Episcope: “Begininning a Sketch of Accumulation by Dispossession in Contemporary Cambodia”

A new short piece of my writing has been published over at Episcope. It’s called “Beginning a Sketch of Accumulation by Dispossession in Contemporary Cambodia,” and I hope you go check it out. I’ve written about Accumulation by Dispossession, or ‘Primitive Accumulation,’ on this blog frequently in the past. Click here to see those posts. There are pictures by photographer John Vink as well, to induce you to click this link.

Episcope is a relatively new online blog from Cultural Anthropology, and is attempting to promote different types of ethnographic writing, as indicated in this partial description:

This is an experiment. The insights of anthropologists are usually sequestered in academic circles, networks, and classrooms. Our work is also often constrained within a slow, arduous publishing process such that our writings frequently fail to address in an immediate way the pressing realities we often grapple with in our fieldwork. For these among other reasons, anthropologists rarely affect how current issues are enacted in mainstream narratives.

Thanks, Episcope!

Read: Eve Zucker’s “Forest of Struggle”

 Eve Zucker’s first book, Forest of Struggle: Moralities of Remembrance in Upland Cambodia, is a village ethnography of contemporary Cambodia. It’s also one of the best post-conflict studies (focusing on the cultural situation after the Khmer Rouge period) that I’ve encountered. In her fieldwork from 2001-2003, she moved to a very small village called O-Thmaa in the Cardamom Mountains. Her interest in this particular village was its social brokenness – unlike neighboring villages, it was clear even on her first visit that O-Thmaa was not ‘recovering’ from the Khmer Rouge era in the same way, or with the same speed.  Zucker focuses on the themes of memory, forgiveness, and morals, tying them together in a way that adroitly notes the ways in which the erasure of memory – forgetting – may be crucial to forgiveness. Ernst Renan, of course, made the same point regarding nationalism over 100 years ago, pointing out that a French person could only become part of the French nation by forgetting the terribly cruelty visiting upon their previous identities and selves (Albigensians, e.g., of the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre). Examination of how morality is constructed, transgressed against, and recalled for the next generation – to put it briefly, how collective moral continuity is reproduced – are at the core of her examination.

A few things of particular note in this book: O-Thmaa is a ‘highland Khmer’ village.  This fact should attract the interest of anyone who studies mainland Southeast Asia. The supposedly great divide between lowlanders and highlanders has long been a staple of studies of Southeast Asia. Lowlanders tend to view themselves as Buddhist, rice-growing, and ‘civilized,’ opposed to highlanders, seen as Non-Buddhist, swidden agriculturalists, and ‘savage.’ Like Nicola Tannenbaum’s famous book, Who can protect against the world?: Power-protection and Buddhism in Shan Worldview, then, Zucker’s book looks a a relatively anomalous group of people, who are highlanders, but ethnically identify as (Khmer). Zucker’s ethnography adds useful and important information to our knowledge of communities in such locations. The fluid ethnic identity of Cambodians is on display, as people early on discuss how they ‘used to be Chong or Suoy,’ but are now Khmer, or even “Pure Khmer.”

And then there are the personalities. From Yeay Khieu to Ta Kam, the personalities of the village – especially the elders – are brought to life. This is a real pleasure of the book.  Yeay Khieu embodies a sort of constant good cheer and perseverance, recalling the old ways, and telling stories with indefatigable good nature. Ta Kam is a considerably more ambiguous character – a local who no longer lives in the community, the villagers of O-Thmaa say he was a Khmer Rouge village chief, and caused the deaths of many in the village. By the end of the book he has returned to live in O-Thmaa.

There are wonderful moments in this book – especially wonderful moments for me were the chapter on commensality and the transgressive bonding over taboo foods and liquor, and reflections on the ways in which the community interacts with, and maps onto its landscape, the ideas of the wilderness, and its amoral qualities.  Against the wilderness, the village becomes the opportunity for the recreation of social possibility.

Zucker is careful not to extend her arguments too far, but does engage usefully with two broad camps of thought regarding the continuing effects of the Khmer Rouge era.  She notes that some argue that Khmer society was nearly completely broken by the Khmer Rouge, while others argue that Khmer Society has recovered and begin to re-institute itself without too much interruption.  Zucker uses these two camps of thought to discuss her example, but refrains from explicitly claiming that her example could be used to reform these camps.

In all, this is an excellent book, and highly recommend to Cambodianists.  It’s clearly written, accessible to experts and undergraduates alike, and makes excellent points in a clear manner, all while introducing the reader to highland Khmer Cambodia.

