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Those of you who are on the job might appreciate the recent round-up of software useful to anthropologists (and those of us who poach anthropological methods) over on the anthropology blog, Savage Minds. The post itself is an aggregation of software which was bandied about on the East Asian Anthropology Listserv. Be sure to check the comments, too. It is an interesting list, though it is somewhat skewed towards Windows and Mac users.

I have been looking for software to help me get my work organized. My own system is pretty unsophisticated– in the field I take notes in my locally-procured exercise books. When I first got started a few years back, I was keen on the Rite-in-the-Rain line of field books. However, after a chiding from a committee-member when I included water-proof notebooks as a line item in a proposal budget (at something like $14 each, they just looked fishy in the budget), I shifted to whatever notebooks I could find when I landed wherever I was going. Luckily for me, most of my note-taking currently takes place under houses rather than out in the rain.

I write up notes and brainstorm using a text editor, either Kate on Linux or NoteTabLight on Windows. I am neither a Kate nor a NoteTab advocate– I remain open to other programs. But they are both free, and I just like the cross-platform flexibility of text files.

One of my serious organizational problems right now is my PDF files. After 6 years of study, I have accumulated quite a mess of scientific literature in PDF format. It is, of course, scattered across several locations and with file names spanning several different conventions (as my naming system has changed over the years, I have not retroactively updated the names of older files). Searching for particular articles by title or author is often tricky, and by subject or key-word is nigh on impossible. So now I am looking for a program which will let me tag my PDFs so that I can keep them all in one place, and search by tag. A library manager, if you will. My cursory search has turned up little so far. If I come up with a program I like, I will post about it. If you know of one, I’d appreciate the tip so share it in the comments.

Sadly, my hard copy files suffer from the same problem; though, several moves between apartments and offices have probably left them in even worse condition. But, they are back home. So I cannot worry about them right now.

A month or so ago, I posted about an article discussing some tips for writing about Africa which I had learned about from a post by Maytel.

The article inspired a little venting on my part, but nothing overtly constructive.

Well, as proof that procrastination really can be constructive, Maytel has revisited the problem and prepared some suggestions for writing about Cambodia. Check it out.

Frank Smith and others have recently made available a new Khmer-English online dictionary. It is searchable using either English, Khmer or the International Phonetic Alphabet. The interesting thing is that the dictionary itself is not new, rather it is a synthesis of three existing dictionaries…

These resources are primarily based on the two very different editions of the Cambodian-English Dictionary: Cambodian-English Dictionary by Robert K. Headley, Kylin Chhor, Lam Kheng Lim, Lim Hak Kheang, and Chen Chun (1977, Catholic University Press), and Cambodian-English Dictionary by Robert K. Headley, Rath Chim, and Ok Soeum (1997, Dunwoody Press, ISBN 0-931745-78-0)

The 1977 edition draws heavily on traditional Cambodian lexicography; in particular, on the monumental Chuon Nath dictionary (see below). With some 20,000 headwords and almost 25,000 subentries, it is notable for its phonemic and grammatical analyses. Headley ‘77 also provides extensive etymological references, with nearly 10,000 Pali and Sanskrit citations, and hundreds more from Thai, Cham, French, Vietnamese, and a dozen other languages.

The 1997 edition contains more than 50,000 entries. It was compiled with an emphasis on the modern languge, particularly modern words, and expressions used in both written and spoken Cambodian. However, it also contains many entries for literary and poetic forms, and can be used to help in reading classic Cambodian texts. It has less etymological information than the ‘77 edition, but include far more usage (e.g. social level) tagging, and more than two thousand example sentences.

Searches in Khmer orthography will also return entries from the Chuon Nath Khmer Dictionary (1966, Buddhist Institute, Phnom Penh). This classic work represents the high point of pre-war Cambodian lexicography.

Khmer language input uses the Khmer Unicode font system. If you have not installed it yet, Windows users should see the KhmerOS site for download and installation instructions. Linux users can track down the language packages in the repositories. In addition to Khmer Unicode font use in particular programs, Khmer translations are maintained for the Kubuntu and openSUSE Linux distributions (maybe others?).

In a seeming last gasp from her supposedly euthanized blog, Maytel points to a really neat essay with great tips about how to write about Africa.

Your African characters may include naked warriors, loyal servants, diviners and seers, ancient wise men living in hermitic splendour. Or corrupt politicians, inept polygamous travel-guides, and prostitutes you have slept with. The Loyal Servant always behaves like a seven-year-old and needs a firm hand; he is scared of snakes, good with children, and always involving you in his complex domestic dramas. The Ancient Wise Man always comes from a noble tribe (not the money-grubbing tribes like the Gikuyu, the Igbo or the Shona). He has rheumy eyes and is close to the Earth. The Modern African is a fat man who steals and works in the visa office, refusing to give work permits to qualified Westerners who really care about Africa. He is an enemy of development, always using his government job to make it difficult for pragmatic and good-hearted expats to set up NGOs or Legal Conservation Areas. Or he is an Oxford-educated intellectual turned serial-killing politician in a Savile Row suit. He is a cannibal who likes Cristal champagne, and his mother is a rich witch-doctor who really runs the country.

Why is this pertinent? As with Africa, journalists covering Cambodia seem to suffer from the same need to trade in stereotypes, and fascination with timeless peasants (either caught in primordial rice-farming village purity or, struggling in the present day unable to escape the trauma of the Pol Pot Regime). While these certainly do represent certain facets of the country, they overlook a lot.

Doubtless there are plenty of exceptions to this criticism. I try to cast a wide net, but likely miss a lot. I just had to vent a little bit. I am also a little late to the table in this discussion, as the links in Maytel’s post reveal. Check it out for broader coverage of the issue.

The village has gone about 2 weeks without rain. This being the rainy season, this is a little unusual. However, it is not that unusual. One of the quirks of the rainy season on the floodplain is that sometimes there are dry spells. For me, as an academic, this is just another reason why farming systems on the floodplain are so fascinating– another occasional surprise which must be dealt with. For the farmers who depend on their rice harvests for their daily caloric intake, it is a much more serious concern. As of yesterday, the lack of rain was a point of discussion. Something which was starting to worry people, but no one I have spoken with was in a panic yet. There have been plenty of promising, black, rumbling clouds like the ones above. But these seem to keep dropping their payload elsewhere.

The rice crops most affected seem to be those most recently sown– the quick maturing rice varieties. These are popular. They mature in about 3 months, and are usually directly sown around this time of year. With the right nutrient management, attention to pests, and a little luck, yields can be higher than with other rice cropping systems used in this area. But the crop needs water. When farmers have the money, and a field located close to a canal or large pond, they may irrigate. However around this village, this is not very common. Thus many of these sites are dependent upon rainfall. So, dry spells early in the season can be very hard on the young plants.

The dry spell left a couple of obvious marks on the landscape. The most obvious is the yellowing, browning and ultimate loss of the newly planted rice. This is evident in the above images. The most recently sown seeds simply fail to germinate and are eaten by birds and rats. The second obvious mark is an increase in weeds, seen in the second image above. As the rice struggles, weeds which are better able to cope with low water levels begin to out-compete the rice plants. I am not yet sure how farmers are going to respond to this, assuming the rain begins again soon. One farmer reported that if they have the time and money, they will re-plow and re-sow the lost fields once there is a good, heavy rain. He did not mention anything about the people who do not have the money.

On the social side, the dry spell has led to a change in daily farming activities. This time of year is the plowing season, among other things. People began to plow the most distant sites several weeks ago. As the season progressed, sites closer and closer to the village are plowed and leveled. The dry spell has slowed this progression. Right now, the soil in many places is too dry and hard to plow. Moreover, many people are waiting to sow the fields which have been recently plowed, as the seed will simply be lost.

