Transcending time and terror: The re-emergence of Bon Dalien after pol pot and thirty years of civil war

Journal of Southeast Asian Studies

Volumn 37, Issue 3, 2006, Pages 527-546

  Zucker, Eve Monique ^a  

^a LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

CIVIL WAR; POLITICAL HISTORY; TERRORISM; VIOLENCE; WAR;

ASIA; CAMBODIA; EURASIA; SOUTHEAST ASIA;

EID: 33748302720     PISSN: 00224634     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0022463406000774     Document Type: Article

References (50)

1. This is a big topic but for a sampling of the variety of approaches see: Maurice Bloch, From blessing to violence: History and ideology in the circumcision ritual of the Merina of Madagascar (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986)
2. Paul Connerton, How societies remember (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989)
3. Clifford Geertz, Negara: The theatre state in nineteenth-century Bali (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980)
4. Roy A. Rappaport, Pigs for the ancestors; Ritual in the ecology of a New Guinea people (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967)
5. and Arnold van Gennep, The rites of passage, tr. Monika Vizedom and Gabrielle L. Caffee (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960).
6. Viviane Frings, 'Cambodia after decollectivization (1989-1992)', Journal of Contemporary Asia, 24, 1 (1994): 49-66
7. Jan Ovesen, Ing-Britt Trankell and Joakim Öjendal, When every household is an island: Social organization and power structures in rural Cambodia (Uppsala: Uppsala University Dept. of Cultural Anthropology and Swedish International Development Authority, 1996)
8. and Doung Virorth, Cambodian community peace building (Phnom Penh: Asia-Pacific Peace Research Association, 2003).
9. Ethnographic studies of Khmer refugee populations have also expressed similar findings: Gay Becker, Yewoubdar Beyene and Pauline Ken, 'Memory, trauma, and embodied distress: The management of disruption in the stories of Cambodians in exile', Ethos, 28, 3 (2000): 327.
10. Ian Buruma, The wages of guilt. Memories of war in Germany and Japan (New York: Meridian, 1995)
11. Uli Linke, 'Archives of violence: The Holocaust and German politics of memory', in Annihilating dfference: An anthropology of genocide, ed. Alexander Laban Hinton (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002), pp. 229-71
12. Naomi Rosh White, 'Marking absences: Holocaust testimony and history', in The oral history reader, ed. Robert Perks and Alistair Thomson (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 172-82
13. Erik Mueggler, The age of wild ghosts: Memory, violence, and place in Southwest China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001)
14. Jennifer Cole, Forget colonialism?: Sacrifice and the art of memory in Madagascar (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).
15. May Ebihara, 'Memories of the Pol Pot era in a Cambodian village', in Cambodia emerges from its past, ed. Judy Ledgerwood (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Center for Southeast Asian Studies, 2002), pp. 91-108
16. Ebihara and Judy Ledgerwood, 'Aftermaths of genocide: Cambodian villagers', in Hinton ed., Annihilating difference, pp. 272-91
17. Ledgerwood, 'Rural development in Cambodia: The view from the village', in Cambodia and the international community: The quest for peace, development, and democracy, ed. Frederick Z. Brown and David G. Timberman (New York and Singapore: Asia Society and ISEAS, 1998), pp. 127-18.
18. Ovesen et al., When every household, pp. 66-77 (quotation from pp. 66-7).
19. Yiey Khieu, interview, 6 Feb. 2003.
20. Éveline Porée-Maspero, Étude sur les rites agraires des Cambodgiens (Paris: Mouton, 1962), pp. 918 (rite for the dead), 53 (offering)
21. Robert K. Headley, Cambodian-English dictionary (Washington: Catholic University of American Press, 1977), p. 319.
22. Ibid., p. 917
23. Porée-Maspéro, Étude sur les rites, pp. 919 (spirits), 235 (banquet). As the Headley dictionary (p. 932) confirms, it is in fact the word 'lieng' (as opposed to 'lien') that means to feast or entertain.
24. Porée-Maspero, Étude sur les rites, pp. 579-86
25. she also discusses related festivals such as the 'asking for rain' (som tuk plieng) ritual in the planting season. For additional information on this ritual see also Ian Harris, 'Magician as environmentalist: Fertility elements in South and Southeast Asian Buddhism', Eastern Buddhist, 32, 2 (2000): 128-56.
