Came to Power, –. Two comprehensive sources for discussion of this period are Colm, “Terre Rouge,” and Baird, Rise of the Brao. Meyer, “Les nouvelles provinces.” Colm, Terre Rouge, . Meyer, “Les nouvelles provinces,” . Ibid., . Allman, “Rock and Rebellion in Remote Ratanakiri,” . Melville, Northeast Forest, –; White, “Indigenous Highlanders of the Northeast,” –; Colm, “Terre Rouge,” –. Meyer, “Les nouvelles provinces,” . Guérin et al., Des montagnards aux minorités ethniques, –. Richard Melville, who served in Cambodia and spent long periods of time in the northeast as a foreign service officer of the US State Department from  to , reported that a labor tax of between fifteen days and two months per year was levied on all males over twelve years old by the regime. Melville suggests that labor provided to pay the tax was unpaid until the obligatory number of days of service was performed, after which the labor obligation could be extended, but would thereupon be paid. See Melville, Northeast Forest, . In fact, compulsory service was likely compensated, as it had been during the colonial period, and Melville likely overstates the number of days highlanders were required to perform this work. A contemporary report found that a system of forced labor “did not exist in Cambodia” at the time. The report, written to serve US foreign policy needs at a moment of increasing US intervention in the region, misstates the situation as it actually existed at the time. See Munson, Area

   –





 

   

      

          



Handbook for Cambodia, –. Ian G. Baird provides firsthand recollections of the labor service by highlanders; he reports that both men and women were recruited and that all labor was paid. See Baird, Rise of the Brao, . On the Pơtao, the shamanic figures who played a role in Jarai rituals and who were misunderstood by French officials to have a role as political leaders, see Dournes, Pötao; Salemink, Ethnography of Vietnam’s Central Highlands, –, –; see also Padwe, “Hrĭn à l’âme de guêpe.” Meyer, “Kambuja et Kirata,” . Ibid., –. Meyer’s opportunistic reading of history earned him the derision of Jacques Dournes, who ridiculed Meyer’s scholarship as mere sloganeering in the service of the “cult” of Sihanouk. See Dournes, Pötao, –. Melville, Northeast Forest, . Meyer uses “Phnong” and Khmer Loeu interchangeably here, to stand for all highland people. Meyer, “Les nouvelles provinces,” . Melville, Northeast Forest, . This script was developed by French missionaries and was taught in the schooling system set up for highlanders during the time that Leopold Sabatier served as the administrator of Darlac Province in the s and s. Salemink, Ethnography of Vietnam’s Central Highlanders, –. CIA, “Intelligence Report: Communism and Cambodia,” . Baird, Rise of the Brao, –. Short, Pol Pot, . Colm, “Terre Rouge,” . Ibid., , . Baird, Rise of the Brao, –. In  Montagnards fighting with the US and South Vietnamese armies, and affiliated with the FULRO separatist movement, had staged a revolt in Buôn Ma Thuột. Following the revolt, FULRO established itself inside the Cambodian border, initially with Sihanouk’s backing. Réalités cambodgiennes, “L’étranger derrière la rébellion,” . Meyer, “Les nouvelles provinces,” . Baird, Rise of the Brao, . Ministère de l’Information, Cambodge, . My thanks to Mathieu Guérin for this reference. Melville, Northeast Forest, . Cambodge, “‘Ni plus ni moins militariste et corrompu.’” Réalités cambodgiennes, “L’étranger derrière la rébellion,” . Ibid. Guérin et al., Des montagnards aux minorités ethniques, . Scott, Art of Not Being Governed, . Salemink, Ethnography of Vietnam’s Central Highlanders, .

   –

   

Pelley, Postcolonial Vietnam, –. Li, “Land Grab Debate,” –. Aso, “Des plantations coloniales,” . Dommen, Indochinese Experience, .

 :     For an examination of Jarai knowledge and practices relating to unexploded ordnance in Ratanakiri, see Uk, Salvage.  Remarking on the “cyborg nature” of the landscape of war, Derek Gregory engages with the materiality of the landscape of the Central Highlands to illuminate the “co-productions” and “formations” through which nature and war transformed each other. In Gregory’s appraisal, “nature is a medium through which military and paramilitary violence is enacted.” Gregory, “Natures of War,” –, .  Eve Zucker recounts that Khmer villagers in southwestern Cambodia identified a set of sacred rocks as belonging to the spirit world, and thus “invisible,” although they could be seen. They were thus surprised to find that the rocks appeared in the photos Zucker took with her camera. Zucker, Forest of Struggle, .  Milne, “‘Our Equivalent of Guerrilla Warfare,’” –.  Grotto et al., “View Spraying Missions in Vietnam”; Stellman et al., “Agent Orange and Other Herbicides.”  In that way, this copse shares much in common with the storied places of the Western Apache in the narrations of Keith Basso in Wisdom Sits in Places.  Zucker, Forest of Struggle, –.  Bennett, Vibrant Matter; Barad, Meeting the Universe Half-Way.  Bennett, “Force of Things.”  Tim Ingold argues for just such a “dwelling perspective” on landscape and its temporality. See Ingold, “Temporality of the Landscape,” . Ingold argues against inscription on the land as an analytical frame, favoring instead embodiment within it. But why should we believe that what is written on the land is not also inhabited? Might embodiment within and writing upon form part of the same process?  Condominas, We Have Eaten the Forest, xvii.  Ibid.  The Jarai word for American, “Mi,” derives from Mỹ, or American in Vietnamese.  Shawcross, Sideshow, –.  Ibid., .  Clymer, United States and Cambodia, .  Colm, “Terre Rouge,” ; Tran, Cambodian Incursion, .

   –



 There were a number of configurations of the B-. The B-D “Big Belly” payload contained up to  -pound bombs, or  -pound bombs. Owen and Kiernan, “Bombs over Cambodia.”  Sak, Khmer Republic at War, .  Meyer, “Les nouvelles provinces,” .  Dommen, Indochinese Experience, .  US Department of the Army, Combat after Action Report.  Tran, Cambodian Incursion, .  Kobe, “/ Hits Reds in Cambodia.”  As Pamela D. McElwee demonstrates, for the socialist states of the Indochinese peninsula, creating new kinds of people relied not just on social engineering, but on projects of environmental rule as well. She cites Ho Chi Minh’s maxim: “If you want to have benefits for ten years, plant a tree. If you want to have one hundred years of benefits, then plant people.” Thus, she writes, “like the process of reforestation, people too were ‘planted,’ moved to new physical locales as objects needing state guidance, and nurtured to become new citizen-subjects in particular ways.” McElwee, Forests Are Gold, .  Diệm refers to Ngô Đình Diệm, president of the Republic of Vietnam from  to . As Liah explained to me, the midwives improvised on a song originally sung by Jarai in Vietnam to describe the destruction of Jarai villages during the Diệm regime; they use the term Diệm to refer to soldiers of the regime, in the same way that Jarai will use the term “Pol Pot” to refer to the Khmer Rouge, saying, for instance, that “Pol Pot” committed a certain act, when they mean that Pol Pot’s cadres committed the act.  Nguyen, Nothing Ever Dies, .  Arensen, “‘All Newcomers Now’”; Zucker, Forest of Struggle.  Schmitt, Étude ethnobotanique, .  Dournes, “Dictionnaire de la langue jörai,” ; Dournes, “Bois-bambou (köyau-ale),” , .  Many of the rhetorical norms surrounding invasive species were established in the landmark  volume by Charles Sutherland Elton, The Ecology of Invasions by Animals and Plants.  Besky and Padwe, “Placing Plants in Territory,” –.  Gilroy, “Nationalism, History and Ethnic Absolutism.”  That Mimosa and other plants are fashioned relationally, through encounters, brings to mind Celia Lowe’s description of the kinds of encounters and historical trajectories that “make the monkey”—that is, the Togean macaque. Lowe, “Making the Monkey.”  Dournes, “Bois-bambou (köyau-ale),” , .  Ibid., . Gynura lycopersicifolia is known as “airplane weed” among the Ma and Sre in Vietnam. Schmid, Végétation du Viet-Nam, . Jacqueline Matras and Marie Alexandrine Martin also identify Gynura as “airplane



   –

       

weed” among the Brao of Cambodia. Matras and Martin, “Contribution à l’ethnobotanique des Brou,” . Dove, “Practical Reason of Weeds in Indonesia,” . Ducourtieux, “Du riz et des arbres,” –. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism. Matthews, Tropical Asia Invaded, . Dove, “Practical Reason of Weeds in Indonesia,” . Muniappan and Marutani, “Ecology and Distribution of Chromolaena odorata,” –; Sleats, “Chromolaena odorata.” Witkowski and Wilson, “Changes in Density.” Their initial characterization of the phenomenon is based on detailed study of the Verdun battlefield in France, as detailed in Hupy and Schaetzl, “Soil Development on the WWI Battlefield.” Hupy extends the analysis to the An Khe battlefield in Vietnam’s Central Highlands. Hupy, “Khe Sanh, Vietnam.”