Though not everyone is waiting. Yesterday, I took the picture above of a newly sown field. Was it sown in anticipation of rain from one of the aforementioned promising clouds? Does the farmer know something about the soil at that site which I do not? Were they simply impatient? Desperate? I cannot hazard a guess, since I did not meet the landowner to talk to them about their rationale.

Some sites have not been as severely affected. Rice planted in and around poorly-drained depressions is able to take advantage of water remaining in the soil. The image below was taken steps away from the site of the second image, above. The rice in that depression is in much better shape than the rice planted on higher sites (the pattern of soil visible in that field is due to the planting pattern, rather than the lack of rain).

Use of sites like this is a good example of farmers’ appreciation for diversity in the landscape. At first glance, the floodplain seems pancake-flat. However, there are many scattered hills and seasonal ponds– some small, quite large. These create a multitude of microsites– banks, islands, gullies– which farmers can take advantage of. Plantings in and around these wet sites are doing a little better right now than rice on better-drained sites.

There are certainly more tools that people use to navigate the caprice of the weather. Deepwater rice varieties were planted in some ponds and swampy areas around the village months ago. These plants are larger and more mature, so they are not as sensitive to fluctuations in water supply. They also are planted in areas which stay wetter longer, further insulating them. Therefore, the deepwater rice fields have not yet been heavily hit by the lack of rain. I suspect that some of the other rice varieties used by farmers are more drought-tolerant than others. I still need to keep looking around and asking questions.

As I write, it has started raining here in town. This does not mean that any will fall in the village. But I hope that it does.

It seems to be roof repair season in the village.

Over the last week, I noticed that many households in the village were cutting down sugar palm (Borassus flabellifer L., ដើមត្នោត) leaves for the preparation of roofing shingles (ស្លិកកន្ដប). This is not a simple process. First, leaves are cut down. Older leaves are taken, leaving a tuft of newer leaves on the top of the tree for continued growth. I find the cutting to be a daunting task, as the trees grow up to 30m tall. No one else here seems to have a problem with that, as the trees are regularly clumb for palm sap collection. The trees themselves are quite common in the Cambodian farm-scape, and are often found along field and property borders.

Cut leaves are then left for about a day to dry, or until labor can be mustered for the next step. Then, the laminae of the leaves are liberated from the massive petioles (which are set aside for use in other projects, like fencing and cordage preparation– an example is in the background of the picture below, with petioles used to construct a duck coop). The next step is splitting the palmate leaves into individual fingers, each with an intact central vein. This adds structural strength to the individual blades. The intact leaves themselves are very large, so they are first split into managable portions (primal cuts). Then a machete or sharpened wooden wedge (in some cases, made from a piece of petiole) is used to split the fingers apart, nearly down to their base, leaving a fasicle of several leaflets. At this stage, small leaves or severely damaged leaves are culled.

The base of each fascicle is then trimmed off with a hatchet or machete. Once trimmed, individual blades are bundled, and left in a shady spot to cure further. These bundles are later opened, and individual blades flattened. Management of leaf moisture is very important throughout the process, as leaves which are either too dry or too wet are difficult to work, and may lead to a weaker shingle.

For the shingles themselves, leaves are folded in half over a bamboo splint (ពុះដើមឬស្សី) ​of about a meter long. They are added individually, so that each overlaps the next. The blades are then sewn to each other, using one row of stiching up near the bamboo splint. Finished shingles are then soaked in a pond for around 3 months– until they turn black. After soaking, they are dried, then washed and dried again. At this point, they may either be used for roof construction or stored in a shady spot until they are needed. As roofing material, they can last several years. Sewn, but unsoaked, shingles may be sold to itinerant merchants for about US$0.02. These are then sold in town. The child pictured here has since sold this batch and started another pile.

