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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Typically conflated with spirit or religion, territorial land entities known by various names across monsoon Asia are engaged in social relationships with human communities. Most often called neak ta in Cambodia (meaning the Ancient ones), but also known as maja tuk maja day, (the master of the water and the land), and arak (guardian or protector), many will tell you this is Brahminism, superstition from the ancient religion. More recently scholars use the term animism, and through this lens, neak ta becomes spirit—metaphysical guardians of territories, spirits of founding ancestors, or the earth-bound deities in Buddhist cosmologies. For locals they are guardians, people we cannot see, punishers, and healers, sometimes ancestors sometimes not. In the following treatment, empirical data complicates the prevailing paradigm and begins to detangle these entities from the constructed category of religion. In the context of an expanding discussion rethinking animism in Southeast Asia and its relationship to universal religions, these sovereigns of the land emerge beyond their confinement, or their assignation as spirits. They are in and of the water and the land and are instrumental social actors in the articulation of economic activity and political strategies as well as Buddhist practice.

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

Efforts to combat global climate change through forestry plantations designed to sequester carbon and promote sustainable development are on the rise. This paper analyses the trajectory of Cambodia´s first large-scale reforestation project awarded within the context of climate change mitigation.

Anthropologists debate the usefulness of an " Ontological Turn " in theory and practice as a way to confront the social and ecological disjuncture at the heart of the Anthropocene. Is it possible, scholars wonder, to validate rather than rationalize the idea that mountains, rivers, and trees are social interlocutors as well as arbiters of justice, resource access, and societal well-being?

This paper investigates how climate change strategies and resource conflicts are shaping each other in the Greater Aural region of western Cambodia. Agro-industrial projects linked to climate change goals are reshaping both social and ecological dynamics, by altering patterns of access to land and water resources as well as the nature of the resources themselves.

I struggled to present this active multiplicity of spirit and the permeable boundaries it engenders and crosses. A chronological approach to the text-based production of knowledge about Cambodia’s spirits illuminates the iterative presence and absence of spirit power in the chronicles of the colonizer.

Recent research has highlighted the conflict potential of both land deals and climate change mitigation projects, but generally the two phenomena are studied separately and the focus is limited to discrete cases of displacement or contested claims. We argue that research with a broader “landscape” perspective is needed to better understand the complex social, ecological and institutional interactions taking place in sites of land-based climate change projects (such as biofuel production or forest conservation) and large-scale investments (plantations or mines).

This article focuses on how climate change mitigation policies and economic land and mining concessions in Prey Lang, Cambodia, accommodate and facilitate each other physically, discursively and economically. Maps and project descriptions reveal that climate-related policies and extraction coexist in the same landscape, even the same projects.

In June 2012, Cambodia’s Prime Minister issued an aggressive land titling order that deployed student volunteers to survey and map the territory. Our study examines this initiative at the theoretical intersections of mapping, mimicry, and governmentality during the months leading up to land measurement.

Climate Change policies are playing an ever-increasing role in global development strategies, and their implementation gives rise to often-unforeseen social conflicts and environmental degradation. A landscape approach to analyzing forest-based Climate Change Mitigation policies (CCM) and land grabs in the Prey Lang Forest landscape, Cambodia revealed two Korea-Cambodia partnership projects designed to increase forest cover that are juxtaposed in this paper.

In 2009, a land spirit disrupted plantation development within a contested Economic Land Concession in Cambodia. The spirit, along with efforts of a monk and NGO, ultimately persuaded state officials to return 5 ha of land to the local temple.

In a rapidly modernising Cambodia, dance parties that accompany large temple celebrations and weddings have become violent arenas where young men fight with fists and knives beyond police control. In 2010, this led to a ban on dance parties during the Pchuṃ Biṇḍ celebration. This paper concerns an ad hoc bribe to lift the ban that was collected in the manner of a meritorious temple offering. I suggest that the flexible parameters of Buddhist merit-making in this ritualised context both reconfigured the bribe and palpably brought expectations of moral conduct into the energetically charged dancing arena — but only momentarily.