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

Abstract

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.