Archaeology Dissertation on Iron Age Cambodia Available

It’s been out there for a while, but I’d be deeply remiss if I failed to draw your attention to Dr. Alison Carter’s (UW-Madison) dissertation. In the spirit of actual intellectual exchange (sometimes called ‘Open Access’), she’s placed her dissertation online for download.  

The dissertation is called “Trade, exchange, and socio-­political development in Iron Age (500 BC -­ AD 500) mainland Southeast Asia: An examination of stone and glass beads from Cambodia and Thailand,” and it’s available here for download in various formats.

Dr. Carter has been doing archaeological research in Cambodia for years, and focuses on Iron Age trade objects – specifically beads. Through the analysis of these beads, she’s able to hypothesize about the geographical origins of the beads (because of the materials out of which they are made). Through understanding the geographical origins, she illuminates early trade networks – both within and beyond the boundaries of mainland Southeast Asia. Her work is deeply important to scholarship on a region, the prehistory of which is difficult to know because of a lack of preserved written texts (excepting inscriptions in stone).

Go! Read!  And when you’re done, check out her great blog.

John Burgess’ ‘A Woman of Angkor’

I’ve just received a copy of John Burgess’ new novel, A Woman of Angkor, published by River Books. This book intends to be a historical novel that takes the regular people of the ancient Khmer kingdoms as seriously as most take the rulers.

It also comes highly recommended by folks with reputations, at least judging this particular book by the blurbs on its cover, including lauds from archaeologist Michael Coe, and art historian and Angkor tour guide author Dawn Rooney.

Most promising in terms of its writing style, however, is the lovely quote from John le Carre:

Burgess has done something that I believe is unique in modern writing: set a credible and seemingly authentic tale in the courts and temples of ancient Angkor to stir the imagination and excite our historical interest.

I’m looking forward to reading it in my spare free moments, and would love to hear from readers in the comments if they have read it, or might read it along with me.

The chapters are generally quite short, so I’m going to set very modest pace of 1-2 chapters a day. I’ll write up my comments below, as well.

edit: I’ve decided against summarizing in the comments below, both to preserve against spoilers, and to allow for a more summary writeup at the end.

LTO Cambodia: Wat Bo: Scenes of daily life

You really need to head over to LTO Cambodia: Wat Bo: Scenes of daily life, to examine the closeup images of Wat Bo’s mural of olden-days, everyday Cambodian life (colonial period, about 100 years old, at monks’ estimation).  There are a lot of images, and LTO is a fine photographer. But what really makes this collection of photos wonderful is his description and surmises about what is going on, all done with reports to what the local monks had told him, and his own thoughts.  I’ll reblog one image to get you over there:

Washington DC Exhibit on Land Grabs in Cambodia: “Cambodia: Losing Ground” from Oxfam America

A pop-up gallery event—Cambodia: Losing Ground | Oxfam America The Politics of Poverty Blog.

Beads, Trade, and Power in Early Southeast Asia” – A Public Talk by Dr. Alison Carter

I was very pleased to be able to help organize and attend Dr. Alison Carter’s public talk at Macalester College, on the topic of “Beads, Trade, and Power in Early Southeast Asia,” yesterday. It was well-attended, and exciting.

If you take the longue durée seriously, and imagine as I do that some things persevere through generations and centuries, and that therefore early history can be very important, then archaeological knowledge is crucial for people like myself, even though my focus is contemporary.  I have many notes for myself.

Dr. Carter’s presentation was hugely engaging, and dealt precisely with some of the themes we are discussing in one of my seminars at the moment, “Ritual and Ecology in Southeast Asia,” which includes the Angkor civilization and its ‘collapse.’ Those themes are complexity, emergence, and collapse, and especially understanding the nature of those processes: is the emergence of complexity dependent on trade network transformations, commodity transformations, local manufacture, the rise of local elite classes, etc., etc.?  What drove early complexity, and what processes underwrote and sustained it?  What was the nature of that complexity?

Dr. Carter will shortly be traveling to the Society of American Archaeology (SAA) conference in Honolulu, where she will be chairing a symposium titled “Technology in Southwest China and Southeast Asia II: Working with Stone, Ceramics, and other materials – tecnological innovation in Southeast Asia, Southwest China, and Beyond,” and presenting a paper on “The production of stone beads in Southeast Asia.”

Also, Dr. Carter has a blog. It’s fantastic, and I have frequently linked to it from here. Most recently, she’s written on the enigmatic jar burials discovered in the Cardamom mountains. Here it is: go, read. http://alisonincambodia.wordpress.com/

 

Association of Asian Studies

Well, here we are at the Association of Asian Studies (AAS) Annual Conference, in San Diego (famous residents include Buffy Summers, apparently), California.  In addition to the excellent looking panels and discussions this year, this is the last year I will serve as the Chair of the Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia Studies group (TLC).

