Brao Erotic

The Brao are an upland people from the hill country where Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam meet, and the borders that run through their land are much younger than the communities they split. Brao villages sit along the Sesan and Sekong river systems and in the forested hills between them, mainly in Cambodia's Ratanakiri and Stung Treng provinces and in Laos's Attapeu province. A small outlying community in Vietnam's Kon Tum province, where they are called Brâu, is one of that country's smallest officially recognized minorities. Family ties, marriages and the language itself all run straight across the lines on the map.

Brao is a Bahnaric language of the Mon-Khmer (Austroasiatic) family. It is a distant relative of Khmer and very close to the speech of the Kreung and Kavet. Whether those two count as Brao subgroups or as separate peoples depends on who is counting: Cambodian officials usually list them apart, while linguists and many speakers point to a shared core. The Jarai, farther south and east in Ratanakiri, speak a Chamic language from a different family altogether, so a short trip across one province crosses a real language divide. Most Brao also speak Khmer or Lao, and Kreung is written in a script based on Khmer for Cambodia's bilingual primary schools.

Life turns on the upland rice field. In rotational swidden farming, a family clears a plot, plants it for a season or two, then leaves it to grow back into forest. That cycle has long set the rhythm of the year, along with fishing, hunting and gathering in the forest. Religion is about keeping good relations with spirits: those of the village, the forest, certain hills and streams, and the ancestors. Sickness, a new field or a death calls for offerings. The biggest occasions still mean sacrificing a water buffalo, playing gongs and drinking rice wine through long bamboo straws from shared jars. Spirit forests and burial groves are left uncut, a rule that matters more now that outsiders want the land. Christians are a minority, and some Brao, especially in Laos, have taken up Buddhist practice alongside the old rites.

The past sixty years have been hard ones. In the 1960s the Ratanakiri highlands became an early Khmer Rouge base, and Brao villagers were among the highland people drawn into the movement. Many later fled into Laos and Vietnam when it turned against them. In Laos, government resettlement from the 1990s onward moved many upland villages down toward roads and rivers. On both sides of the border, logging, rubber plantations and hydropower dams have eaten into Brao land, and some villages in Cambodia have applied for collective land titles as indigenous communities. A few elders still have the stretched earlobes of an older fashion. Most younger Brao dress like rural people anywhere in Cambodia or Laos.