INTERVIEW: Erik Davis
Today, I present the first interview in a series of interviews with experts on various Buddhist countries and communities. Our inaugural conversation is with Cambodia scholar Erik Davis (pictured to the right at Wat Arun in Bangkok, Thailand, with his aptly-named son Arun).
Erik is Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Macalester College in St. Paul, MN, and is currently completing his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago Divinity School. A 1996 alumnus of Macalester, he also earned a masters degree at the University of Washington in Seattle in 2006. From 2003-2006, Erik and his family lived in Cambodia while he did field research. Since then, he has distinguished himself as a significant new voice in the study of the Southeast Asian country. His publications and translations in the two years since his return have been extensive, and he has also started a tremendously great blog “about Buddhism, Cambodia, and the cultural power of death” called deathpower.
Erik and I connected through our blogs, and he kindly agreed to an interview as soon as I asked. We spoke over the course of a few emails about Cambodia and his particular areas of interest.
DANNY FISHER: Erik, you lived in Cambodia for three years, from 2003-2006. Would you tell us about your time there? What were you doing?
ERIK DAVIS: Sure. I was, and remain, a graduate student in the University of Chicago’s Divinity School, in the History of Religion program. I have studied Buddhism in academic settings since 1992, but until about halfway through my tenure at Chicago, my focus was largely textual, learning Sanskrit and Pali, and concerned mostly with very old texts. After awhile, and drawing some inspiration from work I had been doing with my partner Leah Bowe, I decided I’d had enough of ‘talking’ only with dead people in texts. So I moved to a more anthropological mode of study, and spent three years doing fieldwork in Cambodia.
Of course, in this, an irony appears: since my research focuses on what I now think of as ‘the image of death’ in the Cambodian imaginary, instead of talking with dead people in books, I spent three years talking with living people about the dead.
I was fortunate enough to receive funding for two of those years from the Blakemore-Freeman Advanced Asian Language Study fellowship (based in Seattle, Washington), for which I qualified after having done three years of Khmer language study in the US (including two at the tremendous Southeast Asian Summer Studies Institute under the tutelage of Lokkru Frank Smith, now of UC-Berkeley), and on a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad fellowship. With help from a few other smaller grants and stipends, I managed to stretch it out to three years. Although that’s a bit long for current fieldwork stays, I would have stayed there indefinitely had I the opportunity.
More important than my research, I became a father twice over in Cambodia. My partner traveled with me to Cambodia when she was nearly 6 months pregnant, and we had our second child almost exactly two years later. Their names are Freeman Arun and Nahanni Karuna.
D.F.: Would you tell us a little bit about the things you did day-to-day during your fieldwork? Who exactly were you talking to? What kinds of situations where you around?
E.D.: I originally planned to work almost entirely on the ‘funerary specialists’ in Cambodia, and not on the laity at all. And, in large part, that is what I spent the first eight or so months doing–hanging out at crematoria temples, watching bodies burn, families grieve, monks chant, corpse-burners (their title) build coffins, chop firewood, and light fires, etc. Even after the initial period–at which point I decided that I wasn’t going to be interested in focusing solely on this aspect of death rituals for three years and began to expand–this is still mostly what I was doing. It all sounds rather gruesome, I suppose–or if you’re of a particularly ‘romantic’ Buddhist mindset, ‘spiritual’–but it wasn’t. Mostly it was just work, for them and for me. The hard part was when the families came in, especially if the death was a ‘bad’ one–violent deaths, deaths in pregnancy, AIDS-related deaths, etc.
The worst ones for me, however, were the unclaimed at one of the temples I worked at. This temple had a contract with the city to burn all the unclaimed bodies on the streets and from the hospitals. From the former category this included people who were accused of being thieves and had then been murdered by mobs in the streets, the poor, the homeless, etc. From the latter, mostly tuberculosis victims, AIDS victims, and children. These were sad and difficult for me precisely because they were unmourned. They were burned in the afternoons, unritualized, like so much trash.
