Paper short abstract:

This paper explores whether the concept of conviviality between people and soil offers a place of congruence for local inhabitants and state authorities in a national park in Cambodia. As both an anthropologist and a naturalist, I seek a common path for the human and non-human inhabitants of place.

Paper long abstract:

Kulen National Park in northern Cambodia is a protected area in a state of disarray, with multiple threats to its biodiversity. The park contains multiple villages within its borders, who traditionally subsisted through rotating agriculture and foraging. Archaeological work on the Kulen Plateau shows that the park has been a worked landscape for centuries. In other words, there has always been what Michael Givens has termed commotion and collaboration between humans and non-humans in the convivial process of landscape formation on the Kulen Plateau (2013). Yet in this protected landscape that holds human inhabitants, conviviality is not where the battle lines are drawn. Park authorities and heritage protection stakeholders view park residents as an active threat encroaching on important and fragile sites through agricultural expansion. As a naturalist committed to conservation of biodiversity, I share their concerns and have been dismayed by the scale of forest loss in the past decade. Local residents have tended to view conservation mandates and enclosure as the enemy and employ a variety of strategies to evade and avoid regulations. As their anthropologist I have considerable sympathy for their usage rights and have urged state authorities to recognize longstanding and currently unrecognized claims to residence in pre-war villages within the park’s boundaries. This paper will elucidate how I position myself in this particular people versus park conundrum and examines whether a turn away from the trees to the very ground itself might offer a productive way through the current dilemma.