Tides of Empire: Religion, Development, and Environment in Cambodia 9781789207736

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Tides of Empire

Asian Anthropologies General Editors: Hans Steinmüller, London School of Economics Dolores Martinez, SOAS, University of London Founding Editors: Jerry Eades, Emeritus Professor, Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University Shinji Yamashita, The University of Tokyo Volume 10 Tides of Empire: Religion, Development, and Environment in Cambodia Courtney Work Volume Fate Calculation Experts: Diviners Seeking Legitimation in Contemporary China Geng Li Volume 8 Soup, Love, and a Helping Hand: Social Relations and Support in Guangzhou, China Friederike Fleischer Volume 7 Ogata-Mura: Sowing Dissent and Reclaiming Identity in a Japanese Farming Village Donald C. Wood Volume 6 Multiculturalism in the New Japan: Crossing the Boundaries Within Edited by Nelson Graburn, John Ertl, and R. Kenji Tierney

Volume 5 Engaging the Spirit World: Popular Beliefs and Practices in Modern Southeast Asia Edited by Kirsten W. Endres and Andrea Lauser Volume 4 Centering the Margin: Agency and Narrative in Southeast Asian Borderlands Edited by Alexander Horstmann and Reed L. Wadley Volume 3 The Making of Anthropology in East and Southeast Asia Edited by Shinji Yamashita, J. S. Eades, and Joseph Bosco Volume 2 Bali and Beyond: Case Studies in the Anthropology of Tourism Shinji Yamashita Volume 1 Globalization in Southeast Asia: Local, National, and Transnational Perspectives Edited by Shinji Yamashita and J. S. Eades

TIDES OF EMPIRE Religion, Development, and Environment in Cambodia

n Courtney Work

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

First published in 2020 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2020 Courtney Work All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Work, Courtney, author. Title: Tides of empire : religion, development, and environment in Cambodia / Courtney Work. Description: New York : Berghahn Books, 2020. | Series: Asian anthropologies; volume 10 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020016085 (print) | LCCN 2020016086 (ebook) | ISBN 9781789207729 (hardback) | ISBN 9781789207736 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Cambodia--Social conditions--21st century. | Economic development--Social aspects--Cambodia. | Anthropology of religion--Cambodia. | Cambodia--Environmental conditions. Classification: LCC HN700.3.A8 W67 2020 (print) | LCC HN700.3.A8 (ebook) | DDC 306.09596--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020016085 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020016086 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-78920-772-9 hardback ISBN 978-1-78920-773-6 ebook

This book is dedicated to the memory of my father who taught me to question the dominant narrative, and to my mother who continues to teach me how to function within it.

Contents

n List of Illustrations viii Acknowledgmentsx Note on Transliteration xi Introduction1 Chapter 1. Shaping the Space: Movement, Stories, and Structure

11

Chapter 2. A Roadology: Intentional Acts of Movement and Transformation29 Chapter 3. Neak Ta: Articulating the Boundaries

52

Chapter 4. The Cham: History, Memory, and Practice

83

Chapter 5. Merit in Motion: Temple Building and Other Powerful Acts

106

Conclusion

130

Glossary of Non-English Terms 138 References 143 Index157

Illustrations

n Maps   1.1. Topographical Map: Cambodia and bordering countries, sourced from the Library of Congress.   4.1. Mainland Southeast Asia with details of ancient Champa state, map created by Gunkarta. Wikimedia Commons, published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

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Figures  1.1. Neak ta hut at the house, photograph by the author. 24   3.1.–3.2.  Huts for maja tuk maja day in front of homes, photographs by the author. 53   3.3. Hut for maja tuk maja day at the house, photograph by the author. 54   3.4. Three generations of huts for Lok Ta Beung Komnap, photograph by the author. 61   3.5. Lok Ta Oh, the three stones represent the family, photograph by the author.69   3.6. Ta Gum Yay Tia’s fancy hut, photograph by the author. 70   3.7. Lok Ta Beung Komnap as Chinese earth deity, photograph by the author.70   3.8. Line drawing of the temple complex (note vihear at the top of the hill), original artwork by Isaiah Parker, published with permission.75   3.9. Line drawing of neak ta huts surrounding the coming vihear, original artwork by Isaiah Parker, published with permission. 76

Illustrations | ix

3.10. Baisay at Lok Ta Oh’s visiting hut at the not-yet vihear, photograph by the author.   5.1. Name of donor and donation amount on temple pillar, photograph by the author.

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Acknowledgments

n I owe thanks beyond the capacity of this segment for all it took to bring the following pages to fruition. The largest thanks go to the villagers of Sambok Dung, whose patient indulgence and open, friendly hearts helped to forge the content and perspectives presented in the following pages. Additionally, I thank the many people who read and commented on various drafts of this manuscript: Magnus Fiskesjö, Andrew Willford, Andrew Mertha, and Anne Hansen, whose insights and critiques were indispensable. I also thank my reading group colleagues, especially Gökçe Günel, David Rojas, Melissa Rosario, Saiba Varna, and Chika Watanabe. My work has also been influenced by other scholars in classrooms and workshops and I would like to mention (alphabetically) those who had the biggest impact: Anne Blackburn, Dominick LaCapra, Paul Nadasdy, and Anna Tsing. For the line drawings, I thank my friend Isaiah Parker whose skill transformed a collection of photographs into a visual representation of space beyond the frame of a camera lens. I received generous funding from the National Science Foundation, the Center for Khmer Studies, the US Department of State, Foreign Language Area Studies program (FLAS), Cornell’s Southeast Asian Program, and the Department of Anthropology at Cornell University. I also received unending emotional support from my parents Mary Tambornino and Ron Usem, and can never thank them enough for not giving up on me. Finally, I have my beautiful children to thank: Madeleine and Oliver Work. They came into adulthood as this story came into being and without their flexibility and resilience it could have never happened. Their lives were changed as much as my own through this encounter and I cannot wait to see the impact they will have on the world.

Note on Transliteration

n The writing system for the Khmer language is organized in the classical Indian system and adapted for the unique vowel sounds of the spoken language, which have changed over time. Because of this adaptation to the classical Indian script, standardized transcription systems render many Khmer words phonetically unrecognizable. Scholars writing in Roman script are faced with the quandary of choosing between systematic transcription and representing the oral qualities of the words. My approach is to present the word phonetically without diacritics. When the word is uncommon or the phonetic rendering produces a homonym, I include after the first use a transcription in parentheses. This provides an alternately written (aw) transliteration using the American Library Association and Library of Congress system created by Larry Ashmun. The key for this system is available at https://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/romanization/khmer.pdf.

Introduction

n Under the tides of empire, we dance to the rhythms of life and death. With and without markets, priests, and prime ministers, there is arising, and there is passing. Families and food, rain, wind, and shelter: the insistent motions of interdependence and landscape. Old forms and new morph and negotiate the environment, articulating various conceptions of community and accommodating multiple ecologies of mind and energy. Descriptive categories, like Religion, Politics, or Economics that obscure the interconnectedness of all social and material processes have a foothold only inasmuch as they are connected to subsistence and success in a given environment. The environment I describe is a contact zone at the furthest reaches of the incoming tide of empire. This book addresses the constant motion of being human in the world: mobile families, social status, sun, rice, and dwelling in the contact zone. The village of Sambok Dung sits at the edge of the forest and the frontier of empire. It is an interstitial place between subsistence and accumulation. In the current era, we dwell in the presence of extractive technologies and global flows of capital and governance. My story deals with the intentional movements that bring both dwelling and its technological mediation into being. This is not necessarily a story of the inhabitants of this remote village. Rather, it is a story of how I experienced them: the mountains and the rice farmers, the Buddhists and the Cham, the buffalo, the trees, the spirits, the soldiers, and the timber traders at the edge of the forest. The coming into being that I describe is neither unidirectional nor consistent in form; it arises dependent on and embedded in materiality and mind. In fact, it has changed much in the short time between the events I describe here and the state of affairs five years later at the time of this writing. Because so much has changed in this short period, I feel compelled to present the following chapters much as I wrote them at the time. In the conclusion, I present a brief sketch of the contemporary landscape, which sets the stage for

2 | Tides of Empire

the telling of other stories recently gathered in the contact zone of potent climate change effects and impotent policies, unchanged development, and transformed livelihoods (Work 2018; Work et al. 2019). The telling of imperial tides comes first, however, and importantly, as it pulls out sticky strings of stories and practices that trap particular bits of imperial debris in the ebb and flow of tides. As the author, I also trap particular bits that attach to my own strings of relevance. Strings masquerading as knowledge, knowledge required to join the ranks of privilege that expose some of empire’s founding stories. The following is my contribution toward cracking those foundations to make space for transforming practices and emerging stories in the fragile imperial landscape. Empire, I argue, is fragile. Up against the Cardamom Mountains in western Kampong Chhnang Province, the chthonic energies of the land and the weather world thwart all attempts at solidity and smoothness. The obvious power of concrete infrastructure and combustion technology is here visible in a clumsy and futile dance with the monsoon rains that wash away the roads and trap the load-bearing trucks of commerce. Also fragile are the attempts at livelihoods I will describe and the ideological holds of various systems of “religion.” This invocation of a qualified religion, bracketed as if it may not be what it seems, is a signal for me to qualify and explain. My original plan was to study religion in this emerging village. This quickly expanded in response to people’s concerns over forest access, tenure insecurity, Economic Land Concessions (ELC), and the promise and perils of post-conflict, post-genocide development. When I expanded my research focus—into development, the environment, and the steadily increasing flow of commodities and commerce out to this frontier—the debris of empires past and present came into view. This debris sticks to everything. It sticks to classifications and value, how people define each other and themselves as good or successful, as Buddhist, Cham, or Cambodian. It sticks to the laws of subsistence arbitrated by nonhuman sovereigns of the land; laws that transform to accommodate extraction, as the sovereign becomes human through multiple manifestations of empire. Debris from these shifts sticks to both stories and practices. To excavate this persistent stickiness, I deploy materialist, structural, phenomenological, and ontological interpretations of my experiences and encounters. Each theoretical paradigm differently engages particular aspects of the lived experience in Sambok Dung, but blurs the theoretical and lineage categories often privileged by scholarship. In the contact zone, religion looks like politics while magic insists on the moral codes of religion. At the frontier of empire, to have enough is to be poor; human agency is tenuous and fleeting against the backdrop of the weather, and the economic line between subsistence and accumulation is articulated through acts of avarice and the state. I attend to the emergence of categories and the ways that they harden and blur, entangling the present with debris from the past. In doing this, I adopt

Introduction | 3

a particular vocabulary that needs a short introduction before I introduce myself, my methods, the place, and the process of this book.

Genocide and Imperial Grammar The perspective I adopt decenters the modern empire of capital currently smoothing over all past systems of territorial expansion and resource extraction. It attends to the rhythms of stories separating humans from the productive planet and attaching them to human-centered sovereigns guided by divine “supernatural” power external to the palpable forces of the natural world. And it considers the lives of Cambodian villagers beyond the three years, eight months, and twenty days of Democratic Kampuchea. I do not treat the Khmer Rouge years directly, rather I allow them presence as one of the many imperial effects that emerged in certain times and places during my stay at the edge of the forest. I suggest that genocide is not an anomaly, but is rather constitutive of imperial forms (see also Kiernan 2007). I further suggest, but will not explore in these pages, that the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge years are a point of fascination and spectacle for political and social elites. Memoirs and films created by the literate urbanite victims of egalitarian horror dominate the narrative of displacement. The stories I heard from non-elite, lightly literate villagers were both dramatic and banal, none who were alive remained unaffected, but the standard total view from the urban perspective is unrepresentative of the majority experience. “It was better then,” was a refrain that I often heard. “We suffered, we died, and life was hard. But we all suffered together. Today we still suffer, but we can see many who don’t. Like him; like you.” The “like him” in the above statement was directed toward the village chief, whose logging, land grabbing, and corruption were well known. The obvious moral inferiority of the “winners” riding the incoming tide of global capital was regularly and explicitly remarked upon at the juncture of land and resources. There was a boundary being crafted between those who could and would exploit and steal, and those who would not or could not. These dynamics are slowly being explored in other work (for example, Work 2018) and are visible in the stories I will tell here. It is a strange dance of desire, recognition, and resignation that propels subsistence farmers toward the abusive and nurturing structures of the current empire. The “like you” in that refrain was directed at me, the white anthropologist who came to live among them. I was often asked about my salary and life in my country, where people imagined the rule of law and the fair and equal distribution of resources. They asked if there were farmers like them. I told them about factory-farmed food, the rent and utilities that consumed my meager salary (which seemed astronomical to them), and of the size of my educational debt.

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I also told them the leaders of my country appointed the Khmer Rouge to hold Cambodia’s seat in the United Nations until the 1991 peace agreements, prolonging the fighting and destabilizing attempts to recover from their shared trauma of a failed revolution. Those same Western leaders now sponsor the elaborate trials to convict the leaders of the Khmer Rouge for their crimes before they die, sponsoring a flurry of national and expatriate salaries. No one in Sambok Dung was listening to, or interested in that spectacle, which began just after I began fieldwork. These words are said here in the introduction, but the following pages will not deal with the genocidal destruction of the Khmer Rouge years except as it emerged organically through my engagements with the people who lived at the edge of the forest and the frontier of empire. I attend more closely to the promise and perils of the coming imperial tide with which people were universally concerned.

Empire and Chthonic Power The incoming tide swallows the landscape, at once obscuring, illuminating, and adding to what was already present. Things seem wholly other. When the tide recedes the landscape is littered with debris, but remains largely as it was before. Not radical transformations, only slight alterations: add some, take some, move sand. I use this metaphor of ebbing and flowing tides to complicate the unidirectional, destination-oriented ecologies engineered by the imperial projects of development, progress, and economic intensification. I further complicate contemporary development initiatives by discussing them under the loaded and loadable rubric of empire. The empire I invoke is not a discrete object. This term is a container for the various formations of state that have ebbed and flowed over the social and physical landscape of the people in this study. It includes the incoming and outgoing tides of multiple Khmer kings toting Indic cosmologies, Brahmanic priests, and Buddhist monks. It also includes the Muslim influence passed along through traders, diaspora, wise men, and proselytizers whose sixteenth-century excursions transformed the kingly ideologies throughout maritime Southeast Asia, leaving kingship intact. The European colonial tide dismantled kingship and left behind its own particular forms of debris, as did the Khmer Rouge, and Vietnamese socialism. Each of these imperial tides flowed in and covered the landscape with particular ideological and material practices. When each tide ebbs, debris remains. It sticks to trees, rocks, rivers, and modes of production; it also sticks to ideas, chants, and systems of value. All of these bits of imperial debris, different bits for different people and places, adhere to the current imperial tide of development and poverty reduction flowing over the lives and livelihoods of subsistence farmers at the edge of the forest. The Economic Land Concession (ELC) restricting forest access and further

Introduction | 5

destabilizing precarious lifestyles was referred to as “the Chinese company.” Throughout the following chapters, I retain this moniker and present the data as I experienced it. No one I talked to in the village understood that the Chinese company was granted access to develop plantation land by the Khmer-owned Pheapimex company, an important player in forest conversion since the 1990s transition to a market economy (Work 2015). Pheapimex owns the largest ELC in Cambodia, grabbing most of western Kampong Chhnang and southeastern Pursat Provinces, stopping reluctantly at the foot of the Cardamom Mountains. At over 300,000 hectares, this concession was at the vanguard of a massive land giveaway across Cambodia (Vrieze and Naren 2012), and the countrywide effects of ELC development were just beginning to be felt during my research. None of us in Sambok Dung in 2009 saw how this concession was connected to global flows of capital and climate mitigation initiatives, at once poetic and ironic (Hunsberger, Work, and Herre 2018; Work et al. 2019). This new data helps the reader position the elusive Chinese companies, but these elements of the empire were in formation when data was collected. This is the last the reader will see in this volume of how the Chinese companies stick to global and national flows of power and energy. This is the energy of money and machines, to clear, plant, and process commodities for the global market. Chthonic energy powers this movement. It is the constant, but disavowed, foundational element of empire. In the following pages, I attempt to position it in its rightful place as a force that animates all things, including those currently considered inanimate. Chthonic (pronounced 'thä-nik) is a term from ancient Greek, meaning “earth.” It is associated with things underground and used particularly to refer to deities. I invoke it deliberately to describe other-than-human power, often mistakenly called supernatural and sometimes referred to as “nature.” The excavations I provide here, and elsewhere (Work 2017, 2018, 2019), coupled with the scholarship and provocations of others (Blaser 2013; Guillou 2017a; Haraway 2015; Latour et al. 2018; Tannenbaum 1987; Wessing 2016) form the foundation from which I posit chthonic energies as the first and final force of the so-called anthropocene. Chthonic cosmologies, often referred to as “animism,” are explicitly invoked at the creation of all ancient kingdoms in Southeast Asia. These kingdoms were grafted onto colonial projects and eventually morphed into modern nations, dragging their chthonic legitimacy along with them behind claims to human sovereignty. Imperial formations, both ancient and modern, posit a primacy to the human animal that I only begin to explore in the following pages. Human primacy is, however, especially acute in the contemporary era in which all that is not human is rendered inert, insentient, and available for servitude to the human project. Not even ancient trees or mighty rivers are immune to conversion toward the projects of global capital. Phillippe Descola (2013) suggests a “naturalist” ontology to

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describe this way of being in the world that separates humans from “nature” as uniquely culture-bearing individuals. This way of viewing the human in the world is suggestively distinct from other ideas about the world, in which, for example, humans and nonhumans have the same cultures, but physically different natures: “beer” is a delicious refreshing drink for both jaguars and humans, but jaguar “beer” looks like blood to humans (Viveiros de Castro 2004). Another way of viewing the world embeds the human animal in nonhuman networks of both physical and social interdependence, hierarchy, and experience (Sprenger 2016). My friends in Sambok Dung walk between these worlds. For them the hunter has long been vilified in favor of the civilized and abundant life of agricultural production, where the Buddhist precept against killing can be upheld (Porée-Maspero 1962: 586–87). The sentience of the rice is not conceived in the ways it once was, but Buddhist ritual invokes its power through elaborate systems that attempt to bind and capture nature’s wild fecundity. At the same time, the sentient potential of snakes, trees, and freshwater springs, as my stories reveal, continue to inform an understanding of the world where humans are not insulated, but interpolated into relationships beyond human encounters. Chthonic forces are the bedrock of rice production, land claims, and assurances for the continued health and well-being of the social and ecological community. Although the strength of the current imperial tide is loosening the connection, part of my objective is to clear away the debris and expose the connective tissue between elemental energies and other projects of social power. In the following chapters, this is an implicit theme, which, like the earth, underscores all other interventions. Now, for other introductions.

The Place Sambok Dung is a fictional name for a village that sits at the furthest northwestern boundary of Cambodia’s Kampong Chhnang Province. The main reason I chose this research site was the presence of a new Buddhist temple, a new Cham prayer house, and the collection of internal migrants who hailed from many regions in the country to become villagers together in this place. I experienced it as a place of becoming. The forest is becoming village as rice fields push into the scrubby second-growth forest; the trees are at once local resources, dynamic contributors to forest canopy, transnational commodities, and channels for chthonic power. The village was deeply isolated on my first visit in 2006, still at the furthest fringe of empire that exploded into Cambodia when fighting with the Khmer Rouge ended in late 1999. But this place held the unfinished, half-finished, decayed, and re-emerging markers of the earliest moments of the contemporary empire. A rotting remnant of the colonial era railroad, the brick shell of a colonial era shop, and especially the re-emerging land grabs, plantations, and timber extraction evoked in me the notion of imperial tides as Sambok Dung was reconnecting to empire.

Introduction | 7

The land grabs of the Chinese company reached this area only on the gossip trail, but the specter of land loss haunted those who could not or would not grab it. Loss and gain describes a rhythm in Sambok Dung where the landscape shifts and accommodates the changing values and needs of its many inhabitants who will be introduced in the next chapter. The promise of development infused daily life, even as the cycles of weather and soil informed its rhythms. Development also constrains and directs these rhythms: thwarting some and allowing others. The trails of subsistence that persisted during imperial weakness were slowly transforming into roads, solid only in their imminence. They hardened with bursts of capital investment, only to disperse with seasonal rains and depleted funds. Places of worship built during Cambodia’s colonial and independence eras were left to rot or were destroyed through the communist transition, and today transform from thatch huts into bright concrete structures. That these exceed the capacity of local economies concerns no one, as they embedded people and places in national and transnational flows of capital, influence, and care.