After awhile, I began to loosen up a bit, and allowed myself to attend other sorts of events–temple inauguration ceremonies (called Punya Pañjoh Sima, or “Sima-establishing Ceremony”), which establishes a monastic space in which sangha confessions can be made and discipline (Vinaya) followed. These were fascinating to me for a number of reasons, including their symbolic (and many say historical) connection to human sacrifice, as well as their agricultural symbolism. I write about this in one of the chapters of my dissertation. More than this, the ceremonies of Bjhum Pinda (Pchum Ben) were particularly fascinating–and fun–for me. As I made more and more friends, I was increasingly invited to the funerals of family members, and on occasion even to those of relative strangers. That was something that may not be immediately apparent to outsiders–perhaps in part because I am a big white foreigner with all sorts of real and symbolic prestige, people generally wanted me to attend funerals. Weddings were a given, and after a few of those ordeals I graciously declined as many as I could–but I was surprised at the welcome I received at funerals.
I also began to travel more into the countryside. I had originally conceived of my research as essentially urban, for reasons largely to do with my family situation–pregnancy in rural Cambodia didn’t appeal to my partner for obvious reasons (lots of Cambodian women do just fine, but the infant mortality rate is quite high)–but a strict focus on that became obviously untenable because of the essentially rural nature of the culture–so few people have been off the farm for more than a generation. Also, I wanted a greater sense of the variety of practices. So I set up what I thought of as mini-fieldsites: one in Kompong Cham, along the Mekong River, about an eight-hour drive from Phnom Penh, one in Takeo, only about two hours out, and one in Anlong Veng, the former redoubt of Pol Pot’s armies after they rearmed along the Thai border. Each of these places was wildly different from the others, though the similarities were also quite striking.
To make a lengthy answer somewhat brief, I spoke to everybody and anybody who would talk to me, as long as they would speak to me in Khmer. This is one of the greatest pieces of advice I received, and comes to me from [the aforementioned] Frank Smith. He encouraged me to refuse to talk to anyone except in Khmer–it increased my own facility greatly, and forced even foreign-educated intellectuals to speak in a language much more revealing and nuanced than translations. My own preferences guided me a great deal, I suppose. As a matter of course, I gravitate toward older folks, and my favorite crowd were the lay-nuns, called donchee in Cambodia. Fearless, often toothless, usually desperately poor, they would talk about anything and everything with me, especially when they were chewing betel, and bringing my son with me on visits broke the ice like a superheated pickaxe.
D.F.: You teach and write a lot about death, particularly in Cambodia. What about the social study of death interests you so much as a scholar?
E.D.: Perhaps I’m just morbid? A joke that everyone has heard claims that the only two inevitable things in life are death and taxes. But in America, the richest people can often get away without paying any taxes at all, and there are places, such as Cambodia, where personal income tax does not exist. That leaves death as the great universal human experience. We all die. Furthermore, coming from a primary interest in Buddhism (my interest in comparing traditions came to me much later), I was very likely prejudiced toward this focus: it is safe to say that whatever wild diversity exists among the many forms of Buddhism in the world, a tremendous and central focus on death remains universal.
I’m interested in the social construction of authority, and what I’ve come to think of as forms of imaginary ‘closure,’ which are intertwined. Roughly speaking, authority appears as the ability of people or institutions to ‘get their way,’ without having to exert physical force; imaginary closure appears as those boundaries beyond which people in a given cultural setting find it difficult or impossible to think of alternatives. In Buddhist cultures, death exists at the crossroads between those two: Buddhist monks are required, universally speaking, only at funerals. They may, and should be, present at a whole range of other practices, but existing as merit-making factories (in the words of a Sinhalese monk at a recent conference I attended) and as ritualists of death, the Buddha sangha’s primary authority and role comes from mediating personal death, and the continued social relationships between the living and the dead.
D.F.: You’re currently completing your dissertation at the University of Chicago, which is titled Treasures of the Buddha: Imagining Death and Life in Contemporary Cambodia. I’d like to talk about the word “imagining” for a moment. In a piece you wrote for the book At the Edge of the Forest: Essays on Cambodia, History, and Narrative in Honor of David Chandler, where you also talk about the “imaginary,” you explain that you’re using the word in the way continental philosophers would–which is to say, differently than the everyday usage of the word. You define “imaginaries” this way: “The imaginary is…the space where the determined world of symbols interacts with the as-yet-undetermined world of human action, emotion, and behavior.” You also note that scholars of Buddhism are beginning to use this idea more and more in their work. Can you help us understand better how this is a useful rubric for Buddhologists? Why and how is it especially helpful to you in your work on Cambodia?