26. Porée-Maspero contends that the two festivals - 'Filing up of mounds of paddy' and 'offering of the fire' are 'usually mistaken as being one' (Étude sur les rites, p. 579) but also states that further research is needed into the order of these ceremonies as they are practised within the lunar season (p. 598).
27. He is not the official government village chief. The villagers elected him as the Village Development Leader (VDL) as part of a restructuring programme organised by development agencies. The village originally had its own chief before the war; however, in the 1980s the People's Republic of Kampuchea (PRK) government, faced with diminished populations in the region, combined several villages under the authority of a single chief. O'Thmaa is now officially under the authority of the chief of the neighboring village; nonetheless, the VDL is the de facto leader if not de jure chief in most village-level affairs, including the settling of disputes, organizing events and representing the village's interests to development agencies and others like myself.
28. For extensive discussions on the cycle of Khmer holidays and the cycle of agricultural rites including a discussion of their relation to fertility see Harris, 'Magician as environmentalist' and Porée-Maspero, Étude sur les rites.
29. I am uncertain as to which Hindu deity(s) are represented here. One informant mentioned that the teveda is blue, which would suggest that it is Siva or Vishnu. However, in another agricultural rite that also involved offerings to the teveda at the roung shrine, the songs that were sung were directed towards wooing 'the stick god' from the mountain, who I was told was a representation of Vishnu (possibly reincarnated as Krishna).
30. See the accounts in Chanrithy Him, When broken glass floats: Growing up under the Khmer Rouge, a memoir (New York: W.W. Norton, 2000)
31. Ben Kiernan, The Pol Pot regime: Race, power, and genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975-79 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996)
32. Pin Yathay and John Man, Stay alive, my son (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000)
33. Loung Ung, First they killed my father: A daughter of Cambodia remembers (New York: HarperCollins, 2000).
34. Ya, interview, 24 July 2003.
35. Ta Mahn, interview, 15 Aug. 2003.
36. Ya, interview, 24 July 2003. The 'past' referred to here begins in 1969-70, when the civil war came to their homeland resulting in numerous killings, and includes the 1975-79 Democratic Kampuchea period.
37. The Khmei Saa, led by former Issarak leader Chantaraingsey, were based in the region of the village and operating in other parts of Kompong Speu province and beyond; for more on this movement see Ten documents illustrating Vietnamese Communist subversion in Cambodia - August 1969-April 1970 (Translated extracts from notebooks of North Vietnamese military personnel) (Saigon: United States Mission, 1970).
38. I am indebted to Alexandra Denes (personal communication) for her insight into the importance of this point.
39. For more explanation as to some of the ritual components of the bon see Porée-Maspero, Étude sur les rites.
40. Sau (village chief), personal communication, Oct. 2002.
41. Numerous works have been written on the nature of ritual. Particularly pertinent to the 'time out of time' are Bloch, From blessing to violence; Maurice Bloch, Ritual, history and power: Selected papers in anthropology (London and Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Athlone Press, 1989)
42. Van Gennep, Rites of passage
43. and Victor Turner, The ritual process: Structure and anti-structure (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1995).
44. Harris, 'Magician as environmentalist', mentions the offering of 'parasols and banners' associated with the rite of asking for rain.
45. The only explanation I ever heard for this was that the teveda do not like to be in the light, which does not entirely make sense given that candles are placed on the steps.
46. For an elaborate account of the 'piling up of mounds of paddy' see the chapter on the 'Festivals of Makh' in Porée-Maspero, Étude des rites.
47. Turner, Ritual process, pp. 95-6.
48. Thon, interview, 8 Sept. 2003.
49. See Bloch, From blessing to violence for an intricate analysis of how the meanings of ritual may change through historical episodes while the symbolic form of the ritual remains intact in his study of the Merina circumcision ritual.
50. See Lindsay Cole French, 'Enduring holocaust, surviving history: Displaced Cambodians on the Thai-Cambodian border, 1989-1991' (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1996) for a perceptive analysis of the social repercussions of bodily injuries suffered by Cambodian amputees in the refugee camps along the border.