Ithaca; London: Cornell University Press, 2016. xxxi, 230 pp. (Tables, maps, B&W photos, illustrations.) US$29.95, paper. ISBN 978-1-5017-0303-4.
Decades of war that engulfed Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam in the second half of the twentieth century imposed an ethnographic blackout on the region that has only begun to be lifted in recent decades, beginning with the majority populations of each country and only later with ethnic minorities. With rare exceptions, anthropologists have had little opportunity for the kind of long-term participant observation needed for a classic village study, and this was even more true where minority communities were concerned. Geographic remoteness, language difficulties, or arduous living conditions were often trivial challenges when compared to the bureaucratic and security obstacles imposed by the host countries, for whom ethnic minorities were—and remain—a sensitive subject. Yet at the same time, as this important study demonstrates, war and its consequences transformed communities and provoked cultural responses that have much to teach us about the nature of human societies.
Building upon several years of experience in northeastern Cambodia as an NGO officer working on explosive remnants of war (ERW), author Krisna Uk returned for dissertation fieldwork to a village in Ratanakiri Province she calls Leu, inhabited by some 300 of Cambodia’s population of 20,000 Jorai—themselves part of a larger ethnicity numbering more than 400,000 across the border in Vietnam. Ratanakiri and other northeastern provinces served as a base area for the Khmer Rouge in the late 1960s and early 1970s, during which time they were very heavily bombed by American forces. However, this early affiliation of ethnic minorities and the Khmer Rouge by no means exempted their members from the depredations of Democratic Kampuchea (1975–1978). Indeed, Uk offers compelling first-hand accounts of local Jorai who served in key roles such as bodyguard for Pol Pot, as well as those of Leu residents who witnessed (or suffered) events from more peripheral positions. As she explains, even those ethnicities that might legitimately claim indigenous status within Cambodia’s territory were targets of the Khmer Rouge effort to create a “pure” Cambodian nation.
For the Jorai of Leu village, American airplanes high above in the skies unleashing their deadly cargo constituted intrusions of an outside world and a foreign technology that were literally inescapable. One of Uk’s unifying threads throughout her study is how Leu villagers (both those who experienced the planes and their bombs, and those born long after they stopped flying overhead) later appropriated and domesticated those exotic objects, particularly in creative forms such as wood carving and textile weaving. Examining how images of planes and helicopters are incorporated into funerary sculptures or adapted to adorn everyday objects, the author explores how the Jorai—like other war-ravaged communities elsewhere—integrate them into a sacred and secular iconography.
Uk also traces how villagers are drawn by economic necessity into a kind of devil’s bargain in which they venture into already-fearsome forests to salvage ERW, despite the high risk of bodily injury that search entails. This discussion has two important aspects: one is the author’s deft mapping of the Jorai moral order in which the village, as a “space imbued with social meanings” (5), is surrounded by an ever-encroaching forest, inhabited by spirits and rife with risks. Humans depend upon the resources the forest provides for building materials and for food (just as some now depend on collecting and recycling ERW), but they can ensure their own health and safety only through various ritual practices and precautions the author describes. A second important concern for Uk is to trace Jorai conceptions of the human body, particularly as those conceptions may be challenged by bodies that are subjected to dismemberment or accidental death brought on by war or by its remnants. She thus explores how those who have survived such injuries are reintegrated into Leu village and how the spirits of those who have suffered accidental death are propitiated.
The present ethnographic study thus implicates a much larger literature on post-conflict and post-disaster situations, and hence arises one of my small reservations about the work: the author does not fully engage that larger literature. The very subtitle of the book invokes “cultural resilience,” which is a vexed and much-debated concept within conflict and disaster studies, but here the term is used only at a common-sense level and not situated within the ongoing scholarly and applied discourses. Readers coming to the book from those fields will doubtless find hugely valuable insights and resonances with situations already familiar to them, but it can be considered somewhat of a lost opportunity that Uk does not more directly enter into their debates.
My other regret is that the author seems to shy away from some of her own interpretations by couching many thought-provoking and incisive claims in terms of mere possibility: we too often encounter statements along the lines of “phenomenon X may function for the Jorai in such and such a way” or “we may infer that for the villagers of Leu, X does so and so.” Perhaps this constitutes a certain admirable intellectual humility that we might wish to see more often from other scholars, but it also has the cumulative effect of undercutting certain of the author’s most interesting insights.
These small criticisms should in no way diminish the tremendous importance of Uk’s book as a pioneering anthropological study of an ethnicity that has been at the fulcrum of major historical events for many decades. The author has set a high mark for those who will, we can only hope, enjoy further opportunities to undertake ethnographic research with the minority communities of Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam.
Frank Proschan
Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, USA