E.D.: The everyday anglophone usage of the word ‘imaginary’ implies something that is, first, unreal, and secondly, because it is unreal, unimportant. “It’s just my imagination, running away with me,” as the song goes. This meaning is shared in many conventional usages of the word in its continental–especially French–forms, but there also exists another more fertile understanding of it. That understanding owes a great deal, as I understand it, to two different strains of thought. The first is the Marxist tradition: David Graeber, an anthropologist whose work I admire, is fond of citing Marx’s point that in order to create something new, one must first imagine it. Imagination is a form of creation, or at least, a necessary precondition of novelty. The second strain is psychoanalytic, and especially Lacanian and post-Lacanian. I don’t suppose this is the place to spend too much time discussing Lacan or his critics, but his main contribution, in my estimation, was to indicate the way in which the cultural imposes itself and structures the personal, precisely via what he referred to as the imaginary.
The thinker whose work on the imaginary I adapt most seriously is Cornelius Castoriadis (his masterwork is titled The Imaginary Institution of Society). He engaged with Lacan’s work early on, and then became a critic for reasons that were both theoretical and practical. Whereas Lacan’s understanding of the imaginary was consistently subordinated to his view of the ‘symbolic,’ which was authoritarian and associated with the ‘name of the father,’ Castoriadis found in the imaginary the hope of autonomy. That is not to say that anyone can simply reject the culture and the symbols in which one exists (not even in psychosis), but that by focusing on the imaginary and the complex ways in which symbols are apprehended, used, and constantly recreated, the potential for viewing human creation and agency becomes much more realized. Castoriadis was also the pseudonymous editor of the crucial journal Socialisme ou Barbarie, which many see as a major intellectual and political source from which the worldwide revolutions of 1968 began.
That’s all a bit complicated, but the main point would be, I suppose, that if we focus on symbols solely as a sort of cultural dictionary, in which ‘symbols’ have determined meanings, we ignore precisely the ways in which symbols come to have a meaning for the people who exist within a given culture. We reduce their culture to a sort of lexicon which may be ‘correct’ in some ways, but closes itself off to the change, novelty, and creation which, as far as I can see, has been the rule rather than the exception for the entire history of the human species.
Buddhist studies folks are indeed using the idea of the imaginary more and more. Bernard Faure remains perhaps the best-known example (see especially his Visions of Power: Imagining Medieval Japanese Buddhism), but my own adviser, Steven Collins, recently brought it further into anglophone studies of Buddhism in his book Nirvana and other Buddhist Felicities: Utopias of the Pali Imaginaire. I don’t want to misrepresent his position, so I’ll limit my comments on his fantastic book and his use of the imaginary to pointing out that he has preserved the French spelling of the word, precisely to attempt to overcome the dismissive connotations of the word in English.
D.F.: Your bio at Macalester’s website lists among your particular research interests “the connection between agriculture and religious imagination.” This interest seems apparent to me in a conference paper you delivered to the 55th meeting of the Midwest Conference on Asian Affairs, entitled “The Pretas Are Coming!” In that paper, you talk about a fifteen-day festival in Cambodia called Pchum Ben, which involves Cambodians returning to their villages of birth to honor deceased ancestors. Since, as you mention here and in the paper, “almost no one in Cambodia has lived off the farm for more than a generation,” celebrating Pchum Ben necessarily involves the meeting of agriculture and religion. Would you tell us more about the connection between agriculture and religious imagination in Cambodia? Is Pchum Ben one of many ways these two areas connect in the country, or one of few?