 :       “The – death toll was between . and . million people,  to  percent of Cambodia’s  population.” Kiernan, “Demography of Genocide in Southeast Asia,” –.  While often referred to as the “Cambodian genocide,” the term continues to be debated. Of the almost  million people killed, not all were members of minorities persecuted by the Khmer Rouge (i.e., Chinese and Vietnamese). Thus while ethnic chauvinism played an important role in the violence, the term genocide does not fully capture the complexity of the destruction of human lives under the regime.  For Alexander Laban Hinton, the elimination of difference constitutes the “dark side of modernity.” The effort to eradicate difference is a connective thread tying the aspirations of modernization to the phenomenon of genocide. As Hinton notes, “The criterion that distinguishes genocide as a conceptual category is the intentional attempt to annihilate a social group that has been marked as different.” Hinton, “Dark Side of Modernity,” .  I have changed the name of the NGO in this account.  Kren used the Jarai term meaning “younger,” dơi—which might refer to a younger brother or younger cousin. In this case, he used it to refer to his “younger cousin from the same longhouse,” his dơi sang—a very close kin relationship among the Jarai.  Sat translates as “bad,” “evil,” or “villain.” Dournes, “Dictionnaire de la langue jörai,” .  “Be straight, not crooked,” “Ngă kơpă, nam ngă ve,” is a Jarai homily in this area, one that suggests the importance of honesty and fair dealing within the Jarai moral order.

   –



 While the name “Kren” is a pseudonym, his cousin Phi Phuon is a public figure, documented in historical accounts, and I have provided his actual name—well, in fact, the nom de guerre by which he is publicly identified. Phi Phuon was a witness in the Khmer Rouge tribunal in . See ECCC, transcript of trial proceedings, trial days –.  Colm, “Terre Rouge,” –.  Ibid., –; Kiernan, Pol Pot Regime, .  See Colm, “Terre Rouge,” –.  Some scholarship on this period in the northeast has claimed that highlanders were prohibited from speaking their own languages in the cooperatives. See, e.g., Minority Rights Group, Minorities in Cambodia, . Highlanders were encouraged to speak Khmer, especially after , according to several accounts. See Colm, “Terre Rouge,” –; Baird, Rise of the Brao, . A  survey by linguist Gérard Diffloth found very low levels of Khmer speaking ability among highlanders, suggesting that Khmer Rouge language policies were clearly unsuccessful and likely not widely enforced. Diffloth, Indigenous Minorities in Cambodia; Padwe, “Cambodia’s Highlanders,” .  Dournes writes that the Jarai “raised domestic animals for the sole purpose of ritual sacrifice.” Dournes, “Le milieu jörai,” . Pigs are generally not used in sacrifices and trouble Jarai categories of animals into sacrificial/ domestic and nonsacrificial/wild varieties.  Colm, “Terre Rouge,” –.  Baird, Rise of the Brao, .  Colm, “Terre Rouge,” –.  Short, Pol Pot, .  Chandler, Tragedy of Cambodian History, .  Colm, “Terre Rouge,” .  Kiernan, Pol Pot Regime, .  Colm, “Terre Rouge,” .  Ibid., –.  Baird, Rise of the Brao, –.  Kiernan, Pol Pot Regime, .  Pol Pot, quoted in Edwards, Cambodge, .  Condominas, L’exotique est quotidien, . The term ethnocide was also used as an alternate term for genocide in Raphael Lemkin’s initial framing of the word and has since come to be associated with cultural genocide as well. Kuper, Genocide, . See also Boulbet, “Génocide sur les minorités au Sud-Vietnam.”  On the importance of the notion of purity to genocide generally and to the Cambodian genocide in particular, see Hinton, “Purity and Contamination.”  Delvert, Le paysan cambodgien, .



   –

 Baudoin, “La culture du riz au Cambodge.”  For a comprehensive study of prewar Cambodian rice farming, with a lengthy discussion of rice variety diversity, see Tichit, L’agriculture au Cambodge.  Delvert, Le paysan cambodgien, .  Ibid.  Brookfield, “Agrodiversity and Agrobiodiversity.”  Altieri, “Ecological Role of Biodiversity in Agroecosystems.”  Rerkasem et al., “Consequences of Swidden Transitions”; Fox et al., “Shifting Cultivation.”  Boulbet, Paysans de la forêt, .  Matras and Martin, “Contribution à l’ethnobotanique des Brou.”  Dournes, “Bois-bambou (köyau-ale).”  The Great Leap Forward implemented by Mao Tse-tung in China some fifteen years earlier had resulted in famine and the deaths of millions of people. Not to be outdone, the Khmer Rouge proposed a Super Great Leap Forward. See Kiernan, introduction to “‘Excerpted Report,’” .  Chandler was the first to point out the highly ambivalent nature of Khmer Rouge representations of the past. Chandler, “Seeing Red.”  This notion was suggested by French observers of the Cambodian revolution who made the comparison to the French Revolution and to the establishment of the Jacobin calendar. Ponchaud, Cambodia.  Chandler, “Seeing Red,” .  Anderson, Imagined Communities, –, .  Foreign Broadcast Information Service, October , , cited in Chandler, “Seeing Red,” .  Radio Phnom Penh broadcast, , cited in Becker, When the War Was Over, .  Khmer Rouge leaders shared the common perception that intensive irrigation had been the key to Angkor’s prosperity. See Kiernan, Pol Pot Regime, –. Work in the s and s by archeologist Bernard P. Groslier had advanced the notion that the Angkorean kingdom had been “made cultivable by a huge hydraulic network, and farmed to the limit of its capacity. This, and only this, explains the nature of the Angkorean ‘city,’ which is in fact [a] system evolved for intensive exploitation. And only this, again, can justify the social concentration of the period.” Groslier, “Our Knowledge of Khmer Civilization,” . Groslier would go on to assert that Angkor was a “hydraulic society” of the sort proposed by historian Karl Wittfogel, in which the state’s power derived from its role in building and maintaining irrigation systems. Current understandings are summarized by Fletcher et al., “Water Management Network of Angkor.”  Foreign Broadcast Information Service IV, May , , cited in Jackson, Cambodia, –, .

   –



 The phrase occurs repeatedly in Khmer Rouge planning documents. See, e.g., “Party’s Four-Year Plan,” , , , .  Ibid., .  Ponchaud, Cambodia, .  Scott, Seeing Like a State, .  Locard, Pol Pot’s Little Red Book, .  Scott, Seeing Like a State, –; Plumwood, “Concept of a Cultural Landscape,” –.  Pijpers, Kampuchea, ; Himel, “Khmer Rouge Irrigation Development,” –; Martin, “La riziculture et la maîtrise de l’eau,” –.  Ponchaud, Cambodia, ; Dennis, “Kampuchea’s Ecology,” ; Kiernan, Pol Pot Regime, .  Marie Alexandrine Martin describes in great detail the stages of implementation of the new system, using as an example the inaugural implementation of the model near the village of Trav Phaem in Siem Reap, where an area between twelve and fifteen square kilometers was established at the end of . Martin, “La riziculture et la maîtrise de l’eau.”  Helmers, “Rice in the Cambodian Economy,” .  Ibid.  Himel and Nhem, Balancing Change, .  Gordillo, Rubble, , inter alia. Gordillo builds on the work of Ann Laura Stoler, for whom seeing ruins and imperial debris “not necessarily as monuments but as ecologies of remains” opens our understanding to “wider social topographies.” Stoler’s vision accommodates not only the obvious structural remnants of past civilizational projects, but also the sedimented remnants of those projects that may not be immediately visible but nevertheless structure the “subtle dispositions” of the present. Stoler, “Imperial Debris,” , .  Himel and Nhem, Balancing Change, .  Hawken, “Designs of Kings and Farmers.”  One study found that the land area dedicated to rice agriculture declined from . million hectares in  to perhaps . million hectares in . Chaudhary, “War and Rice Diversity.”  Lando and Mak, “Deepwater Rice in Cambodia.”  Javier, “Rice Ecosystems and Varieties,” .

 : -   See Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “aftermath,” accessed April , , www.oed.com/view/Entry/.  See, e.g., in Matras and Martin, “Contribution à l’ethnobotanique des Brou.”  Jane I. Guyer makes this case in her deftly argued  Frazer Lecture. See Guyer, “Aftermaths and Recuperations in Anthropology,” .



