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Paper short abstract:

The paper focuses on the ways of production and translation of knowledge about the specific territorialities of the Bunong and about their loss due to rubber plantations.

Paper long abstract:

Since ten years, the Bunong, an indigenous people from Cambodia, lost vast parts of their customary land to rubber plantations. The Bunong experience what I call in-situ displacement: They are not physically relocated, but remain in place while being powerless to prevent the change and loss of all that is familiar. Drawing from my anthropological research on indigenous territorialities and the impacts of displacement on the Bunong, the paper focuses on the cultural and social dimensions of communities' meaningful places and the tremendous impact of their loss. I elaborate on the challenges to unpack a central feature of displacement - the loss of land, understood not only as an economic resource but as a landscape of identifiable and meaningful places. Considerations on how to explore and translate land's meanings and values and peoples' loss of sense of place and belonging matter. How do we grasp and articulate the impact of the sudden erasure of familiar sensory and physical markers on displaced communities? How do we explore and communicate the cultural and social dimensions of the loss and rearticulation of communities' meaningful places, resources, and practices? What roles play place-based experiences, narratives, mapping excercises and land titling processes in the production of indigenous territorialities? Such a reflection allows for reasoning on the many dimensions of land-based relations that go far beyond mere economic considerations. It enhances our understanding of the effects of displacement on indigenous people 'in the way' and explores ways of remedy starting from affected peoples' understandings of impacts.