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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 December 2015
This article examines one Cambodian village's efforts to resettle a war-altered landscape and reconstruct a sense of belonging in the aftermath of war. The resettlement of Reaksmei Songha village entailed physically settling over the sediments and traces of a fractured and violent past, as settlers cleared a landscape of foliage and the explosive remnants of war. Settlers living side by side had often fought on different sides of the war, yet divisive former allegiances were rarely discussed. Instead, a post-war sense of communal belonging was constructed through references to accounts of the resettlement period, focusing upon common elements of struggle and hardship.
1 Ratanak Mondul was formerly named Pailin district and was renamed in 1997.
2 Women were also involved in the conflict, but their roles as active combatants were largely confined to the civil war of 1970–1975 on the side of the Khmer Rouge. See, for example, Elizabeth Becker, When the war was over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge Revolution (New York: Public Affairs, 1998), pp. 99, 153, 181, 256.
3 Jan Ovesen, Ing-Brit Trankell and Joakim Öjenal, When every household is an island: Social organization and power structures in rural Cambodia (Uppsala: Dept. of Cultural Anthropology, Uppsala University, 1996); May Ebihara and Judy Ledgerwood, ‘Aftermaths of genocide: Cambodian villagers', in Annihilating difference: The anthropology of genocide, ed. Alexander Hinton (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), pp. 272–91; Frings, Vivian, ‘Cambodia after decollectivization (1989–1992)’, Journal of Contemporary Asia 24, 1 (1994): 49–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Alexander L. Hinton, Why did they kill? Cambodia in the shadow of genocide (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Meas Nee, Towards restoring life: Cambodian villages (Phnom Penh: JSRC, 1995); Moira O'Leary and Meas Nee, Learning for transformation: A study of the relationship between culture, values, experience, and development practice in Cambodia (Battambang: Krom Akphiwat Phum, 2001); Eve Zucker, ‘In the absence of elders: Chaos and moral order in the aftermath of the Khmer Rouge’, in People of virtue: Reconfiguring religion, power and moral order in Cambodia today, ed. Alexandra Kent and David Chandler (Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2008), pp. 195–212; and Eve Zucker, Forest of struggle: Moralities of remembrance in upland Cambodia (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2013).
4 See, for example, E. Valentine Daniel, Charred lullabies: Chapters in an anthropology of violence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996); Veena Das, ‘Our work to cry, your work to listen’, in Mirrors of violence: Communities, riots, and survivors in South Asia, ed. Veena Das (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 345–98; Harri Englund, From war to peace on the Mozambique–Malawi borderland (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002); Stephen Lubkemann, Culture in chaos: An anthropology of the social condition in war (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); and Malkki, Lisa, ‘Speechless emissaries: Refugees, humanitarianism, and dehistoricization’, Cultural Anthropology 11, 3 (1996): 377–404CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
5 See Roma Chatterji and Deepak Mehta, Living with violence: An anthropology of events and everyday life (New Delhi: Routledge, 2007); Veena Das, Life and words: Violence and the descent into the ordinary (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); Veena Das and Arthur Kleinman, ‘Introduction’, in Remaking a world: Violence, social suffering and recovery, ed. Veena Das et al. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), pp. 1–31; Kelly, Toby, ‘The attractions of accountancy: Living an ordinary life during the second Palestinian intifada’, Ethnography 9, 3 (2008): 351–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Carolyn Nordstrom, A different kind of war story (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997); and Richard Werbner, ‘Smoke from the barrel of a gun’, in Memory and the postcolony: African anthropology and the critique of power, ed. Richard P. Werbner (London: Zed, 1998), pp. 71–102.
6 Navaro-Yashin, Yael, ‘Affective spaces, melancholic objects: Ruination and the production of anthropological knowledge’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, N.S., 15, 1 (2009): 1–15CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
7 See, for example, the work of Paola Filippucci, including ‘Memory and marginality: Remembrance of war in Argonne (France)’, in Memory, politics and religion: The past meets the present in Europe, ed. Frances Pine, Deema Kaneff and Idis Haukanes (Munster: Lit Verlag, 2004), pp. 35–58; and Interactions with a violent past: Reading post-conflict landscapes in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, ed. Vatthana Pholsena and Oliver Tappe (Singapore: NUS Press, 2013).
