Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the global phenomenon that is land reclamation through an ethnographic study in Cambodia that sits at the interface of environmental and urban anthropology, cultural geography, and science and technology studies.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines the global phenomenon that is land reclamation through an ethnographic study in Cambodia that sits at the interface of environmental and urban anthropology, cultural geography, and science and technology studies. While countries like Malaysia and Nigeria have engaged in land reclamation in order to develop desirable property that will attract speculative foreign direct investment, land-scarce Singapore has been importing sand from neighbouring countries such as Cambodia in an effort to “reclaim” land. Yet as Singapore expands its city-state with an influx of sand, for whom are landscapes reclaimed and what are the social consequences for the communities who live in the source countries? Through ethnographic fieldwork conducted in a fishing village in Cambodia's Koh Kong province, this paper traces the way large-scale sand dredging of seabeds has altered local ecologies, transformed social relations, and dispossessed villagers. Not only has sand extraction and reclamation eroded rivers and livelihoods due to dwindling crab catches, the removal of sand from riverbeds does not make its impact known immediately. A form of "slow violence" (Nixon 2011), I contend that land reclamation reveals what I call a spatiotemporal distancing effect, as villagers anticipate and wait for the collapse of their houses that sit on the riverbank when the ground eventually gives way due to the removal of sediment.