Guardians of the forest or evil spirits?

Abstract

Since the emergence of a new land law in Cambodia, “indigenous minorities” have recurrently substantiated their rights claims by referring to the powerful spirit‐gods that live in their territories. This appearance of spirits on the official stage can be read as “provincializing” a Euro‐modern ontology that does not take nonhumans seriously as political actors. But when spirits come to be integrated into a politics of recognition, questions arise about the effects that such a politicized ontology might have on those who do not appear to conform to it. This is the case for Protestant Bunong, who have long repudiated local spirit‐gods as evil. During the struggle for their rights, they not only faced Cambodian authorities attempting to delegitimize their claims to qualify as an “indigenous minority,” but also had to reconsider their ways of seeing the world and relating to those who inhabit it. [political ontology, indigeneity, Christianization, politics of recognition, nonhumans, moral struggles, Cambodia, Southeast Asia]

The emotional life of rupture at Cambodia's Lower Sesan 2 hydropower dam

“…These rights were available to specified Indigenous groups, like the Bunong, but not the Lao (Baird, 2022). The emerging nexus between Indigenous legal and political rights and land has seen Indigeneity gain greater significance in Cambodian political discourse (Baird, 2011;Scheer, 2021), and it was certainly central in LS2, as we discuss in the next section.…”