E.D.: My own hunch is that the connection between religion and agriculture is much more widespread and possibly even universal than its examples in Cambodia alone; this was recognized in some of the earliest examples of anthropology, such as the work of Johann Jakob Bachofen in 1859, followed by E.B. Tylor in 1871, J.G. Frazer in 1890, and Robert Hertz (a disciple of Emile Durkheim’s) in 1905. With the exception of the last, these early European anthropologists were primarily interested in a relatively static understanding of the symbolic connections between death and the frequent fertility symbolism–that is, agricultural symbolism–that they found within burial and mortuary rites. In 1982, Maurice Bloch and Jonathan Parry, whose work on death has been re-foundational in the anthropology of death, reformulated the interest in a way that I find compelling. Among other crucial insights, they point out that “what would seem to be revitalized in funerary practices is that resource which is culturally conceived to be most essential to the reproduction of the social order.” (I would say culturally imagined, but let’s not quibble). That is to say, that which a cultural imagines as most valuable and reproductive of culture–life itself–must be found in a funeral practice in a way that emphasizes its revitalization.
Very few people in Cambodia lack experience on a farm, or in a rice field. With only a few exceptions, as you note, most folks are one or two generations off the farms, if they are not part of the roughly eighty percent who continue to live as peasant farmers. So agricultural work and imagination–which forms the background to my theory of imagination in Cambodia–hold a large space in people’s minds, and help to structure the way in which they think, the armature on which their thoughts most easily come to rest. As a matter of fact, this is true around the world, and not only in Cambodia–in most industrialized nation on the planet, my own great-grandfather farmed. His father escaped a desperate fishing village north of the Arctic circle, and after one generation, his children escaped farming for city life.
Pchum Ben is tied to agriculture in a number of ways–it happens shortly after the end of the rainy season, when the waters of the country have begun to swell, around the time that the Mekong river forces the Tonle Sap river to reverse its flow (yes, that’s right, the river changes direction twice a year), and causes the great inland lake, also called the Tonle Sap, to triple in size, and increase more than that in depth. This annual flooding makes the area one of the most productive freshwater fisheries on Earth, and provides Cambodians with approximately two-thirds of their protein intake. The end of the rainy season is also the period of the fastest growth of rice in the fields, and is located in a brief rest period between the different labors that intensive rice cultivation requires. Just as the water flows into the country, so during this period dead ancestors are thought to roam the land for 15 days of the waning moon–the ‘dark fortnight.’ Living descendants are supposed to visit seven temples and bring offerings for their ancestors to each one. The ghosts will check up to seven temples, and if they find offerings, will bless their descendants with health and fortune for the coming year. If not, well–curses! No, really–curses. Seriously.
But it’s hardly the only way in which agriculture and the religious imagination are linked in Cambodia–as I hinted earlier, I happen to believe that the agricultural imagination underwrites most of the ways in which people approach the religious imaginaries of Buddhism.
D.F.: You also just gave a paper at the XVth Congress of the International Association of Buddhist Studies entitled “Mourning and Memory in Contemporary Cambodian Buddhism”. That sounds like it might have some relevancy to this blog’s special foci on Buddhism and chaplaincy. Would you tell us a little bit about your paper?
E.D.: I don’t want to overemphasize the relevance of that paper to chaplaincy–it may be most relevant on the issue of military chaplaincy. It is a deeply distressing and difficult subject for me to work on–it will very likely not make it into my dissertation. The gist of that paper takes on two different histories: the first is the history of certain narratives of trauma and memory, which have evolved out of two other coinciding histories: the history of the development of the diagnosis of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (which came after a prolonged struggle by Vietnam-American war veterans and their allies), and the history of the rise of discourses regarding the Holocaust/Nazi Genocide(s). I don’t critique either of these narratives in themselves, but point to the way in which they have become a universalized trope for healing trauma in academic, social-work, and other forms of influential discussions on the topic.
This universalizing narrative amounts to a psychoanalytic narrative writ large–if trauma is defined as the unwilling and unconscious re-experience of traumatic events (memory fragmented and experienced as a sort of shard of glass in the soul), then the treatment must encourage incorporation and engagement with that memory. This is often expressed as ‘working through instead of acting out.’ (It should be said that psychiatry and psychoanalysis have proceeded beyond this simplistic formulation for the most part, but their appropriation by non-specialists has not). The problem with this universalization is that it does not appear to be the way most Cambodians in Cambodia wish to deal with their traumas. There are all sorts of possible reasons for this, ranging from reductive explanations which preserve the narrative (they should do it this way, they just don’t realize it) to a host of others.
