Indigenous peoples’ responses to land exclusions: emotions, affective links and power relations

Abstract

Drawing on ethnographic research, this paper discusses indigenous peoples’ emotional responses to land exclusions in two Bunong villages, Mondulkiri Province, Cambodia. We examine how villagers responded to land exclusions brought about by both state-sponsored conservation and economic land concessions. To understand their responses, we work with the concept of emotions as an embodiment of both personal and collective experiences, to draw attention to the range of feelings, thoughts and expressions that emerge during environmental conflicts. Where local responses to land exclusions appear successful in changing the impact of land exclusions in favour of indigenous peoples, we find that both positive and negative emotions, especially those of local leaders, are important. Further, collective emotional responses to prevent continued land encroachments can shift the power of state actors by subjecting them to the embodied demonstrative strength of community demands. The power dynamics shows how attention to emotions provides a deeper understanding of seemingly contradictory responses by indigenous peoples to land exclusions. We conclude by returning to the importance of local leadership because while collective emotions can be positive catalysts for initiating, empowering and keeping the momentum of a movement, individual leaders need to be comfortable with embodying their own, often contradictory, emotions.

Keywords:

• Land exclusions
• indigenous peoples
• emotions
• resistance
• collective action

Acknowledgements

The authors thank all research participants in Srae Preah commune for their generous time and hospitality. We acknowledge Ms Srey Neang and Ms Tevy for their support with Bunong language translation; and Ms Sen Rineth for her high-quality transcription of the interviews from Khmer to English. We are grateful to WCS and DPA for their kind assistance in the production of the GIS map of the study villages. The first author benefited from the Doctoral Research Fund of the University of Auckland for the fieldwork and the COVID-19 Response Fund of the same university for writing up this paper. Our thanks go out to Sarah Homan for her support in the early stages of writing the paper. We also thank the editor of this special issue, Tanya Jakimow, and two anonymous reviewers for their constructive and insightful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

Disclosure statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Notes

1 The Bunong are one of the 24 indigenous groups who live predominantly in Mondulkiri province. For their socio-historical and cultural details, see Guérin (2017).

2 Swidden farming is traditional and is done in a time rotation. A swidden farm is left fallow for a period of 3 to 15 years before it is cleared and cultivated again.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sochanny Hak

Sochanny Hak has a PhD in development studies from The University of Auckland, New Zealand. She is currently Senior Researcher at the Analysing Development Issues Centre, Cambodia. She was a Participatory Action Researcher with World Fish Centre where she engaged with grassroots-based action research. She has a strong interest in the study of indigenous peoples and forest/land resources.

Yvonne Underhill-Sem

Yvonne Underhill-Sem is Associate Professor in Pacific studies, School of Maori and Pacific Studies, at The University of Auckland, New Zealand. She has research interests in maternities, mobilities and markets and publishes in the broad areas of feminist gender and development, climate change and mobility, and indigeneity and coloniality in the Pacific.

Chanrith Ngin

Chanrith Ngin is Research Director at the Centre for Policy Studies, Cambodia, and Honorary Academic at The University of Auckland, New Zealand. He publishes on the transformation of rural and urban communities by land governance and climate change, migration and disaster resilience. He holds a PhD in international development from Nagoya University, Japan, and has been a Designated Professor at Nagoya University Cambodia Satellite Campus, Dean of the Faculty of Development Studies at the Royal University of Phnom Penh and a Senior Research Fellow at The University of Auckland, New Zealand.