“Maybe the dead were starving…”

Excellent two-part documentary from Al Jazeera on the ongoing Cambodian tribunal of the Khmer Rouge. There’s little discussion (but some) on the extremely limited number of leaders in the dock, but some great discussion. The talented Nic Dunlop, author of The Lost Executioner, takes lead on this report.

In the clip above, starting at about 10:43, note the following quote, which is characteristic of the way in which people have talked to me about ghosts and the dead during the Khmer Rouge period (Democratic Kampuchea, 1975-1979). Seng Yao, 81 year old survivor of prison camp M-99, says

At least ten prisoners died each morning and we would take the bodies away. We kept moving the corpses. I was not afraid of ghosts at that time. I would sometimes sleep on graves but ghosts did not haunt me. Maybe the ghosts did not have the energy left to haunt us because they died of starvation.

[Note that the speech in Khmer is actually somewhat less conditional about the reasoning]

I only interviewed a few survivors of Khmer Rouge prisons during my fieldwork. But such expressions and reasoning about ghosts were common among many survivors, not just former prisoners.  I was frequently told that “there were no ghosts during the Pol Pot time,” because “they had nothing to eat.” I had a hard time understanding this at first, because it was my assumption that whenever there was mass death there would necessarily be more ghosts, not fewer.

But the explanations I received were consistent with what Seng Yao expresses in the documentary clip above. In January 2005, an 85 year old man in rural Kompong Cham province expressed it this way:

When the country is rich, there are lots of ghosts. When there is nothing to eat, what will the ghosts eat? Nowadays, there are lots more ghosts than during the Pol Pot time.

Note that the reciprocity between humans and the dead is assumed to be the basis of the ‘health’ of the dead, and that the basis of this reciprocity is food. This point underlies almost all my work thus far on death and deathpower in Cambodia.

Cambodia Link Dump

Busy writing dissertation stuff lately, and have been neglecting my blog. Here are a few things that have happened of note in the last few weeks. At any rate, it’s the Cambodia-centered stuff that I’m interested in…

Andy Brouwer is one of Cambodia’s most famous non-Khmer bloggers (some graciously give us foreign bloggers the honorary title of cloggers, but I prefer ‘floggers,’ since it takes the air out of our unearned pretention). Andy’s posts are most commonly on temples, and are extremely fun and worthwhile. But here’s a post which deals with the mummified, displayed body, of murdered monk Sam Bunthoeurn, who figures briefly in my dissertation. Warning – the pictures can be disturbing for those squeamish about bodies and decomposition….

Mandevu is back, with a couple of fantastic posts on current fieldwork in the agricultural sector. Great photos of field inventories, and on the production of roof thatch. Can’t wait to see how this work turns out!

You must read the second part of Ka-Set’s interview with Richard Rechtman, French psychiatrist and anthropologist dealing with trauma, death, and memory. Fascinating stuff. (see also part one).

Economic stuff is looking bleak for 2009. The ILO reports that 500,000 Cambodians have been significantly affected already, with another million to be affected during 2009. More precise numerical predictions can be found in the article itself over at the Phnom Penh Post, along with a nice little factoid sidebar. Yikes.

Chea Mony, president of the Free Trade Union Workers of the Kingdom of Cambodia (FTUWKC), about which I have often written in these pages and elsewhere, has been nominated for the Martin Ennals award in Human Rights. Ennals was the founder and first president of Amnesty International. Mony deserves the recognition, and I hope it accompanies a resurgence in local support and labor activism and solidarity.

Ros Sovannareth was a union official and activist within the FTUWKC, when he was assassinated on May 7, 2004. He worked at the Trinunggal Komara Garment Factory, and was gunned down by two men riding a motorcycle. Just as in the murder of FTUWKC president Chea Vichea months previously (brother of Chea Mony), a patsy was found to take the legal fall. Now, with the accused killers of Chea Mony beginning to possibly receive a new trial, the accused killer of Ros Sovannareth will also receive an appeal. This isn’t justice, but it’s a necessary step forward.

Good news, Dougald O’Reilly, archaeologist, founder of Heritage Watch, and acclaimed scholar (I’m slowly working my way through his engaging book “Early Civilizations of Southeast Asia” in the five minute breaks between getting into bed and falling asleep these days, and am grateful for his work), has received a major award for Heritage Watch’s work. The Archaeological Institute of America’s Conservation and Heritage Management Award, was given to Dougald just a few days ago. Congratulations Dougald!

