Articulating Indigeneity,other-than-human relations and environmental crises in Cambodia through participatory film

Abstract

This article reflects on a participatory filmmaking project that was intended to explore and raise awareness about intersecting social and environmental challenges facing a Bunong Indigenous community in Cambodia. Participatory research and arts methods are often deployed because they promise less extractive approaches that lend themselves to challenging dominant narratives, and the erasures, harms and inequalities that they produce. Recent literature has, however, cautioned about the instrumentalisation of Indigenous experiences as a solution for environmental crises, and pointed to the risks of reproducing flattening representations of Indigeneity as synonymous with nature in ways that might instead serve to regulate and essentialise Indigeneity. This article reflects on the project through the lens of these risks. We ask whether, methodologically and substantively, the project imposed its own set of expectations and demands that in fact served to contain and dictate the performance of Indigenous authenticity? To what extent were the project films constrained by our initial assumptions about Indigeneity as a site of potential ecological renewal? To answer these questions, we pay particular attention to the ‘emic’ (insider) and ‘etic’ (outsider) positions that are assumed to govern work within participatory research and participatory arts. We show how the emic and etic dimensions of participatory projects can be multiple, complex and contingent, and highlight how these distinctions remain a generative problematic and set of tensions within the films produced through the project. The article shows how the project's participatory methods allowed films that simultaneously reproduce but exceed the more flattening expectations, constraints and assumptions placed upon them.

Introduction

Research and advocacy with, for and about Indigenous communities has proliferated in the last two decades, and particularly so within debates about human relationships to the environment, ecological crises and wildlife. In this article we want to explore and reflect on some of the methodological challenges arising as Indigeneity is articulated in relation to these challenges and themes. We do so by reflecting on a participatory filmmaking project initiated in Cambodia within a Bunong Indigenous community, which focused, variously, on challenges of preserving cultural heritage and changing practices of elephant custodianship in the context of widespread deforestation. The project embarked from the assumption that documenting Indigenous experiences would help raise awareness about environmental harms, elephant welfare and the challenges facing Cambodia's Indigenous groups. As we have reflected on the process and products of the project, however, we have increasingly recognised that such assumptions, methodologically and substantively, themselves risked reproducing limited, superficial and flattening representations of Indigeneity. Indeed, the wider literature on Indigenous experiences is increasingly wary of framing Indigeneity as an identity intrinsically aligned with ecology or promises of more sustainable ways of being and living with nature (Yeh and Bryan, 2015).

In this article, we take stock and reflect on the methodological and practical development of the project. We ask ourselves whether the project imposed its own set of expectations and demands about the performance of Indigenous authenticity: to what extent were the three films produced through the project determined and exhausted by our initial assumptions about the Bunong way of life as a source of ecological knowledge and potential ecological renewal? We focus especially on the need to complicate assumptions about the ‘emic’ (insider) and ‘etic’ (outsider) positions that are at work within participatory research and participatory arts (Pauwels, 2015). These are, we argue, often more complicated than participatory approaches tend to assume, and remained a generative problematic within the films our project produced. Moreover, within a call for qualitative research in the social sciences to take seriously the products of participatory arts (Cooke et al., 2023), we show how the participatory methods at work in the project allowed films that simultaneously reproduce and yet exceed the constraints and assumptions placed upon them. We critically read the films to show how they self-consciously perform and disrupt the more flattened conceptions of Indigeneity that were imposed on them to begin with. We argue that such indeterminate possibilities and dynamics remain features and ongoing strengths of participatory (arts) approaches for social science research.

The article proceeds as follows: in the next section, we situate the project within the wider landscape of participatory research and participatory arts, noting the tendency within these approaches to focus on process over product, and querying where and how participatory approaches tend to locate the emic (insider) and etic (outsider) dynamics in their work. We then turn to situate the project within the recent growth of research on Indigeneity and its relationship to nature, particularly with one eye on the risks of instrumentally situating Indigenous experiences and cultures as ‘redemptive’ of wider social, political and ecological crises. In the third section, we contextualise our project by situating and historicising the experiences of Cambodia's Indigenous communities, noting the traditional place of elephants therein, and outline the current environmental crises facing them. The fourth section explains the practicalities of the participatory film project in closer detail, while explaining the role of our two partner organisations therein (the Bophana Audiovisual Center and the Elephant Livelihood Initiative Environment [ELIE]). The penultimate section takes up the challenge of engaging seriously with the products of participatory methods through a brief reading of each of the three films produced as a text. We then conclude with observations regarding the importance of the contradictions and ambiguities enacted within the films. We suggest that such complexities are a welcome consequence of the participatory nature of the project.

Participatory research through participatory arts

Before discussing our approach in closer detail, we want to situate the project within the context of a cluster of approaches and assumptions around participatory methods in research, arts and development practice. Broadly, across these fields, participatory approaches cohere around the commitment to devolving the process of research and practice to the groups and communities to which they are addressed. Participatory approaches therefore assume and involve varying forms of co-production between researchers, practitioners and subjects, promising to level traditional power inequalities and asymmetries, while offering participants a sense of ownership and control over the research or creative process. Participation is thought to centre questions of reflexivity and positionality in the research process (Caretta and Riaño, 2016), encouraging a less extractive approach that lends itself to challenging dominant narratives, and the erasures and inequalities that they produce. As such, participatory methods have become increasingly popular within the repertoire of more critical qualitative methods, especially as addressed to social worlds and experiences that are less visible (see e.g. Zoettl, 2012), and within decolonial approaches that emphasise relationalities, interdependence and care (Dazzo, 2023).

