thoughts on how we make the world

I’m thinking about Mondulkiri again. And about my research interests, which are strong and rather inarticulate at this point in time. (Yes, this is a problem.) My own memories of Mondulkiri are, shall we say, elemental, stripped... I posted a few of them here back in June, Notes on a Place I Love, and I can see that stripped quality to them. I have a strong physical memory of the wind and the light and the weight of the rain—my times in Mondulkiri have always been a conscious retreat, and the conditions have acted like a spiritual trope—I have gone to the hills to let the wind and the emptiness scour my soul.

But it’s not an empty place; it never was. I have always stayed in my friends’ homes, or in a guesthouse run by a Khmer family with known shady dealings. There have been webs of relationships all around me—and the sharing of food, of stories, of troubles, the intersections of grace and violence that make up any human society. But I went there to escape the webs of my relationships in the plains below, and so my very presence there was self-interpreted as being a retreat from somewhere else. And made so by me as well, through my actions and my practices—I remember once, while birdwatching down in the valley with Lucas the dog, that I hid in a thicket when I heard voices, because I wanted to be alone and to see the landscape as unpeopled, as wild. I didn’t want to interact with other people or acknowledge other people. I needed it to just be me and the dog and the birds--who were, by the way, busy hiding in the thickets as well, also hoping that we would all just go away.

And I think that all of us in Mondulkiri do this, ‘native’ or expatriate, local or foreign. We interpret or read the landscape and the people there—including ourselves—according to our own scripts. I want to call this ethnogeography, although I suspect that ethnogeographers do something quite different. At any rate, the issue is that these landscapes and representations clash. They are contested, struggling for dominance.

Is this particular hill, for example, the sacred home of some local spirits, a prime site for a Khmer Buddhist temple, or a site for a new plot of pine trees for the Chinese plantation? And what kind of people will people the site? Worshippers, labourers, tourists?

If one position becomes dominant, everything changes. And what then will befall this highland province and its residents? Anyway, I think this is what I am interested in studying. The competing representations of (peopled or unpeopled) landscapes. Before. And now.

Huh. You have now read my attempt to articulate what I’m about. Thanks for listening. Below is a short memory about an interaction during one of my trips:

Len, the self-styled first indigenous reporter for the Bunong, wants to write about land seizure and corrupt chiefs and the neglect of Bunong orphans in the local orphanage. He works for an NGO, not a newspaper, and is supposed to be making a general easy reader paper for literacy practice that won’t offend any of the powers that be in Sen Monorom, and I, as the visiting writer, have been asked to give him some ‘journalistic’ advice. Personally, I would like him to be able to do exactly as he pleases, but he walks a fine line, with the spectre of being shut down altogether only a snap of the Khmer governor’s fingers away. We discuss what he can and cannot safely write about. Then he brings out a photo. He wants to print a publicity still taken from some tourist brochure in the Bunong news sheet. In this photo, Bu Sra women and girls in spotless traditional garb stand arrayed around the waterfall for which their town is named. He has titled it, even, “beautiful women at Bu Sra.” He wants to print a picture of the Bunong posing as traditional for the Bunong themselves. Why are they dressed like that? I ask. To sell cloth, he responds—we both know the drill. The visionary women descend to the tourists splashing about in the waterfall, then on the way home, after paying a small fare for the use of an impossibly long bending bamboo ladder down the cliff, the same tourists find wares laid out in baskets by the path—the same traditional clothing on the women, now for sale in the forest! This is clever marketing. But none of this is what Len wants to write about—this is all understood. He wants to simply print this photo of these women, with no commentary on authenticity. And I wonder, why does this photo please him? Is he trying to create indigenous pride? Is this the only decent photo of Bunong women in public circulation? Or are they truly just, in Len’s eyes, some beautiful local girls?