Group marriages along with prescriptions for sex, pregnancies & births, were a central feature of the remaking of Cambodian society & contributed to the dissolution of ritual practices. This work offers an assessment of the official tampering with ritual under the Khmer Rouge.

How to Love a Rat takes place in a Cambodian minefield. Working amid hidden bombs, former war combatants use explosive-sniffing rats to clear mines from the land. In total, an estimated four to six million landmines in Cambodia have been left behind by wars that ended decades ago. This has created the conditions for a flourishing mine-clearance industry, where workers who were once enemy combatants may now be employed on the same clearance teams. Zeroing in on two distinct sets of feelings, Darcie DeAngelo paints a portrait of the love experienced between humans and rats and the suspicions felt between former adversaries turned coworkers. In doing so, she points to how human-animal relationships in the minefield produce models for relationality among people from opposing sides of war. The ways the deminers love for the rats mediate both the traumatic violence of the past and the uncertain dangers of the minefield. The book's stories depict an transformative postwar ecology emerging through human-nonhuman relationships, including those shared between humans and rats, landmines, and spirits.

This book examines three consecutive famines in Cambodia during the 1970s, exploring both continuities and discontinuities of all three. Cambodia experienced these consecutive famines against the backdrop of four distinct governments: the Kingdom of Cambodia (1953-1970), the U.S.-supported Khmer Republic (1970-1975), the communist Democratic Kampuchea (1975-1979), and the Vietnamese-controlled People's Republic of Kampuchea (1979-1989). Famine in Cambodia documents how state-induced famine constituted a form of sovereign violence and operated against the backdrop of sweeping historical transformations of Cambodian society. It also highlights how state-induced famines should not be solely framed from the vantage point in which famine occurs but should also focus on the geopolitics of state-induced famines, as states other than Cambodia conditioned the famine in Cambodia. Drawing on an array of theorists, including Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, and Achille Mbembe, James A. Tyner provides a conceptual framework to bring together geopolitics, biopolitics, and necropolitics in an effort to expand our understanding of state-induced famines. Tyner argues that state-induced famine constitutes a form of sovereign violence-a form of power that both takes life and disallows life.

Offering a comprehensive overview of the current situation in the country, The Handbook of Contemporary Cambodia provides a broad coverage of social, cultural, political and economic development within both rural and urban contexts during the last decade. A detailed introduction places Cambodia within its global and regional frame, and the handbook is then divided into five thematic sections: Political and Economic Tensions Rural Developments Urban Conflicts Social Processes Cultural Currents The first section looks at the major political implications and tensions that have occurred in Cambodia, as well as the changing parameters of its economic profile. The handbook then highlights the major developments that are unfolding within the rural sphere, before moving on to consider how cities in Cambodia, and particularly Phnom Penh, have become primary sites of change. The fourth section covers the major processes that have shaped social understandings of the country, and how Cambodians have come to understand themselves in relation to each other and the outside world. Section five analyses the cultural dimensions of Cambodia’s current experience, and how identity comes into contact with and responds to other cultural themes. Bringing together a team of leading scholars on Cambodia, the handbook presents an understanding of how sociocultural and political economic processes in the country have evolved. It is a cutting edge and interdisciplinary resource for scholars and students of Southeast Asian Studies, as well as policymakers, sociologists and political scientists with an interest in contemporary Cambodia.

