In this Book
- Disturbed Forests, Fragmented Memories: Jarai and Other Lives in the Cambodian Highlands
- Book
- 2020
- Published by: University of Washington Press
- Series: Culture, Place, and Nature
In the hill country of northeast Cambodia, just a few kilometers from the Vietnam border, sits the village of Tang Kadon. This community of hill rice farmers of the Jarai ethnic minority group survived aerial bombardment and the American invasion of Cambodia during the Vietnam War, only to find themselves relocated to the “killing fields” of the Khmer Rouge regime. Now back in their homeland, they have reestablished agriculture, seed by seed.
Disturbed Forests, Fragmented Memories tells the story of violence and dispossession in the highlands from the perspective of the land itself. Weaving rich ethnography with the history of the Jarai and their treatment at the hands of outsiders, Jonathan Padwe narrates the highlanders’ successful efforts to rebuild their complex, highly diverse agricultural system after a decades-long interruption.
Focusing on the ecological dimensions of social change and dispossession from the precolonial slave trade to the present moment of land grabs along a rapidly transforming resource frontier, Padwe shows how the past lives on in the land. An engrossing treatment of timely issues in anthropology and political ecology, this book will also appeal to readers in environmental studies, geography, and Southeast Asian studies.
Table of Contents
- Title Page, Copyright
- pp. i-iv
- Acknowledgments
- pp. ix-xii
- A Note on Orthography and Language
- pp. xiii-xiv
- Overview Maps of the Area of Study
- pp. xv-xviii, 1-2
- Introduction
- pp. 3-25
- Chapter Four: Rubber, Rule, and Revolt
- pp. 90-108
- Chapter Five: Ecologies of Invasion
- pp. 109-134
- Chapter Six: Revolution in a Rice Field
- pp. 135-160
- Chapter Seven: Garden-Variety Histories
- pp. 161-184
- Conclusion: Fragments Shored against Ruins
- pp. 185-192
- Bibliography
- pp. 217-236