Webinar: Juggling Between Modernity and the Spirits of the Forest: Microfinance and Land in the Highlands of Cambodia

Date and Time: Jan 27, 2023 | 3:00 pm Cambodia Time

Register online via Zoom webinar [new window]

Over the past three decades, Cambodia has transformed economically, socially, and culturally. A major key feature of this transformation has been the rapid expansion of formal financial institutions, which has led to over-indebtedness, land dispossession, and distress migration. However, in the highland provinces of Cambodia, exposure to formal credit occurred less than a decade ago, as more and more cash crops, mainly cashew and cassava, began to replace the swidden subsistence agriculture. These changes have brought a new pattern of understanding, and beliefs in terms of how highlanders relate to the forestland and environmental milieu. Thus, in this webinar, drawn from eight months of ethnographic fieldwork in Ratanakiri, I will discuss how the expansion of formal financial institutions (e.g., microfinance institutions and banks) has impacted and shaped the social, cultural, and economic lives of indigenous households whose reliance on land lies beyond the means of production. I will delve into what it means to be indigenous and to be a so-called “modern citizen” with access to updated services. Those who identified themselves as indigenous have to juggle between maintaining a set of values that are crucial to their indigenous identity and fulfilling a set of economic needs under the new order of the cash economy.

This webinar will be moderated by Ms. Samedy Suong, CKS Deputy Director.