Culture, Place, and Nature. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2020. xiv, 256 pp. (Tables, B&W photos, maps.) US$30.00, paper. ISBN 9780295746906.
The people of the highlands of Southeast Asia have always experienced tension with their neighbours in the more highly organized lowland states, where irrigated rice cultivation is practiced. The highland societies live from swidden cultivation supplemented by harvesting a diversity of forest products. Highland people have developed highly diverse agro-ecological systems that are finely tuned to the conditions of the landscapes they inhabit. These systems have been disrupted in recent centuries by external events that have sent shockwaves through the region. First colonization by France, then rivalries between the ideological and commercial ambitions of the world’s superpowers have subjected the region to an extraordinary period of turbulence and violence. Colonial appetites for estate crops, especially strategically important rubber and more recently commercially valuable oil palm continue to transform landscapes and livelihoods. Cold War battles for hegemony over the countries of the region led to horrific violence in the 1960s and 1970s.
This book is based on two decades of study by Jonathan Padwe, who lived and worked with the Jarai inhabitants of northeastern Cambodia. He developed close links with the inhabitants of Tang Kadon, close to the border with Vietnam. Padwe describes how, together with his Jarai friends and colleagues, he has been able to read the history of the people as it is inscribed in their landscape. Padwe provides us with an eclectic account of how the people of the Annamite Mountains have displayed resilience in the face of the dramatic changes to their landscape during repeated periods of turbulence. Padwe weaves together the complex story of change in the landscape, drawing on historical sources, ecology, and the Jarai stories of the traumatic events to which they have been subjected. Jarai colleagues accompanied Padwe to places where they had experienced the impact of colonial-era rubber plantations, the Khmerization campaigns of Norodom Sihanouk, carpet bombing by the US Air Force during the Vietnam War and Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge attempts to erase history. The Jarai suffered casualties and disruptions. They were constantly forced to relocate their villages and adapt their livelihoods by hiding in the forests or providing the labour to reshape landscapes according to the Khmer Rouge models for collective agriculture. Complex agro-ecological systems that had evolved through experimentation and learning over millennia were destroyed. Padwe tells an amazing story of the resilience and adaptability of the Jarai. The people not only survived and retained much of their culture and knowledge but were also able to recuperate the management practices, locally adapted plant varieties and seeds needed to re-establish their swidden systems when a degree of stability followed the Vietnamese deposition of Pol Pot in 1979.
The book raises troubling and fundamental questions about our understanding of how ethnic minorities will adapt to modern market-driven worlds. The Jarai experienced particularly horrific violence and disruption but similar scenarios are playing out in many other parts of the world. International attempts to bring development to impoverished peoples are driven by simplistic and superficial understandings of the needs and aspirations of these people. The UN Sustainable Development Goals exemplify a global narrative that fails to recognize the value of cultural and ecological diversity. Padwe reveals the contrast between the formal efforts to transform Cambodia’s agriculture towards a Green Revolution model and the opportunistic initiatives by the Jarai themselves to track down seeds of the rice varieties suited to their upland swidden conditions. The Jarai have succeeded, at least for now, in re-establishing a productive upland agricultural system that meets their immediate needs.
But externally forces will continue to shape the Jarai landscapes. The rapidly expanding appetite for timber and agricultural products in neighbouring Vietnam is depleting their forests. The people of Cambodia themselves seek to engage more with the cash economy. The pre-colonial societies of the Annamite Mountains suffered severe inequalities and slavery was widespread. Today new inequalities are emerging as political elites appropriate resources and government policies favour the urban centres. The inertia of economic homogenization and the persistence of extreme power differentials seems unstoppable.
The investments of the Asian Infrastructure Development Bank are supporting China’s Belt and Road Initiative to link the countries of the Southeast Asia region. These investments are encouraging the expansion of rubber and other estate crops in the landscapes where the Jarai live. Local people are not neutral observers, they also aspire to improved material well-being and seek to exploit new economic opportunities.
This thought-provoking book focuses on the landscape as the place where people shape the environment to which they aspire. Many of us concerned with the environment favour development patterns adapted to local cultures and biophysical conditions: local self-sufficiency is an attractive mantra. The narrative of the international agencies that attempt to shape global development is replete with references to landscapes. Global corporations claim to be pursuing sustainable landscapes, but ambitions for sustainable development are not always reflected in the decision making of individual people. The problems confronting the Jarai are far from being solved. Faced with persistent poverty, people from the plains are now migrating to the highlands in search of land to cultivate (J. C. Diepart and C. Ngin, “Internal Migration in Cambodia,” in M. Bell et al., eds., Internal Migration in the Countries of Asia, Springer, 2020).
Padwe’s book is excellent in its richness and detail and I would have welcomed even more accounts of the Jarai interactions with their forest landscape. A great deal of local knowledge is being lost and time is running out to document this rich resource.
Padwe’s book does not provide us with solutions to the problems of the Jarai, but it does give us a great deal to reflect upon. Long-term in-depth studies of social-ecological landscapes are rare. Development investments by governments, NGOs, and aid agencies are based on rapid and superficial diagnoses of situations and rarely deal with underlying long-term drivers of change. More studies like the one documented in this book are needed and the people who establish policies and who take decisions need the deep understanding that such studies provide.
Jeffrey Sayer
The University of British Columbia, Vancouver