Cambodia Research
My Ph.D. dissertation looks at the connections between agriculture, the environment, memory, and history. The dissertation is based on ethnographic fieldwork I conducted in northeast Cambodia from 2004 -2007. For much of that time, I lived in a village near the Vietnam border in Ratanakiri province, a village I call Tang Kadon in my writing. I hope in the near future to be able to provide quite a bit more detail about the specifics of my research, and to provide some resources relating to the history of Tang Kadon and of the Jarai people. In the meantime, the following text is a summary of my research project as it was conceived, when I was still just beginning in the field.
Although much recent scholarship has asserted that development schemes justify themselves through 'high modernist' ideologies and through discourses that privilege technocratic expertise, in fact when one looks carefully at localized conflicts over development one finds they are often essentially arguments about the past. It is thus that in Cambodia the remembrance of genocide and war has become a valuable political resource within the field of development. This research project investigates the ways that the remembrance of genocide and war is deployed in agricultural development initiatives among the Jarai ethnic minority group of northeast Cambodia. Seeking legitimacy for a series of interventions into rural peoples lives there, NGOs and government agencies propose development as a response to Cambodias violent past. This research project seeks to understand how Jarai farmers understand and interpret these legitmating practices, and how they invoke alternative interpretations of history in order to justify a competing set of development agendas.
Such a project requires attention to the ways that memory of genocide is invoked in day-to-day encounters between development agents and their target population. It also requires investigating how communities remember. I suggest looking in an unusual place for the sources of memory among the Jarai: in their agricultural fields and gardens. Each of the cultivars in use today has a history that is well known to the people who rely on it; in fact, these crops may be seen as historical documents of sorts. Research on Jarai understandings of the past will thus begin by asking them about the stories of the crops they use. These stories are strongly influenced by the recent upheavals of war and migration. During the Khmer Rouge era and the Vietnamese regime that followed it, highland farmers were prohibited from practicing traditional forms of swidden agriculture. As a result, many varieties of rice and other crops were abandoned. Yet today high levels of crop diversity suggest that cultivars travelled rapidly back to areas where they had been lost. By investigating the social lives of seeds, and asking questions about who received which seeds from whom and following the networks through which seed-exchange takes place, this research seeks to engage villagers in conversations about their recent past and its meaning for their future.
