Courtney Work, PhD

Published Books and Papers

Tides of Empire: Religion, Development, & Environment in Cambodia

“... a provocative book that advances long submerged connections among state development, layered religious practices, and ecological or place-making endeavors in Southeast Asia.” • Lorraine V. Aragon, University of North Carolina

“The book contains exciting discussions, especially for studying religion and environment… [that] enrich the anthropological study of human–nature relationships.” • South East Asisa Research

"...placing  other-than-human power, or Chthonic energy (from the
Greek meaning ‘earth’) at the centre of the analytical stage [is what] sets this book
apart. In combining  three analytical frames – tides, contact zones, and
other-than-human power – Work seeks to elucidate how development, environment,
and religious practice are animated by non-human forces at the centre
of social and spatial production ..." • Religion and Development

Published Papers

Motofish and Trashfish: Food values and rifts at the agrarian frontier

At the resource frontier of Prey Lang Forest in Cambodia, a new food regime marks multiple rifts in the social fabric. As the forest gives way to rural road development, migrant incursions, and cash cropping, long-term residents lament the paucity of available food. At the same time, new migrants suggest that there is now more food than ever. Based on how food is defined, we find one food, motofish, that emerged as a significant semiotic sign. It is a fish, regardless of species, that is farm-raised and carried from the market to the village by motorbike. It is opposed to a real fish that grows by itself in a river or stream. Long-term Kuy and Khmer residents of the forest see the fish as a sign of destruction and loss, because there are so few fish in the rivers and streams. New migrants see motofish as part of a new abundance coming to this remote corner of the world where there used to be no food. This abundance is facilitated by Cambodia's growing fish farming industry, fed by wild-harvested 'trashfish' and subsidized soy pellets. Motofish is more than a sign of gastropolitics, as it marks a rift in the semiotic landscape through which individual and collective worlds emerge. We use this worldmaking fish to launch a discussion of both the epistemic and metabolic rifts of agrarian transformation and how these rifts are interpreted by different actors in the same landscape: One that recognizes the metabolic rift and the other that carries with them its epistemic cleansing.

Ecocide in the Shadow of Transitional Justice: Genocidal Priming and the March of Modernity

Pol Pot only killed the people; he didn’t touch the forest. Now, everything's gone (Prey Lang resident, 2018).

Genocide is the deliberate killing of a large group of people, especially those of a particular nation or ethnic group (OUP 2019).

“(E)cocide” means unlawful or wanton acts committed with knowledge that there is a substantial likelihood of severe and either widespread or long-term damage to the environment being caused by those acts (Stop Ecocide Foundation 2021).

Prowess and Indigenous Capture: Hinges and Epistemic Propositions in the Prey Lang Forest

In north-central Cambodia, Indigenous minority communities along with the Prey Lang Forest are rapidly transforming market independent ecologies toward market-dependent existences. Through this transition, maintaining access to resources, to status and to politically advantageous connections remain the ‘hinges’
around which other epistemic propositions revolve. The prowess required to capture these vital elements of social life directly from the potent forest is not the same as that required in a market dependent environment. The two worlds of practice are connected in an intimacy that only consumption can create, and as the market eats the forest the stark difference in social organisation emerges as a point of contention on multiple fronts.
In this space, ‘Indigenous’ propositions about ‘reality’ gain purchase, even as ‘Indigenous’ economies are at best constrained, but often foreclosed by market relations. This collision prompts new political and economic possibilities and new classifications for contestation. Drawing together ethnographic data and
epistemology at the ‘ontological turn’, this paper investigates two classificatory anomalies: Indigenous capital accumulation and a silent earth.
ArcGIS StoryMaps •

ប្រវត្តិរបស់ នាងពៅៈ ទេវកថា មកពីតំបន់ព្រៃឈើ

នៅក្នុងផ្នែកនៃរឿង កម្រងស្ដីពីសក្ដានុពលរបស់ព្រៃឡង់នេះ យើងសូមណែនាំកំណែថ្មីនៃរឿងរបស់ នាង ពៅ​ដែលល្បីថា ព្រះនាង​​ត្រូវបានក្រពើលេប។ យើង​នឹង​ប្រៀបធៀប​កំណែ​ថ្មី​នេះ​ជាមួយ​នឹង​កំណែ​ផ្សេង​ៗទៀត​នៃ​រឿង​នាង​ពៅ ដើម្បី​បង្ហាញ​ពី​វិធី​ថ្មី​នៃ​ការ​យល់​ដឹង​ពី​ប្រវត្តិសាស្ត្រ​បុរាណ។
Simas: Foundations of Buddhist Religion, Edited by, Jason A. Carbine and Erik W. Davis. University of Hawaii Press. •

Stones of Spirits and Kings: Negotiating Land Grabs in Contemporary Cambodia

In this chapter, I use a public act of successful resistance against territorial encroachment to frame a discussion of how sīmā stele stones from an ancient ritual came to be involved in that struggle. To do this, I recount the historical and contemporary presence of spirits, stones, and humans that inhabit the mountains and the built environments at the Temple of the Seven Angels on Phnom Gok. This habitation is both material and immaterial: stones, spirits, humans and their objects act alongside and along with each other. Material objects of the present connect with those of the past, objects fashioned by humans draw power from objects fashioned by other means, and political acts of territorial appropriation in the present are confronted by related appropriations from the past.
Journal of Peasant Studies •

