Disturbed Forests, Fragmented Memories is a beautifully written and insightful ethnography that draws on Jonathan Padwe's long-term work in the Jarai village of Tang Kadon, in Cambodia's Ratanakiri province. Padwe became fluent in the Jarai language and was adopted into their community, enabling him to deeply explore villagers’ perspectives on how their culture was entangled with the landscape, and their engagements beyond the village. The book's nine chapters (including an Introduction and Conclusion) are organised chronologically from the pre-colonial lives of the Jarai people to their navigation of contemporary life. Historical accounts are interwoven with the memories and stories of contemporary Jarai interlocutors. The book examines Jarai engagements with more-than-human worlds and how these engagements are shaped by and also produce a complex landscape. It examines violence and memory, and how these legacies are imprinted in plants, animals and the wider landscape. While these explorations are deeply grounded in Jarai narratives, the book's insights on how co-produced landscapes incorporate violence and memory have broader relevance.
The historical arc of the book enables us to see the different ways in which landscapes are animated by human relationships between themselves and with nature, and how landscapes in turn shape social life and history (p. 14). These entanglements of the social and ecological are remade and disrupted over time, especially as elements of the landscape come to be viewed and exploited as ‘resources’ (p. 68). In chapter 2, Padwe shows that before French colonisation the Jarai facilitated an extractive trade-based economy of elephants, tusks, forest resources, and slaves. His characterisation of this ‘precapitalist resource frontier’ contrasts with frontiers as spaces of capital incorporation, as the former did not require the commodification of labour and land (p. 63). Yet processes of alienation were still in play, as landscape components were taken away from their ‘lifeworlds’ for the purpose of exchange. This discussion of pre-capitalist frontiers reveals the foundations of ongoing changes catalysed by colonisation, when land and labour were mobilised in destructive ways, and the landscape dramatically reworked.
Padwe discusses colonisation, independence, and protracted conflict from the perspective of the Jarai, and the legacies that these processes have left in the landscape. In discussing these transformations, Padwe shows how memories of history and violence coalesce around plants, animals and other landscape features. One example is his investigation of the role of rubber in the colonising/civilising missions of French and subsequent Khmer states (chapter 4). For the French, rubber plantations were both material and symbolic representations of order and control, whilst simultaneously facilitating new labour and territorial relations that extended state powers in the colonial hinterland (p. 107). In the post-Independence Sihanouk era, rubber was similarly entangled with neocolonial ‘Khmerisation’ campaigns to settle the upper and outer reaches of the Cambodian ‘geobody’ with Khmer settlers (p. 92). During both periods, the Jarai actively challenged their colonisation, which led the French to view the Jarai as the fiercest of upland peoples, and Sihanouk to complain that it was ‘difficult to fix them in place’ (p. 106). Ultimately, rubber and the authoritarian developmentalism that underpinned it drove highlanders towards communist revolutionaries. Here, Padwe adds Jarai stories to earlier discussions on the enlistment of Kinh and Khmer plantation labour to the communist cause (Martin J. Murray, The Development of Capitalism in Colonial Indochina [1870–1940]; Margaret Slocomb, ‘Tonkinese Migrant Labour in Cambodia: A Coolie History’, in Engaging Asia: Essays on Laos and beyond in Honour of Martin Stuart-Fox, ed. Desley Goldston; Martin Thomas, Violence and Colonial Order: Police, Workers and Protest in the European Colonial Empires, 1918–1940). Other examples of how history was imprinted in the Jarai landscape include the fascinating account of how invasive plant species were introduced during the Indochina War (chapter 5), the Khmer Rouge's attempts to create ordered and modernist agricultural landscapes (chapter 6), and the remaking of rubber plantations by contemporary Vietnamese investors (Conclusion).
By elevating Jarai perspectives on the region's history and social order, Padwe brings Indigenous voices to discussions about the region's violent past and fractured present. His account of pre-colonial Jarai history examines their strategic interests in trading and state engagements. He challenges James Scott's argument (in The Art of Not Being Governed) that Zomian highlanders avoided state engagements by suggesting that ‘the existence of the Jarai on the frontier was made possible because of their relationship with the state, not in spite of it’ (p. 54). Padwe substantiates this with examples of strategic and seemingly beneficial Jarai engagements with the Siamese monarchy. In chapter 3, he considers not only how highlanders are represented as ‘wild’ within lowland nature–culture binaries, but also how Jarai people interpret and respond to these representations. Padwe sees these binaries playing out in contemporary Indigenous rights discourses in Cambodia (p. 87)—an issue that is not discussed further in the book but is potentially important for future research.
Across the chapters, the reader sees that violence has been a constant in Jarai history. As Padwe writes, ‘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 neighbours from the lowlands and from other highland ethnic groups—has been an intermittent but enduring reality during their entire period of history that they record in their oral tradition and retain within living memory’ (p. 22). The book reveals a clear nexus between violence, memory and landscapes—so that ‘living with the land is also a way of living with the past’ (p. 191).
Although Disturbed Forests, Fragmented Lives is a wonderful example of more-than-human anthropology, it will resonate with broader audiences who work on frontier dynamics, violence, memory and the co-production of nature–society in and beyond mainland Southeast Asia.
