Sounding on Cambodia for March 10, 2010

• The Cambodian government has started paying some (minor) attention to bloggers!  Whoo-hoo!  Of course, the form that attention has come in is the banning and blocking of specific blogging services. DAS has the sketchy details.
• You may remember a little group called Amnesty International.  They’ve recently been pissed off at the government of Cambodia for kicking out a bunch of Uighur asylum seekers, including a guy who had a legitimate visa, in exchange for a pantsload of aid from the People’s Republic of China.
• Today, Amnesty International is pissed off that, while the government keeps trumpeting their ‘win-win’ strategies and economic development, rape against (primarily poor) women in the kingdom has become so widespread that gang rape is a common, collective form of social bonding among middle-class urban boys.  See also story reported in The Mirror. How do we get this point to receive the attention it deserves?  Allow me to point again to Siliva Federici’s excellent work, Caliban and the Witch.
• Anne Elizabeth Moore, formerly of the Harpswell Dormitory in Cambodia, has an excellent article over at TruthOut on the garment factories of Cambodia. Go. Read. Now.
• Over at her personal Cambodia blog, Moore points out Guy DeLauney’s BBC video piece on cyclos in Phnom Penh.
• Khmer Krom need defense from the UNHCR to have the right to speak their language, and practice their culture, in Vietnam.  The lack of international attention to this issue is deeply distressing, as is the way in which those few groups who do pay attention to the issue attempt to use it.
• Meanwhile, the US government has promised to return a load of looted Khmer art.  About time.

imagining the real world

What fascinates me most in existence is the peculiar necessity of imagining what is, in fact, real.
-Philip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families

This is a placeholder post for what may become my new blog. Deathpower was originally intended to be a rather focused blog, concentrating on the themes of Death, Power, Cambodia, and Religion, all brought into focus by the work on my dissertation.

But my dissertation is now complete, I’ve quit facebook (two weeks clean, folks!), and I still have things I need to say, write snippets about (snippets that don’t go anywhere, necessarily), and news items to share.

Then, of course, there are the constant demands of ahamkara.

I’ll be migrating some posts over here from deathpower, though I will also leave that blog online, and considering things like design, organization, and frequency over the next month. Feel free to leave suggestions in the comments, suckers.

New Year's Games

Eric Brandt has a great post on New Year’s games. Worth checking out.