While qualitative research has a long history of employing visual and arts-led methods, especially so through photography and film within visual ethnography (Pauwels, 2015; Pink, 2014), the place of participatory arts – as a set of practices and products – deserves further attention. Within the social sciences, there remains a tendency to treat arts as a secondary outcome or impact of a participatory process. Yet arts are an important medium and site of research in their own rights (see e.g. Vaart et al., 2018). The range of participatory arts approaches is vast: comprising graffiti and street art, theatre, music, photography, film and beyond. Crucially, an arts-led lens reminds us that the medium of each method will remain imprinted on each specific project or corpus, where different approaches to the same subject matter can produce highly distinctive and varied results. Poetry, for example, might produce very different and more personal relationships to a subject matter than, say, theatre or film, where intra-group negotiation tends to be built into the treatment of the material (Erel et al., 2017). Indeed, as employed on the project at hand, participatory video specifically tends to work as a group-based practice, where deliberation and reflection are required at each stage of planning, production and post-production work (Shaw and Robertson, 2008). What unifies these differing emphases remains a commitment to ‘…a process-based approach’ that is focused on the ‘…facilitation of dialogue amongst diverse communities’ (Shefik, 2018: 315). This tends to be enabled through academic or professional facilitation and is often focused on the production of art that is meant to amplify, support or critically reflect on the experiences of a given community or issue. In academic and professional practice, the products of participatory arts are often then either assumed to instrumentally serve as advocacy or awareness raising tools that can provide alternatives to the existing representational work in more dominant media and research (Ledwith and Springett, 2022) or, more narrowly, as conduits for research interested in how the participatory experience has impacted the participants.

Our project was addressed to the intersections of environmental and social challenges, and (participatory) visual methods are well suited to exploring such themes for several additional reasons. The popularity of ‘environmental documentary’ as a specific genre and mode of communication – often in alliance with campaigns for action – relies on the affective reach and impact of environmental issues in film (Duvall, 2017). Unlike other visual methods, for example, photography or street art, (participatory) video is equipped to grasp the interplays between text (i.e. dialogue), audio and movement (Baumann et al., 2020), and to situate these dynamics within wider contexts. Such dynamics enable the exploration of environmental worlds and their human occupants through a greater range of sensory feelings that convey affect, such as texture (e.g. bark on trees), or reactions to the environment and wildlife (e.g. smell) (Kaley et al., 2019). In this respect, video as medium for producing research data – and additionally as a research output – transcends some of the constraints of transcripts and written outputs as it allows for more holistic and potentially intimate accounts of place, feeling and context.

It is worth pausing at this point to reflect on important critiques levelled at the participatory tradition. Within development contexts, concerns have been raised that participatory research and practice, being generally an approach that emerged in the Global North, can serve to displace existing or contextually situated approaches for understanding social problems, where a ‘tyrannical’ language of ‘participation’ can actually ‘…encourage a reassertion of control and power by dominant individuals and groups’ (Kothari, 2001: 142). Lenette (2022) cautions of the need to think carefully and reflexively about the assumptions of participatory approaches, highlighting a tendency to apply participatory techniques indiscriminately while risking the reproduction of colonial dynamics. In a similar vein, Dazzo specifically calls attention to the ‘contact zones’ of participatory encounters where asymmetrical power dynamics and ‘tensions’ between researchers, practitioners and participants are actually negotiated (2023: 4). Indeed, the ‘emic’ and ‘etic’ (insider/outsider) positions assumed in participatory approaches further risk flattening diverse and potentially contradictory experiences within subject groups (Caretta and Riaño, 2016), or can neglect the marking and remarking of an ‘insider’ boundary of a group as a negotiated, changing and unfinished process that can itself, reflexively, be reshaped through participatory interventions (Cooke et al., 2023). In other words, researchers engaging in participatory approaches should think carefully about the identities that they locate (and constitute), especially if these are assumed to furnish more authentic or natural data or experiences. We should be especially mindful of such anxieties given that participatory methods – themselves a product of the Global North – are rationalised through a promise of speaking for local knowledge. Indeed, local knowledge is in turn shaped and reconstituted by and through participatory epistemologies and techniques.

Lastly, as we develop in our subsequent discussion, there remains a tendency amongst those using participatory approaches to focus on (or celebrate) the process of their work over, and often at the expense of, their products. As Cooke et al. note, the risk of a (well-intentioned but often paternalistic) emphases on ‘giving voice’ to marginalised groups is that we limit our ability to take seriously the products of those voices (2018). Moreover, an emphasis on the value of participation – over and potentially at the expense of gauging the shape and quality of the products or data yielded – has the effect of instrumentalising participatory research or interventions. This can carry the effect of pathologising social problems, assuming participation as the remedial practice on its own terms, often foreclosing further scrutiny or action around the issues at hand (see Rogers, 2016).