Methods and Author as Actor The frontiers I choose to explore in the following chapters implicate me deeply in the work of making history. No amount of objectivity can remove me as the construction manager of this narrative; all I can do is be transparent about my position and how I came to occupy it. I learned about Sambok Dung through connections made at a small Buddhist temple in Rochester, Minnesota. I originally entered this temple to learn Buddhist meditation techniques, which I hoped would help ease a dramatic life transition. The listing in the phonebook as the Buddhist Support Society did not prepare me for sudden immersion into the Khmer culture of post-genocide diaspora, and I did not enter with ethnography in mind. I was, however, beginning a graduate degree in anthropology, and these two pieces of a new life, Buddhist meditation and anthropology, eventually merged. Had it not been for my personal connections, I would have never landed in Sambok Dung, deep as it was in shady land deals, illicit timber trade, and a highly controversial land concession. The home I stayed in belonged to the monk whose temple-building adventures are described in chapter 5. His older sister and her family lived there and farmed rice on 1.5 hectares of land below Phnom Ta Oh, a place introduced in chapter 1. This subject position gave me a particular kind of access to the Khmer Buddhist rice farmers in the four surrounding villages served by the temple. There was a moment when I had to decide whether to focus my research on this group of Buddhists, which my hosts desired, or to take in the scope of players that the political boundaries of the village described. Obviously, I chose the latter.

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As a live-in participant in the village, I was asked to teach English to local students in their school, which had a tin roof and one wall. I agreed, and most weekdays at 4 o’clock in the afternoon the children and I practiced English conversations. This was a surprising research method, and my relationship with the children bridged prickly places where I might not have been able to tread. I taught the children of all members of society including the police chief, the soldiers running timber, the Islamic Cham, as well as the Khmer Buddhists. The kids loved me, and we had a ton of fun as they indeed learned basic English conversation. The parents were somewhat forced to love me too, and when I came by to chat in the shade and ask them a million questions, they agreed to have a chat. I conducted all interviews, informal chats, and conversations in Khmer, and traveled with the son-in-law of my host. He helped navigate the region, and in the early days of research, helped translate between my classroom Khmer and the special vocabularies of village Khmer and Cham. I attended every event I could in the village. When NGOs came promoting whatever life improvement scheme, I attended the meeting. When new development initiatives from the national level were communicated in meetings called by the village chief and attended by most villagers, I was there. Celebrations at the Buddhist temple, weddings, celebrations at the sites of neak ta (nonhuman land sovereigns introduced in chapter 3), at the rice harvest, and harvest celebrations, I participated and observed. I took photos, videos, and voice recordings of people, chants, and proclamations. I often used photographs I had taken to find and interview people, which lead me into the “forest” neighborhoods and the lives of the loggers. I walked the streets, descending upon people with small gifts of sugar and tea in exchange for their time for a chat in the shade of their homes. I also accepted invitations shouted from familiar homes or shops to come and drink coffee, beer, or rice wine. I spent one calendar year in the village, from September 2009 to 2010, and returned for short visits (ten weeks each) in 2011 and 2012. This is the data that informs this book. I have since returned many times for short visits. The data from these later visits has appeared in other publications and will be included in another manuscript, as well as in the conclusion of this piece. Conclusion is not really an inaccurate word to describe the ending of this story of ebbing and flowing. The village I entered in 2009 is not the same today. It is still becoming. There is neither finishing nor ending, only constant motion.

The Processual Content The stories that people recounted, of constant movement, of placement and displacement, were disruptions borne of the state, including war, private ownership of land, religion, market activities, social hierarchies. But many of their movements and placements are those that go on with or without a state, such as subsistence,

Introduction | 9

travel, families, health, death, birth, and the need to engage the productive energies of the water and land. What I want to pull out through the following pages is the way that these stories “impose order” and “found space” and of what that ordered space consists, but I want also to attend to the contact zones of the stories and how they mark frontiers and establish borders “only by saying what crosses [them]” (Certeau 1984a: 119, 123, 127). The first chapter tells of movement and details the stories people told me about who they were and how they came to be in this place. All these stories wandered through the years of displacement and changes to land tenure that accompanied the imperial grammar of the communist states. This chapter situates the reader in the built and unbuilt environments where the rest of the story takes place. It also introduces the theoretical and operational framework of the story. The second chapter attends to contemporary development initiatives through an examination of the infrastructure of roads and trails in the village, which connect villagers to each other, to their subsistence livelihoods, and to the markets and programs of the coming empire. Chapter 3 introduces the chthonic entities of the land neak ta (aw, `anak tā), and their social and physical place in the village. Chapter 4 plays with history and the diasporic stories of the Cham minority, who are currently pointing their energies toward the external funding of global Islam. Chapter 5 deals with the flexible concept of merit-making and temple-building that attaches Buddhist practice to the imperial grammars of Indic, colonial, and modern conceptions of social power, but does not fully contain them. I do not resolve all of the tensions I set up in this piece. They do not really resolve; the material structures are only fleetingly solid. They arise, remain, and dissolve dependent on the multiple energies and events that are productive of time and space as conceived by discrete nodes of conscious existence. The effect I hope to portray is one of movement and incessant change, highlighting the discourse of life-improving development and juxtaposing it with its messy, uneven enactment, but I also want the reader to feel the surprising constancy that underlies the ebb and flow of imperial tides. In conclusion, I wrap up some of the theoretical threads woven through the disparate chapters and end the book with a new starting point to explore the ecocidal effects of development in Sambok Dung and the imperial grammar for the coming apocalypse. I maintain, however, that we dwell and subsist under the tides of empire. Both before and after, in and through the apocalypse, we dance to the rhythm of life and death.

Map 1.1. Topographical Map: Cambodia and bordering countries, sourced from the Library of Congress.

Shaping the Space: Movement, Stories, and Structure

1 Shaping the Space

1

Movement, Stories, and Structure There is a sharp distance between “ideal” space (what we think and conjecture) and “real” space which is social practice: each underpins and presupposes the other. —Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space My mother had no land and I had none either, that’s why we came here. My husband’s brother found this place and he told us to come, he said there was land here and so I came here with my family. Life is still hard, but now we can grow rice. —Khmer farmer, female, in her thirties

Entangled Power: Mountains, Spirits, and the Chinese Companies Where the eastern slopes of the Cardamom Mountains flatten into a mound-dotted plain in western Cambodia sits the village of Sambok Dung. The mountain range is a dense field that holds Cambodia’s tallest peak and spreads west, north, and south from the village to the Thai border and the gulf of Siam. Northeast from the village is Phnom Gok (Prison Mountain), a long, low mountain that is the home of powerful neak ta, immaterial, agentive entities recognized as the Owner of the Water and the Land, maja tuk maja day (aw, mcâs dy.k mcâs tī), also named lok ta (ancient or honored grandparent). Phnom Gok is the last of the mounds before the land slopes gently into the Tonle Sap River. According to Ta Mien, the elder adjar (aw, `ācārya) at the Buddhist temple,1

Endnotes for this chapter begin on page 27.

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the Cardamom Mountains are the origin of the country, which was articulated through the ancient power of the mountains. In the earliest times, the only land was the mountains, they were islands then; water covered the whole country. Neak ta are those islands and they make up the body of the country today. In the south, the Elephant Mountains [Juar Phnam Dâmrei], Bokor Mountain [Phnam Būkago], these are the feet of Cambodia [Kambujā]. In the north, Ship Mountain [Phnam Sāmphau] and Crocodile Mountain [Phnam Kraboe], these are the head. Here, we are in the heart of Kambujā. Aural Mountain [Phnam Or”al] is the highest mountain and this place where we sit was once the ocean. (Adjar, Sambok Dung, in his sixties)2 The mountains inform people’s lives here. In the rainy season, dark clouds gather in their folds and spread out over the sun-drenched village, igniting rainbows in the unstable contact zones. Rainbows, I was told, are held in place by giants, yak, dangerous protectors of the kingdom,3 and when you can see the ends go all the way to the ground, the rains will come to the land underneath (see also PoréeMaspero 1962: 230–31).4 Water flows down from the Cardamom Mountains, and Sambok Dung has soft marshy places even in the dry season. Phnom Ta Oh, the Mountain of Grandfather Stream, is the tallest mound in the valley and marks the eastern edge of the village. It shares its name with the neighboring village to the east and with the Buddhist temple that sits in its northern shade.5 The surrounding fields are low and fully cultivated into paddy fields. The word phnom in the Cambodian language applies to both hills and mountains, and all are considered powerful until proven otherwise. Phnom Ta Oh is not terribly high, it takes less than an hour to climb the rugged non-trails to the top, nonetheless, it rises above everything else in the roughly four square kilometers that make up Sambok Dung. The mountains define the landscape, and mountain lore marks history. In Sambok Dung, the mountains constitute intimate histories, what Keith Basso calls “place-based thoughts” that generate associations between thinkers and the landscape in mutually constituting awareness (1996: 7, 107). In Cambodia, they hold the abstracted stories of jealous goddesses, powerful crocodiles, or spurned lovers who attempted to marry or destroy the Buddha or a king who eventually defeats them. In defeat, they are turned into mountains by the power of the human sovereign (king or Buddha) (Porée-Maspero 1962: 106–12). Their stories entangle neak ta and the energies always present in the water and the land. Stories make a place by establishing claims to history, ownership, and association. Basso’s work explores the ways that “people know their landscapes” and “take themselves

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to be connected to them” (1996: 106). The story told by Ta Mien of neak ta and the mountains, co-present long before the rise of kings and continuing to articulate and protect the land, suggests a place-based thought. The mountains in Cambodia are powerful places that connect the land, the forests, the weather, and the people. They provide subsistence, representing both security and danger; one encounters powerful and capricious entities, wild and unpredictable animals, and the potential for illness or accident runs high. Nonetheless, everything that creates (social) life comes from the forest: wood for houses and drums, plants for medicine and soup, resins for incense and baskets, meat for nourishment, and land for new rice fields.6 When oceans rise, the mountains remain, and their enduring presence attaches people to a deep history of place infused by the energies of the land, the ancestors, the exploits of kings, and the travels of the Buddha. Ta Mien tells us how mountains entangle the contact zone between water and land and that the origin of the country is part of that interplay; the mountains have always had power and have always been here, they are the head, feet, and heart of the country—and where we sit was once the ocean. The stories of kings and the Buddha are of a different sort. They do not connect the land to the people, but rather connect the land and all its inhabitants, plants, animals, and people both seen and unseen, to the kings and their priests. In these tales of appropriation, agency is reversed. Rather than the mountain making the country, the king makes the mountain. In recent years, the tenor of appropriation changed along with imperial strategies. While the mountain myths remain, new forces of industrial agriculture transform forest “wastelands” into productive spaces (Harms and Baird 2014). “The Chinese company” is the name locally conferred upon all plantation operations currently clearing forest by virtue of the ELC discussed in the introduction, and local soldiers and police protect and profit from company interests. Travel in the forest now includes fear of the company and their representatives along with memories of soldiers, and the always-present dangers of transgressing neak ta or meeting tigers and snakes. Just like the forest, however, the company offers the means of subsistence. And like the kings who transformed the mountains from aggressive agent into subservient stone through stories of divine royal conquest, the semi-domesticated elements of corporate investment and the bureaucratic apportioning of land enact the divine transformation of development and production, without which “we will remain poor” (Work and Beban 2016: 38). Villagers in Sambok Dung feel the dangerous necessity inherent in the stories of the current empire. Schools, roads, health care, and jobs are of paramount importance in the current environment, just as forest products were necessary in environments of the recent past and remain so for the not rich enough. The dangers are not the same but interestingly echo one another. When villagers first came to cut fields from these forests, they asked

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permission from the Owner of the Water and the Land, who will be properly introduced in chapter 3. People knew that access to land and subsistence is bountiful or impoverished according to the quality of their productive activities. “We make offerings to neak ta so that our work bears fruit. If we offend the Owner of the Water and the Land, we will have no harvest.” Fears of loss and the inability to subsist haunt the new owners of the land and many local villagers fear losing land to the company like others have across the country (Haakansson and Saracini 2011). Large-scale landgrabs that accompany the current imperial transfer of resource ownership have not directly impacted life in Sambok Dung. In fact, they are land grabbers—migrants all. The constant presence of the coming global economy, filled with promise and threats, just like the constant presence and danger of the forest, inform all aspects of life in Sambok Dung. My story does not focus on either the forest or the development initiatives currently transforming it, but holds the powerful forces of each present in the background of daily village life, which is how I experienced it through the rhythms of my interlocutors. The stories of powerful kings, high-speed roads, communicative snakes, and newly built houses of worship connect villagers at the same time to the traditions of the past and the promises of the future. These stories are, I suggest, little bits of imperial debris that dot the physical and cognitive landscapes and the contact zones of ­contemporary rural Cambodians.

Theoretical Interlude: On Imperial Debris Imperial debris is embedded in the landscape through stories of hierarchy, power, and appropriation. It is the antithesis of place-based thoughts generating association and mutual awareness. Ann Laura Stoler invokes imperial debris with an eye toward its continued life, its entanglement in the “social and material ecologies” of people’s lives (2013: 4). She suggests the detritus of empires past lives on, unrecognized by contemporaries. Visible, for example, in misidentified terms like “urban decay” or “racialized unemployment,” which call attention to explicit social classifications and exclusions now smoothed into the continuing process: not ruin, Stolar suggests, but ruination (18). This process is visible in the contact zone of Sambok Dung where incoming imperial effects lay visibly over the debris of other, earlier tides. In this village at the edge of the forest in Cambodia, the empire of the Development State is only the most recent in a long history of imperial appropriations that settled into the “social and material ecologies” of people’s lives. It is not my intention to encase the present moment in an imperial genealogy, but this long perspective de-emphasizes the trauma and glory of the recent genocide and the attendant and ongoing expansion of the global market. It also helps to re-member the elusive

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relationship between land and subsistence that caused the original Owner of the Water and the Land to be in conflict with the king and the priest. I examine the ways this relationship between land and subsistence remains at the center of imperial projects even though discourses of development and human rights encode it in a different grammar. Neither the material ruins of kings nor their deep histories are static. The cosmologies, technologies, and modes of production ebb and flow through people’s lives with the changing tides of imperial power. In light of this constant iteration, I focus on the unstable boundaries between the rhythmic beats of quotidian concerns and the “things around which our everyday life establishes itself” (Lefebvre 2004: 7). Henri Lefebvre suggests that ideas (earning merit or gaining prestige, for example) achieve the illusion of solidity through movements and energies of individual bodies within space. At the contact zone between everyday movements in places and the religious, political, and historical stories around which those movements congeal is “interpenetration” and the constant work of “reorganizing what has come before” (Lefebvre 1991: 164). Interpenetration, but not resolution. The stories “amplify the present,” obscuring the rhythms of subsistence and family that require no power other than that of intentional production (Lefebvre 2004: 31), but the quotidian is stronger than the story, which fades if no one feeds it. Sambok Dung is a contact zone where the unstable boundaries of multiple imperial projects and multiple ways of being in the world are in close p­ roximity— mutually producing, altering, and disintegrating one another. Mary Louise Pratt suggests that “contact zones” describe places where the mutual constitution of subjects occur “involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict” (2008: 6). The contact zone and its “radical inequality” is tinged with insecurity, haunted by the impossibility of domination without subjects to dominate. It is also an interstitial zone: a place sometimes in transition, moving from one way of being into another, from being forest to being village, for example; and sometimes productively representing multiple ways of being in relation to multiple nodes of power simultaneously. This was the case in Sambok Dung, where chthonic energies, priests (and their kings), and the Development State were all in play as vehicles to legitimize social standing and belonging. The most visible way of being in the village of Sambok Dung is the way of being subsistence rice farmers. After the wars ended in the late 1990s, when Cham7 and Khmer Buddhists trickled into the newly peaceful environment, the Khmer claimed the low fields under Phnom Ta Oh. In 2007, the power of the mountain informed the decision to build the Buddhist temple there amid other permanent signs of those who build, dwell, and entangle the earth every day. Martin Heidegger insists that dwelling is deeply caught up in acts of peace, cultivation, and sparing: acts, he suggests, that gather together the earth, the sky,

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the divinities, and human society (2008: 350, see also Ingold 2000). This is nice and representative of many moments in the village, but the frontier element of life at the edge of the forest was just as often about not sparing. There was a rapacious edge to everyday life, a scramble for land, timber, and status that attempted to silence the rhythms of dwelling in the transitional zone. Nonetheless, the mountains and forests, rivers and lakes still ground and inform people’s lives in Sambok Dung, and stories attach these powerful elements to the conquests of kings, the Buddha, and now to the Chinese companies. The stories people tell about their lives connect them to the spaces in which they live, through these stories the tides of various empires become visible and unintentionally “amplify” the constant and quotidian—often obscured by the hum of the incoming empire. The stories of empire’s domination will become visible in the following chapters through the boundaries and bridges constructed amid the comings and goings of people in space. But the dwellers of Sambok Dung are also connected to each other through religious practices, subsistence activities, buying and selling, and navigating the gifts and restrictions of elites and political leaders. The next section will focus on the stories people tell about who they are, why they came, and what they are doing in this place.

The People There are three definable groups of people within the political boundaries of the village, each with different histories and trajectories that brought them to this place. Emptied of its few inhabitants by Pol Pot in 1975, the soldiers returned first to dwell in combat against the retreating Khmer Rouge and other factions in contested zones of political power. Vendors and laborers came to supply the war, work the railroad line, and take advantage of the wood trade (see also Billon 2002). Once the fighting finally stopped in the late 1990s, more laborers and vendors came, along with farmers from neighboring Pursat Province who reclaimed old and cut new rice fields and homesteads. In 2004, the promise and potential of a Social Land Concession brought the bulk of the families, who continue to trickle into the region turning the forest into a village. People in Cambodia have been on the move since the Vietnamese ouster of the Khmer Rouge in January 1979 when a return to natal villages was finally possible and the search for surviving family members could begin (Chandler 2008: 278). The interconnected projects of obtaining land, reconnecting family, and establishing livelihoods have not ceased and neither has the incessant movement these projects entail. This section contains travelogues from individuals making a living cutting rice fields and trees, as well as the entangled acts of war, family, and land that set them in motion. The solidarity groups (krum sāmaggī) of twenty or more families established by the People’s Republic of Kampuchea, the Vietnamese-backed Cambodian

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state in 1979, were just as unpopular as Khmer Rouge forced land collectivization and were locally administered with varying degrees of adherence to state decrees (Diepart et al. 2006). Stories from Sambok Dung show how land allocation practices varied widely from region to region after 1979. In some regions, the solidarity groups were established but disbanded in the early 1980s (see also Ebihara 1993: 160). In others, notably in Battambang and Kompong Thom, there was no collective allocation of land and some families claimed their prewar holdings (see also Arensen 2012a; So 2011; Suphal 2002: 46). From the earliest days of resettlement after the disruptions of Democratic Kampuchea, land distribution was contested and contingent. When the first private property laws were established in 1988, administrators that adhered to the state mandate allotted 0.2 hectare of land for each person in the family. According to my interlocutors, if the land was reasonably fertile, it was sufficient for subsistence farming. It was not, however, enough land to accommodate growing families, and there was never enough for married children to feed their new families. Land for this and the next generation was the most cited reason for migration to Sambok Dung. One young woman related her mother’s post-Pol Pot story of return to her home village in Kompong Speu: After the fall of that bastard Pot,8 she returned to her home village and found her brother-in-law had claimed all her land. She protested to the village head, but he was new and didn’t recognize her. None of the other villagers would stand up to my uncle. The village head when she lived here died already and there was no one who would help her. She had no place to go then . . . She went to her birthplace, but by the time she arrived, there was nothing left . . . she found an aunt who took her in, but she never had any land. I was a baby then and she raised me with nothing. She had no land and I had none either; that’s why we came here. My husband’s brother found this place and he told us to come. He said there was land here, and so I came here with my family. Life is still hard, but now we can grow rice. (Khmer farmer, female, in her thirties) This was a common story of early appropriation and the challenges of land laws in transition. People’s claims to land were informally negotiated (So 2011), and those “powers of informality” remain important in land administration, both despite and because of new measurement and titling initiatives (Beban, So, and Un 2017: 591). Regular citizens have a tenuous hold on land ownership, but the military maintains strong claims on the land in this region and the second most cited reason for settling in Sambok Dung was military service. Most of the soldier families currently in Sambok Dung fought for the State of Cambodia and arrived in the early 1980s, many received military land concessions

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after the war. They tell of the never-ending skirmishes and constant movement up and down the towns that dot the railroad line from Phnom Penh to Battambang. Both conscripts and volunteers, many are from Kompong Speu Province where the army still has large land holdings and military training facilities (So et al. 2001: 92). Each soldiering family currently in Sambok Dung had different experiences and trajectories that brought them here, but most of them now squat on state land along the railroad tracks. The search and desire for land is a softly rumbling undercurrent through the stories of the migrants, but also the search for wage labor, the third most cited reason people settled here. The following story from Prey Veng was common among migrant laborers: When we got back to the village [after Pol Pot], we were three people. Our two sons died during the era of that bastard Pot and only our daughter remained. We shared land with the others in the beginning. At that time, we had enough and people worked together. Then they split the land. We received 0.8 hectares of land because we had another child, and there were four of us. At first it was enough, but when we had two more children there was no more land, and sometimes we didn’t have enough. When our daughter married we gave her that land and left the youngest with her. We went with our two sons to look for work so we could buy more land. We went to Phnom Penh, and I worked as a bicycle taxi driver, then my son came here to work loading wood onto the train. He made money and said there was land here, so we came here. Further south at first, then we moved here. We just followed the saws.9 Now we bought some land here, and our youngest son will come here. We have this village land and one hectare of rice field in the forest . . . No, we don’t grow rice; it’s forest land. (Khmer laborer, male, in his forties) Many laborers are displaced rice farmers looking for a way back to the land. Clearing forest land for cultivation, however, is no small procedure and families do it only if the primary means of subsistence involves getting the land cleared. If wage subsistence is available, from logging for example, the dream of land remains but is often only realized in a claim to the forest. A few Cham families from neighboring Pursat had claims to the forest here and returned to prewar homesteads when the wars ended in late 1999. Others followed the time honored-response to land pressure in Cambodia and throughout mainland Southeast Asia: they moved into less populated areas and cleared new ground for farming and homesteading (Scott 2009; Thion 1993). These Cham families live in what is referred to as the “old village” of Sambok Dung. This is the story of one Cham grandmother who returned at the end of the war.