   –

 Guyer urges attention to the ordinary as a concept that can serve “to sharpen the question of what is being sifted out of the detritus of disaster, to be rescued for further use, and by whom.” Ibid., . A focus on the ordinary points to processes of recuperation as grounded in the pragmatic, reminiscent of Michael Lambek’s conception of “ordinary ethics” as a contingent practice, as “a function of action . . . and also a function of making.” Lambek, introduction to Ordinary Ethics, , cited in Guyer, “Aftermaths and Recuperations in Anthropology,” .  The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics backed Vietnam, while the Democratic Kampuchea regime counted on the support of the People’s Republic of China. The Vietnamese invasion of Kampuchea was the first act in the Third Indochina War, which saw China invade northern Vietnam in .  Colm, “Terre Rouge,” –. The S in S- stands for Santebal, the regime’s security police.  On the significance of the human liver to Khmer Rouge violence against individuals, see Hinton, Why Did They Kill?, –.  For a comprehensive account of the Vietnamese liberation and the ensuing period of reconstruction, see Baird, Rise of the Brao.  Mason and Brown, Rice, Rivalry, and Politics, .  Shawcross, Quality of Mercy.  Mason and Brown, Rice, Rivalry, and Politics, .  Ibid., .  Dennis, “Kampuchea’s Ecology,” .  Mason and Brown, Rice, Rivalry, and Politics, .  Frings, “Failure of Agricultural Collectivization.”  Chaudhary, “War and Rice Diversity,” .  Helmers, “Rice in the Cambodian Economy,” .  Frings, “Failure of Agricultural Collectivization,” –.  Fujisaka, “Rice Agroecosystems in Kampuchea.”  Javier, “Rice Ecosystems and Varieties,” .  Nesbitt, “Sustainable Rice Production Systems.”  Dennis, “Kampuchea’s Ecology,” .  Ibid.  Chaudhary, “War and Rice Diversity,” –.  Javier, “Rice Ecosystems and Varieties,” ; Nesbitt, “Sustainable Rice Production Systems,” –; Thavat, “Market Integration,” .  Montero, “Cambodia’s Success Story.”  There are numerous such accounts of the country’s success in “turning killing fields into rice fields.” See, e.g., PBS Newshour, “Rice Production Makes a Comeback.”  Harwood, Europe’s Green Revolution, –.  Evenson and Gollin, “Impact of the Green Revolution.”

   –



 Thavat, “Market Integration.”  Numerous studies suggest that green revolutions contribute to agroecological simplification and genetic erosion: e.g., Harlan, “Our Vanishing Genetic Resources”; Thrupp, “Agricultural Biodiversity and Food Security”; but see Brush, “Reconsidering the Green Revolution”; Smale, “Green Revolution and Wheat Genetic Diversity.”  Nesbitt, “Constraints to Rice Production,” .  Chaudhary, “War and Rice Diversity,” .  Lando and Mak, “Deepwater Rice in Cambodia,” .  Ibid.  White, “Indigenous Highlanders of the Northeast”; Bottomley, “Cambodia’s Environment and the Highland People”; Padwe, “Cambodia’s Highlanders.”  Baird, Tubtim, and Baird, The Kavet and the Kreung, , .  Sahlins, Stone Age Economics, –.  Hodgkin et al., “Crop Genetic Diversity in Agroecosystems.”  Michael R. Dove compares “gross selection of rice varieties” with “finer, intra-varietal selection” in Kantu’ swidden farming in Indonesia. Dove, Swidden Agriculture in Indonesia, –.  Dove, “Theories of Swidden Agriculture.”  Shiva is the best-known advocate for these kinds of narratives. See, e.g., in Shiva, Shroff, and Lockhart, Seed Freedom; see also Steinberg, “Valuing Diversity.”  By comparison, researchers studied varietal turnover in a village near the Thai-Myanmar border where thirty-nine households plant about twenty varieties of rice. Each household there plants two to three varieties per year—an overall situation very similar to that of Tang Kadon. The study found that  percent of households that grew a given variety in one year were unlikely to plant it again the following year. The authors suggest that the discovery that “rice variety turnover is a prominent feature of seed systems in villages that maintain a high varietal diversity” is counterintuitive and “conflicts with conservation initiatives that focus on preventing changes in varietal preference.” Sirabanchongkran et al., “Varietal Turnover and Seed Exchange,” –.

  Dournes describes the wide-ranging adventures of Jarai men. See Dournes, “Le milieu jörai,” . Diffloth suggests that the travels and explorations of Jarai youths is common to Austronesian societies, and compares it to the Malay “merentau.” Diffloth, Indigenous Minorities in Cambodia, .



   –



 Archives nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM), Aix-en-Provence, France Fonds de la Résidence supérieur du Cambodge (RSC) Indochine nouveau fonds (INDONF) Archives nationales du Cambodge (ANC), Phnom Penh, Cambodia Fonds de la Résidence supérieur du Cambodge (RSC)

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Brush, Stephen B. “The Concept of Carrying Capacity for Systems of Shifting Cultivation.” American Anthropologist  (): –. ———. “Reconsidering the Green Revolution: Diversity and Stability in Cradle Areas of Crop Domestication.” Human Ecology , no.  (): –. Burchett, Wilfred. La seconde résistance: Vietnam 1965. Paris: Gallimard, . Cadière, Léopold. “Croyances et pratiques religieuses des Annamites dans les environs de Hué.” Bulletin de l’École française d’Extrême Orient , no.  (): –. Cambodge. “‘Le Cambodge n’est ni plus ni moins militariste et corrompu que bon nombre d’autres nations’ déclara hier Samdech chef de l’etat.” February , . Carthage Record. “The Missing Link: Men with Tails Discovered in Annam.” December , . Certeau, Michel, de. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press, . Chandler, David P. “Cambodia before the French: Politics in a Tributary Kingdom, –.” PhD diss., University of Michigan, . ———. “Seeing Red: Perceptions of Cambodian History in Democratic Kampuchea.” In Revolution and Its Aftermath in Kampuchea: Eight Essays, edited by David P. Chandler and Ben Kiernan, –. Yale University Southeast Asia Studies . New Haven, CT: Yale University Southeast Asia Studies, . ———. “Songs at the Edge of the Forest: Perception of Order in Three Cambodian Texts.” In Moral Order and the Question of Change: Essays on Southeast Asian Thought, edited by David K. Wyatt and Alexander Woodside, –. New Haven, CT: Yale University Southeast Asia Studies, . ———. Tragedy of Cambodian History: Politics, War, and Revolution since . New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, . Chatterjee, Partha. The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, . Chaudhary, R. C. “Encounter of Cambodian Rice Farmers with War and Rice Diversity.” Agricultural Research and Extension Network Newsletter, . CIA (Central Intelligence Agency), Directorate of Intelligence. “Intelligence Report: Communism and Cambodia.” May . Clemenceau, Georges. Au fil des jours. Paris: Bibliothèque-Charpentier, . Clifford, James, and George E. Marcus, eds. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press, . Clymer, Kenton J. The United States and Cambodia, –: A Troubled Relationship. London: Routledge, .

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Thrupp, Lori Ann. “Linking Agricultural Biodiversity and Food Security: The Valuable Role of Agrobiodiversity for Sustainable Agriculture.” International Affairs , no.  (): –. Tichit, Lucien. L’agriculture au Cambodge. Paris: Agence de coopération culturelle et technique, . Tilly, Charles. “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime.” In Bringing the State Back In, edited by Peter Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol, –. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, . Tooker, Deborah E. “Putting the Mandala in Its Place: A Practice-Based Approach to the Spatialization of Power on the Southeast Asian ‘Periphery’— the Case of the Akha.” Journal of Asian Studies , no.  (): –. Tran Dinh Tho. The Cambodian Incursion. Indochina Monographs. Washington, DC: US Army Center of Military History, . Tsing, Anna. “In the Midst of Disturbance: Symbiosis, Coordination, History, Landscape.” Firth Lecture, Association of Social Anthropologists of the United Kingdom and Commonwealth, . www.theasa.org/downloads /publications/firth/firth.pdf. ———. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, . ———. “Natural Resources and Capitalist Frontiers.” Economic and Political Weekly , no.  (): –. Turton, Andrew. “Introduction to Civility and Savagery.” In Civility and Savagery: Social Identity in Tai States, edited by Andrew Turton, –. Richmond, Surrey, England: Curzon Press, . Tylor, Edward B. Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art, and Custom. London: J. Murray, . Uk, Krisna. Salvage: Cultural Resilience among the Jorai of Northeast Cambodia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, . US Department of the Army. Combat after Action Report. Second Brigade, Fourth Infantry Division, . Accessed May , . www.cactith.org /regiment/history/aars/aar/aar__binhtay.htm. Vandergeest, Peter, and Nancy Lee Peluso. “Territorialization and State Power in Thailand.” Theory and Society , no.  (): –. Varadarajan, Lotika. “Glimpses of Seventeenth-Century Currency and Mensuration in Siam.” Journal of the Siam Society  (): –. Vogel, E. “Existe-t-il des hommes à queue parmi les tribus des Moïs ou Khâs?” Aesculape, . Wade, Francis. Myanmar’s Enemy Within: Buddhist Violence and the Making of a Muslim “Other.” London: Zed Books, .