Articulating Indigeneity

The last two decades have seen growing attention and interest in the experiences of Indigenous communities from across the social sciences and the arts, focused on a need to recognise and historicise the relations of Indigenous communities to (colonial) institutions, politics and systems. More critical scholarship has increasingly eschewed attempts to define and categorise Indigenous peoples, especially as expressed in juridical classifications that capitulate to forms of racialised essentialism (Rawson and Mansfield, 2018). Instead, there has been increased recognition of Indigeneity as a contingent relation, or a process of ‘becoming’ (Clifford, 2013), that is realised through ‘…particular configurations of colonial histories, postcolonial modernities, epistemological-ontological commitments, and formulations of difference’ (Radcliffe, 2017: 1). One dominant thread within the recent scholarship on Indigeneity has been around the intersections of Indigenous experiences and environmental harms. Indigenous communities often live in and around contexts that are most vulnerable to the penetration of resource intensive, extractive and ecologically destructive capital accumulation (Hesketh, 2025). Indeed, the occupation of spaces that are deemed marginal or liminal paradoxically serves to negate and delegitimise Indigenous worldviews and identities exactly as they are designated for integration through capital exchange (Radcliffe, 2020). As such, land dispossession – and incommensurable conceptions and meanings of land and place – tend to be central to Indigenous struggles (Burow et al., 2018), especially as these are often continuous with longer standing historical patterns of settlement and coloniality. The tendency of Indigenous struggles to include or depart from patterns of environmental destruction has further meant that Indigeneity has increasingly figured within the recent growth of ‘more-than-human’ approaches to theory and method. Such thinking is predicated on the refusal of binaries such as nature/culture and the prevailing anthropocentrism at work in social science and the humanities. In this vein, more-than-human theorists and Indigenous scholars have often highlighted how (many) Indigenous worldviews recognise the social as constituted through relations with the natural world (see e.g. Pugliese, 2020; TallBear, 2011; Watts, 2021).

Where these approaches are addressed to environmental crises, Indigenous knowledge is often located as a site that promises more sustainable ways of being with nature (Brondízio et al., 2021). For example, legal pluralism has been explored as a means of both recognising Indigenous sovereignty and enhancing natural resource management in settler colonial states (O’Donnell, 2023), while rights of nature movements have been advanced in ways that are intertwined with or informed by Indigenous rights movements across the world (Gilbert, 2022). On the one hand, these approaches offer important recognition of ontologies and resource governance structures beyond those traditionally prescribed by and within colonial systems. On the other, more critical scholars have cautioned of the misuses of Indigeneity. For Chandler and Reid, the recent interest in Indigeneity itself represents a ‘…new form of colonisation of Indigeneity for Western consumption’ (2020: 486), with the potential effect of contributing to its own forms of structural violence that monitor and regulate Indigenous authenticity (Maddison, 2013).

There are real risks that participatory methods, in their attempts to platform Indigenous voices, can constrain and reposition their articulation through Global North frameworks and terms. This should shift our thinking away from avenues to locate and platform ‘pure’ or unmediated accounts of Indigeneity but, instead, be mindful of what Indigenous voices are made to do. Smith et al. (2016) suggest, for example, that the new visibility for (and interest in) Indigenous methods has increasingly become ‘…institutionalised away from its Indigenous communities and contexts, where it began and where it still informs identities, ways of living and being’ (2016: 132). Writing on Australian bushfire management, Neale further highlights the ‘redemptive’ assumptions made of Indigenous knowledge where ‘…frequently, Indigenous peoples are conceptualized and addressed in terms of their potential supplemental-value and are thereby expected to respond to dominant groups in sudden and expectant need of solutions’ (2023). The expectation of Indigenous peoples to perform their Indigeneity in particular ways, for example, through inevitable processes of acculturation, or contained and defined as experiences of disadvantage (Cattelino and Simpson, 2022), further limits the legibility of Indigenous experiences. Such experiences might occupy ‘a variety of “native” and “non-native” habituses’ and might instead show attempts to advance ‘notions of Indigeneity within complex social networks’ that ‘rupture the otherness associated with Indigeneity’ (Virtanen, 2010: 154). In other words, it is crucial that researchers be sensitive to the social and political forces that make Indigenous self-identification necessary and possible. In light of this, the following sections of this article reflect our attempts to reflect on and learn from through the films produced on our project. At the same time, while being mindful that our attempts to work with Indigenous experiences would, themselves, invariably implicate historical and methodological pressures that risk flattening representations of Indigeneity, we are mindful that participatory methods and arts can produce unpredictable outcomes, and can escape the intentions and assumptions of their producers. Before doing so, the following section introduces the context in which our project took place.

Indigeneity, elephants and environmental crises in Cambodia

Debates around Indigeneity – as political, legal and cultural categories – have been increasingly salient across Southeast Asia over the past two decades (see Baird, 2019). In Cambodia specifically, Indigenous communities have been recognised in domestic law since 2001, a category provided through a framework allowing claims for communal land titles. This framework provides recognition for Cambodia's 22 different Indigenous groups. Yet, Indigeneity has a longer and more complex history within the country that implicates longer-term and ongoing forms of coloniality. Indirect French colonial rule (1863 to 1953) materialised principally through the ability to coerce and raise tax across Cambodia's provincial geographies, but also relied on more embedded programmes of governance to normalise the reach of the colonial state, for example, the penetration of western public health programmes (Au, 2012). The French colonial authorities also sought to pacify ‘highland’ (Indigenous) peoples, playing to civilisational ‘…local cosmographic hierarchies that relegated the highlanders to ritually subordinate and even neo-slave status when it came to paying local tribute or economic services later dressed up as tax or corvée obligation’ (Gunn, 2014: 135). In other words, Indigenous communities have long histories of subordination as outside and within Cambodia. The post-colonial period in the 1950s saw Indigenous groups subject to assimilatory policies of ‘Khmerization’ (Gunn, 2014: 147), while the 1960s saw new geopolitical imperialisms explode within Cambodia's north and east – home to the majority of Cambodia's ‘highland’ Indigenous groups – as the Vietnam War spilt across the Cambodian border through the USA's carpet bombing campaigns. Different Indigenous groups experienced the years of the Khmer Rouge genocide and subsequent Civil War in uneasy and shifting alliances (see e.g. Baird, 2020). The advent of peace in Cambodia in the 1990s restarted long-standing processes of integration of Indigenous land in the name of national development programmes that, at least, coincided with historical forms of discrimination against Indigenous cultures (Keating, 2019).