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I was born on this land. My parents came during the Sangkum period [postindependence, pre-US war] because there was not enough land in Pursat. They cut these fields and planted these mango trees. This is my land, but when we returned after that bastard Pot, it was too dangerous to live here and we were forced to live in Pursat . . . When the war stopped, I brought my grandsons here and we cleared the land again. My sons built this house for me with wood from the forest, and we used our oxcart to gather more wood to sell. This helped us to have enough; there was nothing but forest here at that time and we could sell a lot of wood without going too far. Now, my grandsons travel two, sometimes three, weeks into the mountains to gather enough to sell. We are poor, but we have enough. It is harder for others. Each Mawlid,10 we have enough to call our neighbors to come, and we share our rice with them. (Cham farmer, female, in her eighties) The migrants from Pursat are well established with family ties in the region. The stories from Cham in the “new village” offer a different rhythm to the landsong of Sambok Dung. They began to arrive in 2004, and most of them come from the fishing villages along the Tonle Sap that spread from the northern edges of Phnom Penh into Pursat Province. They came for the land, but the fields surrounding the new village were already claimed by 2004 and the available non-village plots for these families were on high ground, thus unsuitable for rice farming. I offer here three short stories from the new village. As a mosaic, it gives voice to their movements. The Khmer have all the land. It has always been this way. We Cham have the water, but we have no land; they are the rich ones, and we Cham are always poor. We came here to get some land, the imam told us about the free land here, and we all left the river to build houses and plant orchards. I have my house, but my orchard is too far away. (Cham fisherman, male, in his fifties)   Before we came here, we lived on our boat: the three children, my wife, and me. My wife’s brother came here, and he told us there was land, so we came. There was never any land for us; we are fishing people. My parents had a house before Pol Pot, but just a house. There was no land. And in the dry season, we would take our boat and go to the Tonle Sap Lake for those months. Just like now. In the dry season, I take my sons and we take our boat to the lake. We are happy on the boat: kluck, kluck, kluck . . . we are always moving. In the rainy season here, we do day labor in the rice fields and repair our nets. (Cham fisherman, male, in his thirties)   I met my husband on the road. After Pol Pot, I was alone. All my family was gone, and I was walking alone back to the river. At that time, things

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were very dangerous; there were soldiers on the road, and they told us to wait in Battambang until things were safe. There were many Cham there. We were all together, and when it was safe, we walked all together. I met my husband then, and we walked together on the road away from there. We went to his birthplace first, even though we were both orphans, we didn’t know where else to go. I came from Chroy Changvar [the peninsular formation at the juncture of the Mekong and Sap rivers north of Phnom Penh], but we stopped in Kampong Chhnang first. When we arrived, all the land along the river was taken . . . there was no place for us . . . we just kept walking . . . We did day labor and rented rooms . . . we just kept moving and looking for work . . . Then we heard about the land here, so we brought our children and try to live on the land. I learned to grow rice in the Pol Pot era, but we can’t grow rice here . . . (Cham laborer, female, in her forties) There are many Cham rice farmers in Cambodia: in Kampong Cham, Kampong Thom, Kampong Chhnang, Pursat, and Battambang. Cham migration and history in Cambodia will be discussed more fully in chapter 5. Here, I want to present the variety of experiences and histories of the people who came to live at the edge of the forest, under the mountains in Sambok Dung. The themes of constant movement, hardship, and displacement since Pol Pot’s regime; shifting subsistence strategies, contingent contracts and multiple authorities, dissipation and reunification of families, war, land, and the experience of moving into the forest. These are recurring parts of the story that villagers in Sambok Dung tell about themselves. In the next section, I will explicitly point to the various and unstable environments of power in and through which sociality and stories emerge in this interstitial zone of rural Cambodia.

Theoretical Interlude: On Stories Stories act upon space as much as travelers and dwellers, each tracing their respective trajectories. The recurring parts of this story, the “proliferating metaphors” that Michel de Certeau invokes in his essay “Spatial Stories” organize places of habitation “through the displacements they ‘describe’” (Certeau 1984a: 116). The forest, filled with everything necessary for social reproduction as well as dangerous and unpredictable entities, creates a particular place that requires certain types of activities: no horsing around, anger, or disrespecting the inhabitants of the forest, for example.11 In another register, the forest can be filled with unproductive resources ready for exploitation, which gives rise to a tangibly different kind of place and different types of comportment in the forest, and the forest as a resource in need of human protection gives rise to yet another collection of activities (Milne and Mahanty 2015).

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Making the move to understand space as multiply constituted through stories and actions allows a shift in thinking. Decentering human activity brings the attentive movements of other entities, like rain, immaterial nonhuman actors, buffalo, termites, and scorpions, into the work of production, rendering ludicrous the idea that any space can be unproductive. I cannot claim a voice for nature or for nonhuman actors, as Donna Haraway suggestively attempts (Haraway 2008) and am cautious of the foibles inherent in “representing” the land, wind, and water, because I only know them where they meet me. My objective is simply to present them as more than the stable and constant background to human activities (Hinchliffe 2000; Massey 2006), by not “dividing what people join,” and by paying heed to both the stories people tell about what constitutes their lives and the work they do toward life’s constitution (Hocart 1953: 23). I see the built environment in Sambok Dung as a contact zone of stories that describe how the world is and should be in relation to the flows of energy that come from the “creative potential of a world-in-formation” and also in relation to narratives of empire, history, and capitalist production (Ingold 2007: S31). “New social relationships call for new space,” suggests Lefebvre, and “‘composition’ is informed by ideologies” (1991: 56, 159). In the contact zone of Sambok Dung, the stories of the new empire emerged as the most powerful organizing forces in the built environment. This is significant. Analytically, however, it would be irresponsible to ignore the other agents, especially in an era where the palpable effects of ecocide and weather insist on being noticed (Lindgren 2017).

Power and Parami Imperial debris that encourages extraction over sparing litters both the landscape and the livelihoods of people inhabiting this space. The cultivators and gatherers whose livelihoods are more tied to the health of the environment than the vigor of the market worry that nothing will be spared. The contact zone where the forest meets the market highlights the entanglement of dwelling. Small mountains in the valley are stripped of timber, and single trees stand on grassy mounds that I am told were once full of trees, “as full,” people say, “as Ta Oh is today.” People report that Phnom Ta Oh is still full of trees because of its parami. Ta Oh is a ­powerful mountain and parami is “a circulating energy present in some trees, stones . . . and spirits linked to special places” (Guillou 2012: 222). Guillou’s explanation confirmed exactly what I understood when villagers explained parami. It is power and energy. In another grammar, however, the term means neither power nor energy. Parami is an explicitly Buddhist term from the Pali language that refers to perfection. It is connected to the ten perfections cultivated by the Buddha over many lifetimes that enabled the achievement of nirvana (Bizot 1980: 221–74).

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Parami is a bit of imperial debris that persists, misrecognized in the present where it connects to non-visible entities of the elements (maja tuk maja day; neak ta, for example). Many people told me, “Yes, Phnom Ta Oh has a lot of parami,” meaning that the mountain itself is the source of great power, and also that many benevolent entities are part of it. The entanglement of parami with elemental energies and entities is confirmed by spirit mediums, who refer to their powerful nonhuman teachers as kru parami (Bertrand 2004). The salient notion for my purposes is the way that parami is at once misrecognized imperial debris, and a bit like a bridge. Martin Heidegger describes a bridge that, “gathers the earth as landscape around the stream” (2008: 355–58, emphasis original). I will unpack the debris in chapter 3 and here continue with the bridge and the stream, which I suggest is unadorned energy around which gather the landscapes of power: the mountains, the water, and the land, the original Owners, and the power of the king, the Buddha, and the development state. The bridge is the term parami. It took me a long time to understand how this term was being used because of its polyvalence, but once I did, its bridge-like properties and its gathering effect emerged. Through parami, the energies of the mountains and the land and the power of the king and the Buddha are intimately connected to the lives and livelihoods of Cambodian villagers. We will revisit this idea in chapter 5. In this chapter, I introduced the mountains in a way that attempted to acknowledge the agentive power that moves because of them and also the stories that describe that power within human sociality. The middle section moved through stories with the current human inhabitants of Sambok Dung, from wherever they were before to the homes where we sat together in conversation. This next and final section of the chapter will describe the built environment and the spatial organization of the village, and will draw some lines between this spatiality and the stories and inhabitants described already.

The Built Environment The mountains here used to hide armies and have always held the power of immaterial entities like neak ta. Mountains provide everything for subsistence, as well as malaria, and they mark the boundaries of the controlled world for many villagers. In this village emerging from the forest, the boundary between forest and village is marked more by discourse than by the built environment, as the built pieces of the village punctuate and slip into the forest. This section attends to the boundaries created by religious, governmental, and economic practices as they manifest in the built environment in Sambok Dung, which has four distinct neighborhoods. Three sit along the three main roads: on one live the soldiers and wood dealers; on another live Cham rice farmers,

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woodcutters, and fishermen; and on the third live Khmer rice farmers; the fourth spreads into the forest beyond the railroad tracks. The natural environment is the “original model of the social process,” but contrary to Lefebvre’s claim at the opening of this chapter, the water and the land are “reality” and the source of the energy deployed within it (Lefebvre 1991: 30, 13). With this in mind, we can open the obvious structures of the built human environment and the “imposition of order” to the also obvious energies of the rivers and hills, plants and animals in this space. Ordering the travel of soldiers, migrants, and timber, the only hard route within thirty kilometers of Sambok Dung is the railroad. It runs through the village, from the southeast to the northwest connecting Sambok Dung to cities south and north, Phnom Penh and Battambang12 respectively, and more often to the small local markets north and south. Next to the railroad, a dirt road runs intermittently all along its course. At Sambok Dung, it is both railroad tracks and dirt road, and while it leads to the market and the city, it is not at the center of the village. It is, however, the site of village administration: the small school, the home of the police representative, and the village head. This is also the main site of commerce in the village. The soldiers, the police, and the wood laborers live between the main dirt track and the railroad tracks. This is state land and none of the residents have title to their holdings. Consequently, the houses are densely packed together. The two other roads of the village, almost a full kilometer apart coming off the trunk road, each lead north to places of worship. One is Buddhist, and one is Cham. Both slip into winding paths as the houses give way to forest and fields. Farmers and fishermen live on these roads. The compounds are large, a minimum of thirty meters wide. Some point economically inward and are crowded with fruit trees and vegetable gardens, various animal huts and corrals; others point economically outward, with no gardens or animals, or minimal fruit trees and husbandry to supplement the primary incomes of fishing or wood trading. To the south of the railroad tracks are a series of trails and cart roads that harbor clusters of homes where some families make charcoal, some grow vegetables and rice, and others labor in the timber trade. These are distinct neighborhoods, selfsegregated, and structurally produced by the forces of economic, religious, and government initiatives. High-ranking soldiers manage state land between the rails and the road, selling small cleared plots to lesser soldiers and the wood and charcoal producers. The houses reflect subsistence. Densely packed together and low to the ground, they face the tracks where piles of wood planks, bags of charcoal, and occasional tree trunks await transport. Along the road, every home has a small spirit house facing it from the yard, raised on a post about a meter from the ground (see figure 1.1).

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Figure 1.1. Neak ta hut at the house, photograph by the author.

This is where offerings are made to the Owner of the Water and the Land who will be properly introduced in chapter 3. The rice fields of their Cham and Khmer neighbors spread in patches and fill niches between the flows of water, the stands of hard trees, the termite mounds, the houses, and the roads of this neighborhood. There are no roads beyond the railroad toward the mountains, only trails winding into the rising terrain. Low trees and tall grasses dominate the landscape and the trails pass by large land holdings in which a few urban dwellers regain their health through the hard work of planting and the clean air of the countryside. Trails pass tight clusters of homes grouped around charcoal kilns, around wood saws where huge rosewood logs wait to be cut according to specification, and at the center of surrounding gardens and rice fields. And they pass under a thicket where neak ta resides at the base of the only tall tree remaining in this low, scrub forest. The people living out here are in “the forest” despite their inclusion in the village as an administrative unit. One woman laughed sarcastically at her remote location, “It’s not just anyone who can live out here in the forest . . . My children are strong: they walk an hour to school and they work when they get home.” She told me she rarely went to the market and when I questioned how she got her food, she laughed out loud at my ignorance. “Out there, teacher,”13 she said, motioning with her head toward the forest. “There’s a stream behind those trees and that forest is full of food!” Not everyone who lived in “the forest” had the same jocular response to living so far away from “the village.” Another woman

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remarked, gesturing to her spacious home, three meters off the ground, “We have money, but eat only fish and grass.” The neighborhoods in the forest are like small clearings in the trees, but as the trails wind southward to cross again the railroad tracks to the east, the forest slowly and intermittently gives way to small tangled clumps of trees amid the homesteads and rice fields. The Cham rice fields here line both sides of the road, and mature fruit trees shade three homes on short stilts. Eastward, the road bends, and Cham houses line up, each on a plot thirty meters wide and a hundred meters long. Many have mature trees, which signal old homesteads cleared before the wars and abandoned during the migrations of 1975, forced upon the people by the new state of Democratic Kampuchea (DK). The trees remain, and DK survivors returned here in the late 1990s to re-clear the rice fields of their younger years and build homes beneath towering mango, cashew, jackfruit, and papaya trees. The never-to-materialize Social Land Concession was strictly distributed in this neighborhood. Early arrivals have larger holdings and claimed the protected areas under the canopy of fruit trees and later arrivals dug new space for themselves from the scrubby trees and brush. The homes here are all close to the road with gardens behind, and most are no more than a meter from the ground with wooden slats for walls and corrugated metal roofs, save the home of the former village head, which is raised two meters on wooden posts with painted wood walls and a tile roof. This former village head was proud of his strict adherence to the standards of land allocation and used it as an example of how corrupt his Khmer counterparts were. He said, “They just gave land to anyone who had money to spend. Over there, the poor didn’t get any good land. Here I gave land to whomever came first. I never took money from them.” His own holding is substantially larger than the others, but this, he said was because he was here first. Rice fields stretch beyond the homes and fill the space that separates the Cham and Khmer neighborhoods to the north and the old and new villages to the south. The southern land is higher. “We don’t grow rice. We came late,” one young father said. “All the rice land was gone and so we try to grow orchards.” Farming the high ground is a hard road to subsistence, especially for fisher families maintaining their fishing lifestyle, and the skeletal remains of failed homesteads dot the new village landscape. Fishing and renting their labor to rice-growing neighbors contribute to family economies, as does occasional work for the Chinese company. Plantation work pays monthly and hires during clearing or harvest, providing unstable livelihoods to supplement the year’s cycle of expenses. The multilayered subsistence strategies of the new village are juxtaposed in the Buddhist neighborhood of Pum Ta Porn where there are also a few empty homes. These are not failed homesteads, however, they are second homes with absentee owners whose rice fields and orchards are tended by tenant farmers. The configuration of space in the Buddhist neighborhoods of Picjoo and Pum Ta Porn is

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different in many ways from the Cham villages. The road to the Buddhist temple is considerably longer (4.6 km) than the road to the Cham mosque (1.3 km), and in the old village, all space along the road is occupied by homes in regular formation. In the Buddhist neighborhoods, large tracts owned by non-resident elites remain unmolested, and extended home gardens line the road where wealthier migrants bought two adjoining lots. Next to these are plots accommodating three homes and four generations in their regulation size thirty by one hundred meter plots. Primarily rice farmers live along the temple road and a family’s economic status is marked by the height of their houses from the ground. From our seat under the tree in her yard, one woman said, “I have no place to sit and chat. We are poor and can’t sit under the house like they do. My house is on the ground but the old tree gives us shade and breeze. One day, we’ll build a house high off the ground.” The homes of occasional urban dwellers are concrete two-story structures with red tile roofs set on a concrete base on the ground, defying the need for shade and breeze. The village head and wealthy wood dealers at the western end of the village have wooden structures lifted three meters from the ground on concrete pillars with the red tile roofs typical of French colonial influence. The transition from low homes that are easy to put up and pull down to homes built off the ground with solid foundations and tile roofs has been documented in other places transitioning or returning to human habitation.14 Early settlers in the old village and around Phnom Ta Oh claimed lowland plots with mature fruit trees along the water flow, the soldiers claimed land by the railroad attached to military supplies and timber markets, the later residents and absentee owners along the temple road claimed as much land as administrators and money allowed, and those with experience climbing the sugar palm chose this region over others. At the eastern end of the temple road far from the administration center, but right up against power of Phnom Ta Oh, is the Buddhist temple. The Cham mosque also sits far from administrative power in the village, surrounded by Cham homesteads. The tension between Cambodian state power and the nodes of religious authority is explored in chapters 4 and 5. What I want to show here by describing the built environments of the distinct neighborhoods in Sambok Dung is the way that the spatial organization of the village is produced by administrative brokers of state power who make decisions about land allocation, and by religious beliefs and affiliations that become entangled in administrative actions and decisions, but most significantly by the quotidian activities of subsistence strategies, land profiteering, and by the land itself.

Conclusion This opening chapter serves multiple purposes and lays some groundwork for the chapters that follow. My primary objective here is to introduce the reader to the

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physical environment and the human inhabitants whose presence gave rise to ethnographic research. The second is to map out, both discursively and physically, the articulated and demarcated zones of human habitation and sociality, attending to the imperial detritus that influences the boundaries and ideas. A final objective is to engage with the theoretical problem of power and agency so important in contemporary social theory. The lives of villagers in this interstitial zone at the margins of the state and the edge of the forest present a staggering array of definitional boundaries. I pull out how stories are embroiled with the work of production, and how together they articulate space and practice and contribute to the making of people and social worlds. This foundation was visible to me as the solidifying markers of the new imperial tide rolled into village life encouraging the transformation from forest to village.

Notes  1. The adjar is a learned lay man who assists the monks with the mundane activities of running the temple and the special acts of ritual performances. Often monks in their younger years, many adjar are spiritually powerful individuals who are well respected in the community.  2. Interview conducted March 2010.   3. Other-than-human protectors in Cambodia are of the elements and tinged with danger. Many, like the yak (arak), are Owners of the Water and the Land, and as neak ta are domesticated into the service of kings or the Buddha, but their wild origins remain salient for outsiders and for those they protect.  4. There are legendary skirmishes between the entities controlling rain and drought. Rainbows often play a role in these battles: they emerge with the defeat of drought sometimes coloring the hair of the defeated drought or the fur of the water entity’s dogs.  5. The temple serves four adjacent villages.  6. During my fieldwork, the poor were still gathering many things from the forest, like food, medicine, and rattan, while the rich purchased beef, pills, and plastic baskets from the market towns.  7. The Cham are the largest ethnic group in Cambodia. They practice Islam, and speak Cham, an Austronesian language, as well as the Austro-Asiatic Khmer spoken in Cambodia. Associated with the kingdom of Champa, an early state formation in what is today central and southern Vietnam, the Cham began migrations to Cambodia in the early ninth century and their diasporic community grew in waves between the ninth and fourteenth centuries. Chapter 5 discusses the Cham in more detail.  8. This is my own translation of the derogatory term most often used to refer to Pol Pot. People say “`ās Pot.” The tag `ās in front of a name signifies distaste and derision. It is often used in front of the names of little boys in a joking way. The woman I lived with called her grandson `ās Yute, I would translate this as “that rascal Yute.” It is also used as a tag for unpopular political leaders. For example, the popular anti-government electronic media often calls Prime Minister Hun Sen `ās Sen. This I translate as “that bastard Sen.”  9. “Following the saws” was a common way to describe the migrant labor experiences along the railroad tracks. The saws move according to available timber and the ­flexibility of local authorities.

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10. The birthday of Muhammad, during which time people who can, often make alms offerings in their community. 11. Many in the village rarely go into the forest, but when they do, they watch their step and mind their words. 12. As of this writing, the rails go all the way to the Thai border at Poipet. While I lived in Sambok Dung, they only went to Battambang. 13. During my stay in the village, at the request of parents, I taught basic English after school. I came to be known by all in the village as neak kru (aw, `anak grū), meaning “female teacher.” 14. May Ebihara did fieldwork in a small village south of Phnom Penh in 1959/60 and returned again in 1989. Judy Ledgerwood and Ebihara visited this same village in 1997, and Ledgerwood visited again in 2010. Home construction reflects the health and prosperity of individuals and community in this village. Also Lisa Arensen, in a recent dissertation on the northwestern forests of Banteay Mienchey, encounters people with the same stories of how the village should look and how houses raised from the ground marked wealth and a distinctly appropriate village home (Ebihara 1968, 2002; Ledgerwood 2011; see Arensen 2012b).

