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In Rural Cambodia, Laos and Thailand

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In Rural Cambodia, Laos and Thailand Plants, Animals, Salt and Spirits: How People Live with and Talk about the Environment in Rural Cambodia, Laos and Thailand about the Environment and Spirits: How People Live with Talk How People Live with and Talk about the Environment in Rural Cambodia, Laos and Thailand How People Live with and Talk about the Environment in Rural Cambodia, Laos and Thailand Plants, Animals, Salt and Spirits: How People Live with and Talk about the Environment in Rural Cambodia, Laos and Thailand March 2015 Edited by Toshiyuki Doi Written and translated by Chaiyarak Bampen, Syvongsay Changpitikoun, Toshiyuki Doi, Satomi Higashi, Yuka Kiguchi, Leakhana Kol and Tomohiro Oh Published by Mekong Watch 3F Aoki Building 1-12-11 Taito, Taito-ku, Tokyo 110-0016 Japan Tel: +81 3 3832 5034 Fax: +81 3 3832 5039 Website: http://www.mekongwatch.org/index.html E-mail: [email protected] Cover art: Amarit Muadthong Layout: Siriporn Pornsiritived Japanese to English translation: Tony Boys and Patricia Ormsby Contents Foreword 4 Part I Introduction: Why People’s Stories? 11 Part II People’s Stories in Rural Cambodia, Laos and Thailand 21 Stories from Bunong Communities in Northeastern Cambodia 23 • Origin of Elephants 25 • History of Keo Seima District 29 Stories from Kmhmu’ People in Central and Northern Laos 33 • A Civet Cat 35 • Brother Rui, Source of Lice 41 • Pho Yal 45 • The Owl and the Deer 51 Stories from Siphandon in Southern Laos 57 • Somphamit Waterfall and the Tale of the Dolphin 59 • The Legend of the Water Buffalo King 63 Stories from Akha People in Northern Thailand 67 • Mo Hue and Mon Yi 69 • Searching for a New Land 73 • How Cats Came to the World 77 • Origin of a Swing 81 Stories from Northeastern Thailand 85 • Great-Grandfather Ja Klawa 87 • White Elephant Path 91 • Phadaeng and Nang Ai 101 • Rhino Head Pond 109 • The Efficacy of Fear – Forest Spirits 117 Part III 125 Notes 126 References 127 Project Member Profiles 128 Fieldwork Sites Map 130 Foreword In the Mekong Basin, where people’s livelihoods are deeply rooted in the natural world of rivers and forests, many legends, tales and narratives that revolve around nature have been created and handed down from generation to generation. These stories have played an important role in protecting nature by avoiding the over-exploitation of natural resources. In recent years, however, profit-focused economic development has increased, leading to the rapid deterioration of the environment. At the same time, traditional knowledge of natural resource use as conveyed by these tales is being lost. “The People’s Stories Project” is an exploratory effort launched in August 2014 with three purposes: (1) To record legends, old tales, folklore and narratives, and access the local knowledge and experience over natural resource use found therein; (2) To develop an environmental education tool kit which makes practical use of people’s stories to bring about better governance of local resources, and; (3) To convey knowledge of local natural resource use and the richness of the world described in the stories to researchers, students, people involved in development, younger generations and citizens in general, providing a new point of view for observing natural resource management in the Mekong Region. Seven Cambodian, Japanese, Lao and Thai researchers and NGO workers set out to investigate rural areas in Northeastern Cambodia, Central and Southern Laos and Northern and Northeastern Thailand. This booklet introduces stories collected in the first year of the project and attempts to present possibilities for practical use of these people’s stories in local environmental preservation efforts. The research team owes a debt of gratitude to the many people who helped us in this project. There are too many to list them all here, but we received kind assistance from local communities in Cambodia, Laos and Thailand. In particular, without the help of local villagers who related their stories to 4 outsiders like us, our project in general and this booklet in particular would never have materialized. We received tremendous assistance, especially from Mr. Randall Arnst, Mr. Amrit Muadthong, Mr. Ariya Rattanawichaikul and Dr. Suksawang Simana, in making this booklet. We were also financially supported by the Nippon Foundation’s Asian Public Intellectuals (API) Program and the Japan Fund for Global Environment of the Environmental Restoration and Conservation Agency for our fieldwork and publication of this booklet. We express our gratitude to both of these organizations. Note that the content and claims contained in this booklet are those of the project team and have no connection with any of the aforementioned individuals and organizations. Through these stories, this booklet may be of some use in gaining an understanding of the connections between people and their natural environment from the perspective of rural villagers living in the Mekong Basin. We would be happy if it provides a new approach to considering development and environmental issues. March 2015 Bampen Chaiyarak, Syvongsay Changpitikoun, Toshiyuki Doi, Satomi Higashi, Yuka Kiguchi, Leakhana Kol and Tomohiro Oh 5 PART I Introduction: Why People’s Stories? 