Links J13

• Dreams and the fear of the dead. A post referencing responses to Vaughan’s earlier SciAm piece on hallucinating the dead.
• Nina Paley has a new distribution plan for her amazing Sita Sings the Blues. With any luck, it’ll be released soon so that I can show it to classes.
• They’re auctioning off the Big Bopper’s coffin. That is all.
• Keith Hart has an excellent piece on Marxism and economic anthropology. And just today, he posted a series of video lectures on “development and anthropology.”
• Raj Patel has a good intro on the concept of food sovereignty.
• Andrej Grubacic and Staughton Lynd have released a book titled “Wobblies and Zapatistas.” As a supporter of the latter and member of the former, I’m really interested, and what I’ve read about the book so far is enticing. I’m not convinced by some of the major claims yet – that marxists and anarchists need to set aside their ideological differences – however: indeed, it seems that everytime the anarchists ’set aside their differences’ with the marxists, the marxists ruin everything in their rush to accommodation and consolidation of state power. Still, massive respect to Andrej and Staughton, whose interview over at ZNet is well worth reading.

UN Expert: Hears Hmong Complaints About Thai Graves

From Saint Paul to Thailand…

ST. PAUL, Minn. -— A United Nations human rights expert says he will present the concerns of Hmong immigrants in Minnesota about disturbed graves in Thailand to the Thai government.

U.N. Special Rapporteur James Anaya was in St. Paul on Wednesday hearing testimony from Hmong families about the desecration of those graves.

They described the emotional misery they´ve suffered since learning that hundreds of graves had been unearthed near a Buddhist temple where many Hmong refugees once lived.

Anaya calls their stories “disturbing,” but he finds their determination to have their rights respected encouraging.

Many Hmong families members say they want the Thai government to apologize. They also want promises that it won´t happen again.

via UN Expert: Hears Hmong Complaints About Thai Graves.

Anthropophagus

Another blog recommendation: of late, I’ve become enamored of anthropophagus, a great blog by an anthropology student who writes about all manner of things political, anthropological, and more. A couple of examples of the sorts of things that come up, prolifically, in her links, that I would not otherwise have noticed:

Dead Nuns Still a Health Hazard? While those who survived old-style Catholic educations may only consider living nuns truly dangerous, a historic crypt in Montreal has refused to allow a crypt to be opened, because the nuns interred within died of infectious diseases. Conversation on metafilter continues. [via]

The reactionary nature of the subalternist. An article from Monthly Review, by Pratyush Chandra, writes compelling of the ‘usefulness’ of terrorism and victimization to ‘the system,’ (which I would like to see better defined) and includes a surprising quote from Gayatri Spivak (“the scholar” in the below excerpt):

Terrorism in the present shape is not a threat to the system but like its counterpart creates an opportunity for the hegemonic bloc to (re)create consensus to (counter)terrorize and further subalternize the alienated voices and stop them from ever becoming a meaningful and organized threat to the system by transcending their own subalternity.  A prominent post-modernist, post-colonialist scholar categorically said, “Who the hell wants to protect subalternity?  Only extremely reactionary, dubious anthropologistic museumizers”¹ — like terrorists and (counter)terrorists.  How do we break this vicious circle?  The scholar added: “No activist wants to keep the subaltern in the space of difference. . . .  You don’t give the subaltern voice.  You work for the bloody subaltern, you work against subalternity.”²

Terrorism in the present shape is not a threat to the system but like its counterpart creates an opportunity for the hegemonic bloc to (re)create consensus to (counter)terrorize and further subalternize the alienated voices and stop them from ever becoming a meaningful and organized threat to the system by transcending their own subalternity.  A prominent post-modernist, post-colonialist scholar categorically said, “Who the hell wants to protect subalternity?  Only extremely reactionary, dubious anthropologistic museumizers”¹ — like terrorists and (counter)terrorists.  How do we break this vicious circle?  The scholar added: “No activist wants to keep the subaltern in the space of difference. . . .  You don’t give the subaltern voice.  You work for the bloody subaltern, you work against subalternity.”²

During my qualifying exams, I got in very serious trouble for making an argument very much along these lines, following largely in the vein of Arif Dirlik, whose work I like very much. One of my committee members literally started screaming at me (thankfully, the member in question was on the phone, and not there in person).

This quote from Spivak makes me wonder what she thinks she was doing for so many years (see below, and especially in the famous exchange between Gyan Prakash and O’Hanlon and Washbrook, which picks up Spivak’s themes). Maybe she’s changed her mind, or did I misread her and the founders of ’subaltern studies?’

• Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and The Interpretation of Culture. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, eds. London: Macmillan, 1988. pp. 271-313.
• Prakash, Gyan. Writing Post-Orientalist Histories in the Third World: Perspectives from Indian Historigraphy,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 32, 2 (April 1990) pp. 383-408.
• O’Hanlon, Rosalind, and David Washbrook, “After Orientalism: Culture, Criticism, and Politics in the Third World,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 34, 1 (January 1992), pp. 141-167.
• Prakash, Gyan. “Can the Subaltern Ride?” A Reply to O’Hanlon and Washbrook,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 34, 1 (January 1992) pp. 168-184.

What KBR does with dead bodies

My “How to do things with dead people” class is coming to a close. I had a lovely time, and my students rocked. I came across this in today’s news/noise. Sweet Jeebus.

A lawsuit against the company recently filed in Houston federal court accuses its workers of exposing military and non-military personnel in Iraq to contaminated food, contaminated water, and improperly incinerated human remains. Yeah, that’s right. Human remains. Joshua Eller, the principal plaintiff, says he witnessed a wild dog running around base one day carrying a human arm in its mouth.

via Military Contractor KBR Sued over Dogs With Human Arms in Their Mouths – Boing Boing.

Neuroscience, Grief, and Ghosts

Vaughan, over at the great Mind Hacks blog, recently had an article published in Scientific American’s Mind Matters section. It’s a touching piece about the commonality of a supposedly rare occurrence: confronting the dead. It’s really worth reading, which you can do here. For a teaser, see below:

The dead stay with us, that much is clear. They remain in our hearts and minds, of course, but for many people they also linger in our senses—as sights, sounds, smells, touches or presences. Grief hallucinations are a normal reaction to bereavement but are rarely discussed, because people fear they might be considered insane or mentally destabilised by their loss. As a society we tend to associate hallucinations with things like drugs and mental illness, but we now know that hallucinations are common in sober healthy people and that they are more likely during times of stress.

A Common Hallucination
Mourning seems to be a time when hallucinations are particularly common, to the point where feeling the presence of the deceased is the norm rather than the exception. One study, by the researcher Agneta Grimby at the University of Goteborg, found that over 80 percent of elderly people experience hallucinations associated with their dead partner one month after bereavement, as if their perception had yet to catch up with the knowledge of their beloved’s passing. As a marker of how vivid such visions can seem, almost a third of the people reported that they spoke in response to their experiences. In other words, these weren’t just peripheral illusions: they could evoke the very essence of the deceased.

Lévi-Strauss: What Disappears on Death

What disappears with the death of a personality is a synthesis of ideas and modes of behaviour as exclusive and irreplaceable as the one a floral species develops out of simple chemical substances common to all species. When the loss of someone dear to us…moves us, we suffer much the same sense of irreparable privation that we should experience were Rosa centifola to become extinct and its scent to disappear for ever. From this point of view it seems not untrue to say that some modes of classing, arbitrarily isolated under the title of totemism, are universally employed: among ourselves this ‘totemism’ has merely been humanized. Everything takes place as if in our civilization every individual’s own personality were his totem: it is the signifier of his signified being.

Savage Mind, p. 214

Via Savage Minds

Village Life is Feminine, But the Socius is Masculine – Eduardo Viveiros de Castro

Seen from the village, life is feminine; one could even say that society is feminine–but it is precisely because it is only part of an encompassing whole from which meaning emanates, and this whole is masculine. If human were immortal, perhaps society could be confounded with the cosmos. Since death exists, it is necessary for society to be linked to something that is outside itself–and that it be linked socially to this exterior. Here is where men enter, charged with two functions that are their exclusive province: shamanism and warfare. In the interior of the socius, male authority can only be based on an association with women: the leader of an extended family controls daughters and gardens, feminine things he obtained through his married status. On the other hand, the power of magic and the force of the warrior exist ‘independently’ of women; they express a movement outwards from the socius, required because it is necessary to administer (in both senses of the term) death. Finally, negated or disguised in its own domain–the internal elaboration of the social fabric–affinity will be used to domesticate this founding bond, the bond with death and exteriority.

Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, From the enemy’s point of view. Humanity and divinity in an Amazonian Society., 190-191

Call no man happy

Call no man happy ’til he is dead

Herodotus’ Histories I. xxxii