A Dragon Apparent

Highlander people, Ratanakiri, Cambodia. 

I've spent a lot - a LOT - of time over the last few years reading about the highland cultures of Cambodia, where the subjects of my book come from. Old travel writing is fascinating. The accounts tell as much about the personal sympathies, preferences and cultural biases of the writer as they do about the highlanders themselves, who generally regard their chroniclers with bemused disinterest.

In January 1950, the British writer Norman Lewis traveled to Indochina to observe the waning days of French colonialism. He recorded his journey in the book A Dragon Apparent. I liked Lewis immediately, as he spends a lot of ink on his daily search for coffee, and complains when his hour of departure prevents him from eating a decent breakfast. The French and Vietnamese referred to the indigenous people almost exclusively as Moi – savages – and Lewis employed the term in his writing. His guide to the highlanders was Dr. Jouin, a French medical doctor and anthropologist, had lived among the highlanders for years and was, Lewis wrote, convinced that “this engaging race was doomed in quite a short time to disappear from the earth.”

Lewis arrived at the beginning of an era more threatening to the highlanders’ existence than any danger faced in their long history – the systematic destruction of the natural world. He was appalled by the slave-like treatment of highlanders employed at French rubber plantations, and bemoaned the expanse of commercial rubber farms that turned the wild, untamed landscape into a monoculture of identical trunks. He worried for the highlanders’ future. For a people whose spiritual life was based on the elements of the natural world, Lewis wrote, the highlanders seemed disastrously ill-prepared for the creep of modernity.

“The Moi has not been permitted the initiative to meet an attack from an unexpected quarter,” Lewis observed. “If someone offends the village’s tutelary spirit, the thing can be put right without much trouble. But if a timber-cutting company with a concession comes along and cuts down the banyan tree that contains the spirit, and takes it away, what is to be done? It is the end of the world.”

 

Posted on Tuesday, May 11, 2010