A Roadology: Intentional Acts of Movement and Transformation

2 A Roadology

1

Intentional Acts of Movement and Transformation Roads can invoke both the presence and the absence of the state. They are concrete material entities . . . that reveal multiple agencies . . . immobile . . . yet they draw attention to mobility. —Penelope Harvey, “The Materiality of State-Effects” I want to see this road cut across the undeveloped land all the way to the red road, connecting us in this remote village to the state highway and to the rest of the country. —Village chief, in his seventies, Pum ta Porn, March 2010

Time and Energy In the early days, there were only trails through the undeveloped landscape. “Just like in the forest now,” Pu Phan said, “people just built their houses, and where they walked, the road started.” People appropriated spaces to dwell, raise families, and grow rice. Their activities flowed according to subsistence practices that happen both with and without states and markets, and the trails, paths, and roads emerged, by degrees and over time, as an effect of appropriation. This was not the case with the railroad. Made of hardened steel, built for French colonial extraction, the railway was used throughout Cambodia’s thirty years of war (1970–1999). In the post-Khmer Rouge era, they transported soldiers and supplies from Phnom Penh to northwestern towns, a practice that gradually reversed flow. As the fighting slowed and the market sped up, goods from Thailand and timber from the Or”al mountains flowed into the city. When settlement began again in

Endnotes for this chapter begin on page 50.

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the forests that became Sambok Dung, the railroad was the only solid road in the region. This iron road was the framework that widened other roads, by filling the region with soldiers and loggers who each carved their own paths through the landscape. In 2009–12, during my fieldwork, the roads were a hybrid of forest trails and purposeful tracts: tangible material forms that bear witness to the movements of actors and to acts of intentional power. They did not begin with the intent to discipline travel and impose differentiation between people and places, but they came to do so through actions both quotidian and imperial. Roads integrate the boundary between the “sweeping narratives of globalization and the materialities of particular times and places” (Dalakoglou and Harvey 2012: 459). But they also entangle histories of both ideas and practice, bringing together the dynamic interplay between the agentive movements of water and land and of fully human engagements to shape space toward the achievement of particular ends. The many trails that run through the fields and forests of Sambok Dung invert Michel de Certeau’s cityscape in which small and circuitous routes emerge after and amid the original planned grids of an urban landscape (Certeau 1984b). Here, the networks of daily activity are the original map over which the dark lines of planning are superimposed. People made these roads by traveling and gathering together: creating neighborhoods and manipulating space according to their own needs. Henri Lefebvre suggests that “[s]pace serves and hegemony makes use of it” (1991: 11), creating the “homogenizing effects” of built environments (64). State-sponsored road-building projects drew heavy lines along certain trails, separating rather than joining the Buddhist and the Cham neighborhoods. At the same time, the undeveloped trails that lead through clusters of homes to the “forest” west of the railroad tracks faded from view. There is connection, but there is also exclusion as particular roads solidify with the incoming tide (see also High 2009). The present moment seems to manifest the way things ought to be, obscuring the dynamic work of time, energy, and extraction. The history of imperial extraction embedded in the railroad is at once a bit of “imperial debris” and the “connective tissue” (Stoler 1984: 193) that situates villagers in Sambok Dung within stories of trans-Asian connections in the future (ADB 2013; Hodgkinson 1996). This chapter discusses the embodied and physical splitting, connecting, and segregating work of village roads, as well as the forces that brought them into being. It also presents emerging and imagined practices of travel on smooth, hard roadways that tie intimate and personal desires to the utopian promises of a yet to be realized development. Villagers recite the promises of development as integral to their own journeys to improve their lives. Behind these recitations, however, is the dystopia created by technological exclusions and project abuses, rain and drought, and other stories people tell about the realities of intermittent development and the destruction of lived experience.

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By highlighting the discourse of life-improving development and juxtaposing it with its messy, uneven enactment, I spin Pierre Bourdieu’s useful notion that legitimacy and integration emerge through subordination to the form of social time (Bourdieu 1977: 163). That we are born into roads and everyone uses them is a form of social time, the time on and off roads make them a legitimate need. Without roads, travel is difficult. But in Sambok Dung, the legitimacy of the road does not emerge out of collective practice. In fact, the ease of travel by road is disrupted by dangerous travel on disintegrated roads and the ease of cutting across fields. Nonetheless, imagined practices of travel on smooth, hard roadways tie intimate, personal desires to the legitimizing force of a yet to be realized form of social time. There is subordination to form, but this is the unformed space where a fully formed story promises a better way of dwelling amid subordination to new practices. The smoothness of the promise that roads will bring about the future as it should be, rigorously overrides the bumpy reality of roads in Sambok Dung, creating subjects that desire rapid transport beyond their homes at the edge of the forest. The narrative begins in the village with tales about people, their movements, and a collection of meaningful places. Then I describe the various road-building projects of contemporary development initiatives, the railroad in historical perspective, and other routes people use get from one place to another. First, however, I offer a brief interlude to discuss the troublesome, but difficult to avoid, analytical rubric of “the State.”

Theoretical Interlude: On the State Under the gloss of state, I attend to the pieces of empire that touch the people of Sambok Dung as they conduct daily affairs. These are bureaucratic structures of control (Scott 1998), ideological apparatuses (Althusser 2001; Dalakoglou and Harvey 2012), and organs of governmentality (Li 2005) that extend from global, national, and local institutions to intertwine with Cambodia’s government offices at national and local levels. They are donor organizations, NGOs, humanitarian aid organizations, development banks, conservation organizations, and so forth. My analysis situates this multiplicity of actors and agencies as divergent parts of a systemic whole involved in delivering development to the people of Sambok Dung. From this vantage point, looking out from the village, I expand on Phillip Abrams’s now classic suggestion that “the state” is not a real thing, but is rather a mask that obscures the “politically organized subjection” inherent in political practice (1988: 63). Jonathan Friedman calls the state a “potent fiction” conjured to administer social interactions, just as gods and spirits were conjured for the same reason (1998: 117). I discuss the relationship between spirits and states in Chapter 3 (see also Work 2019), which illuminates the paths people walk as they

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willingly enter into disadvantageous relationships with states and markets (Li 2014), even desiring the structures of subjection that entangle them (High 2014). This willing entanglement and subsequent subjection becomes a “caricature” of the death upon which any state is founded (Taussig 1997: 5), and underscores many of the chapters in this book. In this transitional zone where people are rushing toward subjection, the inbetween moments of state power and the many ways that the state does not exist are more visible. So many vital activities go on with or without politically organized subjection. The monsoon rains, for example, bring fish in abundance, which brings people out to catch them. Nets are made and fish is pickled. Where people walk, a trail forms. These must be considered alongside those activities that are the effects of subjection, like selling timber or mangos, and building roads to facilitate those transactions. Michael Taussig warns that awareness of the death that founds the state does not dispel the magic, rather it draws more things into its narrative and ritual orbit (1997: 28). This is for Abrams a “state-idea” that works alongside the actual system creating a “unified symbol of an actual disunity.” Its two aspects, structural and ideational, obscure its unacceptable domination and violence (1988: 79). But this seems to be only part of what is going on. The “unified symbol” of the state is indeed present for villagers in Sambok Dung and manifests in an idea of “the state” (ratth) that delivers delightful things like roads, the funds for which flow through donor organizations, NGOs, and micro-finance institutions, all lumped together as ratth in common parlance. The Royal Government of Cambodia (RGC) is not the lead author of the laws of subjection its agents deliver, rather these laws are drafted by international donors and consultants who conceive markets for timber, mangos, and rice that need roads to carry products to international buyers. The so-called modern Cambodian state thus emerges as a caricature once removed. The violence and subjection of its actual activities is obscured through rituals of state enacted by multiple agents, but this state also obscures the violence of another: The colonial violence and death that founded Cambodia and built the so-called democracies of the donor states lives on. Global extraction continues to feed donor nations with Cambodian bodies and resources, obscured by the “potent fiction” that is the RGC. This power-generating obfuscation of separation works at the level of local and national brokers of power, and creates the illusion of agency and autonomy for those actors in donor organizations. The interesting effect of this in Cambodia and among the local authorities in Sambok Dung is the way that both unity and separation are called into the service of domination. Local officials have the power to control villager access to services, but have no authority over service delivery. This is the messy and contradictory contact zone of the sovereign and the bureaucrat that has depoliticizing effects (Ferguson 1994), but also shores up sovereign rule (Hughes and Un 2012; Ong 2012).

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Local officials coordinate with myriad external organizations to execute village-level programs: the World Food Programme (WFP), Asian Development Bank, as well as NGOs promoting the creation of rice banks and cooperative health insurance initiatives, micro-credit agencies, and ministries of the Cambodian government. All of these visited the village and interacted with villagers at meetings called by the village head during my stay. I consciously gloss each of these entities as the state, but will not address their subtleties (Li 2005). This is not in an effort to cultivate the state-society binary produced in James Scott’s Seeing like a State (1998), but rather to present the multiple forces of governmentality as my interlocutors encountered them as “the state.” The state-idea is persistent, but it is multiple. In the following pages I discuss the incoming roads of commerce and development, one manifestation of the life-improving story of empire, as they meet the elemental agency and intentional actions of dwelling that die at their foundation.

Village Travel on Trails and Roads Into the Forest The dirt trails that rise up from the village into the mountains are similar from one year to the next. Used for many generations, they change dramatically from season to season, or even one rainstorm to the next, but they remain in relation to their use. Water changes course coming down the mountain, both washing away beaten paths and flowing along with them; trees fall and force the carts and motorcycles to find a new route through the brush. People accommodate these disruptions and continue on their way to cut and to gather. Tim Ingold suggests that the walker on soft roads is a “wayfarer . . . [whose] concern is to seek a way through: not to reach a specific destination” (2010: S126). There was one wayfaring man who walked along the roads and trails of the village: he lost two families during Cambodia’s thirty years of war and people said he walked to kill the memory (ghāt samara). Every day, he walked up and down the roads of the village, passing all but encountering none. Most travelers, however, were going somewhere. Ta Chen, who moved here from neighboring Pursat Province, traveled these routes as a young man with his father before the disruptions of Democratic Kampuchea: My father cut trees for the French when the railroad first came here. He spent a lot of time in the forest then . . . We came here for a special bark my father used for his arthritis. All the trees in Pursat were gone at that time . . . He died during the era of that bastard Pot . . . After the wars, I came to

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find that same bark for my own arthritis . . . It was thick with trees then, but those big trees are all gone now. Chen’s story of forest change folds into the waves of destruction wrought by the various empires; the trees of Pursat were killed through French extraction, and the father died an early death during Democratic Kampuchea. The internationally funded Kingdom of Cambodia is cutting down the forest again, and individuals load tree corpses on lorries and trucks to send to the market. Despite the loss of trees, the forest is still full of food that easily supplements the rice diet; ants, beetles, wasps, lizards, snakes, rabbits, and birds all find their way along these forest trails and into the many pots of the village. One need not go deep into the forest to find these basic subsistence foods; only the hardwood trees so coveted by external markets require more than a day’s travel. “This area used to be full of trees, big ones,” Ta Chen tells me. “Back then, we didn’t have to ride so far. The forest was right here! The big trees are all gone now . . . Except the stand on phnom khbás,” he added. “That place is protected by snakes.” Ta Ben chimed in, “I’ve seen them. Big snakes, this big,” he said, grabbing his thigh in illustration of their size. “The snakes protect the trees, and even if you don’t get bit, you’ll get sick if you cut there. No one cuts there; even the Cham don’t cut there.” The Cham are alternately separated from and folded into practices acknowledging agencies beyond the human as part of a longstanding discourse that posits Cham and Khmer as one, but also distinctly not one (Stock 2016). In the timber trade and along the trails leading into the mountains, Khmer and Cham are one. They work alongside one another and help each other repair carts, maintain buffalo, and determine the routes with trees. Chen says the trees are all gone, but I see plenty of trees. These, I am told, have “no value,” are crooked, or are too sickly to cut; so, under the shade of this unmarketable canopy, we traveled the well-worn route up and down into the mountains. I traveled with my companions in the dry season, but the rainwater washes that travel alongside and overrun the trail strained even the powerful buffalo and sometimes we had to get off the cart and lift the wheel out of the rut in order to continue on our way. Ta Chen was looking for large trees to sell so that he could pay back the bank for his new house: a painted wooden home on three-meter-tall concrete piles. We rode deep into the mountains before we found the first stand of large trees. Few large animals remain in these forests, as most have retreated further up the mountain, but the wild pigs remain and we followed their trails on foot through the thinning forest in search of suitable trees. Pigs are a danger in the forest, as they were in the village in the early years of settlement, but the threatening presence of wild animals, once the primary fear, is now supplanted by fears of malaria, company loggers, and soldiers who roam the forest. Just the year before, the company moved in and hired local

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soldiers to prohibit the non-corporate extraction of timber. The soldiers work both sides of the protection racket and graciously accept bribes from their wood-seeking neighbors, who in turn sell their logs to the soldiers to saw into lumber. Before the company, people bribed those same soldiers to protect them from the Me Prie (forestry administration officials, literally “the mother of the forest”), who came to enforce the logging bans implemented at the behest of the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC) (Billon and Springer 2007). Officials from the forestry administration continue to make visits to the forest in search of illegal loggers. I have seen them riding in small motorbike packs along the local roads: full uniforms, caps, and sunglasses. They too can be bribed and rarely ride into the mountains, but wait by the rails to catch the young men who go up the mountain on motorbike. These young loggers do not bring down logs for building; rather they dig out the rosewood stumps and gather the thick branches left behind by loggers, still viable for sale as ornamentation and small furnishings. It takes days of riding through the mountain trails to find the stumps and can take a full day or more to chop and dig out all the useful pieces. Typically thirty to forty kilos of luxury hardwood are then loaded onto the backs of motorbikes and driven out of the forest. These young men are most at risk in the shifting economy of wood. Their vulnerability comes from not selling locally; and these men only bribe after they are caught. Both the soldiers and the Me Prie wait for them at the trunk road. The good drivers know the cart paths and forest trails through the undisciplined landscape beyond the roads. They know where the trails are, and they know how to drive them. House-dwellers often shout warnings to them, enjoying the evasion of lawless law enforcement as the young men make their way to the paved roads where they can sell their loads.

Making the Village Roads The mountain trails were carved by soldiers and loggers, foragers, forest animals, and buffalo. Soldiers traveled them seeking and hiding from their enemies. The labors of contemporary wood extraction and subsistence maintain their shape and soft directionality. The roads of the village have a younger history. The two main routes came into being with the earliest settlers who cut the paddy fields around the base of Phnom Ta Oh and originate on opposite sides of the mountain north and south. One leads through the old village of Cham households, and the other through the Buddhist neighborhoods of Picjoo and Pum Ta Porn. Both lead west to the railroad. Early homesteads congregated around the mountain, and people carved the trails to the railroad while visiting families, going to the market, and hauling logs from clearing their land.

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There was nothing but forest here then, no roads, no fields. We had to clear the land to build homes and plant rice . . . We drove only oxcarts then, and used them to get to the fields and to the railroad. Ta Rein was buying wood then [at the railroad] and whatever we cut that we didn’t use to build our own house, we sold to Ta Rein. After that, some of them kept going into the forest to cut wood. It was hard here, and cutting wood we could make some money . . . So, the buffalo made the first road; pulling carts full of wood and rice. (Khmer farmer, male, fifty years old) The roads from Grandfather Stream’s mountain to the railroad became darker and wider as the population grew, but they remained subject to the puddles and washouts of the rainy season and were often difficult to pass. In 2006, an urban monk with a powerful reputation for healing came to perform a ceremony. Forced by the mud-filled road to leave his car at a home on the edge of the village, he proceeded on foot with the family who called for his service. As they walked along the muddy road, his friends told him of the cheap and fertile land in this region, of the grass hut temple, and the desperate situation of most villagers. This monk performed the healing ceremony, visited the temple, and before he left the village, had negotiated a land deal with the village head and returned to Phnom Penh with soft title to a thirty by one hundred meter plot of village land and one-half hectare of cleared rice paddy in Sambok Dung. The next year, he financed the building of a road from the railroad tracks to just short of the temple at Phnom Ta Oh.

Rice for Roads Pum Ta Porn Five years after completing the “monk’s road” during the year of my research, the road was extended past the temple, through the neighboring village, and out into the scrubby forest beyond, where it stopped abruptly amid a small stand of bamboo. Part of a WFP initiative in which people worked for food (WFP 2013), villagers were contracted to build and pack the road by hand and to plant grass along the embankments to fortify and contain it. Individuals were paid four kilos of hulled rice for each square meter of road they constructed. Along the stretch of road extending the monk’s road, it got much worse before it got better and the thin, but passible trail morphed daily and weekly. Ditches dug alongside the trail supplied the dirt to be packed into a road. These later filled with rain, creating spaces for water lilies to grow, for fish to accumulate, and for buffalo to relax on a hot afternoon. During construction, new motorcycle trails wound their way through the holes and mounds that eventually became a road. Each family was responsible for the section of road in front of their homes, but

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villagers who did not need the rice opted out of the digging, leaving the work to the poorest in the village who signed up to dig the road in exchange for rice. Everyone lamented the terrible state of the road during the long transition, but the “hired” diggers could not work on the road every day. “How can we dig when we can’t eat? We work every day to get money to buy food and sometimes we are too tired to dig the road” (Khmer migrant, female, in her forties). I attended a meeting at the temple about the road in advance of the inspection to decide on payment. Rumors circulated about other road building projects that did not pay because the road did not meet donor expectations, so people were anxious. The village head, Ta Porn, was also anxious, and the slow and patchy work thus far prompted an inspiring speech from him, which began with a soft reprimand over the progress made on the road. “Work has been slow,” he said. “Now work has to be everything. We can’t eat, we can’t drink—just dig that road. We will work together to finish it. It’s for all of us and the strong must help the weak.” He continued with a heartfelt and paternal story of how this village had grown up from nothing and how he, personally, tended and cared for the growth of the region and the people since he first arrived. He told people about his vision. He said, “I want to see this road cut across the undeveloped land all the way to the red road, connecting us in this remote village to the state highway and to the rest of the country.” The speech ended with threats of discontinued access to development projects if the villagers did not get moving and finish this road. “Your rice will be thrown to the wind and I won’t have the authority to approve you for other projects. If you can’t finish this one, how can I say you will finish the next one?”1 One day, we traveled with Ta Porn along the new road out to its forested end. People worked along the line, but large patches still remained as scrubby forest and other sections were half-finished piles of dirt with corresponding holes. This was just ten days before the inspection. On our way back, Porn told us to go ahead as he had some business to do out here. When I returned after the inspection, the road was done, and it was quite nice and easy to drive from the railroad tracks all the way to its abrupt end in the bamboo stand. In my view, this was a remarkable accomplishment, but none of those who did the work shared my enthusiasm for their feat. One young mother who spent many days digging, hauling, and packing earth for the road told me, “It was no harder than anything else out here; it was only hard to dig the road and do our other work. It’s done, and now we can eat rice all through the rainy season.” When I suggested that they also had the road, her reply was less earnest, “Yes,” she said, looking at the ground. “We have the road. It won’t make much difference for me. I walk everywhere and usually cut the road on the small trails.” For the poor who dug, elevated, and packed it, the road was a subsistence strategy, not an improvement to their lifestyle. But for many it was improvement of a sort. One Cham farmer in his twenties said, “For

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me, it’s easier to cut across than to take the road around. But the improvement is good, Cambodia needs roads to develop and be prosperous and I need rice to feed my family through the rainy season” (see Trankell 1993: 81–84, for similar sentiments in Laos). They worked for rice. Most of them traveled only locally and went mostly by foot; the road as a means of transport and connection was important for others, working beyond subsistence.