As I have noted before, I am a fan of fences. In agricultural landscapes, they have the obvious use of dividing land. However, these boundaries are not zero-dimensional lines on a map or scratched in the ground. They have their own niche within the landscape system, often different from the tracts which the divide. As such they sometimes play an important role in the ecology of the area as corridors, refuges, relicts and more.

This particular fence protects a garden plot, right next to someone’s house. The plot itself is not currently under cultivation, though it will be within the next few months. A few months after that, it will be under water as the annual floods come up. I thought that it was interesting more for its use as a drying rack.

The leaves in the foreground are used for smoking– you roll your tobacco in them, and it gives a particular flavor to the smoke. This style of smoking is popular among older men in the villages. The leaves are grown locally, while the tobacco usually comes from Kampong Cham Province. It is really strong stuff– I think that I would need at least 20 years of smoking practice before I build the necessary constitution for these guys. I was told that these particular leaves are from the ជើងចាប tree, which suggests that it might be Dasymaschalon lomentaceum Finet et Gagnep (Annonaceae). However, I need to get a good look at the tree before I can say that with any degree of certainty.

So, the other day I joined a team from the provincial agricultural department on a trip up to Prasat Balang District, northeast of town, in order to arrange an extension session on the improvement of watermelon production. Neither watermelons nor the rainfed production systems of that area are a real focus for me. However, I like farms, I like extension work and I like tasty, little Cambodian watermelons. And in this village, approximately 75% of households produce watermelon. I was pretty excited. This trip was to lay the ground work for an upcoming event, which would be attended by the Minister of Agriculture and a number of other dignitaries. We were planning to meet with the village headman (actually, headwoman in this case– not too common) and a crowd of farmers to feel out their interests and gather some information for the planning process.

Due to a scheduling snafu, we were stuck with several hours to kill before the appointed meeting time. Since we were not far from home when we discovered this, I thought that we would just go back and wait at the office (it has air conditioning and a TV). There was some debate, and then one of the guys came out with “I know someone over here who has some interesting mangos…”

Our next stop was the home of a family who indeed have some interesting mangos.

These guys are big– they come in at about 1 kg per fruit (that’s just shy of 2 and a quarter pounds back where I come from). If you look closely in the picture above, you will see one of the extension agents holding a fruit in his hand (second person from the left, black t-shirt). That will give you an idea of how big these things were. The farmers did not know the name of the variety. They just found them at the market in Kampong Thom town, and propagated the trees themselves. Though some from my party suspected that they were an Australian variety.

Mangos aside, they had a great little integrated system. In front of the house, the family was preparing rice-based liquor (in the past, deepwater rice has been important for alcohol production, but I am not sure what rice varieties they used, and whether or not they grew them themselves). After a batch is prepared, the remnants of the mash are brought back behind the house and used to feed the little crowd of pigs that live back there. The family had several low-roofed piggeries, with occupants segregated by age, and a massive boar tied to a post in a little wallow nearby. Their manure then went to fertilize mangos, papayas, bananas, limes, a patch of pineapples (pictured below) and probably a bunch of other things which I missed because I was totally distracted by the mangos.

We did not stay long, and I left their house with more questions than answers (hence my cursory description). I really hope to get back and interview this family sometime, just for fun. They have such an fascinating set-up.

In Phnom Penh, I was lucky enough this year to be able to get in on the fun at the Royal Plowing Ceremony. I enjoy this particular ceremony. It is full of royal pomp, Brahmanist practice (harkening back to pre-Buddhist Khmerness) and of course, is focused on agriculture (plus, who can’t love fertility rituals?). In a nutshell (there’s much more to it than this): the King, or in this case his desigante (as the King himself is unmarried, and so cannot perform the ceremony), opens the planting season by plowing several furrows running around the field next to the royal palace. This year, the King’s designate was Prince Norodom Singharath, pictured above. Following this procession, one of the ox teams is offered a range of foods, in a row of golden bowls– sesame seeds, rice, beans, wine, grass, water and corn. Their behavior, what they choose and how much of it, is then interpreted by the royal Brahman priests in order to forcast the coming year (the Brahmans are on the left wearing white in the image below). This year, neither animal was particularly hungry. One ate 45% of the bowel of corn. The other refused to eat altogether. As I understand it, this suggests that corn yields will be fair. However, rice producers should be worred, as the team avoided eating any rice at all, which predicts a poor rice harvest. Likewise, neither drank any water. This predicts a dry year. So, the outlook is pretty negative, since the majority of Cambodia’s agriculture is based on rice. And much of that depends upon the rain.