Part of the TLC work is the annual invitation to a distinguished academic to speak to issues of broad significance to our members. This year, we have invited Dr. Charnvit Kasetsiri, former Rector of Thammasat University in Thailand, to speak (Dr. Kasetsiri’s personal web page, here). In line with our selected theme for the year – geographies of conflict (or to use a felicitous phrase from our sponsored panel which was unfortunately not accepted this year, “Cartographies of Violence.” Dr. Kasetsiri will be speaking tonight on the conflict over the Angkorian temple of Preah Vihear (Th: Phra Viharn), which has been an object of nationalist desire and mobilization by groups on both sides of the Cambodian-Thai border.

I’m also spending my first conference speaking to publishers, about my manuscript with the working title of “Deathpower in Cambodian Buddhism.” Everyone’s been quite nice,but for a junior scholar (yes, at nearly 40, with a Ph.D., a tenure-track job, and two children, I still consider myself a junior scholar) it’s damn-near heart-attack-inducing.  Luckily those new AED machines are all over the place.

This post marks my intention to return to blogging on a slow, but slightly more frequent pace. In future weeks, I should have a few short pieces including discussions about the ideas in my manuscript, my attendance and studies of Samdech Euv (King-Father) Norodom Sihanouk‘s cremation rituals, which I was fortunate to attend, thanks in large part to a generous travel and research grant from my home institution.

Maps of Primitive Accumulation in Cambodia, via Land Concessions: and an argument?

An article in today’s Phnom Penh Post announces that the Kingdom’s Arable Land All But Gone, according to a report by AdHoc, and as a direct result of the vast practice of Economic Land Concessions, which I associate with Primitive Accumulation. In order to make clear what I mean by that, compare this quote from AdHoc, with the description of the enclosure movement in England (the primary example of Primitive Accumulation):

Exploratory mining concessions had been included in this calculation, he said, because while firms granted these rights did not technically own the land, they acted like it in practice by erecting fences and expelling villagers from the area.

Here’s a wikipedia article on the English Enclosure movement.

Now, I’m not a geographer, so haven’t been able to really sort through this other map, created by someone at the MangoMap weblog, with the title “Lies, Damn Lies, and Maps,” which seems to be somewhat critical of this original map (?) and attempts to correct it.  I’d love to hear from those with more knowledge, what this is supposed to represent:

Cambodia: more on primitive accumulation, and new criticisms of the Khmer Rouge Tribunal

After my recent post on primitive accumulation in Cambodia, now these stories from the Phnom Penh Post:

Shooter Now Unknown. It’s unclear what to make of this. It was pretty obvious from initial reports that Bavet town governor Chhouk Bandith was himself the man who shot into a crowd of workers striking outside a shoe factory. It sounds like the provincial police chief, who claimed that the suspect was identified and under pursuit, may have been planning to arrest a patsy, as the police did in the Chea Vichea case, and that national officials may be preventing that from happening. We’ll have to wait and see.

Monks Await Justice. Khmer Krom – it’s what Cambodians call the Mekong Delta now controlled by Vietnam.  While ethnic Khmer in southern Vietnam appear to have a generally better nutritional profile, and experience somewhat less poverty than do Khmer (as a whole) in Cambodia, it is also clear that the Vietnamese State attempts to control ethnic Khmer display so closely that their policies amount to a form of cultural genocide. (yes, that). Khmer Krom activists are often under attack, as was made obvious in the case of the Khmer Krom activist monk, Tim Sakhorn.  Moreover, it is clear that elements within the Cambodian government often cooperate with the Vietnamese government to arrest and intimidate Khmer Krom activists.

So, when another Khmer Krom monk activist was murdered, with his throat slit in a Cambodian temple in Kandal province, in 2007, few expected a serious search for the murderer. Their suspicions have been proven correct, and five years later, monks and lay-people held a ceremony to remember his death.

Meanwhile, the Khmer Rouge Tribunal is experiencing another set of serious criticisms, and coordination between the Khmer and International judges appears to be non-existent. The new International judge, Judge Laurent Kasper-Ansermet, has re-opened Case 003, to the objections of PM Hun Sen and his co-investigating Khmer judge. Meanwhile, Cambodian staffers at the court have not been paid for a very long time. While this is supposed to be the responsibility of the Cambodian government, they have disclaimed this.  The European Union has just coughed up 1.7 million to help pay this staff. Meanwhile, the Open Society Justice Initiative is releasing perhaps its strongest criticisms yet of the tribunal’s process, talking about a ‘crisis of credibility,’ and the International Bar Association has released a statement claiming the tribunal faces a serious ‘failure of credibility.’

oh. my.