The Old Village The road in the old village was also impassable during its transformation, but not because of its transitional state. The road builders on this side of the village blocked the sections they were working on and forced traffic around the road into the dry paddy and along the dykes. Significantly shorter than its counterpart, the road through the old village was completed much more quickly. The technique of road creation there was the same as in the Buddhist neighborhood: people with shovels and baskets dug ditches along the side of the trail to fill baskets that hung from a yoke on their necks and then piled and packed the dirt up onto the trail. The road was elevated one meter from the original trail, which was widened to three meters. Once the dirt was packed as high and wide as needed, they dug grass from the dry rice beds and planted it along the embankment. The distribution of labor was similar: each family was responsible for the road in front of their homes or fields, but in the old village very few families opted out of their share of work and rice in contrast to their Buddhist counterparts. The most notable difference between the two processes was that no one traveled on the Cham road until it was finished—not walkers, not motorbikes. This innovation lessened the extra work needed each shift to repair what had been undone by the motorbikes and oxcarts. Because there was someone from the Cham neighborhood working most days on the road, their string boundaries were respected and the roads quickly took shape. The Cham remained focused on the task of road building and most of the road was finished two full weeks before the scheduled inspection. When the assistant village heads of Sambok Dung came through to gauge the progress prior to the provincial inspection, just as Ta Porn did with the roads on the other side of the rice fields, only one section remained undone. It was in front of the only Buddhist home on the road. This was Ta Chen, who took me into the forest. He has large land holdings, herds of buffalo, and many hard-working children. He also has a powerful nonhuman teacher and is adept at healing animals. Nonhuman teachers are common throughout Southeast Asia. Space constraints prohibit a full exploration of this, but anyone with extraordinary skill is assumed to have a kru, a term that means teacher and is used to refer to human teachers as well. The kru that teaches and guides the work of musicians, carpenters, healers, and athletes (to name just a few) is a nonhuman invisible person (manuss moel min ghoeñ) with

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special knowledge of the techniques. This entity is typically not of human origin, but can be, and having a kru brings with it great skill, power, as well as the burden of responsibility. Ta Chen has a kru that guides his healing activities, and he is respected and a little bit feared in Sambok Dung, a position he cultivates. When the road project first appeared, he refused to participate. None solicited his portion of work to get the extra rice as many along the other road had done and both the assistant village heads and Ta Chen were a bit indignant that the road was not completed. Chen was finally forced to pay his neighbors to build the road for him. These neighbors received payment from Chen and took his share of the rice from the WFP. Chen was not the only wealthy villager who paid others above their share of the rice to do the digging; he was just the last and the only one who had to be forced. Those who could choose not to dig created a boon for those who wanted work and everyone was satisfied with the outcome. The roads are solid and the people got their rice.

The Payment When the rice came two weeks later, it only came as far as the southern market town. The trucks from the provincial town traveled the red road west from the paved state highway, but could not pass the rugged road from the market town to Sambok Dung. Villagers rode oxcarts, rented motorcycle taxis, and rode the railroad lorries (improvised rail carts) round trip in order to collect their “payment” for road work. The really poor helped the less poor by loading and unloading the carts in exchange for help with transport, an interesting twist on Ta Porn’s suggestion that the strong help the weak. The total cost, on average, for transporting 360 kg of hulled rice2 was 40,000 riel (about US$10). This struck me as quite unjust and I was surprised that no one complained about it. I even pointedly asked one of my friends, “Why do you have to pay money to get paid?” His response was quite practical, “The truck couldn’t get through so, we had to get it ourselves.” This practical, unbothered, sentiment toward what I perceived to be the abuses of strong against weak is one I encountered regularly. There was no disgruntlement; neither was there fear of retaliation or punishment for speaking up against injustice. I saw plenty of that too.3 Rather, there was no injustice, the effects of weather are not unjust. The truck could not pass; accommodations had to be made. When I asked local officials why the rice was not hauled to the village where the work was done, their response was the same: the road was impassible and the truck could not make the journey. When I pushed the issue a bit and suggested that the rice could have been loaded on the lorry to save the poorest villagers the expense of transport, I was told, “the organization did not approve that kind of transport; they only sent the truck . . . We don’t have the authority to make that

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decision.” The problem of authority, its presence, and its lack is here deployed to deflect responsibility, just as Ta Porn used it to reinforce his power as a purveyor of development initiatives in the village.

Theoretical Interlude: On State Effects The depoliticizing effects of this development project, the end result of which was roads for motorized traffic built by citizens who do not have vehicles and had to pay to get their payment, are stark. There was neither injustice nor conscious oppression, the project simply played out the way it did (Ferguson 1994). The development initiatives designed to improve the lives of the rural poor in contemporary Cambodia all work on the under-examined assumption that economic growth and market intensification are the natural cures for poverty. And further, that the various infrastructures necessary to bring about economic growth are naturally going to improve people’s lives. In a recent report issued by the Cambodia Development Research Institute (CDRI) and funded by the World Bank, the authors outline the “pro-poor strategic development framework” of the donor organizations that focus on “rural infrastructure; generating labour demand; technical changes for productivity gains; and, access to stable input, output and financial markets to support such technologies.” This will “enhance the capacity . . . for small farmers to . . . increase productivity and diversification” (CDRI 2012: xiii–xv). In order for this to transpire, the authors note that “land distribution and security, agricultural modernization and diversification, and public goods (infrastructure and ­agricultural extension services)” must be made available to small farmers. In my conversations with people in Sambok Dung, these initiatives were salient and were understood as much for what they promised as for the many unrealized, unequal, and destructive moments of their execution. People see their lives in this rugged place as difficult and unstable and the promise is a non-material bit of debris, a world-forming thought embodied only in the practice of the imagination. The power of imagination does not negate the work of embodied habitus naturalized through everyday activities (Bourdieu 1977), but when activities do not realize the promise and are pursued nonetheless, it becomes a habitus of mind. The desire of development connects people both to the post-independence years of relative peace and prosperity under Norodom Sihanouk’s Sangkum Reastr Niyum (1953–1970) and to the utopian vision of the coming empire. The roads recently built by the poorest of residents will not be used by them, but the truth inherent in the promise that roads make a better life manifests as a desire for roads even if one has no real need of them. I want to keep in the forefront the ways that current development projects mirror, continue, deploy, and reinforce the logics of previous empires, despite claims that the modern state is radically different. Development projects and

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international interventions manifest a “complex rearrangement . . . of different and intersecting logics” (Mitchell 2002: 14), which emerge in Sambok Dung like connective tissues to the legacies of ancient appropriations and colonial abuses. In his critique of the metaphors of power, Timothy Mitchell notes how the articulation of local power into wider systems makes it seem external to ordinary life (1990: 567). Village and commune leaders point to external authority to relieve themselves of social responsibilities within projects. At the same time, they provide soft land titles and offer protection for illegal logging; these are personal transactions that highlight the nature of the sovereign power to which they are aligned. The solidity of the bureaucratic power that binds local leaders to the precepts of donor organizations is different than the personal sovereign power that controls access to local resources, and their juxtaposition creates the “effect” of a singular structure or institution that could be labeled a state (Mitchell 1999: 76). The local flexibility of regular interactions that would go on with or without external power, like work-sharing and negotiations over resource use, face the more rigid, but still fluid power of the patrimonial state, which is itself in thrall to the donor state. It is the donor state that actually provides the infusions of capital and technology to create the technological utopia at the heart of the modern state.

Rails and Roads: To the Market Towns North and South All over Cambodia the turning tides of empire channel intentional energies toward enhancing decades of neglected infrastructure necessary for market intensification. In this section, I present the distinctive routes in Sambok Dung that transport villagers and products to market, attending to “the rot that remains” (Stoler 1984: 200), which is more accurately the rot that continues. The railroad is the kind of “large-scale ruin” that takes planning and resources (202, 211). First proposed in 1880 to connect Saigon and Phnom Penh and continue north past Battambang to the Thai border, it became operational in the mid-1930s as a stump from Phnom Penh to Sisophon (north of Battambang). Its purpose was efficient extraction. The colonial administration fully understood the advantage of hard rails over soft roads that succumbed to “the quality of the sun and the quantity of rain that falls in Indo-China” (Vérignon 1904: 34), but the cost of implementation was more than the empire could manage and the majority of the projected lines never materialized. Nonetheless, the truncated run from Phnom Penh to the north carried large quantities of rice and timber to market from its inception until the French lost control of the region in 1941 (GGI 1935). The section of tracks that connect Sisophon to Thailand was completed while under Thai control in 1942, and Sihanouk organized the line connecting Phnom Penh to the deep-water port at Kompong Som with funding assistance from French, West

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German, and Communist Chinese sources, which became fully operational in 1969 (Whyte 2010: 159–69). The iron road is part of the connective tissue of the state, which in Sambok Dung quite literally binds the soft trails and seasonal rhythms of subsistence to the small market towns north and south of the village. The “state-idea” that founded the colonial project echoes contemporary development in Cambodia: “The first result of the French era in Indo-China is the vigorous measures that guarantee the liberty and property of the native populations; the second is in constituting the economic tools necessary to meet their needs” (Vérignon 1904: 33). David Chandler suggests that from the beginning of the colonial era, and “especially after the economic boom of the 1920s . . . independent, prerevolutionary Cambodia . . . was being built” (Chandler 2008: 170). After thirty years of revolutionary fallout, the building resumes with the same rhythm. The Khmer Rouge (KR) used the rails,4 and party members working during the Khmer Rouge era report that rebuilding the railway network was a priority for the KR (Mertha 2014: 53). But, many promised Chinese infrastructural improvements ran aground (Mertha 2012), and purposeful destruction obscured any improvements when the Vietnamese-backed government ousted the Khmer Rouge in 1979. Only debris remained: burned and pillaged railway engines and large sections of track were missing, burned, or dismantled. One man involved with the resurrection of the railway tells of its transformations through imperial tides. I will cite him at length here: We repaired the engines and they sent the lorries along to repair the lines. The engines were all burnt: some had no motors and were missing parts. The tracks were bad, too. They [the Khmer Rouge] burned a lot of the wooden ties and in some places they lifted the track altogether: wood and metal all gone. . . . When the trains started running, the government used them to haul rice and cooking oil out to the provinces. The people were suffering; there was not enough food and supplies in the provinces. . . . These trips were dangerous; the Khmer Rouge were everywhere in this western region. They were strong in Kompong Speu and all the way up to Pursat; we brought soldiers with us to protect the passengers and supplies . . . People were traveling a lot, looking for work and for family. The trains ran only once each day. We traveled north for two days, stopping in Pursat overnight, and then two days south . . . We were attacked every time, but still we carried passengers and brought provisions to the provinces . . . and we carried passengers back to the city . . . Sometimes the soldiers out here, they would send logs to the city . . . At that time there were still big logs, as big as four men can hug; the government sold them for supplies and salaries. At first, we were paid with rice! There was no money!

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 The lorries were for repair. They were slow and run by hand. They carried tools and repair supplies and would alert us to dangers along the route. Sometimes a bridge would get damaged in the fighting and we would have to wait . . . all the fighting caused a lot of damage and the tracks were old too. There were repairs, but things were pretty run down, the lorries worked all the time . . .   After the peace began in 1990, there was still fighting . . . We carried soldiers and passengers, and we started carrying supplies back from Thailand. Lots of people were traveling then. It was illegal to carry the goods from Thailand, but the police weren’t too strict about it. Everyone wanted the stuff and people made a lot of money carrying it . . . Wood too, that’s when we started carrying a lot of wood. People could sell and people could buy again . . . When we could buy again, the lorry drivers bought motors for their carts and they started carrying stuff too. They carried passengers then too . . . and started running in between the trains. It was dangerous, but people were moving and everyone wanted the merchandise from Thailand.   Once the war stopped, the tracks didn’t need so many repairs and the government stopped paying the lorries to work. They stopped making repairs and people stopped using the train so much . . . The lorries were working all the time, though. They made money carrying people and stuff to sell, and wood: lots and lots of wood. That’s when we could sell wood to Thailand and Vietnam . . . The trains hardly ran then, we only went once a week and stopped carrying passengers, but the lorries ran all the time. There were no repairs though, and then the tracks, especially the bridges, got so dangerous that we had to stop the trains. That was in 2009. (Khmer farmer, male, in his fifties) The lorries were the only vehicles on the tracks and they made short, semischeduled runs between the market towns every morning and evening for school, for shopping, or to catch a van to the city.5 There is only one-way traffic on the rail, and unscheduled lorries often encounter another tram. The lorry carrying the lightest load dismantles their machine, removing platform from axils and axils from rails, then re-assembles to continue their journey (the front cover photograph shows this process). The lorries run all day, and also carry wood and charcoal in the evening to trucks waiting to haul contraband on overnight runs to the capital, to the Thai or Vietnamese borders, or to the port. In the early stages of post-UNTAC rail renovation, many drivers accepted funds allotted for purchasing lorries (JARTS 2006), but the anticipated rail development never materialized and the lorry continues to rule the rails in a surprisingly well-coordinated system of transport. The rails are certainly dangerous, however, and once the lorry drivers changed from repair providers to market entrepreneurs,

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the number of accidents rose dramatically. Few repairs have been done on these rails since the early 1990s and none at all since the trains stopped running in 2009. I heard only one story of death by lorry, but sometimes when the machine hit an unstable break, the entire platform lifted off the axles, smashing spines and occasional pots with the return impact. After one such incident, a woman, sitting on a large bag of bamboo shoots she gathered in the forest and was taking to market, leaned over to me and told me she once flew completely off the platform and into the brush after one of those jumps. With a wily grin, she lifted her sarong to show me the long scar on her leg from the incident. Despite the nagging danger of the lorry, few villagers look forward to its demise. The woman who showed me her scar expressed a sentiment I heard before when she said, rather sadly, “When the trains come again, we won’t be able to use the rails anymore. I don’t know how I’ll get to market.” The violence of life on the margins of the Cambodian state comes from more than landmines and memories of “that bastard Pot.” Stories of imperial roads put a twist on Walter Benjamin’s invocation of violent lawmaking and the violence necessary to sustain it (1978). In my story, the laws enacted upon the land by building market-centered roadways require endless infusions of energy. The crumbling railroad, still productively used locally, cannot sustain the onslaught of time and the weather—what Benjamin labeled Divine Violence. The iron rails are more persistent than the machine-constructed dirt road, but less resilient than the trail that accompanies the rails to the northern market town. The violence of the ever-shifting planet does not exact a heavy toll on the soft trails, only on the hard smoothness created in the service of other laws. This road is difficult, but it is here, in the earth. It doesn’t really change much from year to year. Season to season it changes, but it’s the same from year to year. The red road is easy at first, but when the rain comes, it takes the road with it: the holes are deeper and it becomes harder each year. (Cham farmer, male, in his sixties) The unchanging road described above is a thin trail of fifteen kilometers, wide enough for one oxcart to pass. The trail dips and winds around holes, trees, and water washes. In the dry season, only one of the four wooden bridges is necessary and the heavy trucks can make the journey. With regular traffic, a wooden bridge has a four-to-five-year lifespan before needing repairs: unless a fully loaded truck passes over it, in which case it may break. The repair system in Sambok Dung involved everyone ignoring the broken section of bridge, hoping it did not collapse, and waiting to see if it got fixed. During my stay, this happened to five of the eight bridges between the two market towns. On two occasions concerning nearby bridges, the head of the Buddhist temple association eventually took on

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the project: he raised a little money, gathered a few hands and tools, and begged some wood from the soldiers. It was just a patch job, and after a while a bridge can have seven or more of these. Bridges, as Martin Heidegger suggests, “gather the earth as landscape around the stream.” But they also, and importantly, frustrate all attempts at such gathering: mocking the “ease and power” of utopian fantasies (2008: 354). The trail worn over time into the soft earth shifts and moves following weather and travelers. It is always passable by locals, but not always without incident. The large trucks of commerce and construction cannot always pass, however, and are restricted to dry season travel. The road to the southern market town is, by contrast, a product of history enacted with reference to the 2001 Laws on the Administration and Management of Communes and Commune Elections; the purpose of which was to induce decentralization so that Cambodia can fulfill the recommendations of the World Bank (Heng, Kim, and So 2011). This dirt track is the most treacherous of all local roads and was constructed with the most technological interventions. The twelve kilometer stretch between Sambok Dung and the southern market town was built by the commune chief in 2009 in a move meant to gain him local support and admiration. He took his newly allocated yearly budget of US$9,000 and used it to build the road using machines hired from the provincial capital. His intentions were good and his plan supported development objectives for improved infrastructure and local autonomy in executing development objectives, and it also satisfied local desire for better access to goods and services. It stands now as a testament to the foils of rapid development and becomes more controversial each year that it stands incomplete and deteriorating. Before the improvements, the route was a dirt track like the one described above, plagued by washouts and puddles: impassable by four-wheeled vehicles in the rainy season, but always available for walking, oxcarts, and motorbikes. This “road” now alternates between fields of cavernous gullies where the packed earth departed with the rain, and long stretches of deep, loose sand where the previously packed earth changed composition through the dry season pressures of heavy trucks and constant sunshine. A thin motorbike trail winds along the high points of the caverns and lightly packs a route through the sand. “For the road to stay hard, you have to plant grass,” I was told by a 65-year-old Cham rice farmer in Sambok Dung. “The people would have planted grass,” she said, “and the road would have held.” The road was incomplete beyond its lack of grassy embankments, however, and most notable was its lack of solid bridges. The machines cut and banked the road so the water could flow easily under the bridges obviously intended to span the embankments. Local labor built temporary wooden bridges shortly after the road was completed in early 2009, but when I arrived at the end of 2009, most of them were broken and falling through, and two gave way completely during my stay.

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Shortly after the demise of one bridge, I drove my motorbike down the embankment to go through a deep, but consistently passable water flow. The water was deeper than usual and the bike stalled. While I fixed it, three other waterlogged motorbikes joined me on the other side of the pond. The third driver to succumb grabbed a long stick and planted it in the middle of the pond, the universally accepted road sign for “impassable.” This stick resembled another stick stuck in the “road” above in front of the “bridge” that was now two logs running parallel across the gorge with a few boards still holding fast between them. The stick above directs traffic down off the road to cross the water flow below. The stick in the pond directs traffic past the water and into the forest. It was only a few hours before a new trail emerged, leading around the small lake and through the forest to join first a cart trail and then the main track a little further on. Missing bridges and the impromptu trails that accommodate them are accepted parts of the soft and malleable world where people live. There is a certain stability in the constancy of the rain and the predictability of change. None are surprised. There is discussion, however, about the ways of state; about corruption, exploitation, and the unequal fulfillment of development’s promises. Local gossip suggests that the Commune Chief’s decision to use machines rather than local labor was politically motivated: “the government gives him money and he hires the provincial governor’s nephew to build the road, it all follows the strings [tam khsae].” These khsae cinch together political power and economic access across Cambodia (Billon 2000; Hughes 2003; Scopis 2011; Springer 2009). Although much maligned in international assessments of Cambodia’s “progress” (Hughes et al. 2012), khsae become local sites of stability through which incongruous and shifting developmental programs can make sense. Villagers explained the Commune Chief’s decision to use machines through a logic in which he is bound to certain types of action in the face of higher powers, just as the unprotected embankments of the road are bound to wash away in the rain. It is a cohesive and stable kind of unpredictability that joins state failures within the larger logic of predictable, but unstable planetary systems. Despite efforts at decentralization, money and economic contracts move along khsae that connect local officials to national leaders in networks that also shift but endure relatively unchanged from year to year, from empire to empire. Hand-packed rural roads also endure, and have been demonstrated to be both cheaper and more durable than machine-graded dirt roads (Munters 2003). When I asked him why he chose to use machines for his road rather than local labor, the Commune Chief cited politics, not political obligations. He told me that he believed the machines would “do the job better and faster than the people could. What I didn’t expect was that the provincial office would ‘eat’ the rest of the money.”6 The money for bridges disappeared in fees and bureaucracy at the provincial level and never reached the commune. Decentralization in Cambodia

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is plagued by more than an intractable patrimonial system, there is also a lack of clear understanding and communication between the commune, district, and provincial levels of responsibility as outlined by the World Bank-sponsored Cambodian laws (Chheat et al. 2011). The commune chief claimed he was trying to act responsibly and expressed a real desire to follow the logic of the current empire, and “uplift the lives and improve the conditions in my commune.” His efforts ran aground against the violence of both the weather and the law, which renders him at once empowered and impotent.

The Red Roads The laterite provincial roads that connect the state highway to the market towns north and south of Sambok Dung show the divine violence of the weather world upon market infrastructure. These roads vary. They are wide flat expanses of brand new two-lane gravel roads in the south, and in the north they are wide, washed-out tracks where motorcycle trails wind around puddles and rocks and into the fields adjacent to the disintegrating road. From the southern market out to the state highway, the red road was new, wide, and flat when I arrived in the fall of 2009. The importance of this road in the discourse of Sambok Dung was first and foremost speed and ease. Ming Thea marveled that her brother could travel from Phnom Penh in his car, then take the lorry and arrive in Sambok Dung in just over two hours—a trip that might have taken eight hours before the road was built. Beyond speed, there was talk of the coming network of roads that would “connect us to the big roads” and increase local access to goods and services. Trucks came hauling construction equipment and materials, while mangos and surplus rice left on trucks headed out to market. The benefits of these changes were almost universally reported; only a very few, those whose years taught them to be skeptical of “progress” and those whose poverty excluded them from profit and wealth, leveled critique against the incoming tide of empire. The critiques were few but the dangers were many and the red road was deadly and mercurial. On the smooth road, dust kicked up by speeding cars and trucks obscured small motorbikes and blinded their drivers in the cloud. Three such motorbikes were hit by other speeding cars during my stay, two of the invisible drivers died (see also Mrázek 2002, on invisibility and hierarchy on colonial roads). And after just one rainy season, the new road was rutted by runoff, and large holes surprised speeding vehicles. The joy with which a two-hour trip to the city was reported changed back into the warnings and laments people give for all travel, “it’s far and the road is difficult, you shouldn’t drive your moto. Take the van.” The rains push against the capacity of state forces to keep roads passable for their intended purpose. At the end of the rains in 2011, trucks filled with laterite drove up and down the new road from the state highway to the southern market

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town, piling gravel next to holes in the middle of the road and along the runoff ravines. Soon a motorbike trail emerged, packing down the best route through the obstacles, which resembled the well-worn trail that winds its way along the more treacherous red roads from the northern market town to the state highway (built in 2006). The road imperceptibly dissolves from its hard-packed, speed enhancing newness into the rutted and potholed trail common in the region. Much-desired routes of local transport born of decentralization projects are not yet fully realized promises of development, but their ephemeral nature neither bolsters nor diminishes the power or the presence of the state.