The story of Cambodia's peace process over the past two decades is a story of ecological destruction. The inauguration of peace and development agendas saw a catastrophic increase in deforestation, with Cambodia ranked as the third highest in the world between 2002 and 2012 (Hansen et al., 2013). Deforestation has been led, in part, by new regimes of kleptocratic governance, land grabbing and land conflicts across the country (see e.g. Loughlin and Milne, 2024; Sourn et al., 2021). The remaining forests have been systematically degraded through further illegal logging practices, which often take place near important conservation areas (Milne and Mahanty, 2015). Indigenous groups, who often reside within or adjacent to such areas, therefore tend to experience multiple forms of precarity: forest loss is experienced as a loss of cultural heritage, loss of food resource and as a spiritual harm. At the same time, such Indigenous groups are forced to contest and resist deforestation and land dispossession through (il)legal land frameworks that are incommensurable to more situated, contingent and mobile historical relationships to place and geography.

The loss of forest has particularly affected the Asian elephant population – a key focus of our project due to their relationship with the Bunong community, discussed further below. Asian elephants have historically played an important cultural and spiritual role in Cambodia – most notably within the royal family – and appear in the iconography of local Buddhist, Hindu and Animist religious traditions. Elephants have also been highly valued as a working animal, most famously for their role in the construction of Angkor Wat in the twelfth century (Maltby and Bourchier, 2011). This role reflects the elephant's history across the region as one combining worship and exploitation; from the earliest depictions of the animals, evidence can be found of both their use in war and agriculture and their status as divine creatures (Kopnina and Baker, 2023). Despite this veneration, elephants have faced sustained threats to their wellbeing and lives throughout Cambodian history, threats which only grew more pronounced in the last century. In addition to facing the captivity and exploitation experienced by elephants across Asia (Baker and Winkler, 2020), elephants in Cambodia specifically suffered due to the country's periods of violent conflict. While exact numbers of elephants prior to the Civil War and genocide in Cambodia are unknown, research has demonstrated that this period of conflict resulted in huge losses through the destruction of their habitat and increased hunting for food and ivory. These sustained attacks on habitation have had significant impacts; from the approximately 2000 wild elephants reported in Cambodia in the 1990s, only a few hundred were estimated to remain in the country by 2010 (Maltby and Bourchier, 2011).

Despite the political sensitivities surrounding environmental protection in Cambodia, wild elephant conservation is an area which receives some government support. For example, there is a prohibition on capturing wild elephants for the purposes of breaking them for service, and any killing of elephants is now criminalised (Kuoy, 2013). Yet despite these enhanced protections, a significant percentage of elephants still live in captivity in present-day Cambodia, with the fast-developing ecotourism industry potentially further feeding the illegal trafficking of wild elephants to feed demand (Kopnina and Baker, 2023). With the elephant population facing ongoing threats, organisations such as our project partner, ELIE, have stepped in to preserve remaining habitats, rehabilitate remaining captive elephants and raise awareness of the importance of conservation. ELIE is a non-government organisation based in Mondulkiri, where it has operated an elephant sanctuary since 2007. The sanctuary was developed in close partnership with the local Indigenous Bunong community of Pu Trom. This Indigenous community has a long-standing and particularly close cultural relationship with elephants. Historically, Bunong would capture wild elephants, breaking them for the purposes of sale and service in the region or community (Bion Griffin, 2013). While this human/other-than-human relationship has changed over time, many members of the Bunong community retain a belief that elephants are key agents mediating spiritual relations between humans and the other-than-human natural world (Kuoy, 2013). For example, if a customary rule is broken in a village, there is a belief that elephants will notice first and act strangely, requiring an apology and religious ritual to address the breach (Scheer, 2011). Many communities have also continued to rely upon elephants to aid their farming and rice cultivation activities, as well as more recent ecotourist projects (Baker and Winkler, 2020).

The Bunong community's continued connection to elephants, and their spiritual relationship with the forest itself (Mahanty et al., 2015), have necessitated a delicate mediation on the part of ELIE and other organisations, of relations between these communities and the use of these habitats. ELIE compensates the community for the use of their land and employs members of the community to work in the sanctuary, while also working closely with the community to protect the forest and strengthen the community's position to live there in a sustainable manner, including through funding and support programmes. The forest's proximity to a major town (Sen Monorom) and rich biodiversity has rendered it extremely vulnerable to, and impacted by deforestation, environmental degradation and illegal land grabbing and sales. The threat to the Bunong community is substantial. In addition to placing cultural and religious significance upon the forest, local people rely heavily on the forest's natural resources to supplement their income and livelihoods (Chou, 2019). These threats form part of the backdrop to the participatory films explored in the following sections.

Indigenous heritage and environmental awareness through participatory video

This project was principally conceived as an exercise that could explore and amplify young Cambodians’ views around ecological harms, wildlife welfare and protection and the intersection of these questions with Indigenous experiences and heritage. We envisaged participatory video as a method that could bring together different groups within a creative process that inspired an ‘exceptional sphere of belonging’ (Nunn, 2022), while allowing genuinely transformative impact through the affective bonds at work in the participatory dynamic (Hammelman et al., 2020). Specifically, we wanted to encourage young people – Indigenous and (majority) Khmer together – to explore, document and actively engage with conservation issues, and to amplify awareness of environmental challenges across both Indigenous and Khmer communities.

