Disturbed Forests, Fragmented Memories is an investigation of violence, ecology and memory. The book is based on years of work with the Jarai people of Cambodia’s northeast highlands, and provides readers with a way of understanding how the Jarai see and experience their world. The book explores a series of historical conjunctures, from the role of the Jarai in pre-colonial frontier expansion, to the trials of the colonial era, to their experience of bombing and destruction during the American-Vietnam War, to forced collectivization under the regime of Pol Pot, and finally to the fits and starts of the post-war moment, when the Jarai put their system of agriculture and their way of life back together, seed by seed. In each moment, the book takes on Jarai understandings of their landscape, and explains how that landscape was formed through the agency not only of people, but also of nature, the spirit world, and the dead.

“Padwe brings alive a social-ecological 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.”

— from the Preface, by K. Sivaramakrishnan, Yale University