Wharton, C. H. “Man, Fire and Wild Cattle in North Cambodia.” In Proceedings of the th Annual Tall Timbers Fire Ecology Conference, –. Tallahassee, FL: Tall Timbers Research Institute, . White, JoAnna. “The Indigenous Highlanders of the Northeast: An Uncertain Future.” In Interdisciplinary Research on Ethnic Groups in Cambodia: Final Draft Reports, –. Phnom Penh: Center for Advanced Study, . White, P. F., T. Oberthür, T., and Pheav Sovuthy, eds. The Soils Used for Rice Production in Cambodia: A Manual for Their Identification and Management. Manila: International Rice Research Institute, . Whitehead, Neil L. “Tribes Make States and States Make Tribes.” In War in the Tribal Zone: Expanding States and Indigenous Warfare, edited by R. Brian Ferguson and Neil L. Whitehead, –. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, . Witkowski, E. T. F., and M. Wilson. “Changes in Density, Biomass, Seed Production and Soil Seed Banks of the Non-native Invasive Plant, Chromolaena odorata, along a  Year Chronosequence.” Plant Ecology , no.  (): –. Wolf, Eric R. Europe and the People without History. Berkeley: University of California Press, . Wolters, O. W. History, Culture, and Region in Southeast Asian Perspectives. . Rev. ed., Ithaca, NY: Southeast Asia Program Publications, Cornell University, in cooperation with the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore, . Wood, Ellen Meiksins. The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View. London: Verso, . World Bank. World Development Indicators . Washington, DC: World Bank, . Wyatt, David K. Thailand: A Short History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, . Yeh, Emily. Taming Tibet: Landscape Transformation and the Gift of Chinese Development. Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, . Zaborowski, Sigismond. “Les hommes à queue.” Bulletins de la Société d’anthropologie de Paris , no.  (): –. Zucker, Eve. Forest of Struggle: Moralities of Remembrance in Upland Cambodia. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, . Zukin, Sharon. Landscapes of Power: From Detroit to Disney World. Berkeley: University of California Press, .







abandoned village sites. See ngol aftermath narratives, –; crisis/ recovery, –, –, , , , n; recuperation, , – , n agency, –, –, , , , – n. See also animacy/vitality agricultural policy: of the Kingdom of Cambodia, ; of the People’s Republic of Kampuchea, . See also Khmer Rouge agricultural policy; plantation rubber agriculture: associated with civilization, , –; hydrology and irrigation, –, –, fig., –, n; the srok/prei (cultivated/ wild land) binary, , –, n; upland vs. lowland, . See also farming practices; Khmer Rouge agricultural policy; plantation rubber; and rice entries agrobiodiversity, agrodiversity and agroecology, ; green revolution programs and, , n; as incorporating practices and knowledge, , ; losses during the Khmer Rouge era, –, , –, –

; rice reintroduction focus on, –; seed banking and seed saving as preservation techniques, , –, , n; in traditional farming systems, –, , – airplane weed. See hruơk hŏ alienation: Marx’s theory of, –, n; resource frontiers and, , ; as result of Khmerization, , ,  American bombing (Vietnam, ), – American bombing and land invasion (Cambodia, ), –, map; relics of, on the landscape, , – , fig., – American thorn. See drơi Mi American Vietnam War (Second Indochina War), , , , ; American mythologizing of the Montagnards, –, fig., n; highlands as place of hiding during, , n; Ngol Mi Chuh (the Village the Americans Burned), –, ; plantations as sites of resistance, –. See also American bombing; communist revolutionary struggles



Angkor, n; the Khmer Rouge and, –, , n; vestiges of Khmer Rouge-era agriculture in,  animacy/vitality: of plants and landscape, –, –, –, –, , ; prăn (breath of life), , – n; of spirits and the dead, , , . See also bơngăt (self or soul) animals: the buffalo lip-feeding ceremony, –; elephants and elephant ivory, –, , , n; Jarai beliefs about, , , , , n, n; livestock among the Jarai, –, n; trade in, –; tropes of highlander animality, –, fig., , fig., –. See also hunting; Jarai belief, ceremony, and ritual anthropocentrism, , –, nn, , . See also animacy/vitality; nature/culture binaries; nonhuman forces ARVN, the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam), , – , –, map, n; represented as “Diệm,” –, n Aso, Michitake,  assimilation. See Khmerization atâo (the dead), , , ; Jarai burial sites and practices, –, fig., , fig. See also spirits and the dead augury, –, –, n, n. See also dreams and dream travels; Jarai belief, ceremony, and ritual Aymonier, Étienne, –, nn, Bahnar people, map, map, , , n, n



Baird, Ian, , n, –n Bajaraka movement, , n. See also FULRO banditry, –, , n; French depictions of,  Banlung, xvimap, –, , , ,  Basso, Keith, n Bauman, Zygmunt,  Bel, J. M.,  Benjamin, Walter, , n Binh Tay I invasion, –, map biodiversity. See agrobiodiversity birds, –, n. See also cim blang Blơng,  Bokham, xviimap, , map, n bombing campaigns. See American bombing bondage. See corvée labor; slavery bơngăt (self or soul), , , , n bong yang, or staghorn fern (Platycerium coronarium), –, n (introduction) borders and borderlands, , , , , n; examples of border crossing, , , –, –, , ; as “sensitive spaces,” –, , nn,; as zones of resistance, –. See also frontiers; resource frontiers; state governance and territorialization Borkeo, xvimap, , , , ; the jungle girl story of , – Bouillevaux, Charles-Émile,  Brao people, , , , n breath of life (prăn), , –n buffalo sacrifices, , – Bunong people,  Burchett, Wilfred, –



burial grounds and burial practices, –, fig., , fig. Cadière, Léopold, n (introduction) Cambodia-IRRI-Australia (CIAP) rice reintroduction program, – Cambodian army, highlands occupation and resistance, –, , – ,  Cambodian coup of ,  Cambodian genocide: deaths at agricultural cooperatives, ; death toll, , , n; debates over terminology, n; ethnic identity/ chauvinism and, , , n, n; highlanders’ experiences of, –, , , ; highlands as place of hiding during, , n; landscape and memorialization, ; national identity and, , n; the notion of purity and, , n; regional historiography and, –, n, –n capitalism and capitalist social relations: industrial societies and nature/ culture dualism, n; landscape(s) as productions of, –, ; market as opportunity vs. market as compulsion, , n; resource frontiers and, , , – carrying capacity, –, n cashew cultivation, ,  cassava, ,  cemeteries, fig., fig.; Jarai forests of the dead, –, fig., fig. See also glai atâo Central Office for South Vietnam (COSVN), –, map, ,  Certeau, Michel de, –

Chandler, David, , n Chatterjee, Partha, n China: Chinese participation in Cambodian agricultural research, , ; Great Leap Forward, n; territorialization of Tibet, ; and the Vietnamese invasion of Kampuchea, n Chom-Chwa,  Chromolaena odorata. See hruơk hŏ CIAP (Cambodia-IRRI-Australia) rice reintroduction program, – cim blang, or white-crested laughing thrush (Garrulax leucolophus), , n civilization: agriculture associated with, , –; frontierness and, ; Khmerization as a civilization project, –, –; spatial mappings of, , n; wild/civilized binaries, –, , , nn, Clemenceau, Georges,  climate,  Coleman, Loren,  collectivized agriculture. See Khmer Rouge agricultural policy; sahakaw Colm, Sara,  colonialism and colonization: appointed chiefs and, –, n; colonial narrations of landscape, n; highlanders’ responses to, –; internal, Sihanouk’s Khmerization campaign as, ; invasive plants as colonizers, , , –; nostalgia for, , –n. See also Khmerization; and specific colonial powers commodities and commodification, , , , . See also resource frontiers; slavery





commodity agriculture, . See also plantation rubber; and rice entries Communist Base Area System, –, map, map Communist Party of Kampuchea, , , , , n. See also Khmer Rouge entries communist revolutionary struggles, , , –, nn,; Cambodian army’s withdrawal from Ratanakiri, ; the COSVN, –, map, , ; impacts on agriculture, , n; Jarai sympathies and participation, –, , , ; Khmer Rouge’s ascension to power, ; revolutionaries as teachers of the Jarai, –, . See also Khmer Rouge and the Khmer Rouge regime Condominas, Georges, , , , n, n conjuncture: analytic of, , , , –, , , , , – Cons, Jason, n, n corvée labor: Khmer Rouge labor requirements and recruitment, , ; Sihanouk-era, –, , , , , –n Cosgrove, Denis, n COSVN (Central Office for South Vietnam), –, map, , . See also communist revolutionary struggles crisis/recovery narratives, –, – , , , , n; and Cambodian historiography, – Cronon, William, n cryptozoology,  cultural integration/assimilation. See Khmerization



culture/nature binaries. See nature/ culture binaries Cupet, Pierre-Paul, xi,  Darwin, Charles,  Dawdy, Shannon Lee, n death and the dead (atâo), , , , ; Jarai burial sites and practices, –, fig., , fig. See also Cambodian genocide; spirits and the dead Delvert, Jean,  Democratic Kampuchea, ; Vietnamese invasion and fall of, –, . See also Khmer Rouge Descola, Philippe, n, n development: based on rice reintroduction program, ; capitalist, landscapes as productions of, –, , –, ; crisis narratives and, – ; current development, , –; highlanders’ perspectives and resistance, , , , , –, , –. See also Khmerization; modernity, modernization, and progress; plantation rubber; resource frontiers difference/otherness: antipathy for, , n; highlanders represented as other, , –, –, –, . See also highland people, outsider representations of Diffloth, Gérard, n disaster and recovery. See crisis/ recovery narratives displacement and relocation: Jarai stories about their arrival in the highlands, –, , , ; Khmerization through relocations, –, , , ; Khmer Rouge relocations



