New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. xii, 303 pp. (Illustrations.) US$60.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-231-16918-9.
Interest in the study of Buddhism in Cambodia has grown among scholars in recent years. Historian Ian Harris provided us with Cambodian Buddhism: History and Practice (2005) and Buddhism in a Dark Age: Cambodian Monks under Pol Pot (2013), which provide comprehensive analyses of Buddhism and its role in Cambodian society. Anna Ruth Hansen’s How to Behave: Buddhism and Modernity in Colonial Cambodia, 1860–1930 (2007) explored Buddhist modernism in the French protectorate of Cambodge in the first half of the twentieth century. While these studies broke new ground, certain aspects of Cambodian Buddhism, such as the death ritual practice and its connection to present-day Cambodian culture and society, remained unexamined. This is why Deathpower: Buddhism’s Ritual Imagination in Cambodia by Erik W. Davis, an associate professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Macalester College, is especially felicitous. Davis’ book is the most intensive ethnographic study of contemporary Buddhist death rituals in Cambodia to date.
The book contains eight highly readable chapters that combine Davis’ observations, interviews, and theoretical regressions to highlight the nature and form of Buddhist death practices in Cambodia. It is an expansion of his dissertation and fieldwork, which focused primarily on two temples in Phnom Penh (Wat Koḥ Yakkha and Wat Trī Loka) from 2003 to 2006. Davis draws from Michel Foucault’s notion of “biopower” for his concept of deathpower, which he calls a “domain of death over which human power has taken control” (134). More specifically, it refers to the relationships between the living and the dead as mirrored in the interactions on how Buddhist monks care for the dead. Davis also acknowledges in his introduction that Cornelius Castoriadis’ concept of the “magma of social significations” influenced his work considerably, and credits Clifford Geertz and Catherine Bell for their performance-oriented ethnography.
The first three chapters discuss types of burials, ritual personnel, technical details on the preparation of the body for cremation, and activities conducted after the cremation. Davis describes his fieldwork in two crematoriums where Buddhist monks and lay-ritual specialists physically bind the corpse of the dead to a location. This section includes an insightful discussion of the interconnections between rice agriculture and religious concepts. Chapter four explores funerary practices and two types of power held by the king who controls life and the Buddhist sangha (community of monks) that controls death. Davis introduces the boundary (sīmā) ritual, which he suggests “mimics and replaces the historical decapitation of a human head” (119). Davis then examines the connection between Buddhist ritualistic imagery and agricultural activities, including the role of paṃsukūla (rag robe) and its ties to the burial shroud. Here, he seeks out “agricultural resonances” (153) to link death rituals to agricultural imagery. Chapter six examines Bhjum Pinda (lit. “gathering the rice balls”), which Cambodians perform annually in the autumn and in which the Buddhist monks play a vital role, noting that a “monk serves as a conduit to the dead ancestors, whose blessings are the prerequisite for wealth, health, and happiness for their descendants” (168). The next chapter moves its attention to the ritual use of “physical remains of a human being to the remnants of another’s meal” (189) to show the differences between Buddhist monks, spirits mediums, and witches. Davis turns to the central question of his work in the book’s final chapter: what is, after all, Cambodian Buddhism? The title of the chapter, “Buddhism Makes Brahmanism” is somewhat misleading, since by “Brahmanism” the author does not mean the religion that existed in India or Cambodia prior to the advent of Buddhism. Instead, the author refers to all non-Buddhist spiritual entities and practices other than Cambodian Buddhism.
Davis argues that Buddhist ritual practice creates the “non-Buddhist category of spirits through its domination of them” (22) and “it needs non-Buddhist spirits to treat, tame, instrumentalize, or transform into beneficent ancestors” (241). This gives the sense that the sangha has certain control over non-Buddhist religious practice in Cambodia. How common is it for a non-Buddhist to ask Buddhist monks to perform funeral rituals for their family member? What might ethnic minority peoples in Cambodia who also believe in the spiritual world think of this “lumped” category? Moreover, Davis seems to disagree with the concept of syncretism or hybridity in relation to Southeast Asian Buddhism, suggesting an integration of them into a common Cambodian cultural imagination in which “Buddhism is a moral and ritual offense against a world essentially composed of wild, amoral spirits, including those that constitute us as human beings” (22). But this process is dialectical since Buddhism adopted religious aspects of other local religions and incorporated them. A Buddhist/non-Buddhist binary opposition may occur within the sangha imagination in an urban setting, but this is a questionable assumption in rural communities where everyday interaction and practice are often not as static. Davis acknowledges that Buddhism “embrace[s] as many types of spirits as it can, as long as they are willing to submit to the ultimate moral authority of Buddhism and its power over them” (242). How then can we determine what is Buddhist and “non-Buddhist”? What type of moral authority and power of the “non-Buddhist” submits to the Buddhist? In addition, Davis explains that he focuses more on lay ritual specialists rather than monks, but I wonder if Buddhism as portrayed by monks in general is the same Buddhism as practiced by lay followers?
Deathpower is insightful reading that provides sound scholarly analysis of complex phenomena at play within Cambodian Buddhist practice. This book is a long overdue contribution to the field of Buddhist studies in general and Cambodian Buddhism in particular. Davis’ ethnographic approach to his topic throws into sharp relief new and engaging aspects of the nature of Southeast Asian Buddhism’s encounters with local practices and performances. His work is persuasive and well researched, and should be compulsory reading for any scholar who is interested in both Cambodian studies and contemporary Buddhism in Southeast Asia.
Mai Bui Dieu Linh
Concordia University, Montréal, Canada
pp. 400-402