9 Introduction: Why People’s Stories? This booklet has come out of a research project to collect various types of stories told by local community members living in rural areas of three Mekong countries, namely Cambodia, Laos and Thailand. In this short introduction, we would like to explain why we started the project, how we collected the stories, and what we learned from them so far. 1. Why People’s Stories? All of us in the project team (see “Project Member Profiles”) have work related to development in the Mekong Region. As such, we often use terms such as “sustainable development” and “natural resource management” in our conversations with others. While these concepts are useful as guiding principles, we sometimes feel they are somewhat foreign to us. There can be several reasons for this. One, these and other key words (“gender equity,” “inclusiveness,” “safeguards” and “poverty” to name a few) in the development sector have often been coined and brought to the region from outside. We struggle to understand what they mean to our work. Two, these terms are usually used with scientific data, typically statistics. They are abstracted from the daily life that we see, hear and feel in our contact with local communities in the Mekong Region. Three, they almost always originate from English, and none of us in the project team use English as a first language. How can we deal with terms such as “sustainable development” and “natural resource management” in ways that are grounded in the realities of the Mekong Region? How can we enrich the concepts behind these expressions by embracing details we observe within the lives of community members we meet, including their feelings and emotions? How can we benefit from these terms, while paying due respect to traditional practices among local communities? Finding answers to these questions is one of the purposes of this project. 11 Toward that end, we have realized that stories local community members often tell us may be used as tools. Consider the following story, which one of us heard from a villager in Southern Laos: Once, a soldier stepped into a spirit forest. He discovered a lot of tobacco leaves there and collected them. However, when trying to leave the forest, he could not find an exit. It was because he took more tobacco leaves than he could possibly consume for himself. No matter how hard he searched, he could not find a way out of the forest. Realizing what might have been the problem, he finally decided to return the tobacco leaves to the forest. The moment he dropped them on the ground, he was able to see an exit in front of him. The teller of this story reports the incident in very specific local contexts, such as a spirit forest. However, what he says is really about the management of resources. The story highlights a moral dimension of the soldier’s misbehavior to avoid the over-exploitation of the natural resource, in this case, tobacco leaves. It also incorporates the teller’s feelings of awe towards the forest spirit. As this example shows, a story can provide detailed contexts and a core message around a particular topic, and put them together into an organic whole through everyday language. We have encountered similar verbal performances when working with villagers in the Mekong Region and have been struck by the effectiveness they have in making the point and creating lively conversations. We have thought that such verbal repertories, or people’s stories, can be viewed as locally-shared intellectual resources, based on which key development issues can be reviewed. People’s stories can be seen as common repositories, where local community members have encoded their experiences with the environment, as well as ethical, aesthetic and spiritual values they have formed, in ordinary language. Such an accumulation of wisdom can be used to enhance our understanding of various issues which we often try to capture through such terms as “sustainable development.” 12 2. The People’s Stories Project We named our research program “The People’s Stories Project” and started to collect stories from local communities in August 2014. As of January 2015, we collected 102 stories in Cambodia, Laos and Thailand. Fieldwork sites and schedule are summarized in TABLE 1. TABLE 1: Fieldwork sites and schedule Site Date Group Major Topics # of (District/Province/
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