of highlanders to rice cooperatives, , , , map, , ; relocations before/after the Vietnamese invasion (), –; village abandonments/relocations and related sites, –, , , –, , , . See also migration disturbance processes, , n. See also disturbance domestic/wild binaries, –, –, nn, doubles, , n. See also bơngăt (self or soul) Dournes, Jacques, , n; on Jarai belief about the bơngat, ; on Jarai plant knowledge and usage, , –, –; on Jarai relations with animals, , n, n; on Jarai social relations, ,  Dove, Michael, n dreams and dream travels, –, –, , n, drơi Mi, or American thorn (Mimosa pigra), , , , , , – Dŭ Hrĭn stories, –, –, , , , n; situating in time, – East-West geography, in Jarai belief, –, , n ecocide, Khmer Rouge agricultural policies as, , – ecologies/ecosystems: Jarai understandings of, –; unmaking/erasure of, on the resource frontier, , , n, n ecology and ecosystem science, – n; human use and influence and, , –; nonhuman agency and, . See also carrying capacity

Edwards, Penny,  Eilenberg, Michael, n elephants and elephant ivory, –, , , n Elton, Charles Sutherland, n Enjoy, Paul d’, –, fig.,  ethnic identity: and the Cambodian genocide, , , n, n; cultural practices and, –; ethnic makeup of the highlands, –; Jarai perspectives on ethnic outsiders, . See also Khmerization ethnocide, the Cambodian genocide as, , , n ethnography, the crisis of representation in, – extractive economies. See resource frontiers famine, –, . See also food security; rice reintroduction farming. See agriculture; farming practices; specific crops and farming methods farming practices, , –; agrobiodiversity and, –, , –; crop diversity and polycropping, , –, , ; ecological impacts of, , –; eradication as state policy goal, , –; fallows management, , –, ; government effort to eradicate swidden farming, –; Jarai women’s participation, , fig.; labor requirements and availability, –, ; land availability and access, , – , , ; landscape as product of, –, –; long-term cycles and sustainability, –, nn,;





farming practices (continued) lowlands paddy rice, , –, – , fig., ; modern resumption of, , , –, –, –; origins of, in Jarai legend, –; rice cultivar diversity and sources, –; rice cultivar selection and experimentation, –, n; rice harvesting, , , , fig., fig., ; rituals and cycles of, –, –, fig., , ; the role of the spirits, , –; seed and plant exchange systems, , –, –; swidden farming cycles and processes, , , –, fig.; swidden site selection, –, ; swidden system variations and sustainability, –; visiting Phuon and Phem’s fields, –; and the vitality of the forest, –. See also Khmerization; Khmer Rouge agricultural policy; rice agriculture; rice reintroduction fern, staghorn. See bong yang fictive kinship,  Ficus,  firearms, , , , –, n fire regimes, , – First Indochina War, , ,  Fontanel, Jean, n food security: during/after the Vietnamese invasion, , , ; during the American Vietnam War, ; during the Khmer Rouge regime, –, ; mutual aid and, . See also rice reintroduction forced labor. See corvée labor; slavery forest products, –; the commodification of wildlife, – forests, –; animacy/vitality of, –, –, –, , ;



anthropogenic, –, ; the forest in exoticized representations of highlanders, –; forests of the dead (Jarai burial grounds), –, fig., fig.; highland forest types, –; Jarai understandings of, – ; as sites of memory, , –; swidden site selection, –, ; swidden system impacts and sustainability, , –, –, nn,; understory plants, –, ; wartime bombardment and defoliation, , –, – forêts claires,  forgetting. See memory and remembrance; oblivion fragmentation/incompleteness, , , , , , , , , –, , – , n, n. See also remnants and traces Franco-Siamese War (),  Free Khmers, , , n French Indochina, ; abolition of slavery, , ; the end of French rule, , ; highlands administration, , ; plantation rubber establishment and boom, –, –, n. See also colonialism and colonization French influence in the precolonial highlands,  French writings: about tailed men, –; on the Jarai and other highlanders, –, –, n; on slavery, , –, n, nn,,. See also specific authors Freud, Sigmund, n frontiers and frontierness, –, n, n; Khmerization



as a frontier civilization project, –, –; sensitive spaces and borderland constellations, –, nn,,. See also borders and borderlands; resource frontiers FULRO (Unified Front for the Liberation of Oppressed Races), , –, n Fussell, Paul, n Gagelin, François-Isidore,  galanga (răng gơnem),  Garrulax leucolophus. See cim blang “gathering rice in the skin of a buffalo,” , , . See also mutual aid gem mines, n gender, in Jarai culture, –, n. See also Jarai social relations; women Geneva Accords of , , n glai atâo (forests of the dead). See forests Gluckman, Max, n Golley, Frank, –n Gordillo, Gaston, , n governance. See state governance and territorialization; and specific regimes Great Leap Forward, n green revolutions, –, –, n; top-down/technoscientific rice reintroduction programs, , –, , –, , , , n Gregory, Derek, n Groslier, Bernard, n Guérin, Mathieu, , n, nn, Guha, Ranajit, n guns, , , , –, n

Guyer, Jane, n, n Gynura lycopersicifolia,  HAGL company,  Halang people, map, map, , n Hall, Derek, n halliers (thickets), . See also forests Harrois, Jules,  Hawken, Scott,  Hearst, William Randolph, –, fig. Hevea brasiliensis. See plantation rubber highland people: ethnicities and population size, –; as ideologically pure communists, ; as indigenous rights advocates, ; the FULRO separatist movement, , , n; Khmer identity attributed to, ; languages and cultural diversity, –; relations with the Khmer Rouge, –, –, , –; as resisters, , –, –, , , ; the “tribes” label, . See also highland people, outsider representations of; hill/valley divide; Khmerization; tribalization; and Jarai entries highland people, outsider representations of: among the Khmer Rouge, –, –; based on French and American wartime encounters, –, n; the jungle girl story of , –; landscape and the nature/culture binary in, –, n; as other/nonhuman, , –, –, –, ; as primitive nomads, –; stories of tailed





highland people, outsider representations of (continued) men, –, fig., –, n; western soldiers’ wild man stories, –. See also Jarai people, outsider representations and perceptions of highlands: arrival of plantation rubber in, , ; Jarai arrival and settlement in, –, , , , n; lowlander migration to, –, , ; national border establishment in, , n; as place of hiding, , n; as sensitive space, –, n; Vietnamese invasion and occupation (), –. See also frontiers; highland people; highlands landscape and geography; hill/valley divide; precolonial highlands highlands landscape and geography, , , –; forest and vegetation types, –; geology and soils, , , ; maps, xv–xvii; as product of traditional farming practices, –; roads and transportation, –, –, , , –. See also landscape(s) hill/valley divide, –, , n; mapping of altitude to identity, n. See also srok/prei binaries; wild/ domestic binaries Hinton, Alexander Laban, n “histories from the hills,” –, , , –, n; role in decentering dominant narratives, , , n, n. See also ordinary histories, fragmentation/incompleteness hlun (slave/servant), , –, n, n. See also slavery



Hoang Anh Gia Lai (HAGL) company,  Ho Chi Minh, n Ho Chi Minh Trail, –, map Hrĭn stories, –, –, , , , n; situating in time, –  Hruơk, stories about, –,  hruơk hŏ, or airplane weed (Chromolaena odorata), –, fig., – , –n hruơk se, hruơk rodeh por. See hruơk hŏ human-animal relationships, –, n hunting: the commodification of wildlife, –; in the Hrĭn stories, ; hunter-prey relationships, –, n; stories of Toiñ the hunter, –, , ; swidden farming and,  Hupy, Joseph, n hydrology and irrigation, –, – , fig., –, n Ia Drai (Satai River), xviimap, , , n Ieng Sary, , ,  Imperata cylindrica. See lang incompleteness. See fragmentation/ incompleteness indigenous knowledge. See traditional/ indigenous knowledge infrastructural violence, n Ingold, Tim, n International Committee of the Red Cross,  International Rice Research Institute (IRRI): Cambodian rice variety development and preservation efforts, , , –, ;



reintroduction program, , – . See also rice reintroduction invasive plants, –, n IRRI. See International Rice Research Institute irrigation and hydrology, –, – , fig., –, n Issarak (Free Khmers) resistance movement, , , n ivory and the ivory trade, , , , , n; ivory as Jarai adornment, ,  Japanese coup (),  Jarai belief, ceremony, and ritual, fig.; agricultural rituals and cycles, – , –, fig., , ; the bongăt double (self or soul), , , , n; burial sites and practices, –, fig., , fig.; childbirth rituals, ; East-West geography and its significance, –, , n; formalization of friendships/ alliances, , ; gongs and other equipment for, ; Khmer Rouge prohibitions against traditional practices, –; kŏm (ritual prohibition), , , n; the lip-feeding ceremony, –; livestock and animal sacrifice, , –, n; the Pơtao, , n; prăn (breath of life), , –n. See also animacy/ vitality; spirits and the dead Jarai farming. See farming practices Jarai history and legend: American bombing campaigns and land invasion in, –, , –, –; arrival and settlement in the Cambodian highlands, –, , , ; the forests as sites of memory, ,