To do so, we worked with two partner organisations. The Bophana Center is Cambodia's leading organisation specialising in audio-visual archives and resourcing. From February 2020, Bophana helped to coordinate the recruitment of 12 young people, drawn from Indigenous and Khmer communities, and provided basic training in film planning, production and, later, editing. The three UK project investigators supported this process through a seminar in Phnom Penh outlining basic themes around environmental harms, the aims of participatory video as a community-led communication and advocacy tool (Shaw and Robertson, 2008), and a session on safeguarding training for all participants. In partnership with ELIE, the 12 young people were hosted in the Pu Trom Bunong community elephant sanctuary, with an open brief to produce films that could explore intersections of Indigenous identity, heritage and elephant welfare. Despite significant disruption around the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, with social distancing protocols limiting the participants’ ability to travel and constraining the filmmaking process itself, the 12 young people were able to work in three teams to produce three films over 2020 and 2021. We discuss these in closer detail in the next section.

Two points of reflection are important here. Firstly, the design of the project included (what we envisaged to be) innovations in participatory methodologies. On the one hand, at its core, we wanted to disrupt the emic and etic insider/outsider tradition that tends to structure many participatory projects. We had sought, for example, to recruit young Indigenous and (majority) Khmer students onto the project in deliberately mixed groups. These students would then work together with members of the Bunong community in Pu Trom, as well as Indigenous staff at ELIE. In other words, the boundary of participatory insider was deliberately stretched across multiple groups and layers of ‘insider-ness’, all of whom were involved in a co-productive and iterative process through the development of the films. This design resituated and complicated where – and between who – we expected to see power dynamics and inequalities at play within the process, including (but beyond) those we conventionally start to think about in terms of the (‘outsider’) facilitators of participatory projects and their participants. ¹ We wanted, particularly, to soften hard boundaries between the Khmer and Indigenous participants by encouraging co-confrontations with the challenges facing the Bunong Indigenous community. Our feedback from the young people on the project showed that strong and ongoing relationships had emerged specifically from the creative work on the project, though, on reflection, particularly in the context of the pandemic, we cannot gauge how these relationships themselves materially shaped the content of the films.

Secondly, and attendant to the above, we cannot escape the possibility that we simply displaced (but reinscribed and re-centred) the influence of an ‘outsider’ gaze. Crucially, though, such an outsider gaze should be understood as multiply located, uneven and in need of historicisation. As noted above, the tensions we set out here between our original expectations of the project – to support the production of films that would trouble and amplify the emic insider in order to disrupt etic outsider perceptions of Indigeneity and environmental crises – is an important dynamic in the literature on participatory research generally, as well as participatory video specifically, especially as it seeks to apprehend the re-inscription or reproduction of ‘colonial’ external perspectives (Grierson, 2010). For instance, we relied on training and support – and inevitably creative influence – from facilitating staff at the Bophana Center. Institutionally, this relationship implicates its own local and international influences, with implications for multiple insider and outsider positions. The history of film production in Cambodia has long been technically influenced by the aesthetic practices of colonial metropoles, such as the USA and France, which have historically provided training opportunities for Cambodian filmmakers. In the periods during which the industry has flourished, international aesthetics (from Hollywood to J-Horror) have been used to tell local stories, frequently as scaffolds for the depiction of Cambodian folklore, and yet designed to generate and engage a sense of collective Cambodian identity (Hamilton, 2012).

These dynamics have themselves shaped the rationale and work of the Bophana Centre. Cofounded in 2006 by Ieu Pannakar, an early Cambodian filmmaker who began in the 1950s as the industry took its first steps in professional film production, and Rithy Panh, now the country's leading documentary filmmaker, the Centre was conceived of as way to archive and protect the country's film heritage and to provide training opportunities for local filmmakers that could lead to international exposure. For the Bophana Center the international is, for better or worse, the context through which the local is to be articulated, a tension poignantly encapsulated in an encounter between Panh and an Australian curator at a screening of his 2022 documentary Everything Will Be OK, recounted by film academic Andrew Hollister:

‘Why wasn’t the narration in Khmer? I don’t understand why you did the film in French,’ she says harshly, ‘The French were your oppressors!’ The theater is silent. Panh replies, a little less calmly than usual, “Because I am French! Yes, I am Khmer, but I am also French. The Khmer Rouge were my oppressors and they spoke Khmer!” The crowd applauds. (Hollister, 2023: 2)

Panh escaped the Khmer Rouge genocide (1975–1979) and was accepted into the prestigious Paris film school L'Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques, where he developed a poetic approach to documentary filmmaking that uses the artistic heritage of Cambodia, modulated through an aesthetic inspired by his international training, to interrogate the country's past and, in so doing, redefine its place in the world today (Cazenave, 2021). The point here, methodologically, is to acknowledge the way that insiders and outsiders actively contest and renegotiate their own (multiple) insider and outsider positioning. Panh's influence on the work of Bophana, broadly understood, has been significant and we can observe imprints of it within the three films produced in the project as they variously adopt an observational approach to documentary as ‘witnessing’ (Hamilton, 2012).

