Death, memory and building: The non-cremation of a Cambodian monk

Journal of Southeast Asian Studies

Volumn 37, Issue 3, 2006, Pages 491-505

  Marston, John ^a  

^a El Colegio de   (Mexico)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

CULTURAL INFLUENCE; CULTURAL TRADITION; RELIGION;

ASIA; CAMBODIA; EURASIA; SOUTHEAST ASIA;

EID: 33748335372     PISSN: 00224634     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0022463406000750     Document Type: Article

References (40)

1. Katherine Verdery, What was socialism and what comes next (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 233.
2. There is no completely satisfactory transliteration system for Khmer. I use here the Franco-Khmer Transcription system, which produces the closest approximation to Khmer pronunciation, even though it results in Buddhist terminology being written differently from standard spellings.
3. 'Vihear', following the Franco-Khmer Transcription system, closely represents the Khmer pronunciation of the term which in other Buddhist contexts might be written as 'vihara'.
4. 'Chetěy' is the Khmer term for stupa, sometimes written in English as 'cetiya' or 'chedi'.
5. Sherry Ortner, High religion: A cultural and political history of Sherpa Buddhism (New Delhi: Montital Banarsidas, 1992), p. 12.
6. Robert Hertz, Death and the right hand, tr. Rodney and Claudia Needham (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1960).
7. Charles Keyes, 'From death to birth: Ritual process and Buddhist meaning in Northern Thailand', Folk, 29 (1987): 181-206.
8. For other accounts see Shway Yoe [James George Scott], The Burman: His life and notions, 2nd edn (New York: Norton, 1963), pp. 583-8
9. Keyes, 'Tug-of-war for merit: Cremation of a senior monk', Journal of the Siam Society (henceforth JSS), 63 (1975): 44-59
10. and Keyes, 'The cremation of a senior monk', in The life of the Buddha, ed. Frank E. Reynolds and Jason A. Carbine (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000), pp. 124-35.
11. Anusaranasasanakiarti and Charles F. Keyes, 'Funerary rites and the Buddhist meaning of death: An interpretive text from Northern Thailand', JSS, 68, 1 (1980): 1-32.
12. Alan Klima, The funeral casino: Meditation, massacre, and exchange with the dead in Thailand (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), p. 205.
13. Nerida Cross, 'The position of nuns in Thai Buddhism' (M.A. thesis, Australian National University, 1981).
14. Marcus Bingenheimer, 'Roushen pusa and corpum integrum - Whole-body relics in Buddhism and Christianity', in The contribution of Buddhism to world culture, ed. Kalpakam Sankamarayan (Mumbai: Somaiya Publications, forthcoming). Note that Klima also refers to the relic-like character of the body in the passage quoted above (Funeral casino, p. 205).
15. Holmes Welch, The practice of Chinese Buddhism 1900-1950 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), p. 343.
16. 'Monks get new lease on life', Vietnam News Service, 23 Apr. 2003; my thanks to Frank Proschan for sending me this article.
17. Bernard Faure, The rhetoric of immediacy: A cultural critique of Chan/ Zen Buddhism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), pp. 150, 160-1.
18. Welch, Practice of Chinese Buddhism, p. 344. Could the special circumstances of Taiwanese Buddhism in the 1950s - when it faced the task of constructing a sense of the symbols of the past that would compete with those lost in mainland China - be a factor in the existence of this practice at this particular time?
19. Donald K. Swearer, The Buddhist world of Southeast Asia (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), p. 93.
20. A summary of the literature can be found in John S. Strong, Relics of the Buddha (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), pp. 4-5.
21. See, for example, the Thai practices described in Peter Metcalf and Richard Huntington, Celebrations of death: The anthropology of mortuary ritual, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 136-11.
22. The best-known discussion of this idea in the Southeast Asian context is O. W. Wolters, History, culture and region in Southeast Asian perspectives, rev. edn (Ithaca: Cornell Southeast Asia Program, 1999).
23. François Bizot, Le don de soi-même (Paris: École Française d'Extrême-Orient, 1981).
24. One case is rather different, with overtones of the secondary burial described by Hertz, in that the monk died and was buried during the Pol Pot period; villagers say he was forced to disrobe during that time but never totally abandoned his religious discipline. It was in 1982 that his body was exhumed and preserved in a decorative coffin for eventual cremation.
25. Hayden Dewes and Lon Nara, 'Mummified monk draws the crowds', Phnom Penh Post, 17-30 Jan. 2003.
26. For a general discussion of memory of the Pol Pot period at the village level, see May Ebihara, 'Memories of the Pol Pot era in a Cambodian village', in Cambodia emerges from the past: Eight essays, ed. Judy Ledgerwood (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Southeast Asia Publications, 2002), pp. 91-108.
27. Ashley Thompson, 'Mémoires du Cambodge' (Ph.D. diss., Université de Paris-VIII, 1999).
28. Asked why a chicken would be offered in this way on the grounds of a wat (a practice to me inconsistent with basic Buddhist thinking), villagers answered matter-of-factly that it was because the particular weak ta in question liked chicken.
29. Such a perspective is found, for example, in Judy Ledgerwood, 'The Cambodian Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocidal Crime: National narrative', Museum Anthropology, 21, 1 (1997): 82-98.
30. Arnold Van Gennep, The rites of passage, tr. Monica B. Vizedom and Gabrielle L. Caffee (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), pp. 146-65.
31. Justin McDaniel, personal communication, 19 June 2003.
32. Metcalf and Huntington, Celebrations of death, pp. 144-51.
33. Mircea Eliade, Myth and reality, tr. William R. Trank (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1963).
34. Klima, Funeral casino.
35. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a theory of practice, tr. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 41.
36. Marcel Mauss, The gift: The form and reason of exchange in archaic societies, tr. W. D. Halls (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990).
37. For mainland Southeast Asia, a classic text relating to these issues is Lucien M. Hanks, 'Merit and power in the Thai social order', American Anthropologist 64, 6 (1962): 1247-61.
38. I discuss them in a Cambodian context in John Marston, 'Cambodia 1991-1994: Hierarchy, neutrality and etiquettes of discourse' (Ph.D. diss., University of Washington, 1997).
39. Maurice Bloch, 'Death, women, and power', in Death and the regeneration of life, ed. Maurice Bloch and Jonathan Parry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 219.
40. John Marston, 'Clay into stone: A modern-day tāpas', in History, Buddhism, and new religious movements in Cambodia, ed. John Marston and Elizabeth Guthrie (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2004), pp. 170-92.