–, ; life at Mo Buon and its remembrance, –, ; old village locations as time markers, –; patronage and dependence in, –, , –, , ; the Ploi O villagers’ relocation and deaths, –; precolonial migrations mapped, , ; remembrance of Ơe Gun, –; situating the Du Hrĭn stories in time, –; stories of Dŭ Hrĭn, –, –, , , , n; stories of Toiñ the hunter, –, , ; wild man stories, ; Yă Bôm and the origins of swidden farming, – Jarai language and orthography, xiii– xiv, , , n, n; agricultural metaphors for social relations, ; literacy/literacy education, –, ; prohibitions against speaking Jarai, , n; terms for social statuses, , – , n, n. See also Jarai sayings Jarai people: author’s informants and research methods, –, –, , –, n; Dournes’s work with, ; recruited as Khmer Rouge cooperative leaders/bodyguards, –, ; sympathies with communist revolutionary struggles, –, , , . See also displacement and relocation; highland people; Khmerization; Tang Kadon; and specific individuals, time periods, and regimes Jarai people, outsider representations and perceptions of: by the French, , –, , n; Jarai responses to, , , –; Khmerization and,





Jarai people, outsider representations and perceptions of (continued) , –; by the Khmer Rouge, –; present-day, –. See also highland people, outsider representations of Jarai plant knowledge and beliefs, –, , , , , –. See also farming practices Jarai sayings: “be straight, not crooked,” , n; “gathering rice in the skin of a buffalo,” , , ; “he stole our corn,” ; a Jarai man enters a marriage “with nothing but the clothes on his back,” ; “throwing away rice,” –,  Jarai self-representations, , –, n. See also Jarai history and legend Jarai social relations: agricultural metaphors for, ; communal longhouses and household groups (khul), –; farm fields as loci of, , ; farm labor exchanges, – , , –; gendered behaviors, –, n; human-animal relationships, –, –, n; kinship, and marriage practices, – , n; property rights and relations, , –; social statuses, – , n, n. See also mutual aid; patronage and alliance; property rights and relations; slavery; social relations Jarai village abandonments/relocations, –, , , , –, ; abandoned sites (ngol) on the landscape, –, ,  jiang (allies). See patronage and alliance



Johnson, Lyndon,  jungle girl story, – Kacŏ people, , , , , n Kampuchea. See Democratic Kampuchea; Khmer Rouge and the Khmer Rouge regime; People’s Republic of Kampuchea; and specific regimes and time periods Kampuchean People’s Revolutionary Party, n Kennedy, Jacqueline,  Kham Teuang,  Khmer Issarak, , , n Khmerization, Sihanouk-era, , , –; cultural integration policies, –, –, –, –; development as strategy of, , , , ; highlanders’ responses and resistance, , , , –; Khmer Rouge policies as extensions of, , –; labor demands and recruitment, , , –; minority language prohibitions, , n; plantation rubber establishment and, , , , –, , ; relocations and remapping as tools of, –, , , ; social and ecological impacts of, –; state-sanctioned violence during, , , , ; Vietnames analogues, – Khmer language, , , n, n Khmer Loeu,  Khmer Rouge agricultural policy, – , ; collective settlement locations, map; dediversification as result of, –, , –, – ; dubbed the Super Great Leap Forward, , n; goals of, ,



–, ; the highland landscape before implementation, –; highland vs. lowland results, –; irrigation projects, –, fig., –, n; Jarai in sahakaw leadership, –; life at Mo Buon, –, ; relocations of Jarai to the new cooperatives, , , , map, , ; rice cultivar introductions, –; rice production goals and practices, , –, fig., fig., , –, n; uniformity as goal and feature of, , –. See also rice reintroduction; sahakaw Khmer Rouge and the Khmer Rouge regime, , –, –, n; cultural assimilation policies, – , –; Democratic Kampuchea’s legacy of ruin, –, –; despair in highlanders’ experience of, –; Jarai recruited as cooperative leaders/bodyguards, –, ; labor requirements and recruitment, , , ; political instability, Vietnamese invasion, and fall of the regime, , –, n; population policies, ; treatment of/relations with highlanders, – , –, , –; views and representations of Cambodian history, –, n. See also Cambodian genocide; Khmer Rouge agricultural policy Khmer settlement in the highlands, –, –,  khul (households), –, ,  Kiernan, Ben, , n kinship. See fictive kinship; Jarai social relations; khul; matriliny; phung

Kissinger, Henry,  Kôla people, , n kŏm (ritual prohibition), , , , , n. See also Jarai belief, ceremony and ritual kong chalat (Khmer Rouge–era labor gangs), ,  Kơsor Bem,  Kơsor Bim,  Kơsor Hĕp, , , –, –,  Kơsor Hloĭc,  Kơsor Liah, , – Kơsor Me, –,  Kơsor Phem, – Kơsor Plang,  Kơsor Tang, , , –, , ,  Kơsor Twek, , –, ,  Kristof, Nicholas, n Labansiek rubber plantation, , – , ,  labor and labor recruitment, , – , ; Jarai farm labor exchanges, –, , –; Khmer Rouge labor requirements and recruitment, , , ; Sihanouk-era corvée labor impositions, –, , , , –n. See also Khmer Rouge agricultural policy Lamb, Nicole, –n Lambek, Michael, n landscape(s), –; agency/vitality of, –, , –, –, –, , ; embodiment versus inscription in the production of, n; and exoticized representations of highland people, –, ; the highlands’ geographic setting, xv–xviimaps, , , –; Jarai terms for landscape zones and features, ; key processes





landscape(s) (continued) of landscape production, –, –; as memory technologies, , –, , ; ruins on the landscape, – , , –, n; scholarship on landscape and memory, –, , –, nn,; spatial mappings of identity, , , , n; srok/ prei or culture/nature binaries, – , –, nn,; as temporal markers, –, , n. See also forests; highlands landscape and geography Landscape and Memory (Schama), n land use rights and claims: conflicts over, –, ; Jarai farming sites, – lang, or cogongrass (Imperata cylindrica), ,  Lao mint,  lawlessness, , . See also banditry Ledgerwood, Judy, n Lefebvre, Henri, , n Leopold, Aldo,  Li, Tania, , n, n, n Lieberman, Victor, n lieux de mémoire, , n Lon Nol, , ,  longhouses, –, –, , , , n; “breaking” the longhouse, , map; perceived of as archaic,  Lowe, Celia, n lowlands and lowland people, –, , ; highland-lowland trade, ; lowlander migration to the highlands, –, , ; lowlanders’ representations of highlanders, – , . See also hill/valley divide; Khmerization



lowlands rice agriculture: rice reintroduction, –, –, –; traditional, –, –, fig., . See also Khmer Rouge agricultural policy; sahakaw M- cooperative, map M- cooperative, map,  M- cooperative (Mo Bei), , map, , – M- cooperative. See Mo Buon M- cooperative, map,  M- cooperative, map,  Maître, Henri, , – Maize (Zea mays), ,  Mao Tse-tung, n marriage, –. See also kinship Martin, Marie Alexandrine, fig., , n Marx, Karl, , –n masculinity, , –, –, , , , , n. See also gender; Jarai social relations mastery (mchas kar), –,  materiality: and the agency or subjectivity of the physical world, , , n; as a dimension of landscape analysis, , , n; and the expression of social relations, – , –, –, , , , , n; of remains and ruins, , , –; resource making, , n. See also animacy/vitality; remnants and traces matriliny, map, –, , . See Jarai social relations; khul; phung McElwee, Pamela, n Mekong River, , , , ; maps, xv, , ,  Melville, Richard, –n



memory and remembrance: forests of the dead, –; landscapes as memory technologies, , –, ; scholarship on landscape and memory, –, , –, nn,; of war and violence, , , , – , n. See also Jarai history and legend; war memory Memot rubber plantation,  Meyer, Charles, –, , n, n migration: Jarai stories of, –; from lowlands to highlands, , , . See also displacement and relocation Mimosa pigra. See drơi Mi mint, Lao (Mentha arvensis),  Mnong Gar people,  Mo Bei (M-) cooperative, , map, , – Mo Buon (M-) cooperative, , map, , ; life and work at, –,  modernity, modernization and progress, ideologies of, , –, – , –, , ; Cambodian genocide as an outcome of, ; and ethnocide, ; “high modernist” aesthetics and state simplifications, –, , –, ; within rice reintroduction programs, – , , . See also development; Khmerization. moïs or moys, xiv, , , n Montagnards. See highland people Mourin d’Arfeuille, Charles, –,  mutual aid, –, ; farm labor exchanges, –, , –; Khmer Rouge institutions of, ; resumption of traditional farming and, ; seed and plant exchange systems, , –, –. See also

