Bunong people

Indigenous people of northeastern Cambodia

Community details
Khmer name	ព្នង
Also known as	Phnong; Pnong
Community type	Indigenous people
Country	Cambodia
Subjects	Community & Civic Life; Language & Literacy; Music & Sound

The Bunong people (ព្នង), also called Phnong, are an Indigenous people of northeastern Cambodia, with communities in Mondulkiri province and in Kratie. The Ministry of Planning and the Ministry of Rural Development, who write the name Pnong, count them among the six Indigenous groups in Cambodia with more than 10,000 people each in their 2008 and 2013 data. In 2022 the World Monuments Fund placed the Bunong cultural landscape on its World Monuments Watch.

History

Sylvain Vogel saw the Bunong way of life change over the years, Voice of America (VOA) Khmer wrote in 2017. In his account, the village chiefs and local elders who had governed were replaced by administrative officers and provincial officials, and Bunong children were encouraged to go to schools taught in Khmer.

In November 2013 villagers and a rights group told the Cambodia Daily that the government had finished the process of communal land titling for three Bunong communities in Keo Seima district, living on 1,000 hectares. The titles, for about 100 families in Sre Preah and Sre Khtum communes, were expected to be handed over by the end of that year. They would raise to six the number of communal titles granted since the 2001 Land Law. In January 2016 two Phnong villages in northern Kratie became the first in that province to receive community land titles.

Life and culture

Glottolog lists Bunong among the names of Central Mnong, a Mnong language of the Bahnaric branch of the Austroasiatic family, spoken in Cambodia and Viet Nam, and rates it as threatened. VOA Khmer describes it as a largely unwritten language. Vogel, a professor at the Royal University of Fine Arts, has documented it since the mid-1990s; his first book on Bunong grammar came out in French in 2006. Becky Butler, at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, who wrote her dissertation on Bunong, estimated in 2017 that about 75,000 people speak Bunong in Cambodia, Vietnam and the United States, and judged the language vulnerable.

In 2022 the World Monuments Fund's representative described what the Bunong cultural landscape holds. It includes traditional houses built straight on the ground, unlike traditional Khmer houses, as well as burial places and spirit forests, stretches of forest with a special meaning and their own prohibitions. Bunong elders, the representative said, hold the "mental map" of these places. The fund planned to map sites over about 100 to 200 square kilometers between the communes of Bu Sra and Dak Dam. The International Federation for Human Rights described the Bunong in 2011 as a people practicing shifting cultivation.

Sounds of Angkor, a site by Patrick Kersalé, presents a set of four bossed gongs recorded in December 2010 in a Bunong village of Mondulkiri. Each gong has its own name, from the largest to the smallest: me (mother), klöu, trö and kon (child). The largest, which keeps the beat, is the "mother", and the site reads the set as an image of a society organized by matrilineal descent. Such sets normally accompany animist ceremonies, although the people of that village had become Christian.

Vayo FM wrote in 2015 that the Brao, Bunong, Kreung and Tampuan keep a "new village" romvong, danced when a village moves from its old site to a new one. Usually in the three to seven years before a move, the village head and the elders hold divination rites to find new land.

Organizations and places

VOA Khmer places the Bunong in Mondulkiri, and Lepetitjournal calls them a people of that province whose way of life cannot be separated from their ancestral lands. The places named in these sources include Keo Seima district, and the communes of Bu Sra and Dak Dam, in the districts of Pechr Chenda and O'Reang. Into Cambodia names the Phnong among the Indigenous groups of Stung Treng.

References