Jonathan Padwe, PhD

Assistant Professor

Office: Saunders Hall 317
Office Hours: click here
Phone: 956-2707
Email: padwe@hawaii.edu

Background
General Interests
Current Research
Selected Publications

Background

Ph.D. (Environmental Anthropology): Yale University
MESc.: Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies
BA: University of Virginia

My research looks at post-war environmental and social change in the highlands of northeast Cambodia. My dissertation fieldwork consisted of over two years living and working with highland farmers near Cambodia’s northeastern border with Vietnam. I also conducted archival research at Cambodia’s National Archives and at the Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer, the French colonial archive in Aix-en-Provence.

My work in South America includes over three years of field research on hunting and natural resource use with Aché foragers in Paraguay’s Atlantic Forest, where I also worked on community development. I have also conducted field research on land reform and identity politics with the lowland indigenous peoples’ movement in Bolivia.

For more information, please see my personal website.

General Interests

Environmental anthropology, agro-ecology and the cultural politics of natural resource use
The anthropology of war, genocide, and the politics of remembrance
Ethnicity and belonging
Southeast Asia (Cambodia) and South America (Paraguay, Bolivia)

Current Research

My current research explores the post-war politics of memory and belonging among highland farmers in northeast Cambodia. The Jarai ethnic minority experienced the Vietnam War and the Cambodian genocide not only as human tragedies, but as environmental crises, too. My research investigates the relationships between environmental and social change in the aftermath of war in Cambodia’s northeast hills.

I’m particularly interested in the ways that highland farmers use plants and the landscape to tell stories about their past. To date, I’ve worked intensively with a small group of villages along the middle-Sesan River near the Cambodia-Vietnam border. In my present research I’ve begun to trace Jarai plant-knowledge, and practices of remembrance, along networks that stretch from the highlands of Vietnam and Cambodia to communities of the Jarai diaspora in the United States and Europe.

Selected Publications:

In press for 2011. Weird undertakings: Cashews, cash and capitalism in northeast Cambodia. Pp. 123 – 153 in Caroline Hughes and Kheang Un, editors. Cambodia’s Economic Transition. Copenhagen: Nordic Institute of Asian Studies Press.

2011. (with Mathieu Guérin). Pénétration coloniale et résistance chez les Jarai: Revisiter le rôle des colonisés dans la mise en place des frontières en Indochine. Outre-Mers No. 370-371:245-272.

2010. Customary law, traditional authority and the ethnicization of rights in highland Cambodia. Pp. 325-363 in Frederic Bourdier, editor. Development and Dominion: Indigenous Peoples of Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos. Bangkok: White Lotus Books.

2008. (with Michael R. Dove, Andrew Mathews, Anne Rademacher, and Keely Maxwell) The Concept of Human Agency in Contemporary Conservation and Development. Pp. 225-253 in Bradley B. Walters, Bonnie J. McCay, Paige West and Susan Lees, editors. Against the Grain: The Vayda Tradition in Human Ecology and Ecological Anthropology. Lanham, New York: AltaMira Press.

2004. Participatory Conservation at the Condor Bioreserve, Ecuador: Representations, Decision Processes, and Underlying Assumptions. Journal of Sustainable Forestry18(2/3):107-137.

2001. Resolving land conflict along the border of the Mbaracayú Reserve, Paraguay. Pp. 125-149 in Tim Clark, Michael Stevenson, Kim Ziegelmeyer and Murray B. Rutherford, editors. Species and Ecosystem Conservation: An Interdisciplinary Approach. Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies Bulletin Series, No. 105. New Haven: Yale University.

2000. (with Kim Hill) Sustainability of Ache hunting in the Mbaracayú Reserve, Paraguay. Pp. 79-105 in J. Robinson and E. Bennet, editors. Hunting for Sustainability in Tropical Forests. Columbia University Press, New York.

1997. (with Kim Hill, Carlos Bejyvagi, Ambrosio Bepurangi, Felipe Jakugi, Roberto Tykuarangi, and Tito Tykuarangi) Impact of Hunting on Large Vertebrates in the Mbaracayú Reserve, Paraguay. Conservation Biology11(6):1339-1352.

page last updated May 9, 2012