Harvesting grass for roofing.  This tends to be a job women engage in. There’s a pretty narrow window when this can take place.  The floods have receded by December or so, and then by the end of February most of the savanna will have been burned. People cutting grasses to tie into roofing (to use themselves or [...]

I am back in the field!  I got back about a month ago, and am charging along on the last leg of my fieldwork before I write all this business up.  One of the big foci on this trip are descriptive ecological inventories of the floodplain vegetation surrounding the village.  I have done a lot [...]

Ka-set broke the news to me: “Most of our presenters are not professional and besides, they are not acknowledged by our Ministry [of Information]”, Nouv Sovathero deplores. Some speak Khmer with a heavy foreign accent! It is something that worries us. With the new law, they will be required to be of Cambodian descent, able to [...]

This is a Yilida YD-10000.  It is a flashlight.  In fact, it is a special flashlight.   In addition to the classic spot light, it also has a flashing yellow light (for emergencies) and a siren (for more serious emergencies).  It is owned by a friend of a friend, who brought it with him when he [...]

First, let me apologize to my three readers for the length of time between posts. I have been busy with fieldwork, and have not had time to write new posts. On the bright side, this post is the first to include video of some of the farmers who I am working with. The [...]

At the request of Refuter, here are some fish.  Actually, I do not have any images of the ones caught by the kids behind the house.  These were caught in a gillnet which was stretched perpendicular to the current, along the border between a rice field and a pond in a completely flooded landscape. When the [...]

ifocus and Details are Sketchy have posted a bit on some newspaper coverage from the 2007 Clogger Summit. Give it a read!

This past week, I took a couple of days off from my work up on the floodplain to come down to Phnom Penh for the Cambodian Blogger Summit. I had a great time! This event featured two days of presentations and discussions focusing on blogging, ranging from the technical (e.g. an introduction to [...]

Over the course of my project here in Cambodia, one activity which has sucked up a lot of time is the accumulation of spatial data, ranging from paper topographic maps to digital orthophotos. These are invaluable for general thinking about land use, as well as developing landscape histories, which are an important aspect [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]