“gathering rice in the skin of the buffalo”; patronage and alliance National Geographic, , fig. National Liberation Front, , , – . See also communist revolutionary struggles; Viet Cong Nature, – nature/culture binaries, –, –, nn,; mastery over nature as ideology, . See also srok/prei binaries; wild/domestic binaries Nesbitt, Harry,  New York Journal, –, fig. Ngô Ðinh Diệm, , n ngol (abandoned village sites), –, ,  Ngol Mi Chuh (the Village the Americans Burned), –,  Nguyen, Viet Thanh, – Nguyen Xuan Hoang, n nineteenth-century highlands. See French Indochina; precolonial highlands Nixon, Richard, , ,  NLF. See National Liberation Front nomadism: state efforts to eradicate, –. See also Jarai village abandonments/relocations nonhuman forces/agency, ; in the production of landscape, , , – , –n. See also animacy/ vitality; spirits and the dead nonhumans, highland people represented as, , –, fig. nonnative invasive plants, –, n Nora, Pierre, vii, n. See also lieux de mémoire Nothing Ever Dies (Nguyen), –





obliteration, –, n. See also disturbance oblivion, –, n. See also memory and remembrance Ơe Gun, –, , , , ,  Ogden, Laura, n Ohl, William, II, – O Kop, xviimap, map,  Old Borkeo, xviimap, , n Operation Binh Tay I, –, map Operation Rolling Thunder, . See also American bombing (Vietnam, ) ordinariness and ordinary action, , , , –, n ordinary ethics, n ordinary histories, vii, –, –, , –, n ordnance,  Oryza sativa. See rice entries otherness. See difference/otherness Pachirat, Timothy, n Pagès, Maurice,  Pandey, Gyanendra, n patronage and alliance, , n; among the Jarai, –, , –, , n; and the commodification of human life, , n; jiang alliances, , , , –, ,  Le paysan cambodgien (Delvert),  People’s Republic of China. See China People’s Republic of Kampuchea, , ; rice reintroduction programs, – Peou Youleang,  Phi Phuon, –, n phung (matrilineal descent groups), –, ,  plantation agriculture, , n



plantation rubber, –, –, ; establishment by the French and ensuing boom, –, , n; as exercise of state power, –, – ; labor requirements/recruitment and, –, , , ; as motivator of resistance, –, –, , –, –; physical and social qualities of, –; recent plantings, –; and Sihanouk’s Khmerization campaign, , , , –, ,  plants: associated with American bombing and invasion, –, fig., –; Jarai plant knowledge and beliefs, –, , , , , –, ; number of plants used by the Jarai, ; plant and seed exchange systems, , –, – . See also agriculture; farming practices; forests; and specific plants Platycerium coronarium. See bong yang Pleiku Province (Vietnam), , ,  Plơi In, , ,  Plơi Ket, , –, – Plơi Ketang (Tang Village), , –, ,  Plơi O, –,  Pol Pot, , , , , , . See also Cambodian genocide; and Khmer Rouge entries Pơtao, , n prăn (breath of life), , –n. See also animacy/vitality Pratt, Mary Louise, n precolonial highlands, –, n; French influence in, ; internal movements of indigenous groups



during, map, map, ; as resource frontier, , , –, n; Siamese hegemony in, , –, ; situating the Du Hrĭn story in time, –; slavery in, , –, , –; stories of tailed men in, –, fig., –, n; the zone of refuge theory,  prei/srok binary, , –, n property rights and relations: at the agricultural collectives, ; among the Jarai, , –; current land use conflicts, ; Romam Kren’s disputed land deal, – purity, , n Rahlan Beo, ; at the lip-feeding ceremony, , ; and the rice variety survey, , –; and the stories of Hrĭn, , –; visiting the sahakaw sites with, – Rahlan Bien, – Rahlan Hap, – Rahlan Hiok, – Rahlan Hlăn,  Rahlan Juơn, – Rahlan Phuơn, –, – Rahlan Sen, – Rahlan Yô,  răng gơnem (galanga),  Rank, Otto, n Ratanakiri Province, xvimap, –, . See also highlands entries; specific features and locations reciprocity. See “gathering rice in the skin of the buffalo”; mutual aid recovery narratives, –, –, , , , n. See also crisis/ recovery; recuperation; rice reintroduction

recuperation: resumption of traditional farming as, –, –, –; vs. recovery, , –, n. See also rice reintroduction Red Cross,  religious practices, –, –. See also Jarai belief, ceremony, and ritual relocations. See displacement and relocation remembrance. See memory and remembrance remnants and traces, –, , , , –, , , , n; absences and, , . See also fragmentation/incompleteness; materiality; ruins research methods, –, –, – , ; challenges of power and positionality, –; reading landscapes as method, n; walking as method, , –, –, n. See also conjuncture; Tang Kadon resistance: in colonial Cambodia, – , –; highlands as site of, , , n; to Khmerization policies and impacts, , , , – ; plantations as sites of, –. See also communist revolutionary struggles resource frontiers: commodification and the unmaking of previous ecologies, , , n, n; commodification of forest products and wildlife, –; commodification of human life, –; as noncapitalist/ precapitalist phenomena, , , – ; precolonial highlands as, , , –, n; reflected in Jarai stories, ; as sensitive spaces, , n; violence and, –, 





Rey, L.,  rhinoceros horns,  rice (Oryza sativa): centrality to Jarai culture, ; in Jarai sayings, , , ,  rice agriculture: features and impacts of Khmer Rouge policies, –, , –; impacts of civil war on, , n; Jarai harvesting and processing methods, , fig., ; seed sharing and exchange systems, , –, –; traditional highlands practices, , fig., –; traditional lowlands practices, , –, –, fig., ; traditional practices, , , fig., –, –, fig., ; varietal selection and experimentation practices, –, n. See also farming practices; Khmer Rouge agricultural policy; rice reintroduction; sahakaw rice beer, ,  rice reintroduction, –, –; in the highlands, –, –; by individual farmers using traditional varieties and methods, –, – , –, –; Jarai rice cultivars and their sources, , –; in the lowlands, –, –, –; seed banking and, , – ; top-down/technoscientific programs, , –, , –, , , , n; varietal selection and experimentation practices, –; Vietnamese invasion and its food security impacts, – ritual. See Jarai belief, ceremony, and ritual



roads and transportation, –, – , , , – Rơcom Chom,  Rơcom Chwa,  Rơcom Kwĕn, –, , –,  Rolling Thunder,  Romam Han,  Romam Kren, –,  rubber cultivation. See plantation rubber ruins, on the landscape, –, –, , n; ngol (abandoned village sites), –, , ; visiting the sahakaw sites, –. See also remnants and traces Sabatier, Leopold, n sacrifice. See Jarai belief, ceremony, and ritual sahakaw (collectivized agricultural settlements), , , , map, , , , , , ; life at, –, , ; and the Vietnamese invasion, –; visiting the sites of, –. See also Khmer Rouge agricultural policy Salemink, Oscar, n, n Sal Lou and the jungle girl of , – Saloth Sar. See Pol Pot Satai River, xviimap, , , n Sauer, Carl O.,  Schaetzl, Randall, n Schama, Simon, vii, n Scott, James, , n, n Second Indochina War. See American Vietnam War Sedang people, map, map, , 



seed banking and seed saving, , – , , n Seio Byil, – Seio Cheng,  Seio Duăn, ; on the Jarai’s precolonial history in Cambodia, ; on life at Mo Buan, , ; at the lip-feeding ceremony, , ; narration of the stories of Hrĭn and Toiñ, – Seio Hai, , – Seio Hlurl,  Seio Mlil, – Seio Mơn,  Seio Nol,  Seio Sa,  Seio Sơn, – sensitive spaces, , n serfdom, , n. See also corvée labor servitude. See slavery sesame, ,  Sesan River, xvimap, xviimap, , , ,  Shiva, Vandana,  Siam: Hrĭn’s relations with/death in, , , , –, , ; Siamese hegemony in the precolonial highlands, , –, . See also precolonial highlands Sihanouk, Norodom, , , , , , –, . See also Khmerization Sihanoukville Port Route, map, map slavery, bondage and forms of dependence: the commodification of human life, –; French writing on, , –, n, nn,,; Jarai movement westward and, , , ; in Jarai stories, , , , ;

