During the past century, the highlanders of Indochina (Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia) have experienced their share of trials and tribulations in the form of wars and revolutionary upheavals. These events and subsequent postwar/postrevolutionary forms of governance militated against the possibility of long-term in-depth fieldwork, at least until relatively recently. Disturbed Forests, Fragmented Memories investigates changes in the cosmological and practical connections of Jarai people in northeast Cambodia from a decidedly vernacular point of view—as recorded and represented by Jonathan Padwe in the course of more than ten years of fieldwork. Following Jarai cosmological beliefs and practices, the landscape is more than a Pierre Nora–type landscape of memory, but is changeable, enchanted, and agentive.
Disturbed Forests, Fragmented Memories is organized in chapters that combine a chronological with a thematic approach. After a first chapter that summarily introduces the region and village of Tang Kadon, where Padwe spent most of his time, chapter 2 recounts the mythical stories of how Jarai people—who hailed from the Central Highlands in what is now Vietnam—fled enslavement in the early nineteenth century (i.e., before French colonial rule). They sought refuge with a local “slaveholding chief” and were granted land and seeds, but they quickly established themselves as redoubtable traders, raiders, and slavers. Chapter 3 bundles a number of—sometimes hilarious—colonial-era stories about wild men, jungle girls, and people with tails, which “locate highlanders within the landscape, in this case marrying the physical landscape of the northeast highlands to a conceptual landscape of wildness and savagery” (p. 77). Paradoxically, such exoticizing and dehumanizing tropes are to some extent shared by Jarai themselves, who make a hierarchical, spatio-cosmological distinction between village, field, and jungle.
Under Prince Sihanouk, a newly (1953) independent Cambodia sought to civilize its margins and “khmerize” the highlanders through road building, an administrative and military presence, cultural assimilation, and the development of rubber plantations, as analyzed in chapter 4. As elsewhere, this was done by appropriating the land claimed by highlanders and forcing them to “sedentarize”—abandon shifting cultivation practices—and contribute their labor. As the cultural disdain and dispossession accompanying these policies were distinctly unpopular among the Jarai and other highlanders, this made the northeast more amenable to revolutionary activity by the Khmer Rouge, who emerged during the 1960s along the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
Chapter 5, “Ecologies of Invasion,” tells the story of the furious American bombardments of the 1970s that forced highlanders to abandon their villages and fields altogether and flee into the forest to live from hunting, gathering, and forest gardening. The fighting scarred the landscape with craters, mines, and defoliated tracts, but also with sites of abandoned villages and sacred cemetery groves—in one case a village was so totally obliterated that no trace of the inhabitants could be found for burial. But it also introduced new plant species that followed the “invaders”—such as “airplane weed”—and thrived in the changed landscapes.
Chapter 6 tells of how, during the Khmer Rouge regime—which began in the northeast in the early 1970s and lasted until 1978—all highlanders were forcibly moved down to collectivized agricultural settlements in the Sesan River valley. Chasing a modernist dream while disregarding the landscape, the Khmer Rouge forced highlanders and other residents to dig giant rectangular fields and canals that were dysfunctional and quickly abandoned after the liberation by the Vietnamese army, but that left marks on the landscape as ruins of a failed civilization.
The last chapter, “Garden-Variety Histories,” shows how Jarai and other highlanders reconstituted their villages and swidden agricultural lives by recuperating the immense variety of seeds necessary for shifting cultivation in widely diverging micro-ecological places. Contrasting Jarai strategies of seed recuperation with the International Rice Research Institute's strategy of recovery and centralized preservation, Padwe shows how Jarai and other highlanders constantly gift or borrow, exchange and test rice and other seeds and cultivars. Rather than a static system of in situ preservation, Padwe describes a highly mobile, everyday system of circulating seeds and cultivars that are tested and “thrown away” if better options are found. Padwe concludes with the return of rubber plantations bankrolled by foreign capital, and with a summary of the book, amounting to the observation that for the Jarai, “living with the land is . . . a way of living with the past” (p. 191).
Disturbed Forests, Fragmented Memories is part of an expanding library of recent monographs that seek to highlight vernacular memories of highland ethnic minorities in erstwhile French Indochina and their responses to the legacies of the past.Footnote 1 Comparable books focusing on vernacular histories among highland ethnic groups in Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam include Pierre Petit's History, Memory, and Territorial Cults in the Highlands of Laos, which seeks to capture the memory and vernacular history of the Tai Dam or Tai Vat villagers in northern Laos, who migrated there from Vietnam in the 1950s. For a Hmong village in northwestern Vietnam, Tâm T. T. Ngô traces vernacular—both local and transnational—routes toward Protestant conversion and the conflicts within Hmong kin groups and villages as well as with Việt authorities in The New Way. For northeastern Cambodia, in Salvage, Krisna Uk recounts the experiences of Jorai/Jarai villagers in Ratanakiri Province through decades of war and devastation by zooming in on their handling of a specific legacy of the wars, namely, the omnipresence of mines and unexploded ordnance. In Temps de guerre, temps de révolte chez les populations autochtones du Cambodge (Times of war, times of revolt among the autochthonous populations of Cambodia), Frédéric Bourdier uses ethnic Brao, Jarai, and Tampuan sources to focus on the specific historical period of 1967–71, when the Khmer Rouge guerrillas first established themselves in Cambodia. In The Rise of the Brao, Ian Baird does something similar for the post–Khmer Rouge period of Vietnamese occupation (1979–89), when the ethnic group that facilitated both the emergence of the Khmer Rouge and the Vietnamese occupation enjoyed a rare and brief episode of political dominance.
By zooming in on vernacular geography and ecology in combination with history and anthropology, Padwe has crafted a compelling addition to this small library of vernacular highland histories in mainland Southeast Asia. A highly readable book that does not suffer from overtheorization, Disturbed Forests, Fragmented Memories will be of interest for historians and anthropologists of the region and, more importantly, for those interested in how a “more-than-human anthropology” and history might look like in practice.