Another thing that I find interesting about the Royal Plowing Cermony is that I keep getting my pocket picked there. In 2005, a girl tried to sneak my camera out of my pocket, but I interrupted her mid-sneak. This time, my ziploc bag of toilet paper was removed from my back pocket, despite it being securely buttoned in. I caught on quickly after it was gone, and recovered it from the ground next to me (beneath the feet of the guy who I think stole, then discarded, it). Then, not 10 minutes later, someone else tried the same thing. This time I was onto him before he got my pocket open. Interestingly, I had to nearly turn my entire body around to face him before he let go of my pocket flap (reminding me of a friend of mine, who caught someone picking his pocket, grabbed him by the shirt with both hands, and while he was administering the pre-beating cuss words, the slickster stole the watch right off of his wrist and then wriggled free). I am not surprised to have been targeted in that situation (a foreigner in a crowd of people, all craning their necks to see what the oxen are doing = easy pickins), and am not all that bent out of shape about it. I’d probably be more annoyed if they had actually found something valuable.

I think that over the course of my life, I have been the target of pickpockets 5 times– twice at bus stands in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and three times here at the Royal Plowing ceremony (almost 10 years living in New York City, and nothing has happened there, yet). I try to plan for such events, and I have been lucky. So no one has ever gotten anything more valuable than my stash of toilet paper (which they always seem to discard immediately, for some reason). And, I sort of appreciate the chance to analyze their tactics.

In retrospect, it is always pretty clear how they did it– what distractions they used, whether they were working in a group of not, and stuff like that. Sometimes it is pretty ingenious (in a slight of hand sense), like the one guy that was part of the chaos of a pre-dawn bus loading who pointed up at the top of the bus with one hand, yelling to his friends (seemingly involved in lashing down cargo), while at the same time discretely reaching with his other hand beneath his pointing arm (his hand concealed by his armpit) to get into my breast pocket as we passed each other shoulder to shoulder. I, of course, was distracted– looking up to see what he was yelling about. Others are not that ingenious, like the first guy today. He took advantage of people moving from the front of the crowd to the rear, to push me forward. I just thought he was a big jerk trying to get closer to the front. And that is what I was supposed to think, as all his pushing on my upper back distracted me from my behind, which was signalling an intrusion attempt which ultimately went unheeded.

I was not the only one targeted at the event. One young woman was taken away by the police when a middle-aged Khmer man caught her stealing his cell phone. He seemed more amused about it than anything, though she certainly was not. I believe that she was part of the team who made the second attempt on my toilet paper. So I must confess to having some satisfaction in her capture. However, I have never confronted anyone or called in the police when this sort of thing happens. I am never 100% confindent in my assessment of exactly who did it. The sneaky nature of the crime, and the anonymity of the crowd, makes it difficult to be certain enough to get all serious about things. Things certainly could have been worse– some of the government employees I know who came in from the countryside to work at the event that had their hotel rooms broken into. They lost money, cell phones, keys. That really stinks. One vowed never to return to the city again. I can’t say I blame him for feeling that way. But I’ll still probably turn out for the Royal Plowing Ceremony next time I am in town for it. Maybe I’ll even jump on the chance to gather more data, and put toilet paper in both my back pockets.

Above: packing up after the ceremony, the mobile traditional percussion unit is returned to the palace.