Social Science Research Council

"Garden Variety Histories of Genocide: Development and Agriculture among the Jarai of Northeast Cambodia"

Although much recent scholarship has asserted that development schemes justify themselves through `high modernist` ideologies and through discourses that privilege technocratic expertise, in fact when one looks carefully at localized conflicts over 'development' one finds they are often essentially arguments about the past. Thus in Cambodia the remembrance of genocide and war has become a valuable political resource within the field of development. This research project investigates the ways that the remembrance of genocide and war is deployed in agricultural development initiatives among the Jarai ethnic minority group of northeast Cambodia. Seeking legitimacy for a series of interventions into rural people's lives there, NGOs and government agencies propose 'development' as a response to Cambodia's violent past. This research project seeks to understand how Jarai farmers understand and interpret these legitmating practices, and how they invoke alternative interpretations of history in order to justify a competing set of development agendas.

Such a project requires attention to the ways that memory of genocide is invoked in day-to-day encounters between development agents and their 'target population.' It also requires investigating how communities remember. I suggest looking in an unusual place for the sources of Jarai memory: in their agricultural fields and gardens. Each of the crop varieties the Jarai are using today has a history that is well known to the people who cultivate it; in fact, these crops may be seen as historical documents of sorts. Research on Jarai understandings of the past will thus begin by asking farmers about the stories of the crops they use. These stories are strongly influenced by the recent upheavals of war and migration. During the Khmer Rouge era and the Vietnamese regime that followed it, highland farmers were prohibited from practicing traditional forms of swidden agriculture. By investigating the social lives of seeds, and by following the networks through which seeds, and stories, are exchanged, this research seeks to engage villagers in conversations about their recent past and its meaning for their future.