Company Roads The solidity of state is also manifest in the economic activities performed by companies, even though companies are explicitly separate from states. Earlier, I pointed to the way that the state seems unified but that mirage is actually the result of multiple organizations that work outside national governance structures. In the case of companies, we find an opposite effect: they act independently of states that can be both unable and unwilling to enforce their laws over them. Timothy Mitchell suggests this “illusion of disunity” is another mechanism of power (1999: 83), just as Abrams suggests that the illusion of unity does the same. In Sambok Dung, people clearly saw the collusion between company and state actors, but no one confused the activities of the company with those of the state, as was common with NGO, microfinance, and donor activities. The company did not pretend to take care of the people, but provided some of the infrastructure promised by the Development State. Talk of the company’s roads colored numerous conversations in the shade of houses, second- and thirdhand recitations from travelers focused on speed and profits. But up-close were stories of restricted access: Yay Triep rode the van from the northern market town out to the state highway along the new plantation road. “They tried to kill us!” she recounted excitedly under the house one evening. As soon as we turned onto the new road, a truck with four company guards standing in back started following us. They drove fast and got up alongside the driver. One of the men shouted from the back, “You better get off this road!” Then they drove so close and we went off the road. They turned around and drove back, right at us then. I was so scared. They swerved just in time, but shouted again, “This isn’t your road. This is the company’s road. Stay off!” The development of infrastructure, jobs, and economic growth envisioned through the Economic Land Concessions in Cambodia are not necessarily fictions,

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but in practice they are not what people were expecting. Averaging US$60 to US$80 per month, the low wages of local plantation jobs are scoffed at by semiaffluent families, who in 2011 began to pay the fees to send their children to Thailand or Malaysia for wage labor that yields USD$200–400 per month, after expenses. Only the poorest went to work for the Chinese company and the pay was barely enough to feed the worker. Of the promised infrastructure enhancements, only the roads are visible as contested sites of access and ownership.

Conclusion James Scott famously explains that states do not achieve their stated goals because bureaucratic structures cannot contain living processes (1998). What they do achieve, James Ferguson also famously claims, is to depoliticize the domination of lives and landscapes toward a “particular” sort of state power (1994: 21). Depoliticized state power is explicitly not coercive (High 2014; Li 2014), and people choose and desire the enhancements promised by the state, as long as they are fairly distributed (Bear 2014; Harvey 2005). The villagers of Sambok Dung welcome movement toward the undefined shape of a story as old as empire that promises a better way of dwelling, for them yet unrealized and illusive. The elements on the other hand, remain recalcitrant and unyielding toward state projects. Tania Li points to the ways these projects “help prepare villagers for the expansion of global capital” (Li 2007: 267). What is underexplored is the ways elements are also prepared for this expansion. Implanting the dead solidity of rails and roads into the living spaces of water and land provokes resistance, requiring an endless infusion of energy. Unlike people, the elements are immune to stories of progress, and continue to push against solidifying agendas enacted through various bursts of imperial energy. While there is much discussion in the scholarly community as to whether or not the state exists and what forms that state may take and how we can talk about it, among the people in Sambok Dung there is little puzzling over this problem. One 35-year-old landowning father of five made this distinction: “They are all the state: if they come to ‘eat’ us, they have power. If they come to help us with roads and doctors, they are civilized.” This village philosopher makes an important point. Seeing clearly the tension between unity and disunity, as described by both Abrams and Mitchell, he also taps into the story of the so-called modern state that claims to provide more benefits than the ancient kings who used their power to “eat” their kingdoms. The efforts of donor organizations and international financial institutions to instill the technologies of “good governance” in Cambodia give rise to an interesting obfuscation in Sambok Dung. The poverty-making effects of economic intensification are not erased, but are displaced onto the patrimonialism of the Cambodian state.

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When local infrastructure could not support the rice delivery from the civilized organization, the only recourse for the Commune Chief was to pay from his own pocket to have the rice delivered. His power to “serve” his constituents in the spirit of “good governance” was in the hands of the donor who prioritizes “rural infrastructure” and “labor demand” in ways that hauntingly echo colonial corvée. [T]he population can do the earth-moving and stone-crushing work for the railway free of charge or, at worst, it can be paid in rice and salt, as this can be made a part of a usual corvée service for the government . . . it is evident that the costs will be even more affordable than those in either Europe or America. (Mrázek 2002: 5) This does not, however, make the state undesirable. On the contrary, it seems to drive desire as rumors of new roads continue to enliven local gossip, even as the old new roads disintegrate further each year. Riders of the makeshift and dangerous lorries are lightly haunted by the displacement to come when the empire takes back its rails and with it local market access supporting small charcoal producers and forest gatherers. Provincial roads are built, but often cannot be maintained or even finished. The smooth, speed-enhancing character of the red roads stretch provincial budgets to fill, groom, and level them each year. Through all that, the forces of the state are unmistakably fragile and the promise of development is tenuous against the scruffy solidity in the trails and cart paths that wind through the mountains and cut across the crumbling roads raised by the state. These trails were made with intention and are directed toward destinations of both subsistence and market, nonetheless, they are, as Ingold suggests, “a cumulative trace, not so much engineered in advance as generated in the course of . . . movement” (2010: S127). The movers in the interstitial zone of Sambok Dung are going somewhere with intentions of cultivating, gathering, and engaging the market to the best of their capacity. The soft trails of this place react to all of these activities and through the persistent movement of individuals through space an agreement of dwelling is reached.

Notes 1. The power of the village head to provide access to development initiatives is an important trope of governmentality in Sambok Dung (see also Hughes et al. 2012). 2. This amount is equal to building ninety square meters of road, the approximate amount of road in front of most homes and would feed a family of four for three months. 3. Cambodian complacency against abuses is often described in terms of subjection, fear, dysfunction, and lack of civil society. But there is a practical nature to their position. People do stand up for themselves, but most often they conserve their energy and steer clear of the ill wind. What is often glossed as avoiding confrontation is discussed in

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terms of laziness, “I was too lazy to fight with my neighbor when he moved his paddy dike and took some of my rice field, so I moved here.” Personal time and energy is better directed toward what brings benefit, and showing anger shows a lack of selfcontrol and wisdom. 4. A famous photograph of Pol Pot and his coterie is in the train (see Juskalian 2011), one man from Phnom Penh tells of being transported by train to Kampong Chhnang in 1979 (Vickery 1982: 205), but local reports do not include rail travel or improvements. 5. In some areas, especially in Battambang, the lorry has become a tourist attraction and is referred to as the “bamboo train” in the travel and popular literature on Cambodia (Juskalian 2011; Kurczy 2009). 6. The verb “to eat” is used to refer to many acts of state; it is notable that in the Cambodian language, like many others in South and Southeast Asia, the king does not reign over a kingdom or rule a kingdom, a king “eats” a kingdom.

Neak Ta: Articulating the Boundaries

3 Neak Ta

1

Articulating the Boundaries The neak ta in Cambodia have changed over time from being the main purveyor of death and exceptional power into good Buddhists upholding moral precepts. —Alain Forest, Histoire Religieuse Du Cambodge Neak Ta connects to Buddhism because we use the tools and the language of Buddhism to communicate, but they are different—they are older. —Village woman, twenty-one years old In the previous chapters, I presented the interactions between space and movement, between trail-making, road-building, and the social projects that bring both into being. Feet, hooves, plows, and wheels carve grooves in the earth. This is not just movement but also appropriation and encounter. For the majority Khmer in Sambok Dung, neak ta articulate the agreement of dwelling. Before clearing land for homes and fields in this forested landscape, families introduce themselves and state their intentions to the lord of the land, maja tuk maja day (literally Owner/ Master of the Water and the Land). Accompanied by clear statement of intent and a promise to take care and to take only as much as they need, aspiring residents interpolate neak ta into their social space. They call on power and they hope for protection, both by and from power. Small huts, ctum,1 in front of village homes testify to this original and ongoing agreement between the community and the elements of water and land from which it grows (figures 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, and 3.4) Neak ta are entities of the elements, owners of the elements, perhaps the elements themselves, known by many names across Monsoon Asia, and associated with access to resources, health, prosperity, and justice. In this register, neak ta Endnotes for this chapter begin on page 81.

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Figures 3.1–3.2. Huts for maja tuk maja day in front of homes, photographs by the author.

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Figure 3.3. Hut for maja tuk maja day at the house, photograph by the author.

are also entangled with the histories of village ancestors and national heroes. Also called lok ta in Cambodia, meaning honored grandparent, or arak (guardian or protector), and maja tuk maja day (Owner of the Water and the Land). The term neak ta translates best as “Ancient Ones,” and alternating with lok ta was used most often in Sambok Dung.2 An ubiquitous feature of the physical and cosmological landscape in Cambodia, today neak ta inhabit a realm that modern statecraft attempts to render obsolete, part of the same secularizing process through

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which Buddhism pushes nonhuman social actors toward superstition. Currently, neak ta are understood to be sasana boran (the ancient religion, aw, sāsanā purān) and/or sasana Brahman (Brahmanism). Paul Mus suggests this entity constitutes a universally recognized early “form of religion” and is a manifestation, a “divinization,” of the productive “energies of the soil” (1933: 10). Understood by scholars to occupy a place between religion and politics (Forest 1991, 2012), and also between the soil, the forest, and the village (Ang 1995, 2000), neak ta disrupt and transverse classificatory systems. In another piece (Work 2019), I critique Mus and the centuries of social productions that connect neak ta with religion, arguing that neak ta is neither spirit nor religion. In the same piece, I follow Mus and others to discuss how they are manifestations of chthonic energies that have been “trapped,” as Michael Taussig (1997: 185) suggests, in attempts to harness ubiquitous circulations of energy and direct them toward “stately signs.” Situating neak ta as first and foremost an economic and political force, the subjugation of which legitimized the founding of the Khmer empire and whose relegation to “religion” was necessary under the modern secular state (Work 2019), I proceed here to analyze neak ta through the lens of “religion.” This operation opens a space where the remarkable persistence of “superstition,” often found at the very heart of both “religion” and “politics,” can be understood as a logical and rational possibility for social formations. By first disentangling elemental forces (referred to here as neak ta) from the human category of “religion,” I work toward an idea of history that cuts through the debris of empire. Human society, politics, and science are far older than the imperial civilization to which they are attributed (Sahlins 2017; Wengrow and Graeber 2015), and engagements with chthonic energies and the rhythm of life and death seem to be part of that deep history (Hocart 1953; Munn 1996; Mus 1933; Taussig 1997). Mus suggests that the founding interaction between powerful humans and the “energies” they engage gives rise to the entire pantheon of divinities, ghosts, and spirits. The stories of history and religion wherein this pantheon resides can be read as intricate myths to obscure the reciprocal relationship between empire and the elemental forces that sustain it. In this chapter, I will explore how the impossibility of such detachment presents itself in the lives and habits of villagers carving out a dwelling space from the forest. In chapter 1, I introduced Mary Louise Pratt’s (2008) notion of the “contact zone” and discussed how it reveals the insecurities of empire and the “obsessive need” to present and represent the other as always the other. This work of division and classification obscures the fictional foundation of hierarchy and especially the reciprocity upon which it is based. Only recently have scholars stopped worrying about the persistence of socalled animist practices alongside major religions (Spiro 1978; Tambiah 1970) and started to examine the threads of power that weave through these hybrid

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systems (Guillou 2017a; McDaniel 2011). I will focus here on neak ta, but all the “spirits” that Mus suggests emerge at their divination, create a contact zone that demonstrates the obsession to deny both origins and reciprocity. This is not only a contact zone, but also a bridge, in Heidegger’s sense, that extends into deep history and gathers together the power of the land, water, forests, and fields with the lives of subsistence farmers. This further gathers the imperial projects of kings and their priests (Forest 1991; Guillou 2017b), as well as the contemporary processes of religion-making and development (Rist 2008; Masuzawa 2005). The particular stories I relate here focus on the persistence of chthonic power that radiates across social, “religious,” and environmental activities, blurring any kind of actual boundary (High 2006). A boundary is established “only by saying what crosses it,” and close inspection reveals that which crosses was always there (Certeau 1984a: 128; see also Edwards 2008a). The power of maja tuk maja day was present when people arrived to dwell in this place. No one knew particular names or histories, but neak ta presence was a fact and people understood themselves to be crossing into uncharted territory. Empirically inextricable from Buddhism, but segregated categorically, neak ta persist through particular social relationships connected to resource use, health, prosperity, and humility. Guido Sprenger (2017b) suggests that part of the persistence of so-called animist understandings of the world comes from their cosmological flexibility. This is absolutely the case, and the way that neak ta fit neatly within Buddhist frameworks attests to this. The data I present (see also Work 2019) pushes the question of persistence further to grapple with not only the cosmological circulation of neak ta, but also the physical energetic circulation, entangled with presence and connectivity. Flexibility is certainly an important element, but persistence may also be intimately tied to the energetic forces that exist in the water and the land. Weak bureaucracies of both state and religious hierarchies defined the historical moment when people in Sambok Dung encountered neak ta. They did not come to settle as a group but as a collection of individual nodes of extraction to enter into precarious relationships with the yet-unknown but ever-present energies of the territory. In this environment, people cleared land with the tacit permission of the Owner of the Water and the Land to whom they made offerings. Engagements with neak ta under these circumstances are neither religion nor religious despite their classification as such. The claim I develop (Work 2019), and will further explore below, is that this is an economic relationship, a social relationship of care and respect. The founding principles are power and protection (see also Tannenbaum 1987). Cultivating social relationships with chthonic energies is a means of accessing power, and also a means of protecting oneself from that power. At the intersection of resource access and extraction, and the reproduction of social life, this is a political relationship mediated by technology.

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In other writing (Work, forthcoming, b), I explore the technological aspects of this political relationship in the Cambodian context (see Tannenbaum 1987; Taussig 2003 for more on this notion). The stories I collected and understand about neak ta and their social position express sentiments about ownership, caretaking, power, and protection that are also expressed by highland shifting cultivators and forest hunter-gatherers (see also Swift and Cock 2015; Work 2018, 2019). These qualities are also connected with founder and ancestor cults across Southeast Asia. Land was cleared and offerings made, but in Sambok Dung, this was ad hoc and decentralized. It was only later that villagers were called together by neak ta to build huts and make communal offerings, there were no human ancestors here and no village founder. The data I present complicates the narrative of founding ancestors persistent throughout Southeast Asia, India, and China. Other studies give glimpses into the fraught space between ancestor, founder, and earth (Århem and Sprenger 2016; Tannenbaum and Kammerer 2003), and this treatment situates neak ta directly into the land. Neak ta, the chthonic sovereigns with whom the king made his territorial contract (Work 2017, 2019), is not a human ancestor. This enriches the story that connects the Owner of the Land to Buddhism and the power of death and fecundity it claims to control (Davis 2016). Hundreds of years of scholarship and practice connecting these economic and political entities to the fictional category of religion, must, however, be excavated. This entails a monumental decolonization of modern scholarship. As part of that effort, this chapter examines neak ta through the lens of religion in the social context of an ethnographic encounter at the edge of the forest. I begin by describing the relationship between chthonic power and religion mediated through state-making activities and purifications. From there, I introduce neak ta in Sambok Dung amid various social entanglements, including Buddhism, and provide theoretical discussions about the power of parami and the invention of Brahminism. Behind this discussion is the space, movement, and rhythms of dwelling already discussed, and to that foundation, I add some active ­engagements with ontology-building classificatory systems.

Chthonic Power and the Invention of Religion The Owner of the Water and the Land sits at the center of a number of ontological transformations across Southeast Asia. Paul Mus describes this territorial spirit of the land as “the fecundity latent in the earth, productive of fruits, harvests and cattle, which constitutes the real substance of the god of the soil” that is “divinized” through human action (1933: 10–11). Divinization marks a boundary of human encounter, when a powerful individual (shaman, warrior, priest, king, etc.) mediates an engagement with soil energies that are sovereign over territories. Mus finds that “[t]he locality itself is a god” (1933: 11), a notion

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that entraps water, minerals, and soil into social and ancestral relationships with human communities across Monsoon Asia (Århem and Sprenger 2016) and beyond (la Cadena 2015; Munn 1973; Viveiros de Castro 2012). The profundity of this insight can get lost in academic efforts at classification attempting to describe the ways that belief create reality, which is to say, the “ontological effects” of belief. Mus’s suggestion that this was an original “form of religion” not “purely and simply” definable as “animism” (1933: 10–11) in a text that so explicitly connects these divinized entities to state formations is perhaps a product of the ontological effects of belief in his time. All nonhuman agency in Mus’ time was classified as superstition and mystification, Tomoko Masuzawa traces colonial obsessions in Western academia to first search for the origins of religion, and then to bring previously pagan and idolatrous beliefs into the sphere of Western influence as “world religions” (2005). In strange mimesis, contemporary scholars continue with classificatory gymnastics to include previously excluded systems of “belief.” Beliefs in and relationships with animated elements, for example, are often referred to as animism, but as Mus pointed out so many years ago, animism is more than it seems (see also Descola 2013; Descola, Godbout, and Luley 2013). I am not concerned here with describing classificatory boundaries, but rather in clearing the debris that sticks to classifications to expose the tissue that connects chthonic energies to other projects of social power. In other work, I follow the traces attaching the Lord of the Land to the foundations of Cambodia’s ancient kingdom, the contemporary juridical structures, and to the economic processes of subsistence and accumulation (Work 2017, 2019). These processes of governance, justice, and economics are entangled through neak ta with social and ecological health and productivity, caretaking, and appropriate human comportment. In a provocative essay, Nicola Tannenbaum discusses Shan tattooing practices whose efficacy hinges on comportment. Tattoos are not at all magical, but are practical technical excursions into the acquisition of power/protection. “People interact with powerful beings by seeking shelter within their power . . . there is an underlying element of fear in all these interactions” (Tannenbaum 1987: 704). It is this fear that upholds a system of governance in which personal health, access to resources, and ecosystem services are all mediated by the energies of water and the land and accessed by proper comportment. In a recent treatment of ancient kinship, David Graeber and Marshal Sahlins note that even without kings, humans have political systems governed by a variety of “metapersons” endowed with life-and-death powers over human populations. These “cosmic polities” and the “magical” techniques they engender are currently understood as religion (Graeber and Sahlins 2017: 25).

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Tracing the phenomenon of divine kings, Sahlins provides intimate details that show early jurisdictional splits between invading “kings” and the “lords of the soil” in which the kings have power over life and death, and the owner of the soil is responsible for the growth and well-being of the village (MacGaffey 1986: 182, cited in Sahlins 2017b: 188). They find, that “in every case, sovereign power . . . is held by humans only insofar as it is an embodiment, extension, refraction or delegate of metahuman beings” (Graeber 2017: 397). These institutions of divine kingship, in which the king’s right to govern is wrested from its cosmo-political elemental ground, eventually emerged as empires controlled by force (Graeber 2017: 463). One important element of this shift is the emergence of universal “religions.” What I begin to explore here is how this shift attaches the Lord of the Land and the “pantheon of spirits” at the local level to those of sovereign systems beyond the soil. What makes Cambodia such an interesting case is that the sovereign entities of the soil were entangled with cosmic deities first from the Vedic traditions of India and then later the cosmic trappings of the Buddha, with long gaps of imperial weakness in between. The divinization of the very human Siddhartha Gautama is beyond the scope of this chapter, but is an important element of the story of sovereignty and religion. For now, I make some brief points about the transition to Buddhism in Khmer historiography. The first is that while there is evidence of Buddhist elements blended with the Indic iconography of Khmer kings long before Jayavarman VII (Giteau 1969; Sanderson 2003), things changed with an explicitly Buddhist orientation to kingship. The reign of the first Khmer Buddhist king saw the greatest territorial expansion of the empire, and it also created the first institutions toward humanitarian and social goals (Thompson 2004b). Buddhist temples played an important role both the administration and expansion of the empire (Hawixbrock 1998). Alain Forest traces the progression through which the king appropriates the elemental power over life, death, and fecundity, and the temple accepts the offerings previously designated to ancestors and ­elements (Forest 1991). This is consistent with Graeber’s argument that adopting the tenants of popular movements, like Buddhism, was a necessary companion to the rapacious and expanding state (Graeber 2011: 23–50). It is also significant that the death of Jayavarman VII was followed by decline and the eventual collapse of the Khmer empire, and Theravada Buddhism emerged as the source of cosmic legitimization for subsequent attempts to consolidate sovereign power.3 Scholars of the relationship between neak ta, Buddhism, and the king are clear about the blurred boundaries between these entities. In his study of the relationship between the king’s power and those of the spirit, Alain Forest (1991) shows the progression from the Angkorean period, where Indic gods sat directly on top of neak ta, to the post-Angkorean period where neak ta maintained their identities but were in service to the king. In both cases, the king claims power over life

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and death as well as control of the territory, its inhabitants, and its resources. The addition of Buddhist temples played an important role in extending the king’s influence beyond the limited territory of chthonic sovereigns (Forest 1991: 192), and the Buddhist monks took explicit control over managing the dead (Davis 2016). Forest (1991) speculates that Buddhism’s deep connection to the chthonic traditions of ancestors and neak ta is what kept it in place during the years of upheaval between kingdoms, and today, under the sway of the secular state, they have changed from the “main purveyor of death and exceptional power into good Buddhists” (Forest 2012: 196). But they remain as part of the everyday landscapes of subsistence across the world, and I will proceed to tell you of my experience with chthonic energy at the edge of the forest.