8 See Nicholas Saunders, ‘Matter and memory in the landscapes of conflict: The Western Front 1914–1999’, in Contested landscapes: Movement, exile and place, ed. Barbara Bender and Margot Weiner (Oxford: Berg, 2001), pp. 37–53; and Donovan Webster, Aftermath: The remnants of war—from landmines to chemical warfare, the devastating effects of modern combat (New York: Pantheon, 1996).
9 International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL), Landmine and Cluster Munition Monitor, ‘Cambodia Landmine Report’, http://www.the-monitor.org/en-gb/reports/1999/cambodia/landmine-monitor-summary.aspx (accessed 9 Sept 2015).
10 Ibrahim Baba-Ali et al., Land release: A guide for mine and ERW-affected countries (Geneva: Geneva International Centre for Humanitarian Demining, 2007).
11 Oral histories were gathered from 12 elderly villagers; 49 of the semi-structured interviews were conducted with residents of Reaksmei Songha and two neighbouring villages, and 6 were conducted with outsiders, including 2 with former Khmer Rouge child soldiers who had fought in the area during the war years, but had settled elsewhere. I also conducted 71 interviews of one to two hours in length, with 67 individuals (some were interviewed multiple times). Events and informal conversations were recorded in ethnographic fieldnotes. Atlas-TI software was used for content analysis of these materials.
12 See, for example, Unruh, Jon, Heynen, Nikolas and Hossler, Peter, ‘The political ecology of recovery from armed conflict: The case of landmines in Mozambique’, Political Geography 22, 8 (2003): 841–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Maher, Charles, ‘Maps, measurements, and landmines: The global landmines crisis and the politics of development’, Environment and Planning A 34, 2 (2002): 239–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Webster, Aftermath.
13 Bottomley, Ruth, ‘Balancing risk: Village de-mining in Cambodia’, Third World Quarterly 24, 5 (2003): 823–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
14 Robert K. Headley, Cambodian–English dictionary (Washington, DC: Catholic University of American Press, 1977), p. 1251.
15 Village deminers or informal deminers are private individuals who demine land for a fee. These men are generally former soldiers. See Ruth Bottomley, ‘Crossing the divide: Landmines, villagers and organizations’ (Oslo: International Peace Research Institute, 2003).
16 See Michael Fleisher, ‘Informal village demining in Cambodia: An operational study’ (Phnom Penh: Handicap International, 2005).
17 See, for example, Carsten, Janet, ‘The politics of forgetting: Migration, kinship and memory on the periphery of the Southeast Asian state’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 1, 2 (1995): 317–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jennifer Cole, Forget colonialism? Sacrifice and the art of memory in Madagascar (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Birth, Kevin, ‘The immanent past: Culture and psyche at the juncture of memory and history’, Ethos 34, 2 (2006): 169–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Harrison, Simon, ‘Forgetful and memorious landscapes’, Social Anthropology 12, 2 (2004): 135–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Alexander Hinton, ‘Truth, representation, and the politics of memory after genocide’, in Kent and Chandler, People of virtue, pp. 62–81; Jon Holtzman, Uncertain tastes: Memory, ambivalence, and the politics of eating in Samburu, northern Kenya (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009); Michael Lambek, The weight of the past: Living with history in Mahajanga, Madagascar (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); and Littlewood, Roland, ‘Neglect as project: How two societies forget’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 15, 1 (2009): 113–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
18 See David Chandler, Voices from S-21: Terror and history in Pol Pot's secret prison (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999) and Ben Kiernan, The Pol Pot regime: Race, power, and genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975–79 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996).
19 Boreth, Ly, ‘Devastated vision(s): The Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia’, Art Journal 62, 1 (2003): 66–81Google Scholar.
20 See David Chandler, The tragedy of Cambodian history: Politics, war, and revolution since 1945 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991).
21 Villagers' names have been changed to protect their privacy, but I have followed the customary Khmer practice of using age-specific pronouns before names. Ta is the Khmer pronoun used to refer to an elderly man.
