Catherine Scheer

Catherine's research focuses on the intersection of Christianity, development and indigeneity in continental Southeast Asia. In her doctoral dissertation, she explored the multifaceted encounters between members of an ‘indigenous minority' living in the Cambodian highlands and foreign as well as local Protestant development actors. She analysed the articulations of cosmologies, ritual practices and missionary teachings in a rapidly changing socio-economic environment - going back to the Vietnam War, and up to the loss of land and the rapid expansion of the market economy in the new millennium. The question of how these articulations and negotiations have been influencing indigenous conceptions of morality and personhood was hereby of central interest.
In the course of her post-doctoral fellowship, she extended her research to examine the production of a "moral economy" of language in development by following Christian NGO representatives active in transnational networks of knowledge production and policy-making in South-East Asia. Her ethnographic field research has involved Bunong highland dwellers, Christian NGO representatives, indigenous rights activists, Cambodian government officials and international experts.