The Potent Places of Prey Lang

The water and the land communicate with people. Investigating the interdimentional communication between people, water, and land can enrich contemporary scientific understandings and enhance contemporary economics. Kuy Indigenous communities in Cambodia cultivate social relationships with the life-giving potency of water and stone, which are at the foundation of traditional livelihoods. In the Potent Landscapes Series, local traditions come alive through myths, history, and technologies that offer new ways to think about potency, history, and the political economy of society in times of great uncertainty.

The 'Potent Places' introduced in this series are often rock formations and fresh water sources, which together make dirt and everything that grows. These are sometimes associated with ancient temples, but they can also be ancient rice fields, crossroads, termite mounds, and ancient trees.

Crossroads signal economic activity and social contact both within and across species. Termite mounds provide rich nutrients to the surrounding soil and signal underground water sources. Ancient trees communicate their deep experience of place as well as their nutrients across the forest through mycorrhizal networks of fungi threads. 

These are places where one competes and collaborates with other species, all of whom are making a living inside the system created by water and land. These collaborative competitions happen both inside and outside of state-market systems.

People engage the landscape with prowess, humility, concentration, and respect, pointed towards growth and fecundity. This last is very important and often misunderstood by scholars and 'educated' urban people. What we call 'superstition' or 'spirits' are based in economic activities and involved in growing healthy systems.

All water, stone, and soil are potent, but certain places are more communicative than others. They communicate in different ways and come in a variety of shapes that express multiple histories, both human and non. Places can communicate through accident and illness, visited upon those who enter their territories neglecting to pay respects or state intentions.

They can also communicate through dreams and sometimes by drawing sick people to them, healing them, and using their bodies and voices to communicate to others. Sometimes people make requests at these places, asking for success in business, battles, or love. If they are successful, others come to make requests.

Ancient temples and fortress, places of exceptional human prowess built of brick and stone, are always potent. Creating these places deploys the ancient knowledge of place-based potency and the ritual technologies of architecture, and have lasting presence.

One important thing about the temples inside Prey Lang, is that they are often associated with fresh water sources. In the contemporary moment, many of these sites bear the name of that water source, which remains directly relevant to livelihoods in general and to life in particular.

Places are potent because there is a force communicating with the human community that lives in their vicinity, or who cross their territory. There is a territorial element to this communication, which assimilates inhabitants or travelers into the laws of the place.

People come to place for a reason. To clear farm land, hunt animals, cut timber, or engage in industrial mining. If they do so without introducing themselves and stating their intention, they may become ill or have accidents. After several accidents in an area, or uncurable illnesses, or communicative dream, people come to recognize the potency of a place. Then they are sure to introduce themselves and make offerings.

They may place a hut at the road nearby as a convenient place to offer some friut and say hello.

Before they clear an industrial mine, they might offer pigs many nights in a row.

Potent Places introduce themselves and are incorporated into peoples lives and stories, revealing history, territory, and the making and unmaking of life in place. This segment on Potent Places explores the places and the stories created in collaboration between Kuy people and their forest.

These are ancient relationships. Every account that calls itself 'history' refers to them as 'religion'. As you explore this segment on Potent Places, be attentive to the layered possibilities in the places themselves, both beyond and within the stories people tell about them. Places know things. They hold time and have their own histories.

Maybe we can remember how to listen and to see what the places are telling us.