Coastal crossings, or what the environmental history of the island of Phú Quốc (Vietnam) teaches us

Abstract

Today, the island of Phú Quốc, off the south-west of Vietnam, in the Gulf of Siam, near the southern tip of Cambodia, encapsulates all the banality of international touristic destinations. These littoral societies survived across the centuries, in what seemed to be an eternal ebb and flow of opening and retrenchment. Yet at the present time, fewer and fewer of them still remain. The least that the historian can do is to use the material and ecological traces which exist throughout the landscape and the archives, but which remain effectively unseen, with the goal of giving life again to the human experiences of the coast, in an era in which they have been increasingly negated by capitalism and international tourism. By bringing out this anthropological and environmental dimension, the archives allow us to repopulate the islands with all the entities that have woven their territory, making it possible to see by contrast the extent to which the paradisiacal image of these islands depopulates them. But even more profoundly, this perspective reformulates the understanding of the island as a set of shifting boundaries that move over time and are meant to be crossed.