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

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.