My only point here is that regardless of the reasons, the only people in Cambodia who appear to engage with this narrative of trauma and memory right now are politicians, who host a variety of ‘celebrations’ or ceremonies at Choeung Ek (the first identified of Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge ‘killing fields’). These celebrations are directed primarily to a foreign audience (Cambodia’s government receives over half its operating budget from international aid sources, e.g.) to convince powerful international actors that Cambodians are on the road to recovery, and are taking the right steps. The problem is that Cambodians themselves appear to have chosen very different means to deal with their grief.
That said, and on the issue of military chaplaincy, I might point out that whether the treatment schedules for PTSD are correct or not seems hardly to matter to sufferers of PTSD right now, even in the US: US soldiers have died in far, far greater numbers from suicide in the United States than from combat in Iraq and Afghanistan during the periods of the current conflict. The current administration and Veteran’s Affairs administrations have done an absolutely shameful job of dealing with this issue, which places not only the soldiers themselves–haunted by lives they took, watched taken, or almost lost–but also non-combatant civilians in the US at great risk. That is to completely exclude any question of the massive numbers of Iraqi and Afghan civilians who have died and been murdered during that same period.
D.F.: It’s clear to me in what you’re saying about how universalizing is a problem–indeed, it’s not a very postmodern thing to do. Would you say more specifically about how Cambodians do deal with traumas? Generally speaking, what does mourning look like in everyday Cambodia?
E.D.: Let me do a very egg-headed thing first and distinguish between grief and mourning. Grief is what an individual feels when something or someone very dear and important has been lost; it is personal, idiosyncratic, and difficult to predict. Mourning is a social obligation: even if you hated your aunt, when she dies, you are supposed to attend the funeral, say nice things, and wear black. Bringing a beach ball or telling ribald jokes violates the obligation to mourn.
So, as to grief, it’s extremely difficult to characterize generally. For those who do social work in Cambodia, there is a durable understanding that Cambodians tend to somaticize their traumas and grief in numbers higher than those found in the contemporary US. So, ‘blocked throat,’ for example, where a (usually) woman feels that her throat is blocked, causing her to have difficulty swallowing, talking, or even breathing, is quite common. Headaches, chills, nightmares, depression, all of the ‘normal’ things you might expect from someone dealing with grief, are also quite present.
Mourning is easier to characterize, though for the reasons I discussed in the question on my “mourning and memory” paper, I’m loath to say whether or not these practices are truly ‘cathartic,’ or ‘coping.’ I can, however, say that these are common, and what people do. First and foremost, and excluding the political ceremonies which are largely the affairs of political parties, people make merit. They go to the temple, especially on ‘morality days’ (Tngai Sil), and dedicate that merit to the names of those who have died. They pray. They talk to the dead, and, especially in houses where the family is partially of Chinese descent, they may have photos in front of which they burn incense. Pchum Ben is perhaps the most important collective event for mourning the dead in Cambodia–it is an event during which people come together to make merit for the dead all at the same time, and not only the named, but all of those ‘to the seventh generation.’ Since almost no one knows their relatives to the seventh generation, this is in fact precisely a way of indicating ‘everyone.’ Pchum Ben is also a ceremony during which you make merit for those of whom there is uncertainty–when did they die, where, have they been reborn yet, and how? The uncertainty is a major cause of stress, as I’ll mention in a minute, but during Pchum Ben, it is precisely addressed.
For those who lost loved ones during the Khmer Rouge, there was often a period of years of doubt over whether or not they were actually dead. Still today people run classified ads looking for disappeared relatives. And occasionally they find them. Not knowing is the hard part, it seems. You can’t make merit for someone who may still be alive, but they are still not in your life. You still grieve, but you can’t mourn. And here, it seems to me, is where the ground between mourning and grief becomes apparent–people dream. Dreams are a part of real life in Cambodia, for most people. “Just a dream” is not a common thing to say, and when the dream involves the dead, as they often do, you never dismiss them. You can get comfort from a dream, like the women I spoke to whose husbands disappeared during the Khmer Rouge period: they grieved for years until they began seeing their dead husbands in dreams. Often, their husbands were clearly healthy, happy, and even better behaved in the dreams than they had been in life. These women usually took this as a sign of their husbands’ death and present status, and this allowed them a modicum of relief. If the dreams alone are not enough, they may go to kru (Sanskrit, Pali: guru), ‘fortune-tellers,’ ‘seers,’ etc., who can offer advice or attempt to divine the truth.