The films on this project were also inescapably produced subject to the wider demands and parameters of a UK research and innovation-funded award. Such funding dictates the adherence to specific timelines and sequences of action, as well as underpinning a generic instrumentalisation of project activity. The ‘projectification’ of the creative process – where arts and arts-led research are subordinate to a bounded and episodic instrumentalism (Jałocha and Ćwikła, 2017) – inescapably shaped our work. As far as we tried to devolve ownership of the creative process to the young people in an effort to facilitate an open and indeterminate creative process, our initial framing of the project was justified through an instrumental logic of awareness raising around Indigenous experiences and environmental crises, premised on its ability to spark change. That logic itself risked sustaining and reproducing flat and flattening accounts of Indigeneity as an object of research that could be observed as synonymous with environmental harm, forest loss and other-than-human relations between communities and elephants. In other words, on reflection, we are forced to ask whether, and to what extent, we re-imposed another set of expectations about Indigeneity – its own regulatory form over the context – that demanded its own performances of Indigenous authenticity? To what extent were the films determined and exhausted by our initial assumptions about Indigeneity?

To return to our introductory framing question we will now offer some brief reflections on the films, taking them seriously as creative products and social texts in their own rights. In doing so, we want to centre the tensions, outline above, between a participatory process that can be simultaneously open, undetermined and yet constrained and limiting. Crucially, we reflect on the films produced by the project to think through how a participatory (arts) method can be both limited by and yet exceed such constraints. We want to draw attention, specifically, to how the films can be read to self-consciously perform this problem, thereby both underlining it, while problematising and critiquing the pressures and constraints of form, trope and direction impressed on them, particularly as they can be read to disrupt and contest multiple ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ positionings and pressures. In doing so, we insist that our focus requires greater attention on – and to take seriously – the products of participatory arts interventions as sites of research in their own right.

Making legible tensions between the ‘emic’ in order to disrupt ‘etic’: discussing the project's films

In the three films produced by this project we see a similar set of tensions play out in both their form and content in terms of emic and etic positioning. Indeed, it is a tension which at times they seem, self-consciously, to perform, in turn seeming to make deliberately legible the limitations of our initial propositions.

My Home

CHOUN Sopheana, MECH Choulay, YAM Sopheak, MEAN Sochetra, CHHEAN Pisen, 2020, 28mn 34 s, https://vimeo.com/488357760

This film draws strongly on the observational documentary tradition, in which the camera functions as a ‘fly on the wall’, with the narrative seemingly allowed to emerge organically from the actions of the film's subjects (Nichols, 2017). This is an approach to filmmaking that emerged in the west at the same time as the first participatory video projects started to be developed in the 1960s, projects which often adopt a similar approach, while also drawing on the ethnographic concept of the ‘transect walk’, where a film is constructed around a journey through the protagonist's environment, mapping out the local resources available to the community (Rogowski et al., 2022). In so doing, the film seeks to emphasise an entirely emic experience in which, initially at least, an almost symbiotic relationship is posited between Chheol Thouk, the mahout (elephant custodian), the elephant he tends (Gee Nowl) and the forest environment. The film opens with a wide aerial shot of a verdant forest landscape to a soundtrack of ambient forest noises and a traditional Khmer tune, intercut with close-up shots of monkeys playing, and a snake working its way along a tree branch. This prelapsarian image is, however, quickly disrupted by another wide shot of an area in the forest that has been destroyed by illegal logging. Enter Chheol Thouk, who silently makes his way through the forest, observing the impact of deforestation, before moving into the forest undergrowth, the aerial shot giving way to a sequence of low-angle close-ups firmly establishing his (Indigenous) authority in this space, an authority which is then juxtaposed with a similar low-angle close-up of the elephant Gee Nowl, the editing creating a sense of parity between these two protagonists.

Ultimately, however, it is clear that it is the elephants for whom this world exists, and Thouk is there primarily to protect both elephant and habitat. As he finally speaks, it is to emphasise this power dynamic. That said, it is clear that human society is having a destructive impact on the forest environment. The forest is for the elephants we learn. It is clear that human society is having a very negative impact on the environment, and Thouk does not understand why humanity wants to have this impact, nor why they would want to exploit the elephants more broadly. Why are humans so interested in ivory, for example, he asks. Thouk exists for the elephants, going so far as to suggest that he has a mystical connection to the beasts, that as a baby a fortune-teller made an offering to the spirits on his behalf, and since then he has always been protected by them, just as he seeks to protect them. Indeed, these are the co-constitutional more-than-human ‘relationalities’ that are a signature of the nascent interest in Indigeneity (see e.g. Pugliese, 2020; TallBear, 2011; Watts, 2021). Both Thouk and Gee Nowl are firmly rooted in the forest, the continual use of low-angle close-up shots that punctuate the narrative throughout continuingly reaffirming this. They are both of this land, their only knowledge of the world beyond being the sense that it is a world that is coming ever nearer, evidenced in the debris that the illegal loggers leave behind them.

Thouk is a product of the emic and the only defence against the etic for Gee Nowl. However, at moments in the film this perspective is fractured and it becomes clear that Thouk's performance of his emic sense of self is in fact constructed through the etic. As Thouk forages for, and prepares, his lunch, extradiegetic music begins. We hear Thouk singing a traditional melancholic song about someone in despair. The song roots Thouk within this space, his local culture providing a phatic reflection of his state of mind. However, this image is then immediately fractured as we cut to a quasi ‘behind the scenes’ shot of Thouk performing the song to the camera, reading the lyrics from his mobile phone. The fragile, performative nature of his positioning is then further emphasised as he returns home to his family in the evening after work. He hands over some of the food he has foraged to his wife to cook as he seeks to play with his baby daughter, the scene set as an image of traditional rural family life in which Thouk plays the role of the patriarch, providing and caring for his family. The only problem is that his baby won’t play ball. She is much more interested in being fed by her mother and watching cartoons on a mobile phone than engaging with her father. Again the deliberate presentation of technology on camera can be read as a challenge to the performance of the identity Thouk seeks to present, while also reflecting the reality of his life, his baby's absorption in the cartoons allowing Thouk to fall asleep after a long day's work. It is also clear by this point that Thouk has a stronger understanding of the broader context of his position than he generally seeks to present, problematising the assumption that Indigeneity is necessarily, or permanently, a bounded and emic subjectivity. Thouk is a protagonist working across ‘multiple habituses’ (Virtanen, 2010). He understands that the only solution to the destruction of his environment can come from a pragmatic engagement with the local authorities, that he does not ultimately live in an (albeit ever-shrinking) rural idyll with the elephants, but in a human world in which collective solutions must be found: ‘To prevent deforestation’, we are told, as Thouk closely studies a denuded section of forest, ‘all communities must be involved, with authorities from ministries’. Otherwise there is no hope.