The Kingdom of Cambodia has an ancient pedigree, a time when its people first established small principalities which evolved in small kingdoms. These kingdoms merged, often violently, eventually establishing the great Angkorian kingdom of the Khmer. The great building complex known as Angkor Wat, an achievement of stupendous proportion, whose dimensions are still being determined, is a product of the Khmer Empire. The empire was subject to much tension, both internally from competing nobles who sought to ascend the powerful throne, to outside kingdoms who tried to invade and subjugate the Khmer. Vietnam to the east, and further south also to the east, was the Cham Empire, while to the west was the Thai. These three kingdoms warred with the Khmer, eventually reducing it from grandeur. After the Khmer Empire fell, Cambodia entered a Dark Ages, a period of 431 years, from 1431 to 1862, years of scant records. Historians today try to reconstruct why the empire fell and why its people moved from the Siem Reap area and why records from this time are almost entirely unknown. In 1862, France became Cambodia's protector, defending its autonomy from both Vietnam and Thailand (Siam) who were both nibbling at either end of Cambodia. The Protectorate ended in 1942 when the Japanese occupied the land, followed by the return of the French in 1945, after the end of the Second World War. As in other countries subjugated by colonist powers, the defeat of France encouraged Cambodian nationalists to fight for a return to independence and autonomy. It is in this crucible that the Khmer Rouge, a communist-inspired group, began an insurrection against the French, and later against the Cambodian government. The Khmer Rouge, inspired by nihilistic beliefs, came to power in 1975 and began the tragic genocide of the Cambodian people. Between a quarter to a third of the people were murdered, representing the best and the elite of its society. There were many actors in this saga, both ancient and modern. I review these persons, to the extent known and the roles they played in Cambodian history and the effect it has had on the country today. The character of Pol Pot, mastermind and leader of the Khmer Rouge, is of special importance. I review his strange way of not identifying with a leadership role until absolutely necessary. But the menace of this man went much deeper; through guile and bland smiles, he allayed fear about himself, though he ordered the murder of those closest to him. Yet, even as they were led away, they disbelieved the order for their deaths, believing that if they could but have a moment with him, all would be set right. Even those closest to him did not see him for the monster he really was. He was a master at guile and deception, with none seeing the man as the monster of terror and destruction. Even in the Far East where exhibiting emotion and genuine feeling is shunned to the nth degree, this man’s ability to remain hidden reflects the ultimate achievement. But he brought ruin to his nation, with today’s loss of the elite of the country. I spent two months in Cambodia, visiting and researching material for this review. During my time there, I visited the only synagogue in the country, the Chabad House in Phnom Penh. It was then that I became aware of an amazing fact: a granddaughter of royalty celebrated her Bat Mitzvah in the capital, attended by members of the royal family. The story of how a member of the Cambodian royal family became Jewish is itself an incredible development. Cambodia today is a Third World country, with many attractions, both superb and revolting. At core, its representations reflect the saga of humanity, whose pages are sometimes elevating and also horrific. I describe my journey to this corner of Asia, hoping I've done justice to its many contours and personalities.

Pribble investigates the barter economies that developed in many of the labor camps established under the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. When the Khmer Rouge abolished currency and markets in 1975, starving Cambodians created underground exchanges in labor camps throughout the country, bartering luxury items for food and other necessities, while simultaneously undermining the regime’s ideological goals of eliminating any traces of capitalism in Democratic Kampuchea. Pribble asserts three key points about the barter economy in the Khmer Rouge labor camps. First, the underground exchanges in Democratic Kampuchea provided food and medicine for desperate people subsisting under a totalitarian regime, saving the lives of countless Cambodians. Second, bartering was the riskiest way to obtain food because it was dependent upon the discretion of two or more individuals from different social classes under the threat of violent punishment, thereby altering the social dynamics of the camps. Finally, despite the regime’s extreme efforts to eliminate foreign influence from the country and impose communist ideology on millions of citizens, basic forms of market capitalism and a demand for superfluous luxury goods persisted in labor camps throughout the country. A fascinating study of the human consequences of imposing rigid ideology, that will be of particular interest to scholars and students of political history and Southeast Asian history. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

In the early twenty-first century, trauma is seemingly everywhere, whether as experience, diagnosis, concept, or buzzword. Yet even as many scholars consider trauma to be constitutive of psychological modernity or the post-Enlightenment human condition, historical research on the topic has overwhelmingly focused on cases, such as World War I or the Holocaust, in which Western experiences and actors are foregrounded. There remains an urgent need to incorporate the methods and insights of recent historical trauma research into a truly global perspective. The chapters in Traumatic Pasts in Asia make just such an intervention, extending Euro-American paradigms of traumatic experience to new sites of world-historical suffering and, in the process, exploring how these new domains of research inform and enrich earlier scholarship.