Under the Canopy of Development Aid: Illegal logging and the shadow state

The term ‘Shadow State’ refers to illicit extraction and patrimonial resource grabs. This paper documents the history of Cambodia’s Shadow State and its interlocutors in the timber trade, drawing connections to contemporary timber extraction involving syndicated logging, government officials, and USAID. We use this to discuss three interrelated things: How infrastructures for Shadow State extraction morph with policy changes and persist through time. How climate change politics connect a long history of violent resource extraction, and how the ‘shadow’ state is knowingly hidden within the modern state. The implications of our findings for social and environmental justice cannot be ignored.
Review •

A Review of Historical Imagination, Diasporic Identity and Islamicity Among the Cham Muslims of Cambodia, by Alberto Pérez Pereiro

This dissertation is an ethnographic study of contemporary Cham Muslims in Cambodia. In it,
the author lays out a number of intertwining and complicated questions that he subjects to the
insights of long-term community engagement and the power of ethnography. Pereiro addresses
the intertwined conceptions of religious proscriptions and cultural performances that give rise to
Muslim identities in light of historical consciousness and coexistence within a Buddhist state. He
also attends to the relationship between the Cham, the Khmer, and the Cambodian state, as well
as their situation within the broader Muslim community.
Review •

Finding the Future: A review of ‘Love and Dread in Cambodia: Weddings Births, and Ritual Harm under the Khmer Rouge’ by, Peg LeVine

This is an important book that challenges what Michael Vickery refers to as the standard total view (stv) of life under the Khmer Rouge and rethinks the practice of ‘forced marriage’ during that era. LeVine’s treatment centers on the family and the ways that marriage and
especially childbirth for many were not the coerced and humiliating experiences recounted in much of the literature, but were opportunities to connect the disordered present to the continuity of past traditions and to extend imaginative reality into the future.
Unpublished •

Climate Change in Anthropological Perspective

Adaptation drives evolution and climate change poses significant challenges for unadaptable species. Despite this well-known fact, climate change mitigation and adaptation policies are explicitly pointed toward the same practices shown to cause climate instability. This research emerges at the intersection of studies in religion, spirits, and states in Southeast Asia and more recent investigations into land use and climate change mitigation and adaptation policies.
Indigenous Peoples, Heritage and Landscape in the Asia Pacific: Knowledge Co-Production and Empowerment •

Engaged research uncovers the grey areas and trade-offs in climate justice

As instances of green grabbing increase, the subtle and indirect connections between climate change politics and the disenfranchisement of local resource users are ever more relevant for appropriate political interventions. It is common to privilege formally constituted climate change policies, like REDD+ or reforestation projects, but the politics of climate change go far beyond that, often disrupting and displacing people in ways that exceed actual climate change effects.
Stone Masters: Power encounters in Mainland Southeast Asia •

The Dance of Life and Death Social Relationships with Elemental Power

Water and earth deal in elements, conspiring to make all life possible. This grand conspiracy is understood by many to be a social relationship between humans, other plants and animals, and the elements of water and land. The elements are called by many names across vast geographic regions, and within disparate cultural systems. In Cambodia, from which the data in this chapter comes, people most commonly refer to the elements as Masters of the Water and the Land, Ancient Ones, or Honoured Grandfather/Mother. Long understood as owners or guardians of territories, in some descriptions they are historical figures, in others they are potent invisible actors, and are also physically the water and the land. These agents protect and manage territories and resources with particular guidelines and consequences. Villagers, priests and kings alike negotiate in some way with the Ancient Ones, which shapes village, national, and as the contributions to this volume suggest, regional claims to land, resources and political power. Paul Mus was one of the earliest scholars to analyse regional similarities in social and political systems across East, South and Southeast Asia through the lens of these distinctive vectors of chthonic energy (Mus 1975 [1933]). Since that time, scholars of Southeast Asia continue to grapple with this cross-regional foundation that at once grounds and permeates social systems classified variously.
National Chengchi University •

Book Review: Home SOS: Gender, Violence, and Survival in Crisis Ordinary Cambodia.

This is an important book with theoretical interventions and insights that take us
beyond the confines of both Cambodia and Gender as analytic categories, even while
remaining solidly grounded in each. Expanding the terms under which we conceive
gender-based violence, Brickell puts forward a novel approach to social analysis that I
will call a ‘home-based’ analysis. Through the lens of the home, which she argues is
‘intimately connected, rather than sealed off’ from the impacts of political processes
(p. 8), this book connects the seemingly disparate episodes of forced eviction and
domestic violence.
Climate Policy •

Climate change policies, natural resources and conflict: implications for development

A wide variety of policies, programmes and projects aiming to address global climate change, its drivers and impacts, have emerged and taken center stage in a wider context of ongoing development discourses, policies and practices. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), launched and supported by the World Meteorological Organisation and the United Nations, has framed since the mid-1990s the major discourses and policies about climate change, reflecting scientific evidence of the c
Elsevier •

Climate Change and Conflict: Global Insecurity and the Road Less Traveled

Fears of climate conflict expected to erupt in states with unstable political and economic systems contribute to the global land rush through emerging politics of climate change mitigation and adaptation. Scholarship reveals, however, that solutions to the problem of climate change, like biofuel production, carbon capture, and 'climate-smart' industrial agriculture, are exacerbating both conflict and environmental change. This contradiction is created in part by long-standing and unchanging policies regarding societal security, which legitimizes economic development's extractive resource transformations to avert conflict, incorporates climate change mitigation and adaptation into a development framework, and exacerbates the environmental crises of over-development. On a positive note, the obvious failure of these policies gives rise to social and scientific collaborations that disrupt the conflict scenarios promoting continued economic growth as the path to peace. New cooperation from the ground up can create new possibilities for integrated, and thus actually sustainable futures.
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