Jarai terminology and attitudes toward, , –, n, n; life under communism equated with, ; in the precolonial highlands, , –, , – social equity, green revolution programs and,  social relations: at the agricultural collectives, ; human-animal/ hunter-prey relationships, –, n; landscape as social/cultural production, –, nn,; lowlands vs. highlands, , ; plantation rubber and, –, n; plants as products of, , n; on the resource frontier, , n; seed and plant exchange systems, , –, –; violence-focused remembrance and, , n. See also capitalism and capitalist social relations; Jarai social relations; mutual aid; patronage and alliance; slavery socioecologies, , , , , , , , n soils, , , , , n soldiers: violence committed by the Cambodian army, ; western soldiers’ stories of highlanders, – Son Sen,  soul of the rice ceremony,  spirits (yang) and the dead (atâo), in Jarai belief, , –, n; associated with plants and landscape, –, , –, , ; the dead active in the landscape, , –; dreams as access to the spirit world, –, ; farming knowledge and





spirits (yang) and the dead (atâo), (continued) success attributed to, , –; land use/swidden site selection and, –, –; ritual invocation/ propitiation of, fig., , , ; in the story of Hrĭn’s wasp soul, –; in the story of Toiñ the hunter and other hero tales, –. See also animacy/vitality; Jarai belief, ceremony, and ritual srok/prei binary (cultivated land/ forestland), , –, n staghorn fern (bong yang), –, n (introduction) state governance and territorialization: border establishment in the highlands, , , –, n; Cambodian army administration in the highlands, –; continuity of state efforts to control highlanders, across regimes, , –, , , ; corvée labor impositions, –, , , , –n; “external relations” and Jarai efforts to benefit from relations with states, , , –, ; highlanders’ efforts to evade state control, , , ; irrigation networks as source of state power, n; landscape production and, , –, n; mapping efforts and village mobility, , –; official histories and their misrepresentations, , ; plantation rubber as exercise of state power, –, –; political insecurity as rot (pourrissement), ; political power and the commodification of human life, –, n; postindependence remapping and village



relocations, ; state-administered rice reintroduction programs, , –, , –, , , , n; state interactions with Jarai villages and headmen, –, n; Siamese hegemony during the precolonial period, –, . See also frontiers; Khmerization; resistance; and Khmer Rouge entries Stevenson Plan, n Struys, Jan,  Stung Treng, –, ,  Sturken, Marita,  subaltern histories. See “histories from the hills” Super Great Leap Forward, , n. See also Khmer Rouge agricultural policy “taboo.” See kŏm (ritual prohibition) Taichu company,  tailed men, stories of, –, fig., –, nn, Tampuan people, map, map, , –, n, n Tang-A, –, map Tang Kadon, xviimap; and the American bombing campaigns, –; author’s research methods and approaches, –, –, , – , n; ecological setting, – , ; geographic setting, , , – ; getting to and from, –, , ; population size, ; Romam Kren’s disputed land deal, –; the village longhouses and their residents, , –, map. See also Jarai entries Tang Se, , , map



Tang Village (Plơi Ketang), , –, ,  temporality: in Jarai narratives, , , –, –; in Khmer Rouge views of history, , n; of landscape, –, –, n; in regional historiography, – territorialization: by invasive plants, , , –. See also colonialism and colonization; state governance and territorialization Tha Duơn, ,  Thai period of influence, –, . See also precolonial highlands Tha Praw, ,  Tha Thi, ,  thickets (halliers),  Third Indochina War, n Thompson, E. P.,  “throwing away rice,” –,  Tibet,  Tilly, Charles, n Toiñ the hunter stories, –, ,  Tonle San,  Tonle Sap Lake, xvmap, ,  traditional culture: destruction of, as ideology, –, ; Khmer Rouge prohibitions against, –, n. See also Khmerization; and Jarai entries traditional/indigenous knowledge: agricultural, losses of, –, , –, ; agricultural, rice reintroduction success and, , – , ; colonial failures of acknowledgment, n Trav Phaem,  tree species, – “tribes” and tribalization, xiv, , –, n, n

Tsing, Anna, n, n, n Tylor, Edward, –, n Un, Kheang, n UNICEF,  Unified Front for the Liberation of Oppressed Races (FULRO), , – , n United Nations High Commission for Refugees,  United States: anti-US sentiment in the s, . See also American bombing; American Vietnam War USSR, and the Vietnamese invasion of Kampuchea, n Viet Cong, , , . See also American Vietnam War; Communist Base Area System; National Liberation Front Viet Minh, , nn,. See also American Vietnam War; communist revolutionary struggles Vietnam: cross-border movements of traditional rice varieties, , ; highlands colonization schemes in, –; Jarai migration from, –, , , , n; Jarai territory and people in, n;  invasion of Kampuchea, , – , n. See also American Vietnam War; French Indochina Vietnam: Inside Story of the Guerilla War (Burchett), – Vietnam War. See American Vietnam War violence, , –, n; aftermath narratives, –; armed/violent resistance by highlanders, –, –, , ; highlands as place





violence (continued) of hiding from, , n; historiographical focus on, –, n, –n; Jarai stories of their flight from, –; landscape as production of, , , , –, n; in the precolonial period, , –; slave raiding and, ; state-sanctioned, in Sihanouk’s Khmerization campaign, , , , ; war/violence memory in landscape and culture, , , , –, n. See also American Vietnam War; Cambodian genocide; First Indochina War; and war entries vital forces. See animacy/vitality; nonhuman forces walking, –. See also research methods war: Franco-Siamese War (), ; impacts on rice agriculture, , n; western combatants’ representations of highlanders, –. See also American bombing; American Vietnam War; violence war memory, , , , –, n; in Jarai plant taxonomy, –; Jarai recollections of American bombing and land invasion, –, , –, – weapons, , , , –, n



weddings, mass, during the Khmer Rouge period,  weeds, associated with American bombing and invasion, –, fig., – We Have Eaten the Forest (Condominas),  wild/domestic binaries, –, –, nn,. See also srok/prei binary wildlife. See animals; hunting “wild man” stories: as dehumanizations, –; the jungle girl of , –; tailed men, –, fig., –, nn,; from twentiethcentury wartime encounters, – Wittfogel, Karl, n Wolf, Eric, n women: farm work participation, , fig.; in Jarai culture, –, n; matrilineal descent, –; rape incidents during the Khmerization campaign, , ; widows in Tang Kadon, ,  Yă Bôm and the origins of swidden farming, – yang (spirits). See Jarai belief, ceremony, and ritual; spirits and the dead Y Don, ,  Yeh, Emily,  Zaborowski, Sigismond,  Zucker, Eve, n

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, ,  

Studies in Anthropology and Environment Shifting Livelihoods: Gold Mining and Subsistence in the Chocó, Colombia, by Daniel Tubb Disturbed Forests, Fragmented Memories: Jarai and Other Lives in the Cambodian Highlands, by Jonathan Padwe The Snow Leopard and the Goat: Politics of Conservation in the Western Himalayas, by Shafqat Hussain Roses from Kenya: Labor, Environment, and the Global Trade in Cut Flowers, by Megan A. Styles Working with the Ancestors: Mana and Place in the Marquesas Islands, by Emily C. Donaldson Living with Oil and Coal: Resource Politics and Militarization in Northeast India, by Dolly Kikon Caring for Glaciers: Land, Animals, and Humanity in the Himalayas, by Karine Gagné Organic Sovereignties: Struggles over Farming in an Age of Free Trade, by Guntra A. Aistara The Nature of Whiteness: Race, Animals, and Nation in Zimbabwe, by Yuka Suzuki Forests Are Gold: Trees, People, and Environmental Rule in Vietnam, by Pamela D. McElwee

Conjuring Property: Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon, by Jeremy M. Campbell Andean Waterways: Resource Politics in Highland Peru, by Mattias Borg Rasmussen Puer Tea: Ancient Caravans and Urban Chic, by Jinghong Zhang Enclosed: Conservation, Cattle, and Commerce among the Q’eqchi’ Maya Lowlanders, by Liza Grandia Forests of Identity: Society, Ethnicity, and Stereotypes in the Congo River Basin, by Stephanie Rupp Tahiti Beyond the Postcard: Power, Place, and Everyday Life, by Miriam Kahn Wild Sardinia: Indigeneity and the Global Dreamtimes of Environmentalism, by Tracey Heatherington Nature Protests: The End of Ecology in Slovakia, by Edward Snajdr Forest Guardians, Forest Destroyers: The Politics of Environmental Knowledge in Northern Thailand, by Tim Forsyth and Andrew Walker Being and Place among the Tlingit, by Thomas F. Thornton Tropics and the Traveling Gaze: India, Landscape, and Science, –, by David Arnold

Ecological Nationalisms: Nature, Livelihood, and Identities in South Asia, edited by Gunnel Cederlöf and K. Sivaramakrishnan From Enslavement to Environmentalism: Politics on a Southern African Frontier, by David McDermott Hughes Border Landscapes: The Politics of Akha Land Use in China and Thailand, by Janet C. Sturgeon

Property and Politics in Sabah, Malaysia: Native Struggles over Land Rights, by Amity A. Doolittle The Earth’s Blanket: Traditional Teachings for Sustainable Living, by Nancy Turner The Kuhls of Kangra: CommunityManaged Irrigation in the Western Himalaya, by Mark Baker