Lindsay French_"Looking Back and Projecting Forward from Site II"

In-person event

This talk reflects on my trajectory as an ethnographer, teacher and writer about Cambodia over the last 35+ years, and considers how my understanding of ethnographic "research" has changed over this period, as (arguably) the scholarship that is produced in and around Cambodia has also changed.  It is presented as a series of observations and questions about changes in the environment in which I (and others) have done our academic work, and in the way I understand my relationships to Cambodia and Cambodians. 

I began doctoral field work with displaced Cambodians in Thailand in 1989, when things  began to change very quickly in Cambodia, and in the wider, rapidly globalizing world as well.  I was able to visit Cambodia briefly in 1991, just before the country opened up to an international presence, and made subsequent fieldtrips every two, four, or five years.  On each trip these changes had multiplied. 

Meanwhile, more and more Western academics were involved in different ways in Cambodia: during the UNTAC period and the years following the first national election; during the Khmer Rouge Tribunal; and in the development of higher education and exchange programs with universities abroad especially.  I was watching many different ways of engaging with Cambodians, not just as an ethnographer.

Teaching about Southeast Asia also changed the way I thought about Cambodia, profoundly.  College and university populations were changing.  Classes are now filled with students of Asian and Southeast Asian heritage, of many different nationalities.  I realized that my academic "subjects" were actually my students, and my students were becoming my colleagues and friends. Who was I writing for ?  What was I teaching ?  To what end ? Southeast Asia no longer seemed appropriately conceived as a distinct region of study (as I had learned) but rather as a focus within wider networks of relationships, variously inflected by culture, power, and history.  How was I to position myself in this shifting landscape of self and other?  What did ethnographic research really consist of? How could I best represent what I was learning? And how, if at all, had institutional structures changed to accommodate new ways of being a scholar? 
This talk explores these questions, and looks for resonances beyond my own personal experience. 

Lindsay French, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Emerita, at the Rhode Island School of Design, taught social and cultural anthropology at RISD for 27 years.  Her research focuses on post-Pol Pot Cambodia, and the processes of social and cultural reconstruction in the aftermath of genocide.  She is especially interested in families divided by war, displacement and migration, and the efforts to maintain family ties attenuated by time, space, politics, and very different economic opportunities.  He current project looks at an area of unusual religious diversity in northwest Cambodia, and these communities' focus on commonalities rather than difference.  More generally, she is interested in migration, both voluntary and forced, Buddhism and everyday life in different parts of the world, the political economy of international interventions, and the challenges of representation, whether ethnographic, photographic, theatrical or curatorial