D.F.: Lastly, I’m curious to ask one sort of broad question: What trends or issues in contemporary Cambodian Buddhism do you think are important for curious practitioners or other interested parties to be aware of? Compared to, say, Tibetan or Burmese Buddhism we don’t hear much about Cambodian Buddhism in the mainstream media. What is there to know generally about Buddhism in Cambodia today?
E.D.: Hah! What a question. Broad, indeed. Let me start historically with a few things that many outsiders won’t know. First, Cambodia was ‘Hindu’ before it was Buddhist, and Mahayana before it was Theravada. The empire of Angkor worshipped gods with Indian names, especially Vishnu and Shiva. The most famous Buddhist emperor was Jayavarman VII, who embraced an apparently esoteric (and very possibly tantric) Mahayana Buddhism, and whose ambitious building projects may have encouraged the downfall of the empire itself. Theravada Buddhism in Cambodia seems, on the other hand, to have had a different set of entrances into the country, and gained its power bases more in the villages than in the royal courts. Ian Harris’ excellent introduction to Cambodian Buddhism (called Cambodian Buddhism) does a fantastic job of sort through some rather spare evidence on all of this. Ashley Thompson’s work, which is still unfortunately largely only in French, uses very imaginative approaches to understand the historical and social transformations that took place during the so-called Middle Ages (better than what it had previously been called, the “Dark Ages”), between the fall of Angkor and the rise of the French colonial period.
Cambodian Buddhism exists in two major institutional variants–the Thommayuth (Dhammayutika) and the Mohanikay (Mahanikaya). The Mohanikay comprise about 95% of all monks, slightly less of all temples. There are supposed to be about 60,000 monks in robes (in a country of about 14 million people, that’s a lot!) and about 3,000 temples. But the practices are largely the same, and while the Thommyuth–whose lineage was imported into Cambodia in the late nineteenth century by the royal family from Thailand – are more ‘modernist’ and reforming, there is generally little difference between the two. 95% of the country’s population identifies as Buddhist, but what I try to impress upon people in my classes and what writing I’ve accomplished so far is that this does not mean the same thing as it might if those same people identified as Muslim, Christian, or Jewish. This will be less difficult for your readers to understand, but those latter three are what might be termed ‘membership’ traditions, in which you choose one and abjure the others. Buddhism, at least Buddhism in Cambodia as in most other places, coexists quite happily with a host of other, supposedly non-Buddhist beliefs. In Cambodia, that means that Buddhism partakes of a large pool (an imaginary) of belief in supernatural beings which many Westerners especially would not consider ‘properly’ Buddhist. Moreover, Buddhism is not the only game in town. Sure, you go to the monks if you need certain things done, and the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha remain the most morally prestigious and non-negotiable objects of veneration. But a great deal of attention is also given to localized supernaturalism, in the style of ancestor spirits, tree spirits, ghosts, house spirits, etc., etc. (There’s a lot of ghosts! A taxonomy, which the inimitable Ang Choulean began with his book Les êtres surnaturels dans la religion populaire khmère, would take several volumes, I think). So you might very well go to a kru (guru) one day for something that the Khmer would consider ‘brahmanical’ and then immediately head over to the Buddhist temple. No problem.
Scholars have tackled this problem for a long time. Melford Spiro, who wrote about Burmese religion, felt that the variety of religious practices was so difficult that he wrote about them in separate books, as if they were separate religions and experienced separately by the Burmese. Stanley Tambiah took a somewhat different approach, arguing that what we saw was a religious ‘field’ dominated and organized, but not totally subsumed, by Buddhism. Nicola Tannenbaum (whose book Who Can Compete with the World? should be required reading for folks interested in Southeast Asian Buddhism) furthered this discussion by placing religious practices in relationship to a central signification–a culturally constructed vision of ‘power.’ My own work follows from each of these, in a way.
