IRASEC-NUS Press Publications on Contemporary Southeast Asia. Singapore: NUS Press in association with IRASEC, Bangkok, 2014. xi, 300 pp. (Maps, plates, tables.) US$32.00, paper. ISBN 978-9971-69-701-3.
Over the last decade, an exciting body of scholarship has emerged on the socio-cultural consequences of some thirty years of extreme warfare over the former states of French Indochina: Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. This renewal is part of a wider intellectual shift in scholarship focused largely on the world wars of the twentieth century. Scholars of World War I led the way, as George Mosse’s classic study, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (1990) and Paul Fussel’s landmark The Great War and Modern Memory (1975) attest. The emphasis on historical memory was itself connected to innovative and theoretical attempts to understand what this might mean. Pierre Nora’s magisterial Les lieux de mémoire (1997) comes to mind as does Paul Ricoeur’s work.
With the publication of their edited volume, Interactions with a Violent Past, Vatthana Pholsena and Oliver Tappe make a major contribution to our understanding of the socio-cultural impact of the wars for Indochina on Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam and how a wide range of peoples living in these countries have remembered, forgotten, retailored and continuously lived with these wars and their memories to this very day. In their introductory chapter, the editors focus the book thematically on the notions of “post-conflict landscapes” and “violent memories.” In different ways, all of the contributors to this book (initially a conference) show how the war has deeply affected “these countries’ human and physical landscapes.” “From battlefields and massive bombing,” the editors write, “to reeducation camps and resettled village, the past lingers on in the physical, often ruined, environment, but also in precarious objects such as unexploded ordnances that are shallowly buried in large areas of contaminated land” (6).
All of the authors effectively demonstrate the different ways war transformed physical reality; but they also show that the postconflict landscape is not some sort of an objective reality existing “out there” (6). The unexploded ordnance and the Agent Orange continue to transform that landscape quite literally, while people for all sorts of different and ever-changing reasons continue to remember the landscape—now and then—in a myriad of ways. And in so doing, they constantly change the contours of the landscape.
Consider the following. Elaine Russel and Susan Hammond take up the question of the still very real dangers of “Living with Unexploded Ordnance” and “Redefining Agent Orange, Mitigating its Impacts” (chapters 4,7). But both go beyond mere description of the consequences to take up questions of how people live with this passé qui ne passe pas. Oliver Tappe, Marksus Schlecker and Ian Baird show us in different and quite original ways how local peoples in Vietnam and Laos today have carefully contested and reshaped official sites and narratives of memory. Vatthana Pholsena zooms in on Route 9 in southern Laos to serve as her postconflict “landscape.” She teases out nicely how people in Sepon see this road as being more than just a source of development and modernity, but also as “a source of healing, with travel and trade resumed, craters filled in, and lingering memories of violence slowly dwindling” (182). Christina Schwenkel tapped into recent scholarship on “the productive life of risk” to provide a highly original and insightful study on the question on how landscapes “heal” and get wounded again. Yes, she concludes, the rapid economic development—new roads, homes, forests, buildings and markets suggest that regeneration and renewal are well under way in Quang Tri—but the global demands for war debris, for example, have led people, including children, to take extraordinary risks to unearth relics of the war. In so doing, they leave holes in the ground and they often leave their lives behind, as the war and its hidden landscape continue to maim and kill.
Each contributor has conducted very impressive fieldwork and advances solid arguments. They also provide us with a vast array of new information and insights. While my eyes sometimes glazed over when certain authors bogged us down with unnecessarily academic jargon, it’s worth carrying on. For, together, they have succeeded in providing us with new insights into the socio-cultural consequences of war in this part of the world and how the peoples who suffered through it still cope with this violent past in a variety of different and ever-changing ways.
Christopher Goscha
Université du Québec à Montréal, Montréal, Canada
pp. 352-353