Meeting Lok Ta It was a late afternoon in September 2009 when I finally made it to the village to begin my fieldwork. I went directly to the home of the family I arranged to live with, dropped my bags, and was saying hello, when Yay Som, the matron of the house, announced she was taking me to meet lok ta. They all nodded and waved us off, returning to their conversation about the rice and the lack of rain. The woman who lived next door, Yay Go, came along with us and Yute, Som’s threeyear-old grandson. We walked down the dirt road about twenty paces and turned onto a cart path, and again onto a trail that ran along the edge of the plowed, unplanted rice fields. Som walked briskly along the trail, the rest of us followed behind. While we walked I asked Yay Go about our little outing: starting with, who is lok ta? “Our neak ta,” she answered. “Lok ta Beung Komnap. Lok ta protects all of us in this place and we need to introduce you, so you will be protected too. You don’t know our ways and we don’t want lok ta to be angry if you do something wrong!” Something wrong? Go chuckled at my discomfort and grabbed me around the shoulders. “Don’t worry little sister,” she said. “Lok ta just likes to know who’s here!” The possible transgressions against the delicate sensibilities of neak ta will be discussed below, the point I want to make here is the way that engagements with these nonhuman arbiters of justice are at once important encounters with social and physical ramifications—like possible illness or death delivered at the whim of maja tuk maja day—and banal everyday events. No one at the house considered it terribly important that we were going to visit lok ta and they just waved us along. Meeting with lok ta was my first “event” in Sambok Dung and when we arrived at the hut (figure 3.4), Som set down her basket and proceeded to arrange the offerings.

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Figure 3.4. Three generations of huts for Lok Ta Beung Komnap, photograph by the author.

When she had everything prepared,4 she lit one large and two small candles inside the hut and from the large candle she lit fifteen incense sticks, five for each of us three women in attendance. Yute passed out the burning incense sticks and Som said this prayer: Lok ta, please give us good health and happiness and keep misfortune from us. Lok ta, protect my daughter and son-in-law, who are on the road traveling here now, and keep us all in the house safe and happy. Especially younger sister Courtney who came here from far away, protect her like one of our siblings and guide her study of Buddhism. Bring us happiness, lok ta, we honor you and have brought you chicken, fruit, and tea. We, your grandchildren, pray for prosperity, lok ta . . . We make these offerings to you so you will be happy and will keep us all happy and healthy. (Yay Som, in her fifties) It was important that we go immediately to visit lok ta and get me situated in the village. When we went back to the house and dinner was served, Som took a few fingers full of each dish on a spoon and carried them over to the hut for the maja tuk maja day in front of the house (figure 3.3) and put the food in the little bowls: no prayer, no incense, and no special gesture save placing the food.

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During dinner, I asked about lok ta. The people who sat around the food were all first generation inhabitants of the region and I wanted to know why they built the ctum at that particular place. The obviousness of the answer in local terms rendered the question esoteric and obscure. “What do you mean, why?” My companions invoked the palpable power of the place. Ta Dum said, “You can feel the parami when you walk there. It makes the hair stand on my arms!” Others told stories of miraculous healings, of water buffalo lost and found, and of streaking light traveling at certain times toward Phnom Ta Oh or toward the forest and the Cardamom Mountains. People also told of illness and accidents that befell those who failed to respect lok ta’s rules. I asked about these rules with many people in the village, and the following paragraph provides the collection of infractions and injunctions I gathered. There is no fighting or bad-mouthing each other,5 no clearing land or taking resources without asking, no swearing or disrespectful behavior in the forest or around lok ta’s places, and no taking more than you said you would. Lok ta should be informed when you leave the village and when you return, consultations before large business dealings are advised, and offerings in the event of illness or other misfortune are common, especially if medicine was ineffective or if someone knows they transgressed the above rules. That year malaria was stronger than ever before, but most people falling ill were involved in the informal timber trade, and many said this was lok ta. All these stories confirmed the presence of power and are consistent with broader regional interpretations of this entity’s attributes and legal structures (Ang 1986; Århem and Sprenger 2016; Đõˆ 2003; Forest 1992; Holt 2009). During the first conversation about neak ta, I learned the story of Lok Ta Beung Komnap (Grandfather of the Lake of Buried Treasure). This is the story: the owner of this lake caused gold and silver to rise from the water and all who came to collect the riches received an equal share. People settled in this area; they began to grow rice and to raise families and they honored the lake that provided their wealth. Then one powerful man desired the treasure of his neighbor and stole his gold. The success of this greedy man inspired other powerful people to overrun their neighbors, stealing their treasure. This made the lake angry and all the gold and silver once provided freely sank to the bottom (see Work 2019 for a fuller analysis). Komnap is a common name for powerful places and entities associated with both power and treasure around Cambodia. For all my interlocutors, lok ta was already part of village social life when they arrived and no one could answer my question of origins, but at each questioning I was provided with another miraculous event and came to know each of the three lok ta sites in the village. I learned nothing, however, of how people first became aware of the power at the individual places. Months later, I met Yay Ren, who remembered when they built the first ctum for Lok Ta Beung Komnap. She told me:

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Lok ta told Ta Nao to come and make offerings . . . it was in a dream . . . we were clearing fields and fighting wild pigs then; the place was nothing but forest. Ta Nao told us about the dream, with the fresh water spring, the tree, and the marsh ground. No one here knew, so we went to ask the fortune-teller’s advice. Then we came to find the place and make offerings where the water spreads from the roots of the tree. Later we built a ctum next to the tree and you can see we keep improving the space. (Yay Ren, female, in her sixties) All the other stories I eventually collected of the three named and propitiated neak ta in Sambok Dung involved dream interactions. This is significant. Only in the postwar era in Cambodia have researchers encountered Khmer Buddhist rice farmers cutting new villages from the forest (see also Arensen 2012). In more established villages, neak ta was always already there and both villagers and researchers described this as an ancestor or village founder (Ang 1986; Forest 1992; Porée-Maspero 1962). In this village, we find the unmistakable presence of neak ta in the land, socially engaged with the desire for power and protection with no reference to dead humans or to village founders, but explicitly connected to elements of the landscape. Lok Ta Beung Komnap (Grandfather of the lake of buried treasure) is a fresh water spring under an ancient tree. Lok Ta Oh (Grandfather Stream) is the mountain called Phnom Ta Oh, and Lok Ta Gum Lok Yay Tia (Grandfather Revenge and Grandmother Duck), is in a field at the base of the tallest tree. This last, Grandfather Revenge and Grandmother Duck, could be human ancestors, as the area along the railroad tracks was inhabited before the wars, but no one remembered. Human remains play an important role in communications with the earth (Guillou 2014), but it is not a part of this story.6 What is significant here is that none of these sites were initiated by local inhabitants, but were called into being by the elements themselves—through dreams. Fulfilling my quest for origins helped me finally understand why no one answered my question directly. It was not relevant. There is no origin of neak ta, only encounter (see Work 2019), a fact that was not extraordinary for my friends in Sambok Dung. Sometimes lok ta is an ancestor and sometimes a mountain. Before, it was more dangerous and only people with merit [`anak mān bunya (neak mien bun)—discussed in chapter 5] could cut the forest to make a village. That’s the ancestor, lok ta. Neak ta are everywhere in the forest, and if we aren’t careful, one will make us sick. That’s why we have to be so careful. That’s why we ask permission here before we clear the land. We don’t want lok ta to be angry and punish us. People have accidents or get sick when arak gets angry. Wherever we are, when we walk there or want to settle

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here, neak ta is there, we never know. So, we are always careful! (Khmer farmer, male, in his fifties) People walk through their world prepared for encounter. Neak ta are the original and powerful elements of the land that engage the residents in their territory. They are explicitly concerned with respecting resources, offerings in return for subsistence, and harmony-enhancing behavior. In Sambok Dung, all villagers are the children and grandchildren of lok ta, and the honored grandparents also insist upon congeniality and sociality among them. Each neak ta specifically requested sociality; in the case of Lok Ta Oh, the initial offering was made by a barren young woman, whose husband was invited in a dream by lok ta to make an offering at the designated location. When the baby was born, the people built a hut and held a large celebration. The other two neak ta simply made themselves and their desires known: they both wanted parties and offerings and are pleased by the food, music, and dancing. Yay Grim told this story: We just cleared our first rice field when they called us to come [to] larng neak ta [aw, loeng`anak tā, meaning “to raise the Ancient Ones”]. It was our first planting season; the others were here longer, but we happily joined the others to ask lok ta for a good harvest . . . We all made food . . . we had the drums and after we ate, everyone started dancing. I never danced before and didn’t know how, but when they pulled me into the circle I knew just what to do. Hong too, [referring to her sister-in-law sitting next to her, who nodded] she started dancing too. We just knew all the steps then, I had never done it, but I knew all the steps like I had always known them . . . we danced all of us together. We were so happy and danced into the night. . . It was like lok ta wanted us to dance, all of us . . . It was lok ta that taught us. . . That’s parami, that’s lok ta that taught us. I get chills remembering it!

Theoretical Interlude: On Parami The energy of lok ta is the circulating force of parami described in chapter 1. There are important aspects of the term parami so intimately understood by villagers, which connects the Owner of the Water and the Land to the power of Buddhism, the king, the land, and to the lives and histories of the Cambodian people. This contact zone blossoms with the insecurities of empire and its various hierarchal formations. Some of these I have outlined above, but parami deals especially with the problem of power, protection, and the perfection necessary to achieve both. This tangled knot takes particular turns across Southeast Asia, which I only begin to untangle here, starting with an ethnographic moment

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before I went to Cambodia in a conversation with a Khmer Buddhist monk in Minnesota. He was the head monk at a small-town temple that recently purchased land and moved from a two-story, single-family house to build a “proper” temple on ten acres of land on the edge of town. As part of the many building projects going on at this temple, a community member erected three little huts on poles at different locations around the grounds. When I asked what these were, the monk was dismissive and said, “That’s not Buddhism. It’s superstition, Brahminism.” His reaction surprised me, but after much back and forth questioning about the dreams that induced the man to build the huts and the nonexistence of whatever sent the dreams, the monk said, “It is not the Master of the Land he senses, it is thamabal.” The term thamabal comes from the Pali language of Buddhist scripture, and was described to me as part of attipol (aw, iddhibal), which, again from the Pali, is effective, universal power associated with miracles. Thamabal is energy; it can be known. The monk told me, “Thamabal is attipol that is in this world with us. It is what scientists measure, what monks control in magic, and what creates the rain when villagers pray.” This last sentence exposes the contact zone where secular modernity meets the power upon which all life stands and exemplifies Talal Asad’s observation that by finding the “essence of religion,” we are invited to “separate it conceptually from the domain of power” (Asad 1993a: 116). Separation is certainly at play, an elementary part of the contact zone, but there is also connection, a sort of inseparability between human projects and the elements from which they emerge. Sometimes, potent places that entangle chthonic energies, kings, and priests are called konlieng mien attipol (aw, kanlaẹn. mān iddibal) this can be interpreted word for word as “places which have influence” (Guillou 2017a: 4), but I suggest the term attipol works here in the register of “unknowable power,” used to refer to the power of maja tuk maja day, also referred to as parami. Buddhism does not deny chthonic power, but attempts to situate it as mundane and worldly power. In a Buddhist world, the Owner of the Water and the Land is the most powerful entity in the world of desire but is still on a transformative journey through the world of birth and rebirth (san.sāra). Neak ta that work with spirit mediums are often called kru parami (Bertrand 2001), meaning perfected teacher. It took many questions and clarifications of each seemingly new use of this term to understand how the circulating, unknowable, universal energy of parami, is also the parami (perfections) recited by the monks at every holy day (thngai sel), and the abstract name by which mediums refer to the entities that teach and possess them. Academic production on the subject of parami also circles, clarifies, classifies, and grapples with the polyvalence of the term. Ang Chouléan suggests that the term contains a “certain confusion” (1986: 225) with no rigid taxonomy

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and shifting boundaries. Anne Yvonne Guillou (2017a) finds the term connected explicitly to kingship in Thailand (see also Johnson 2017) and, in her field site, to specific places associated with Khleang Muang (aw, Ghlāṃn. Mīoen), the most famous neak ta in Cambodia history, whose self-sacrifice raised an army of the dead to defeat the Thai in a decisive victory for the Khmer king.7 The term meuang comes from the Thai, meaning a city with a defensive wall, which typically has a pillar at its center, much like the pillars still found in indigenous villages across the region that ground the earth entity into place (Ang 2004). The place belonging to Khleang Muang was a termite mound before the Khmer Rouge, and the surrounding landscape is “strewn with . . . potent places, most of them related to each other” (Guillou 2017a: 2). All are connected explicitly to either to Buddhism or the monarchy, but “most of the time anak tā [sic] or other spirits . . . are also involved, as well as natural elements like big old trees, termite mounds and animals.” In my field site, not far from Guillou’s but in a less continuously populated area, the situation is exactly the opposite. All the potent places are associated with natural elements and connections to Buddhism or political power are supplemental. Regardless of their affiliation, all the places are infused with parami. Khleang Muang also has a site in Sambok Dung, explained below, and Phnom Ta Oh “has lots of parami”, a phrase that meant alternately “the mountain is the source of great power” or “many benevolent entities are present in the mountain.” Parami means “perfection,” specifically, the ten perfections cultivated by Bodhisattva to achieve nirvana. François Bizot notes the term’s transformation from “perfection” to “the power emanating from statues of the Buddha,” power that came directly from the guardian spirit of the village (Bizot 1994: 104) over which Buddhist statues are often placed (Ang 1990; Forest 1991; Hayashi 2003). Guillou (2017b: 4) suggests there is a different spelling and different pronunciation for the two terms, one that means “power” and one that means “perfection” with the origin of their split unknown. My origin theory is that during the many years of weak imperial influence between the fall of Angkor and the rise of the colonial state, neak ta re-appropriated Buddhist and royal claims to parami, which had never been anything but the ever-present circulating energy of the fecund earth.

Neak ta and Religion Neak ta reappropriates Buddhism just as it reappropriated Brahmanism before it (Pou 2002). When modernist purifications took hold of Khmer intellectuals (Hansen 2007), land energy, esoteric practices, and spirits became the ancient religion sasana boran (Marston 2008b) and Brahmanic superstition. This was a powerful transformation of practice and thought, but there were a few key terms could not be cleansed. Parami is one of them.

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The old religion, Brahmanism, connects powerful practices to the Brahmin priests of the divine king that “owe almost nothing to the scholarly Brahmanism of Indic and Indological studies” (Davis 2016: 15–16), but are deeply associated with techniques of power and protection, and provocatively associated with the practices of indigenous highlanders (Swift and Cock 2015). Erik Davis’s treatment of Buddhism and its “deathpower” will be treated below, here I stay with Masuzawa, who ventured into the now-maligned scholarly quest for the origin of religion (1993), and found things that could “threaten the very configuration of positions that legitimates ‘Western man’s’ occupation in science/knowledge” (1993: 5, italics original). She finds not only repetition without origin (28) in which the mythical past is repeated in ritual (163) and truth distorted by mythical words (69), but also sustained social relationships with ancestors, which are typically “personified aspects of the environment” that created the world (Munn 1973: 23; cited in Masuzawa 1993: 170). This complicates the relationship between human ancestors and elemental energies, and it adds important dimensions to Asad’s critique that religion is a thing disconnected from earthly, and thus political, power (1993b: 112). My objective is to connect this separation beyond the secular state, which I suggest is just the most recent severing brought by multiple imperial tides. In support of this, let me present first the ceremony to consecrate the sacred boundary sima of a Buddhist temple (Davis 2016; Giteau 1969; Harris 2010; Work forthcoming, a), which presents a clear contact zone between the Buddhist temple, the elemental powers, and the king. The ceremony opens with offerings to the Naga King, another manifestation of the Master of the Water and the Land, and proceeds by dropping nine stones shaped like heads upon which blood is often dripped at the four cardinal and four intercardinal points around the perimeter of the building. The ninth stone, Indra’s stake (indrakhila)—sometimes represented as a stake and not a stone—is the king. Together the group of stones “pin down, or hold fast, a subterranean body” and Indra’s stake marks its navel (Harris 2010: 223). This stake, I suggest, is also the pillar of the meuang in Thai cities, which most likely comes from regional practices to found village spirits. Wooden stakes are buried deep into the ground at the cardinal points to anchor the neak ta at the site of the village with one stake driven into its navel (Ang 2004), which becomes the navel of the village. Radiating back out, it becomes the pillar at the center of the king’s territory, the stake at the center of the Buddhist temple, and now, unmoored by the secular state, becomes the Brahmanism that so doggedly hangs on to a Cambodian Buddhism that actually needs it to justify its existence (Davis 2016: 215–48). Erik Davis makes a subtle point by showing how powerful elements of the ancient religion are captured and controlled by Buddhist monks who also, and importantly, manage the dead through cremation. I suggest this managing of the

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dead, and especially cremation, de-territorializes the ancestors and disconnects the community from the power of elemental forces. Religion may be disconnected from earthly power, but people in Sambok Dung were not deeply concerned with religious doctrine, and neak ta in Sambok Dung are inextricable from daily life. “Lok ta, your grandchildren are here . . . please protect us and let us prosper.” As the primary purveyor of power and protection in the territorial, agricultural, and social cycle of villagers, maja tuk maja day is sui generis, present already and always. Émile Durkheim’s naturalist ontology led him to suggest it was “religion” that was sui generis (2008 [1912]), but the idea of a universal belief in the “sacred” or the “holy” may have been manufactured by “religion” (McCutcheon 1997: 259–82) as it does not match with empirical studies. I proceed here to provide data from this village that emerged from a place that was “nothing but forest” in 1995 and now sports all the hallmarks of a typical Cambodian village.

Spatial Production In chapter 1, I discussed the production of space in the village as a whole. In this section, I will situate neak ta into the story of place-making and discuss the fine-tuned interactions between elements, individuals, insects, and temples through which parami circulates in this particular location. Phnom Ta Oh, under which sits the Buddhist temple, has a lot of parami. This is one of the reasons they asked the land-holder to gift it to the village. Before they built the temple on the land, there was a ctum on the dry flat ground where Buddhist monks would gather when villagers wanted to perform an important ceremony. They might call monks for a holy day, or to perform a special blessing ceremony, but also to say a blessing before one or both of the seasonal celebrations dedicated to Lok Ta Oh, the larng neak ta (raising the Ancient Ones) and the phnom srou (rice mountain, a harvest festival). Today, both these celebrations for lok ta are held at the temple. This, people say, is easier than holding it right at the ctum on the other side of the mountain, and no one sees a problem with this arrangement. In fact, there is a certain pleasure every time they use the temple grounds, which through their dedication (and the work of two powerful urban monks, discussed more fully in chapter 5) has been growing steadily since they built the first kut to house their monk. Having monks was a good thing for people, and making offerings to lok ta at the temple was both practical and good for everyone. In addition, the hut for Lok Ta Oh was not a terribly comfortable place for a big celebration. Offerings at this hut are made primarily by those whose rice fields are in proximity, and also by those who need special assistance. The place is just a hut at the base of the mountain, where lok ta is represented by three stones at the back of the hut (figure 3.5).

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Figure 3.5. Lok Ta Oh, the three stones represent the family, photograph by the author.

The hut for Lok Ta Gum Yay Tia is quite fancy by local standards, and this is at the request of the Ancient Ones who live there. Ta Ren received the dream from the neak ta telling him they were there and wanted him to build them a hut and throw them party. The next season, after providing a good harvest, they requested stairs and a window (see Work 2019). The Ancient Ones are represented by two stones at the back of the hut. Despite the ornate construction (figure 3.6), celebrations for Lok Ta Gum Lok Yay Tia were not at the hut, but were held in the lumber yard of a powerful soldier next to the railroad tracks. The ctum of Lok Ta Beung Komnap is a modest ground-level concrete structure (figure 3.4), inside lok ta is represented as a Chinese earth deity (figure 3.7) (suggestively similar to neak ta, see Work 2019; Mus (1933) 1975). Unlike the other two locations, Lok Ta Beung Komnap has a designated area for celebrations. There are also three generations of huts under the tree that bear witness to consistent renovation and the transformation of neak ta space to follow elite trends toward concrete construction. The oldest hut looks like other neak ta huts: made of wood, raised off the ground on stilts, three walls with a thatch or tin roof. The new concrete hut sits directly on the ground. Its construction, along with a retaining wall around the spring, and the foundation and roof for holding celebrations are the collective work of nearby residents. One man specializes in concrete, another is a builder, and people collected money to build up the site. Many celebrations are held at this place, and like the temple, people are pleased

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Figure 3.6. Ta Gum Yay Tia’s fancy hut, photograph by the author.

