ASAA Southeast Asia Publications Series. Singapore: NUS Press; Copenhagen: NIAS Press, in association with Asian Studies Association of Australia, 2014. xvii, 316 pp. (Illustrations, maps.) US$32.00, paper. ISBN 978-9971-69-778-5.
Kampuchea Krom has served for centuries as a much-contested middle-space that occupies the rich Mekong Delta area of southern Vietnam. The Khmer Krom people, who comprise a large demographic in the region, are an ethnic Khmer minority who have called this area home for centuries. Due in large part to centuries of regional rivalry, Kampuchea Krom, which is under Vietnamese territorial domain, has taken on a legendary character. Most famously, a Cambodian story told of an early seventeenth-century betrayal of Khmers by Vietnamese, one which the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK) under Pol Pot revived to foment hatred among his people toward the country’s ethnic minority Vietnamese population. As the story goes, despite a treaty between the Khmer and Vietnamese parties that was bound by the marriage of Khmer prince Chey Chetha II (1618–1628) to the daughter of the King of Annam, the Vietnamese occupied the region via mass migration, thereby forcing the local Khmer peoples out as primary inhabitants and rulers. Centuries later, the CPK regarded the Khmer Krom as “Khmer bodies with Vietnamese minds” who might turn their allegiance against Cambodia due to their connections to “stolen” Khmer lands. While oral history and nationalistic narratives about the region are widespread, few scholarly efforts have been made to examine the Khmer Krom people and how they interpret and interact with their environments.
The Khmer Lands of Vietnam by Philip Taylor sheds much overdue light on the livelihoods of the Khmer Krom outside of the nationalist frameworks of Cambodia and Vietnam by exploring “locally contextualized questions about the Khmer Krom … to generate a set of comparable criteria” (6). The book consists of seven readable chapters in between a comprehensive introduction and conclusion. Taylor’s thesis argues that the Khmer Krom are “the rightful subjects of two different nations, neither of which fully accepts them as its own,” and through “recasting Buddhist and folk cosmologies and [by] improvising stories … they have imbued their diverse local ecologies, circumstances and histories with universal significance” (252–253). Each of Kampuchea Krom’s seven main sub-regions receives chapter-length attention. The first two chapters discuss the northern and southern halves of the region complex, respectively, and explore how inhabitants adapt to the ecological setting in which they live. The third chapter employs oral history interviews as well as stories about the region to cast into light various histories of displacement, settlement and flight along the central Mekong Delta. Taylor then draws from stories told by residents to frame a history of the Khmer river basin. He asserts that such tales “embody a unique form of historical consciousness and bring into view conceptions of place, morality, and authority that remain salient for the Khmers of this region of saltwater rivers” (129). He concludes that although the Vietnamese have unquestioned military power over this region, “Khmer sovereignty over the peninsula remains potent, and is made manifest in miraculous events and the telling of stories” (161).
Subsequent chapters also highlight Kampuchea Krom as a locus between two nations, shedding light on the survival, modernity, and identity of the Khmer Krom. Chapter 5 examines the lives of Khmer Krom between the mountains and floodplains of the area, which the author describes as “incorporated yet distinct” (189), while the sixth chapter analyzes the inhabitants of the northwest shoreline—their livelihoods, transformations and threats to their security in this unique locality. The final chapter discusses the uplands region, which, the author states, “is considered by Khmers in the Mekong Delta to be the oldest site of Khmer settlement in Kampuchea Krom and is said to remain home to Khmer daem, the original Khmers” (219). In the conclusion, Taylor summarizes his findings and identifies some common threads as well as some contrasts.
Taylor’s study of Kampuchea Krom places needed attention on the Khmer-speaking minority in southern Vietnam, and it satisfies as an introduction to the region, its people, and the ways in which they eke out their survival as a nation between nations. However, the book could have benefited from the inclusion of a theory, or theories, in which to locate the phenomena under analysis. The absence of any engagement with James Scott’s The Art of Not Being Governedseems to me an opportunity that the author missed, since Scott’s study examines statelessness and resistance in an area in Southeast Asia that he terms as Zomia. I also would have liked to see Taylor situate his analysis of the Khmer Krom within the scholarly polemics on ethnicity and nation. For instance, Rogers Brubaker’s assertion that groupness is a contextually fluctuating conceptual variable, and Thongchai Winichakul’s notion of the geo-body and his discussion of lost territories, are both salient theoretical lenses through which one can grasp the complexities that undergird Khmer Krom conceptions of identity as well as their weltanschauung. Although the author succeeds in placing primacy on ecology and cosmology as alternative scopes through which to analyze the Khmer Krom, the absence of any dialogue with these major theories leaves the reader having to navigate through the book and approach loaded terms such as nation, ethnicity, and modernity without a theoretical heading.
The Khmer Lands of Vietnam is nevertheless a thoughtful analysis of an important yet oft-overlooked ethnic group that inhabits the rich Mekong Delta. As Taylor makes clear, nationalistic narratives of the region occupy the collective consciousness of Vietnam and Cambodia, and politicians and revolutionaries alike have mobilized its loss and acquisition as a rallying cry for expansion and national legitimacy. Often lost in these narratives, however, are the inhabitants themselves, who, with a dual identity and varied livelihoods in a geographically diverse terrain, remain resilient and somewhat defiant in the faces of both ruling bodies to this very day.
Matt Galway
The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada