Lithic Lives: Earth Stories from Cambodia’s Land of the Gemstones

Professor Harriet Hawkins
Department of Geography

A fragment of ruby, a hand-written list of sapphire sales from February 1918, a much-loved pop song crooned during Cambodia’s second ‘Golden-Age’, a necklace of tumbled garnet chips, a golden otter, a mosquito infected with drug-resistant malaria, a head-dress from Ancient Rome, an up-turned muddy plastic bottle on a bamboo stick. Any and all of these offer generative beginnings for telling Earth Stories from Cambodia’s Land of the Gemstones.

The Land of the Gemstones, located in Cambodia’s North-Western forested uplands, has for millennia been a source of gemstones, a site of geopolitical controversy and a richly fabled land. Yet in the wake of the Khmer Rouge whose genocidal regime was funded by extraction of stones and timber from the area, many of these stories remain untold. For the past three years we (a group of Cambodian and British researchers and artists) have been collaborating with miners, cutters, dealers, stones and spirits to track gemstone geobiographies and explore the lithic intimacies of lives lived seeking, shaping and protecting gemstones.

The Earth Stories we share here draw together ethnography, image, song and stone in a geopoetic response to the challenges of living and researching lithic lives in the Land of the Gemstones. Some of these challenges are unique to this place and its practices, others are shared with those mining around the world and all sit within the impulse to complicate the Earth stories that colonialisms have told.

Harriet Hawkins is Professor of GeoHumanities at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her research focuses on the intersections of geography, art, creativity, aesthetics, and the imagination. She explores how creative practices can contribute to critical contemporary issues - such as the current and future use of underground spaces, and engagements with climate change. Her recent research project, THINK DEEP, was funded the European Research Council. She is the author of For Creative Geographies (Routledge 2013), Creativity (Routledge 2016) and Geography, Art, Research: Artistic Research in the GeoHumanities (Routledge 2020).

The lecture will be followed by a reception in the Moore Building foyer.

Admission is free but booking is essential.