22 Paul Davies, War of the mines: Cambodia, landmines and the impoverishment of a nation (London: Pluto, 1994).
23 Kevin Rowley, ‘Second life, second death: The Khmer Rouge after 1978’, in Genocide in Cambodia and Rwanda: New perspectives, ed. Susan Cook (New Jersey: Transaction, 2006), pp. 191–212.
24 A town situated along the side of National Highway 10 between Battambang and Pailin.
25 See Ovesen et al., When every household is an island; François Ponchaud, ‘Social change in the vortex of revolution’, in Cambodia 1975–1978: Rendezvous with death, ed. Karl D. Jackson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), pp. 151–77; and Philip Short, Pol Pot: The anatomy of a nightmare (London: John Murray, 2004).
26 See Penny Edwards, ‘Between a song and a prei: Tracking Cambodian history and cosmology through the forest’, in At the edge of the forest: Essays on Cambodia, history and narrative in honor of David Chandler, ed. Anne Hansen and Judy Ledgerwood (New York: Southeast Asia Program Publications, Cornell University, 2008), pp. 37–162.
27 See Davies, War of the mines.
28 Foraging was the primary cause of accidents from war debris in this period and throughout the years of conflict. In district authorities' records of 225 landmine casualties between 1975 and 1993, at least 76 per cent of the injuries were sustained while engaged in subsistence activities, a large proportion of them related to collecting forest-based resources (Davies, War of the mines, 1994). These reported numbers should be considered partial, as district authorities did not keep full records. In addition, this data was only available for accident survivors — the records on deaths caused by landmines did not show activity at the time of death.
29 Like landmines, these spike-jacks were planted on defensive perimeters to injure and maim opposition forces.
30 See Huw Watkin, ‘Peace claims casualties on Route 10’, Phnom Penh Post, 15 Nov. 1996; http://www.phnompenhpost.com/national/peace-claims-casualties-route-10 (last accessed 15 Jan. 2014).
31 David Chandler, Brother Number One: A political biography of Pol Pot (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1999), p. 76.
32 For an in-depth discussion of the role of the forest in cosmological beliefs of area residents, see my article, ‘Displacement, diminishment, and ongoing presence: The state of local cosmologies in northwest Cambodia in the aftermath of war’, Asian Ethnology 71, 2 (2012): 159–78Google Scholar.
33 The forested regions of northwest Cambodia host a virulent strain of malaria. See Slocomb, Margaret, ‘The K5 gamble: National defense and nation building under the People's Republic of Kampuchea’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 32, 1 (2001): 202CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
34 See also Richard Moyes, ‘Tampering: Deliberate handling and use of live ordnance in Cambodia’ (Phnom Penh: Handicap International Belgium, 2004).
35 These are all common village demining techniques. Bottomley, ‘Crossing the divide’.
36 Chandler, Facing the Cambodian past, p. 180.
37 See Henri Locard, Pol Pot's Little Red Book: The sayings of Angkar (Chiang Mai: Silkworm, 2004).
38 See further John Marston, ‘Metaphors of the Khmer Rouge’, in Cambodian culture since 1975: Homeland and exile, ed. May M. Ebihara, Carol Mortland and Judy Ledgerwood (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), pp. 105–18.
39 NGO Forum on Cambodia, ‘NGO position papers on Cambodia's development in 2007–08’ (Phnom Penh: NGO Forum on Cambodia, 2008).
40 May Ebihara, ‘Svay, a Khmer village in Cambodia’ (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1971), p. 93.
41 Ibid.
42 Erik W. Davis, ‘Between forests and families: A remembered past life’, in Kent and Chandler, People of virtue, pp. 128–44.
43 In her recent ethnography of a Cambodian village (Forest of struggle), Eve Zucker has also discussed the role of commensalism in creating powerful signs or displays of kin-like intimacy. See also Janet Carsten's The heat of the hearth: The process of kinship in a Malay fishing community (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997).
44 Zucker, Forest of struggle.
45 Disarming the populace and gathering up the discarded weapons was reportedly a long and gradual process, as in other parts of Cambodia.
46 Areas that remained under Khmer Rouge control until the end of the war.
