• Portrait of an old Kreung ethnic minority woman - Ratanakiri, Cambodia
  • Portrait of a Tompuon ethnic minority woman - Ratanakiri, Cambodia
  • Portrait of a Tompuon ethnic minority man - Ratanakiri, Cambodia
  • Portrait of a Bunong ethnic minority elder - Mondulkiri, Cambodia
  • Portrait of an old Kreung ethnic minority woman - Ratanakiri, Cambodia
  • Portrait of an elderly Pnong ethnic minority man - Mondulkiri, Cambodia
  • Portrait of a Kreung traditional healer - Ratanakiri, Cambodia
  • Portrait of an old Kreung ethnic minority man - Ratanakiri, Cambodia
  • Portrait of two Bunong ethnic minority women - Mondulkiri, Cambodia
  • Portrait of Tompuon and Bunong (Pnong) ethnic minority women - Ratanakiri and Mondulkiri, Cambodia

The Last of the Chunchiet

Cambodia’s northeastern provinces of Mondulkiri and Ratanakiri are home to many indigenous hill tribes – collectively called Chunchiet in the local Khmer language. The Bunong, Brau, Kachork, Kreung and Tompuon today face manifold challenges to their traditional ways of life in the vastly disappearing jungles of the northeast. Rampant illegal logging and poaching, loss of ancestral land to economic land concessions and sale by villagers, as well as the assimilation to a more modern Khmer lifestyle, have resulted in the younger generations giving up on their language, culture, slash-and-burn farming and traditional housing. Only the village elders possess the time-honoured skills that will die with them in the coming years.
The ethnographic portraits presented in The Last of the Chunchiet is an effort to document and preserve the beauty and culture of these soon-to-disappear people.

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