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- Panel 1-2 Wild Edible Plants at the Contact Zone: Prey Lang Forest, Cambodia /Courtney Work
Panel 1-2 Wild Edible Plants at the Contact Zone: Prey Lang Forest, Cambodia /Courtney Work
Courtney Work
Associate Professor, Department of Ethnology, National Chengchi University (NCCU), Taiwan
In response to the extreme degradation of forest resources in the Prey Lang Forest of north-central Cambodia, local Kuy Indigenous people are collaborating with researchers at the National University of Battambang to re-populate their landscapes with forest plants. The wild plants are understood as “heritage” by both the urban academics and the forest Indigenous. This is a contact zone where urban and forest knowledges meet, and where the boundary between the tangible and intangible collapses. The knowledge about which plants can be used in what ways and the techniques needed to propagate them is intangible, and this knowledge is being shared between Kuy and university researchers, respectively. Kuy researchers have more specialized intangible knowledge about how plants behave as social actors to support forest and human health, and university researchers are learning these new concepts about the world of plants. The plants are also clearly tangible objects in the world. Kuy researchers understand wild plants as part of the infrastructure of the rapidly disappearing forest, while the university researchers capture them as objects for seed banks to preserve heritage into the future. While both collectives of researchers understand the primary ‘heritage values’ of the others, such mutual visibility is unique to this particular historical moment. The fact that plant knowledge beyond propagation and seed banks is made visible to university-trained ‘scientists’ is due in part to the policy interventions related to how ‘heritage’ is defined and to larger value shifts toward sustainability and the decolonization of knowledge production. The fact that university knowledge is made legible to Indigenous communities is also part of these value shifts. Beyond policies and human values, we argue that what makes this mutual visibility possible is the obvious physical transformations of the planet and the ongoing systemic health issues that are unmistakable in both urban and rural environments. Social change happens at the contact zone of theory and practice, and the current turn toward intangible heritage, sustainability, and decolonized knowledge production was a tool for trans-disciplinary as well as transcultural collaborations and innovations.
Associate Professor, Department of Ethnology, National Chengchi University (NCCU), Taiwan
In response to the extreme degradation of forest resources in the Prey Lang Forest of north-central Cambodia, local Kuy Indigenous people are collaborating with researchers at the National University of Battambang to re-populate their landscapes with forest plants. The wild plants are understood as “heritage” by both the urban academics and the forest Indigenous. This is a contact zone where urban and forest knowledges meet, and where the boundary between the tangible and intangible collapses. The knowledge about which plants can be used in what ways and the techniques needed to propagate them is intangible, and this knowledge is being shared between Kuy and university researchers, respectively. Kuy researchers have more specialized intangible knowledge about how plants behave as social actors to support forest and human health, and university researchers are learning these new concepts about the world of plants. The plants are also clearly tangible objects in the world. Kuy researchers understand wild plants as part of the infrastructure of the rapidly disappearing forest, while the university researchers capture them as objects for seed banks to preserve heritage into the future. While both collectives of researchers understand the primary ‘heritage values’ of the others, such mutual visibility is unique to this particular historical moment. The fact that plant knowledge beyond propagation and seed banks is made visible to university-trained ‘scientists’ is due in part to the policy interventions related to how ‘heritage’ is defined and to larger value shifts toward sustainability and the decolonization of knowledge production. The fact that university knowledge is made legible to Indigenous communities is also part of these value shifts. Beyond policies and human values, we argue that what makes this mutual visibility possible is the obvious physical transformations of the planet and the ongoing systemic health issues that are unmistakable in both urban and rural environments. Social change happens at the contact zone of theory and practice, and the current turn toward intangible heritage, sustainability, and decolonized knowledge production was a tool for trans-disciplinary as well as transcultural collaborations and innovations.