Memories

PAOV Theang, SAT Sreytoch, SOUS Sonan, 2020, 14mn 15 s https://vimeo.com/488355447

In Memories we once again have a film exploring tensions between the insider/outsider perspectives on the elephants and those who care for them. The film adopts a similarly observational aesthetic, this time underlining the importance of tradition to the Indigenous community. The film opens with archival footage (highlighting Bophana's extensive archival film holdings) that shows the importance that elephants have long played in this community, both pragmatically and spiritually: a shot of elephants being used to transport a group of people through the forest is juxtaposed with a shot of Bunong women performing a traditional musical rite in front of a group of elephants, a sequence, it would appear, from a traditional ethnographic film seeking the capture Indigenous tribal rites for external audiences. At the same time, the film highlights how times have changed, or perhaps better, how this community has responded to the challenges it has faced. The archival footage that opens the film is followed by a sequence in which two women leave their village on a motorbike to tend to their local elephants, a sequence that offers a direct counterpoint to the narrative of the previous film in which the film ends with Thouk returning on his motorbike from the forest to his family.

Here we are introduced to the Preng Chanthy family, the grandmother of which is the dominant figure and the holder of traditional knowledge, knowledge that is central to the way the family conducts its primary mission of caring for the local elephants. In this film, the centrality of the elephants to this environment and the role of the humans that live in their proximity would seem to be even more emphasised than in the first film. This is communicated aesthetically through the use, once again, of low-angle close-ups of both the grandmother's and the elephants’ faces, in this case frequently held for an extended period of time. In the process, the film seems to emphasise the affective potential of the medium to force empathy between the spectator and film subject. We are given the opportunity to slowly contemplate these images, allowing us to read into them an emotional response to their environment. Both the grandmother and the elephants are the holders of authority in this space. However, through the words of the grandmother, in particular, it is clear that the elephants are truly the centre of power. No decision can be made without them. If one is to marry, a sacrifice must be made to them. And, in the final section of the film we see the family come together, under the direction of the grandmother, to make rice wine, a drink this is also consumed primarily, as presented, as an offering to the elephants for future prosperity. The reality of the spiritual encounter between humans and elephants for the family is emphasised throughout in the way that the need to make a sacrifice to the elephants sits side by side with the grandmother's understanding of the need to look after the elephants’ toenails, to tend their snakebites, or to pull their faeces out of them if they are constipated (we learn how the grandmother's son Cheam has done this for the elephant he tends, Neang Van).

Tradition is everything in the way the film conceptualises the more-than-human relationality between humans and elephants. However, the film also shows how times are changing, highlighted through the presentation of the family as a matriarchy, and in particular the ways in which the grandmother plays an important role in overseeing the elephants’ health. Women in the Bunong tradition would not normally become mahouts. This is presented here as a necessity because she is the only remaining member of her family with the necessary knowledge of the local traditions. And while her son is allowed to undertake day-to-day tasks, such as dealing with elephant constipation, he must refer all significant decisions to her – significance being defined as decisions connected to ‘tradition and so on’.

Memories presents a deeply emic picture of Indigenous life and the challenges it faces, particularly in terms of maintaining the community's traditional heritage. The film prioritises tropes around Indigenous acculturation – that Indigeneity is necessarily a site of cultural loss (Cattelino and Simpson, 2022) – while simultaneously demonstrating the renegotiation and possibility of cultural life. At the same time the film also shows that it is impossible to ignore the etic. In a particularly curious final extreme close-up, the camera pans along a shot of the whole family standing outside their home. This is a shot disturbingly reminiscent of the kind of early ethnographic films that we see in the film's opening archival footage. Here the shot evocatively reminds us of a colonial encounter with Indigeneity, where the Indigenous is a site of taxonomy and classification, where a filmmaker might seek to capture an intergenerational shot of the ‘unknown tribe’ in its environment. In the present film, the shot is presented as a problematisation of, and capitulation to this aesthetic: the apparent discomfort some members of the family exhibit in being filmed challenges the sense of this being a film that entirely expresses the emic experience of the local population. This encounter with the outside etic world, through this participatory film project, would also appear to be an intrusion into familial intimacy, even as it is through the film that that this family's story can be told – storytelling thought to serve an arc and impulse of cultural preservation – and helping to protect this culture from being lost once their grandmother has passed.

