Jonathan Padwe
Advisor: Michael R. DoveResearch
My research looks at the way that agricultural and ecological transformations help to tell larger stories of social and cultural change. It is hard to think of what is important to a society in a given place without taking into consideration that society’s use of the environment – its agricultural system, for instance, or the way that people use forests, grasslands, or the marine environment. Because these systems are in fact central to the way that a society exists and thrives, or fails to thrive, and because these systems are dynamic and are always changing as people adapt to new circumstances, they provide an excellent point of entry for attempting to understand the larger currents of social change in which they are embedded.
In my research in northeast Cambodia I look at these issues as they relate to the Jarai ethnic minority group, a group of highland agriculturalists who live in the Central Highlands region of Vietnam and Cambodia. In particular, I’m interested in the way that changes in the Jarai farming system reflect and help us to understand larger processes of social and cultural change that have unfolded over the past several decades. During that period, the villages where I work have been subject to the spill-over of the Vietnam War into the Cambodian border region, the massive aerial bombardment of Cambodia by the United States, the rise to power of the Khmer Rouge regime and the subsequent forced transition to collectivized agriculture, and then, following the Vietnam-backed invasion and liberation of Cambodia in 1979, a period of protracted civil war and insecurity that lasted into the 1990s.
