Southeast Asia: Politics, Meaning, and Memory. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2013. xii, 233 pp. (Figures, B&W photos.) US$28.00, paper. ISBN 978-0-8248-3805-8.
This is a fabulous and timely book. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Cambodia’s mountainous southwest, it takes a “social memory approach [combined with] theoretical paradigms concerning morality” to explore the reconstitution of village life following the significant violence and dislocation experienced in the region (and the nation) during the 1970s and beyond.
In the main, this book provides a lucid account of a village named O’Thmaa. As the author rightly underlines, studies of the events, experiences and afterlives of Khmer Rouge violence in “base” (moulâdthan)areas and communities are almost nonexistent. (These were areas and communities under Khmer Rouge control from the early 1970s that subsequently provided a material and political base for the rule of Cambodia as a whole from April 1975.) O’Thmaa is one such community, though its members fought both for and against the Khmer Rouge, as well as for various groupings in preceding conflicts. Moreover, “accusations among the villagers [of O’Thmaa] had led to a significant number of executions [of fellow villagers]” (7).
There are several interwoven aims of the book, including concern with “how communities negotiate the memories associated with difficult pasts and come together to rebuild their lives” (7), “how people and their societies cope with radical and violent social change” (176), and with “the moral ideals or virtues for which individuals and communities [such as present-day O’Thmaa] strive” (172). The larger commune that contains O’Thmaa, Prei Phnom, and the neighbouring commune of Doung Srae, are brought into the analysis at various junctures to provide comparative perspectives on how villagers are reconstituting their shared existences.
The book is accessible for the non-anthropological reader because it starts from the ground and builds up. It offers analyses of everyday social interactions—including commensality and assistance—and of kinship in O’Thmaa. In addition, the book analyzes various contemporary festivals and observances associated both with Khmer Buddhism (including a chapter on Bon Dalien) and the guardian or tutelary spirits of this upland locale. Significant attention to the question of moral discernment(sâtisampajania) is given throughout, as are the wider societal constructs of the civil and the wild (srok/ prei), trust and distrust, “face” (mukh), agency and victimhood. The book will thus be of great interest to ethnographers of Cambodia and scholars of Khmer Buddhism, as well as to those concerned with social memory in post-conflict societies beyond issues of formal political discourse and state-based initiatives.
A significant part of this fine-grained study of morality and remembrance in O’Thmaa concerns the village elder, Ta Kam, a former village chief who many families hold responsible for the execution of their loved ones during the 1970s. Zucker’s account of the complex and changing relationship between villagers and Ta Kam should be essential reading for anyone interested in the current international criminal tribunal, the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC). The conclusion of the book comments explicitly and expertly on this formal legal mechanism for “dealing with the past” vis-à-vis social memory at the village scale. Insightful as the case of Ta Kam is, Zucker does not claim that the same social practices are wider spread though, as she notes, instances of living with Khmer Rouge perpetrators certainly is.
Indeed, as a caution against generalizing about Cambodian social memory, the book offers very important lessons in socio-spatial specificity. Zucker explores how even the neighbouring communes of Prei Phnom and Doung Srae “have the means and motivation to produce different narratives about the past that [nonetheless] still share common features” (176). An example of differing stories about an historical Thai invasion of the region proves this point, allowing Zucker to note that: “Prei Phnom and Doung Srae’s distinct ways of coping with the past and their notions of modernity and tradition reflect their recent histories” (146). In these and other ways, the book goes to the heart of the question of whether or not (and how) the experiences of “base people” (neak moulâdthan) have differed significantly from other Cambodian groups. It also gives a nuanced response to the question of the degree to which (and in what ways) contemporary Cambodian communities still (differently) struggle with the losses and ruptures of the late twentieth century.
Resonant and resurfacing memory (149), the mixing of memory (139), and the projection of an idealized past onto the future as a moral ideal (173), are each fascinating discussions. And although the book is (necessarily) limited to a discussion of processes at the village or community level, the social space of the household as an intimate zone of relatedness suggests itself (to this reader at least) as a potential future research site for a closely related set of research questions about the reconstitution of household or family life in such areas.
Students contemplating ethnographic fieldwork in similar contexts would do very well to read this book, and early! Zucker is open about the challenges of ethnographic research, and does not omit the story of her own development as a researcher: her earlier states of not-yet-knowing, her immediate responses and confusions, her hopes and humour. But neither does this personal voice dominate, rather the quality of thought and mastery of the field demonstrated in the book is greater for it. Here is a deftly detailing voice whose growing knowledge, sensitivity and involvement encourages these attributes in the reader.
Rachel Hughes
The University of Melbourne, Parkville, Australia
pp. 645-647