Dull Trail

KHON Raksa, PEOU Mono, CHOEY Rickydavid, 2020, 11mn 16 s, https://vimeo.com/488352126

In terms of the emic/etic dichotomy outlined above, Dull Trail is most firmly rooted in the emic world of the elephants themselves. While Dull Trail, like the other films, highlights the powerful relationship between the elephants and the Bunong community that tends to them, here the films seeks to present the world as far as possible from the perspective of the elephants. The film opens with an aerial pan across the forest canopy to the sound of an elephant trumpeting. Cut to a close-up of a group of elephants, again the dominant sound is that of their trumpet call. This is then set against a piece of archival footage of a Vietnam War era US bombing raid, footage from inside the cockpit of the plane followed by an external wide shot of the same plane dropping its payload on a Cambodian forest, to which we seem to see one of the elephants respond, the camera focusing in on the animal's eye looking towards the sky as we once again hear the animal trumpet, trumpeting that continues as we also hear the explosion of the bombs and the destruction they have wrought on the elephants’ home. This powerful opening sequence highlights the history of destruction and violence that has long been central to the relationship between humanity and the elephants, and the context within which the Bunong seek to protect their charges.

Even as we are first introduced to the mahout Da Chroed and Mae Nang, the elephant he looks after, the elephant's perspective is maintained. There are no words spoken. The trumpeting of the elephants is contrasted with the grunts Da Chroed uses to communicate with the animal. And, when the man does begin to speak it is only to tell us details about Mae Nang's mental and physical health. The animal has been profoundly damaged by her experience of war. She has lost an eye and has been left traumatised, which sometimes leads her to panic when, for example, she hears an engine approach, Da Chroed suggesting that this reminds her of the sound of approaching bombers. The mahout is clearly dedicated to doing what he can to provide a sanctuary for his charge. We see the care he takes in applying an ice pack to the elephant's foot to reduce the swelling after she has been bitten by a snake. He always takes care to approach Mae Nang from the left, so that she can see him, and to shout when he wants to speak to her, as she has also been left partially deaf by her experience of war, her experience of bombing being further compounded by the brutality she suffered being forced to transport arms during this period.

We are given some sense of the everyday reality of life as a mahout. As in My Home, we see the group of men involved in looking after the elephants prepare their lunch, in this case a dish of prahok (fermented fish paste), accompanied by rice and foraged wildflowers. However, we never see where the men live. It is the elephants’ perspective that provides the main focus throughout, emphasised in the use elephant point-of-view shots which highlight how they experience moving through the forest and how they see their human protectors. This is their world, the camera seeking to capture their subjectivity, once again, film exploiting its ability to create empathy between its subject and the audience. The final shot is saturated in bathos, as we see Mae Nang and Da Chroed leave the frame, the film simply stopping, offering no further reflection on what we have seen. The audience is left without a sense of resolution or closure. Mae Nang cannot be healed, and the forest will not be restored, further problematising the salience of our etic expectations of the film to begin with.

Taken together, the films can be read, on the one hand, to implicate simplified and superficial associations of, for example, Indigeneity and cultural loss, or unmediated relationalities and interdepencies with the more-than-human world. Such simplifications are pathologies of a nascent wider interest in a reified Indigeneity. But on the other, and at work within and alongside such tropes, we see the films self-consciously perform such approaches to Indigeneity as a problem, pronouncing on them, while also disrupting and challenging the possibility that Indigeneity is a single subjectivity or mode of being. Thouk is a protagonist within an Indigenous and Khmer habitus (My Home); the role of the mahout is no longer exclusively male (Memories) and the possibility of the forest or elephants as sites of redemption or resolution is deliberately eschewed (Dull Trail).

Conclusion

There remains a tendency within the social sciences to treat the art produced as a secondary outcome or impact of a participatory method. We are reminded, here, that the arts can be an important medium and site of research in their own right. The value of arts as a tool for research is their ability to transcend some of the limitations of texts and transcripts, conveying a greater range of affective and intimate meanings within a research context, such as the textures visible as a mahout bathes an elephant, or the feelings of place animated by the sound of an elephant trumpeting. We urge social scientists to go further in taking the products of the creative process as seriously as research sites as they tend to take the process itself.

This project began with a series of assumptions about Indigenous groups in Cambodia, their relationships to ecological and wildlife crises and the ‘redemptive’ potential of awareness raising through research as a call for environmental action more broadly. Two points of reflection arise around this with methodological implications beyond this case. Participatory research and arts are often justified in the name of their ability to document and access the insider worlds of marginal and disadvantaged groups. We had, on the one hand, initially sought to disrupt and trouble the emic and etic dynamics within the participatory process, including the inclusion of mixed insider and outsider groups of Khmer and Indigenous young people, and the centring of the local Indigenous community within the stories, development and production of the films. In other words, we envisaged, at the start, multiple boundaries and layers of insider and outsider positioning. However, even this understanding of the emic and etic dynamics at work in the project was partial. As we have noted, the imprint of our project partner organisation remains – itself inescapably a product of its own local and international history – and the ‘projectified’ nature of the initiative had further effects in terms of the framing and constraint of project activity more broadly. Our point here is that we have to ask methodologically critical questions about the ways participatory projects locate, constitute, perform and regulate their insiders, because these boundaries are often more intersectional, contingent and porous than participatory methods tend to assume – or, indeed, be justified in the name of documenting or advocating for.

Given these dynamics – especially our initial (more instrumentalist) assumptions about the nature and value of awareness raising – the project risked producing flat and flattening representations of Indigeneity in Cambodia, particularly around the relationships of Indigenous experiences to nature, elephants and cultural loss. Yet here, following the need to take the products of participatory arts projects seriously, we can see how each of the films expresses contradictions and ambiguities. The films problematise Indigeneity as much as they flatten it, a product, in part, of deliberate destabilisation of the emic and etic boundaries assumed to work in the films. An ongoing strength of participatory arts as research tools is exactly this tendency to exceed and disrupt the constraints that are placed on them.