Jonathan Padwe

Jonathan Padwe is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. A specialist in the highland societies of Cambodia and Vietnam, where he has conducted field research for 20 years, his recent book, Disturbed Forests, Fragmented Memories: Jarai and Other Lives in the Cambodian Highlands (2020) is a study of the ways that landscapes preserve the memory of war and violence. His current research examines the relation between the ecology of malaria and social history in mainland Southeast Asia.

Matthew Carey participe au Programme Professeurs invités de l’EHESS, sur proposition de Paul Sorrentino et Catherine Scheer (CASE)

Conférences 

Rubber, rule and revolt in Cambodia, 1963-1971: The plantation form as a practice of state-making  

This seminar investigates the uses of rubber, and its intrinsic orderliness, as a way of disciplining both landscape and labor in mid-20th century Cambodia at a time when communist revolutionary activity threatened the “rotting away” or pourrissement of territory controlled by the state. The use of plantation as a strategy of statecraft resulted in the taking of land from highland residents and forced integration into state society through military colonization. The outcome was their further alienation from the regime and from Khmer-centric notions of belonging. Here the spectacular imposition of plantation rubber is understood as an incomplete project of rule; the seminar examines the forms of resistance such projects have regularly produced in Cambodia and elsewhere in the region. 

 Dans le cadre du séminaire EHESS « Dialogues entre recherches classiques et actuelles sur l’Asie du Sud-Est » organisé par Elsa Lafaye de Micheaux, Catherine Scheer et Paul Sorrentino 

• Le 7 avril 2022 de 10h30-12h30 - Salle 25-B, EHESS, 2 cours des humanités 93300 Aubervilliers 

Invasion Ecologies: Weeds and the landscape of memory 

The First and Second Indochina Wars created the conditions under which plant species previously unknown in the region became established in the landscape of northeast Cambodia. Ecologists refer to such plants as “invasive species.” By assigning these globally-traveling invasive species the names “American thorn” and “Airplane weed” respectively, Jarai highland farmers’ folk taxonomic practices inscribe memory of the past into the landscape of the present. Struggles to extirpate these “foreign invaders” from their farm fields thus open up a field of meaning and invite moral reckonings with the past and its lingering effects. This seminar explores the practices of memory through which folk taxonomies make landscapes meaningful to their residents. 

Conférence INALCO organisée par Laurent Coumel, Cyrian Pitteloud et Marie Aberdam

• Le 20 avril 2022 de 17h30-19h30

Mosquitoes and the Making of the Annamite Hill Country: A Parasitical Speculative History  

The distinction between upland and lowland society in mainland Southeast Asia is an enduring social divide and one of the constitutive features of the region. Although some attention has been given to the role of disease in structuring the human geography of the highlands, new research suggests that forest ecology and the ecology of vector mosquitoes has contributed to the emergence of acquired immunity to malaria among highland people there. This has important implications for how social scientists interpret the history of social relations between upland and lowland societies. This seminar takes up environmental anthropology’s question of nature as a social actor, as it applies to the role of mosquitoes and plasmodia in human affairs. 

Dans le cadre du séminaire EHESS « Anthropologie de l’Asie du Sud-Est » organisé par Vanina Bouté, Yves Goudineau et Catherine Scheer 

•  Le 21 avril 2022 de14h-16h - Maison de l’Asie, 22 av du Président-Wilson 75016 Paris

Two mechanisms for the reintroduction of rice diversity after the Cambodian revolution: Institutional technical knowledge and farmers' emotive and sensory practices 

The Khmer Rouge revolution in Cambodia was not only a social revolution, but an agricultural one too. Yet the regime’s efforts to modernize rice production through the regimentation of the landscape resulted led to a rapid de-diversification of the country’s seed stock, constituting a serious threat of mass starvation when the regime collapsed. In the lowlands, the International Rice Research Institute led an effort, based on a highly-centralized logic of recovery, to re-introduce traditional rice varieties, and to provide improved varieties to farmers from the international gene-banking system. In contrast, the system of rice re-introduction undertaken by highland people, based on an ethos of “throwing away seed,” ironically accounted for their success in re-establishing diverse agro-ecological system. 

Dans le cadre du séminaire EHESS « Agriculteurs, sols et semences dans la globalisation » organisé par Birgit Müller

• Le 2 mai 2022 de 10h30-12h30 - salle 3.05, EHESS, 2 cours de Humanités Aubervilliers