Of the Forest, Of the World: Challenging Misconceptions of a Southeast Asian Forest People

This blog post is the second in a five-part series written by Yale School of the Environment students enrolled in a graduate seminar that accompanied the spring 2025 Yale Forest Forum, “A History of People, Forests, and Forestry.” The webinar series and seminar were cohosted by the Yale Forest Forum and the Forest History Society.

Each student was asked to select a presentation and write an essay reflecting on what they learned. Brittaney Key chose Jonathan Padwe’s “Culture and Silviculture: Forests and Forest Societies of the Annamite Mountains of Cambodia and Vietnam.” You can watch the presentation video on Vimeo. 

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Our hyperconnected society is a recent phenomenon, but people have been linked across distances for centuries. Think of the trading hubs of port cities and the Silk Road, but think, too, about where the precious metals, lacquers, fragrant woods, and the like had to come from for these goods to flow through urban marketplaces. Jonathan Padwe, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, made a similar point during his Yale Forest Forum talk “Culture and Silviculture: Forests and Forest Societies of the Annamite Mountains of Cambodia and Vietnam.” He found 17th-century records indicating approximately 200,000 deerskins were imported every year into Japan as a crucial component of samurai armor. And although these hides arrived by way of Dutch and Chinese trading companies, the deer were hunted by the indigenous peoples of the Annamite Mountain highlands. These peoples were remote, yes, but not completely isolated from the world.

[At left] A 1970 U.S. Central Intelligance Agency map of ethnolinguistic diversity in part of Southeast Asia. The yellow color in southern central Vietnam represents the range of the Jarai, and the boxed area in red indicates the specific study area of Jonathan Padwe’s research. Notice that the Jarai speak a Malayo-Polynesian language while the majority ethnic groups of Vietnam and Cambodia (shown primarily in brown and green) speak Austroasiatic languages. The different linguistic clades of these groups’ respective languages are analogous to the degree of sociocultural distinction that exists between them as well. However, this diversity is at risk of being lost due to past and present assimilation pressures that have been put on the Jarai.

The Jarai were one of the highlands people and the focus of Dr. Padwe’s presentation. The Jarai traditionally live in the forested highlands of Cambodia and Vietnam, historically outside the reach of so-called “state societies” of the lowland kingdoms. As seen in the map at left, they are linguistically and culturally distinct from these state societies and today constitute an ethnic minority in Cambodia and Vietnam. The Jarai have been intimately linked with the upland forests for millennia, where they practice swidden agriculture (also known as shifting cultivation or slash-and-burn agriculture, a traditional farming method where areas of forest are cleared, burned, and used for a short period of cultivation before being left to fallow) for their primary livelihoods-although trade has long been an important part of their economy, too. Evidence suggests human-based fire management in the mid- and highland forests of Cambodia and Vietnam began approximately 2,500 years ago. Although the Jarai’s traditional swidden practices are at risk, they continue today.

As swidden practitioners, the Jarai use a combination of controlled burns, agriculture, and long fallowing periods to rotate their settlements and food production throughout the forest. After deciding on an initial area to settle (usually near a water source) and skillfully applying fire, the Jarai will begin planting their crops in the newly cleared area. They will continue clearing upland each year for additional farm plots, eventually creating a system of plots that are sited across the landscape and differentially exposed to various rainfall and weather conditions (microclimates). After about 2 to 4 years, the Jarai will stop cultivating the plots to allow the area to rest and return to forest regrowth. These agricultural practices are also closely linked to the Jarai’s spiritual and social practices; for example, major life events and rituals are observed in accordance with the agricultural cycle, and they have distinct forest stewardship practices relating to death and the afterlife, such as a prohibition against forest clearing where people are buried.

As previously mentioned, the Jarai have not been isolated from the world, and Dr. Padwe spoke of various impacts they have experienced in recent decades: American bombings during the Vietnam War, forced resettlement by the Khmer Rouge regime, loss of forest land tenure to the Cambodian national government, expansion of commercial plantations, and flooding from upstream dam releases. The “fencing in” that has occurred as Jarai people are increasingly excluded from forest areas means that their mobility and hence ability to practice traditional swidden agriculture is becoming stymied. Yet, in a modern iteration of their attunement to global forces, many Jarai have adapted to both the loss of traditional swidden ability and the presence of capitalist markets by planting cashew or rubber trees (both cash crops) to substitute functionally for the traditional fallowing period.

A Jarai woman cuts swidden rice. Photo credit: Sinoun Kasol, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Although Dr. Padwe spent the bulk of his time explaining the swidden practices of the Jarai, his global contextualization was perhaps the most illuminating part of the talk. The present-day land dispossession and economic hardships faced by Jarai could lead some to perceive them as passive, unfortunate victims subjected to the might of the state and globalization. And while these power imbalances and real impacts absolutely need to be acknowledged and addressed, it’s also important to avoid false conceptions of a “pre-contact” Jarai whose bubble was penetrated when they were intruded upon by global markets and influences in the 20th and 21st centuries. The 17th century international export of what totaled to millions of deerskins sourced from the Jarai and other highlander peoples refutes this notion. As Dr. Padwe said, the Jarai have been integrated into both the regional and global economies for hundreds of years. This historical context is important for understanding their agency over how they continue to engage with these economies today.