The Irrawaddy dolphin, a critically endangered freshwater dolphin, was first a beautiful woman, the story goes. A lover spurned her when she was pregnant with his child. When she told her mother, her mother sobbed at the shame her daughter had brought her family. When confronted with her mother’s sorrow, she put a bucket over her head and entered the Mekong River. Instead of drowning, she became the first Irrawaddy dolphin, also known as the pink dolphin, who has a bucket-shaped head and nurses her babies like a human. Stories that depict human-nonhuman transformations give cosmic life to the shapes of the landscape, flora, and fauna in Cambodia. They reframe categories of nature and culture while painting them in tears. The sorrows the storytellers incorporate as part of their narratives often come alongside stories of the endangered ecologies and the violent histories of place. So the attempted suicide of the shamed woman corresponds to the dwindling population of pink dolphins who live in only 118 miles of the Mekong River and whose members number fewer than 100. The woman’s transformation is also laced with a condemnation of gendered violence, implying that the shame of being a woman who cannot control her lover’s rejection is unjust. In the stories of these ecological transformations, sorrow captures the characters as much as it does the storytellers.

The pink dolphin population has been dying from a perfect storm of environmental threats: from the illegal use of gillnets and electrofishing to the construction of dams to the increasing heat and droughts from global climate change. As an aquatic animal in a unique ecosystem, it is at high risk from the onslaught of environmental crises altering our shared world. The pink dolphin’s personal creation story, though, proclaims the animal not an animal, but a transformed woman. The transformation represents a paradox of triumph and sorrow, a woman who is able to love her babies but a woman who has been transformed due to her own heartbreak and shame. This paper will elaborate on stories of ecological transformations as they were told during years of ethnographic fieldwork Cambodia. The stories reflect the emotional charge of climate change in a local setting, reiterating the sacredness of the ecology for the villagers who live and interact with it but also the pain that comes from the suffering that the flora and fauna endure that these villagers experience themselves. Keys to understanding this pain are the entangled categories of nature and culture, human and nonhuman, which are often embodied by gendered suffering. A depressed woman with a bucket becomes a pink dolphin. A giantess with no eyes becomes a mountain that overlooks wetlands. Three daughters, abandoned by their mother in the wilderness, turn into birds. The stories express origin stories that shape the environment but also the violence enacted upon it, resonating with contemporary climate crises that threaten life today.

Keywords: anthropology, folklore, Cambodia, gender, ecology

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Dr. DeAngelo is a medical anthropologist with training in sensory ethnography. Her area of focus is on landmine detection industries in Cambodia, especially those that work with animal detection aids. She is currently an assistant professor of sociocultural anthropology at the University of Oklahoma, a Wilson Center China Fellow, and is a member of the policy-scholar team at the Mansfield-Luce Asia Foundation. She is Co-Editor-in-Chief of the journal, Visual Anthropology Review.