Research Statement

Agriculture and Development in the Aftermath of Genocide: The Jarai of Northeast Cambodia

The Central Highlands of Vietnam and Northeast Cambodia have long constituted a borderland characterized by diverse and overlapping ethnicities, environments, and political spaces. While French colonial intervention and the expansion of lowland states from the late 19th to mid 20th century put into motion a series of transformations with important implications for the inhabitants of the highlands, the late 20th century witnessed an unprecedented upheaval throughout the highlands, a rupture which continues to have important effects on the way life is lived there. The events of the American-Vietnam War and, in Cambodia, the Khmer rouge regime, the Cambodian Genocide, and the civil war which ended only in 1991, have all contributed to a transformation of highland social life in important ways. This prospectus, and the doctoral dissertation research project which it describes, is particularly concerned with two inter-related stories about this transformation.

Story #1: Environment and history. The first is the story of the highlanders’ experiences of war, genocide, and the postwar development period. This is largely a historical question, but one which I will address through ethnographic forms of inquiry. My interest is in discovering the events which people participated in, the movements of individuals, families, and villages back and forth across the Cambodia-Vietnam border and between their villages and Khmer rouge agricultural collectives, the texture of life in the agricultural collectives, the challenges which highlanders faced when they returned to repopulate the sites of the villages they had been forced to abandon. To ground this inquiry, and to establish a core set of concerns through which to try to understand this first story, I propose to look at the transformations of the period. Because agricultural practices and forms of natural resources use are always embedded in larger social processes, they provide an excellent avenue through which to explore the nature of social change in highland society.

Story #2: Violence, development and legitimation. Yet this first story of the transformation of highland life in the late 20th century is complicated by a second story, one which is closely tied to the first. That is because recollection of Cambodia’s past has become an important element of political practice in the country’s present. References to the Cambodian genocide, and constructions of Cambodia as a country recovering from a violent upheaval, permeate political discourse at many levels, from nationally televised presidential speeches to the deliberations of rural planning committees. The politicized nature of collective memory today thus complicates the historiographic project of documenting the highland experience of revolution, genocide and recovery. Individual’s positions in present-day political engagements affect the way they encounter, understand, and relate the historical events in their past, much as their participation in those events has helped to shape their current positioning in present-day politics. The second story this project is concerned with, then, is the story of how and to what end memories of collective suffering are invoked within political struggles in the highlands today. To ground this inquiry, I will look specifically at the politics which permeate the field of post-conflict development initiatives in the highlands, and specifically, those which deal with ‘sustainable development.’

In my dissertation, I take up these two ‘stories’ as independent but inextricable problems, each requiring its own research agenda. The first problem, that of understanding history through attention to agricultural history, is largely a problem of method itself: I wish to suggest that agricultural practices may be seen as political acts, as acts of critical engagement, as praxis, even when they are not accompanied by statements of interpretation made by their authors. In a way, then, my intent is to develop a set of methodological tools for reading agriculture. The second problem, that of understanding the utility of collective memories of war and genocide within contestations over ‘development’, is largely a theoretical problem, intended to resolve some of the incongruences one finds between the various literatures on genocide, violence, and critical development studies. As I hope to demonstrate, these research agendas are in fact complementary. In research conducted over two and a half years in the highlands of Cambodia, Jarai highlanders' agricultural practices, the forms of historical memory which they and others engage in, and the politics of development through which the future is conceived of--all of these increasingly seem connected to each other.