As for current changes, I expected to find a lot more transformation than I did. I focus on death rituals, and those are perhaps more resistant to change than other areas, but I went into my fieldwork expecting to be able to simply compare current practices with reported practices from the past. There is some change, but I was really impressed by the stability, even after a lengthy period of time when Buddhism was first prohibited (1975-1979) and then when it was under very restrictive and watchful government control (1979-1989). This is one of the main reasons that I have focused on the fact that Buddhism by itself explains very little in Cambodia–it only begins to take on its meaning–as anthropologists have known for a long time as a general rule–when placed into its context.
D.F.: Here’s a broad follow-up: How has the devastation of the Khmer Rouge regime affected modern Cambodian Buddhism? What have been the most obvious changes?
E.D.: It’s really hard to say. I think, again, the places to look would be in Ian Harris’ book, or in the edited volume from John Marston and Elizabeth Guthrie, called History, Buddhism, and New Religious Movements in Cambodia. I never even knew about Cambodia prior to the Khmer Rouge, and the sources are relatively thin. There’s some excellent French-language work, by folks like François Bizot, Éveline Porée-Maspero, or further back, Adhemard Leclère, but little that focuses solely on Buddhism outside of these. The only fieldwork-based dissertation in English to have been published on Cambodia before the Khmer Rouge era was by the late, great, May M. Ebihara. Given these sources, it is possible to make some comparisons, but it is really a rather speculative thing to do.
But, why not speculate? There are things we can point to with some certainty. The institutional hierarchy of the Buddhasangha was smashed by the Khmer Rouge, and reestablished under the People’s Republic of Kampuchea (1979-1989) with immense restrictions and government surveillance. There are those who still deny the legitimacy of the earliest ordinations after 1979, and it’s funny and a bit sad to read of those times that the monks were called members of the Revolutionary Sangha. The current hierarchy in Cambodia remains a politically-dominated affair: the supreme patriarch, Venerable Tep Vong, was a party member who ordained in the earliest ordinations after the Khmer Rouge, and has held a rather tight grip on power, largely to serve the interests of his patrons in the ruling party. Not all high-ranking monks are tools, however, and even some of the highest hold nearly universal respect, such as Nun Ngait, currently number two in the hierarchy. Still, today, we have two main nikaya of Buddhism–the Mahanikay (Great Nikaya) and the Thommayuth (Dhammayuth). The numbers and percentages are largely at pre-civil war levels, and the influence of the government over them was hardly minimal before the war.
In my opinion, the greatest change since the Khmer Rouge era would have to be economic and agricultural. People think of the Khmer Rouge as anti-modern, but they accomplished what no other combination of modernizing forces in Cambodia had been able to do: force the entire country into massive, intense, agricultural production. Their methods were often the ‘latest’ in modern agronomy, imported from China (that they were wrong is another matter, and not necessarily to be separated from their modernity), and their relationship to the laborers certainly more modern and capitalist than that of the peasant-based production that had prevailed previously. The agricultural sector never really recovered from that blow. And though it has taken years to really show, we’re starting to face the worst long-term outcomes of that shock in the present. Without some surprising good fortune, almost all of Kompong Speu province (just to the West and South of the capital) will be a failed agricultural sector, and the rest of the country is in rather dire straits.
Back to Buddhism–I originally expected to find huge changes, and was surprised to find that for the most part, the changes were not as large as I’d expected. Undoubtedly many changes have occurred, but I am unconvinced that these are qualitatively different in kind from the changes that Buddhism has always made in Cambodia, and elsewhere, to massive historical changes. My sense is that it is with the transition from a dominantly agricultural society to an industrial one–if that is indeed where Cambodia is headed–that we will begin to see major changes in Cambodian Buddhism. Those changes will take a few more generations to really set in, though we can begin to see some of them now, in the rise of ‘cults’ and ‘superstitions’ about the industrial sector, and the urban lifestyles that more Cambodians are beginning to live.