Figure 3.7. Lok Ta Beung Komnap as Chinese earth deity, photograph by the author.

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with the developments, which bear witness to their collective prosperity and solidarity. There is a sense of “becoming” associated with all these places. People talked about how these changes made a “proper” village. “Lok ta is happy to have a proper place for celebrations,” and more often, “now with the temple, it’s just like a real village.” These places are at once the reproduction of an ideal space and the creation of something new and particular for individual spaces. The appearance of neak ta in this area followed human habitation, with the first hut built under the mountain where the first settlers landed. These are the furthest settlements to the east of the railroad tracks. Lok Ta Gum Yay Tia are in the new settlements west of the railroad, and also appeared after people began to appropriate territory in the area. The same is true of Lok Ta Beung Komnap, whose fresh-water spring and three generations of huts sit almost exactly halfway between Lok Ta Oh and Lok Ta Gum Yay Tia. Each site is associated with an element of nature, the mountain, the spring, and the tree, and they do serve the communities who live and work nearby in a loose territory (see Work 2019), but these places are not village centers. In Sambok Dung, and in most Khmer Buddhist regions, the places for neak ta are not associated with stakes to hold the energy in the ground at the navel of the village, the central stake is in the temple as will be explained below. But the Ancient Ones are always physically represented in either statue or stone. Ang Chouléan (2000) cites this as unique among the multitude of nonhuman elements in Khmer social life. There is something important here in terms of spatial productions and both ancient and modern claims to territory. Neak ta are territorial entities, which is part of what entangles them with the resource claims of ancient kings. In Davis’s (2016) discussion of the sima ceremony before which there is an offering to Krung Vali, the naga king, who is the Master of the Water and the Land (Guthrie 2004). The naga, and neak ta work in the same register, and through ritual and myth, the naga ceded territory to the kings. Then again through the sima ritual and the stories of the Buddha, both naga and the king cede to the Buddha (Davis 2016: 127–29). Any kind of extraction or habitation in the territory requires establishing a social relationship with this Master, the naga, the neak ta. The power of the king and the protection of the Buddha are stacked on top of each other and each upon the original foundation of chthonic energies. Then, the modern state sits atop these: all growing things, including modern capitalism, are part of this circulating dynamic of bio-geo energy. In the agricultural context, the energy circulates along the rhythms of the larng neak ta and the phnom srou ceremonies performed at the beginning and end of the agricultural cycle, respectively. Through these performances, Ang suggests, “villagers re-confirm their subordination to the spirit and the spirit’s agreement to provide protection and rains for them” (Ang 1986). This is a fraught relationship

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that at once grounds the cycle of life and death and is at the foundation of human claims to territorial access. Stories and rites bring it into the human social world where it becomes embroiled in everyday acts of subsistence and extraordinary acts of appropriation that have nothing to do with the “supernatural,” but e­ verything to do with power.

Theoretical Interlude: On Religion Davis claims that Buddhism makes Brahminism (2016: 215). With this claim, he continues to cultivate the “problem” of classification and what to do with non-canonical entities that persist alongside and inside universal religions (Work 2017). This classificatory conundrum haunts the field of academic production, from the colonial era to the present (Cœdès 1911; Davis 2016). Stanley Tambiah (1970) was progressive in his day to suggest that the spirit cults and Buddhism made up “one single field in contemporary life.” But for him, it signaled “the historical processes by which Buddhism came to terms with indigenous religions in its march outwards from India” (1970: 377). “Religion” was expected to dispel spirits, but was forced instead to come to terms with them. In some ways, Davis continues this tradition, albeit with more nuance because of his explicit focus on power. Davis suggests that Buddhism in contemporary Cambodia had to make the label of Brahminism a way to both define itself in opposition to it, but also to exercise domination over it (2016: 219–20; see also Picard 2017). This goes a long way toward addressing the construction of classificatory systems and the creation of world religions themselves (Asad 1993b; Masuzawa 2005). When the imperial tide ebbs, however, it looks like the elements reclaim sovereignty, and Buddhist parami becomes again what it always was: chthonic energy. This is a connection through which the energetic power of the soil reclaims what the Buddhist monastic discipline attempts to control. Neak ta emerged in Sambok Dung as part of an interaction between human and chthonic energies, as independently instigated communications originating from the land itself, before there was either a village chief or a Buddhist monk. I suggest that human communications with neak ta and a world alive with circulating energy is what makes Buddhism, Brahmanism, and the kings they support. Perhaps ancient social relationships with this power, at the contact zone of geo and bio, shapes the ontological realities possible at the “divinization” of the soil (see Work 2019). Religion becomes a category of thought only because power-laden relationships with water and land have long been cultivated. Religion is imposed upon these entities just as it is imposed upon humans, and Cambodian neak ta, like their human interlocutors, adopt Brahmanist or Buddhist stories, rituals, and attributes accordingly through time.

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This communication makes particular kinds of “persons” and changes the connectivity of neak ta to local economies (Sprenger 2017a), but these “persons” are ancient and will likely remain when Buddhism fades away. Buddhist rites are extra, contingent on monks; offerings to the Owner of the Water and the Land are eternal. Interestingly, Davis (2016) does not see this as the local producing the universal, but harkens back to Tambiah to suggest that “Buddhism makes Brahminism” attributing agency to the universal and noting with a hint of incredulity that “[i]n fact, Buddhism seems to need spirits to manage” (242). Guido Sprenger suggests that “persons, both human and non-human, are constituted through relationships and communication” that establish connectivity to particular domains of life (Sprenger 2017a, 2017b). Domination is a kind of relationship, and Buddhism manages “spirits” by connecting itself to them while disconnecting them from other particular relationships. This is an emerging contact zone where competing ontologies, one in which the human acts upon a potentially animate nature, as the monk acts upon the spirits in Davis’s observations (also suggested by the monk I introduced above), and another in which the human interacts with an animated landscape, which is how my friends in Sambok Dung described the situation (see also Descola and Pálsson 1996; Haraway 1991; Latour 1993; Viveiros de Castro 2004). Mario Blaser uses the term “political ontology” to describe both the field of study and “the power-laden negotiations involved in bringing into being the entities that make up a particular world or ontology” (Blaser 2009: 10). These entities do not need to be brought into being. They are already present, but their connectivity is obscured by other claims to power and authority. Buddhism, modern science, and the market disrupt their connectivity and revalue them as “Brahminism” or “superstition.” This reclassification started with stories and rituals of kings and gods, continued through the Buddha, and into the modern state. Sprenger notes how such shifts “differentiate contexts or historical phases” (Sprenger 2017b: 96; see also Davis 2016: 219), and this is my position as well. We are dealing here with human systems of classification, not with any kind of reality per se. The work of classification is not, however, trivial. The political ontologies of Buddhism, science, and the market circumscribe the connectivity of the elemental energies of the water and the land that have been classified into characters like Lok Ta Beung Komnap. The Buddhist world of nineteenth-century Cambodia, the purified Buddhism of the twentieth century, and the secular landscape of the contemporary world are all at play in the above mentioned monk’s discomfort with neak ta huts in the Minnesota landscape. The monk did not object to the idea of controllable power, but of the intentional nonhuman agency implied in the dreams of the ignorant man. This haunts the void that Masuzawa finds at the origin of religion.

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Neak ta and Buddhism Ethnographically, that haunting is visible in what appears to be a reciprocal relationship between neak ta and Buddhism in Sambok Dung. Henri Lefebvre notes that “a presence survives and imposes itself by introducing a rhythm” (2004: 23). I present here the rhythms and intimate social productions that attend to the problem of attipol, with neak ta emerging from the landscape as the primary arbiter of resource access, of sickness, health, and social cohesion. This supports a move to view the relationship between neak ta and Buddhism through the lens of the Master of the Water and the Land, entangling both the conundrum of classification and the presence of effective power. Before building the Buddhist temple, segregating that piece of land for temple use, the monks, like the Buddhist rice farmers, must ask permission from the Master of the Water and the Land. What the temple does through the sima ceremony, that the villagers do not do, is to bind that power inside the Buddhist cosmology of moral transformation—in this move the entity of the land (the naga) is staked into place with the power of the king, and both are bound within the vihear (aw, vihāra), the sacralized building of the temple complex. In the interstitial zone of Sambok Dung, this relationship was under construction. As the physical and bureaucratic elements of Buddhism were reconnecting to the lives of subsistence farmers, there was a temple, but there was no sacralized vihear (figure 3.8). The physical emplacement of Buddhism, via temple and monks, into the annual cycle of village life exposes categorical boundaries as they are crossed by a Buddhism that is intimately entwined with the fecund energies of the soil. Both the temple and the monks are used in the service of offerings and gratitude directed toward the Ancient Ones. Exactly as Tambiah suggests, this is a fluid field: Buddhist monks give blessings at neak ta ceremonies, neak ta are invited to attend Buddhist celebrations, and Buddhist holy day offerings are regularly made at household ctum. There is an unselfconscious interchangeability and reciprocity that entangles the mutual moral development of Buddhist power and the protections of the Ancient Ones. This moral development is importantly tied to the productions of space, and people expressed clear sentiments of moving toward an imagined collection of proper spaces to make a “real” village. Buddhist temples and monks are deeply tied up in those aspirations, while neak ta are not at all aspirational. The Ancient Ones are always and already an intrinsic part of the community. “We are all Buddhist,” was a phrase I often heard, and in Sambok Dung, the named and propitiated neak ta are, obviously, Buddhist. Their influence over social relationships is often understood in terms of particular Buddhist precepts (sel) such as not stealing and not talking badly about others. Even though, unlike

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Figure 3.8. Line drawing of the temple complex (note vihear at the top of the hill), original artwork by Isaiah Parker, published with permission.

monks, neak ta enjoy rice whiskey and participate in, even facilitate, the dancing, neak ta are pleased to have Buddhist monks at their celebrations. As social actors, neak ta participate in village activities, like drinking, dancing, sharing offerings with monks, and thinking about holding Buddhist precepts (kān sel). I discuss individual relationships with the precepts in chapter 5, but here I present the ways that lok ta is at once the wielder of amoral elemental power, a facilitator of moral transformation, and instrumental in the transformation of offerings into merit for human inhabitants of the territory. “Lok Ta Oh drinks tea and prefers vegetables, but Lok Ta Beung Komnap likes whiskey and chicken” (Khmer male farmer, in his forties). This was common knowledge, and was associated with Lok Ta Oh’s intimate relationship with the temple. Purified notions do inform Cambodian Buddhist practice to varying degrees across the country (Harris 2008; Kobayashi 2005; Marston 2008b), but there is little uniformity with regard to the place of neak ta or other nonhuman entities—especially among non-specialists. Most of my interlocutors suggested

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that lok ta preferred to have the monks give a blessing before larng neak ta and phnom srou. Only one member of the temple association expressed his purified views when he told me, “If there are no monks, I don’t go [to the agricultural celebrations].” Significantly, Ta Ren, who looks after Ta Gum Yay Tia was a little sad when he told me they would not have monks at the larng neak ta, as the transport and offerings were too costly. “Ta Gum Yay Tia will be happy though,” he said. “The long drum troupe will come play for the cost of food and wine.” Having monks at neak ta celebrations is important, but is in no way necessary. On the other hand, most villagers would not imagine a Buddhism in which neak ta did not participate. Even the well-educated, French-speaking adjar was careful to take proper care of neak ta within all ceremonies. He understood them to be separate, but insisted that both be attended to. Beyond formal rituals, neak ta are also present in Buddhist spaces. For ­example, in conjunction with laying the foundation for the vihear, the community erected three ctum for neak ta sitting to the north, east, and west of the concrete slab and tin roof structure (figure 3.9). One is for Lok Ta Oh, one for Khleang Muang, and one for Lok Yay Krape Samot (Honored Grandmother Who Sips the Sea, lok yāy krepa samutra). These ctum are explicitly for neak ta to attend celebrations at vat Phnom Ta Oh.

Figure 3.9. Line drawing of neak ta huts surrounding the coming vihear, original artwork by Isaiah Parker, published with permission.

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We build the huts for neak ta to come join us in our celebration. We place the baisay so they have someplace to rest . . . We have good hearts and call them here; we all want to make merit together . . . We know what they like and take care of them. They protect us from disease . . . bring the rains and help the rice bring a good harvest. The newest ctum, next to the vihear is for the famous neak ta of Pursat province introduced above, Khleang Muang, whose parami infuses the surrounding landscape. The army captain spirit is famous throughout Cambodia, with a flexible history and great mobility. Always connected with Pursat province, Khleang Muang is also an actor in California, and in Kampot (Porée-Maspero 1961; Yamada 2004). Another army captain, with a strikingly similar story but a different name was also reported in Preah Vihear during recent skirmishes with the Thai (field visit, 2009; see also Davis 2016: 243). The army captain as neak ta has an explicitly human origin, but an extraordinary human with attipol and the power to do miracles. The other two neak ta at the temple are nonhuman. Honored Grandmother Who Sips the Sea, Lok Yay Krape Samot, “ensures that water from the sea fills the clouds and spreads evenly and constantly into the rice fields,” and Lok Ta Oh, Grandfather Stream, whom the reader has met, also has a place for visiting the temple. There are no statues or stone representations in these huts, because the neak ta only visits the top of this hill, but each ctum has one baisay (aw, pāysī), a ritual object that serves as a temporary resting place for non-corporeal entities to enter human celebrations (figure 3.10). Human generosity and caretaking of neak ta and ancestors accumulates merit for both actors through both purposeful and ad hoc reinterpretations of Buddhist doctrine. The three neak ta are honored with incense, offerings, and music performed by the local long-drum troupe during the big Buddhist celebrations in the village especially the New Year, Robe Offering, and Hungry Ghost ceremonies (cūl chnām thmī, kathin, and Pchum Bind respectively). This is not part of any Buddhist ritual structure, nor does it adhere to particular doctrinal practices. Nonetheless the production of Buddhist space in Sambok Dung includes a spot where the circulating rhythm of neak ta energies can come and visit at the site of a future vihear, a sort of harbinger of the sima to come. Also significant, but beyond the scope here, is that the three most important celebrations of the Cambodian yearly cycle are the result of doctrinal manipulations, through which the new year, ancestor worship, and gaining merit by providing worldly goods for monks have been justified through time. Forest (1991) notes that Buddhism accepts the offerings previously directed toward lok ta and other important nonhuman entities, as well as those offered to the king, in the Khmer social system. Accepting offerings for the king was straightforward, but justifying entitlement to the offerings for lok ta required some manipulation by monks through time.

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Figure 3.10. Baisay at Lok Ta Oh’s visiting hut at the not-yet vihear, photograph by the author.

In Sri Lanka, Richard Gombrich excavates the written record through which monks and ancestors can both be ‘fed’ by temple offerings (Gombrich 1971: 212–13). In this revision, what is transferred to the Ancient Ones is not the food or the care, which obviously goes to the monk, but rather the merit associated with the act of giving, transubstantiated through the pure body of the monk. In this way, merit becomes an appropriate and useful offering to entities who are also understood to need sustenance. This is a slippery space, however, and neak ta exceeds the boundaries of both the monk and the temple, despite the social, monastic, and academic energy exerted to bring them into the same field of signification. One young woman in her twenties described it perfectly when she said: “Neak ta connect to Buddhism because we use the tools and the language of Buddhism to communicate, but they are different—they are older. They come from the time before and we need relationships with them, but the only language we know now comes from Buddhism.” With this spontaneous answer to my query, she makes an important and subtle point about the relationship between neak ta and Buddhism. Social relationships with neak ta are important and do not change or go away, but are mediated and reclassified by Buddhism. In a lovely twist to the story of monastic manipulation of offerings noted by Gombrich above, people in Sambok Dung often make offerings of fruit, water/tea, and incense at their household ctum on the holy days of the Buddhist calendar. People say they are too poor or too busy to attend to the monks at the temple,

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and that offerings to maja tuk maja day do the same work. “We can make merit right here at the house, we respect the monks and lok ta right here.” This is a fluid field of moral transformation and merit-making through respect, reciprocity, and caretaking within a dynamic field of classificatory systems. Of course, not every villager makes offerings on the holy days, only those interested in cultivating power and protection through social relationships and caretaking as will be discussed further in chapter 5. “The offerings are important, they show we care and are not greedy. When I give to lok ta here at my home, it’s just like an offering at the temple” (Khmer female farmer, in her fifties). And this researcher could not help but notice that once the bananas sit on the household ctum through the holy day—the family eats them.

Morality and Care Relationships between powerful neak ta and humans adhere to Khmer Buddhist understandings of the morally transformative nature of hierarchal relationships (Davis 2012; Hansen 2007). This is a bit slippery because the power of neak ta is at once dangerous and benevolent—amoral. But at the same time, staying out of harm’s way in social relationships with powerful elemental forces requires particular types of comportment that look suspiciously like morality. Today, this can also be understood in terms of the Buddhist virtues, sel, but the injunction exists with or without Buddhism. This social harmony-enhancing edict was first on the list of important things in all my discussions with people about lok ta. In indigenous villages I have since visited, social harmony is associated with village lok ta, while the arak in the forest are not concerned with village harmony. These “guardians” demand respect for all the entities in their territories, and are associated with enmity more than benevolence, especially in the context of accumulative extraction (Århem and Sprenger 2016; Fiskesjö 2017). In Sambok Dung, maja tuk maja day is at once the benevolent caretaker and the dangerous arbiter of life and death at the edge of the forest. I will demonstrate this by describing one private neak ta ceremony in which the woman gathered her close friends and family to help her ask lok ta for assistance to cure her sick children. “Lok ta,” she called over the offerings she prepared, “your grandchildren are sick, please come. I have delicious food for you and we brought the drums. Come and enjoy; come make merit and let the grandchildren be well.” It is in this spirit of caretaking and moral transformation that people cajole neak ta to join in their social lives. Behind this woman’s supplication of the benevolent grandfather, is her awareness of the rules of extraction to which she may not always attend, and the punishments this entails. People suggested it was her logging prowess that made her children sick. She had power and held all the symbolic capital of a modern and civilized person: Her clothes were new, her daughter urban educated,

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and her house stood three meters off the ground on concrete pillars. But she did not have protection. It is not to the morality of lok ta that she appeals, nor is it to the Owner of the Water and the Land as omnipotent and circulating parami, it is rather to the presence of power and to the protection it entails by successfully cultivating the social relationship of unequal power. “We never know if lok ta hears us, but if we don’t ask, we will not get help. We are only small. Lok ta can come and help us. We offer food and music to make any anger with us become pity, to let lok ta help us” (Khmer farmer, male, in his sixties). Spirits are not neutral, “they bear the marks of history,” as Robert Orsi (2005: 7) suggests, noting how “the spirit” gets “caught up and implicated in struggles on earth.” The woman was asking lok ta to be complicit in and forgiving of her transgressions.

Conclusion Neak ta is of the forest and of the village, of kings, of Buddhism and bureaucracy, of agriculture and merit-making, and of subsistence, the family, and rain. Social relationships with the Owner of the Water and the Land are foundational to economic activity, resource access, and good health. Despite their obvious political and economic foundations, academic production recognizes them primarily in the context of Buddhism, of religion, which misrepresents their social position (Work 2019). In the context of secular modernity, the priests who used to wield power over the kings slipped into the designated category of religion, explicitly separated from the king, who now owns the land. With that secular split, all the chthonic energies that fueled (and still fuel) empire were classified into religion, superstitious and primitive elements that dangle like unwieldy appendages, which religions (and states) across the globe attempt to contain and purify. This chapter shows how neak ta does not represent an original religion onto which Buddhism was either superimposed or by which Buddhism was incorporated, but rather an original political and economic structure. Buddhism is an appendage of the ancient state that attempts to control this disruptive social force. Deeply social and connected in kinship relations to local people, neak ta are not of human origin. These are not ancestors, but human ancestors become entangled with the chthonic energy of the Ancient Ones by clearing the forest and founding the village. Before clearing fields and homesteads, people call out to maja tuk maja day, and they establish ctum for ongoing household offerings. The fact of maja tuk maja day infusing all life is nothing special, just part of the fabric of everyday life that is infused with dangerous and effective power. That dreams are vehicles of communication with neak ta is also unremarkable. Dreams are understood to hold important information, and dreams from the land entwine with a collection of stories and experiences through which appropriate action is

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decided. While none of this is remarkable for the inhabitants of Sambok Dung, had there been no dreams, there would have been no huts for neak ta at the places we find them. Neak ta is neither supernatural nor sacred, but is, I suggest, elemental. The ideas of supernatural or sacred are but classifications, forged in the kiln of academic production freed from the binding power of priests. The priests do bind, but that which is bound was present before and remains after the flow of priestly influence. We can see this ebb and flow when we look through the lens of spatial productions in this village—a place that emerged from the forest through individual nodes of extraction. Through time, those individual nodes were brought together to have a party through explicit dream instructions. In the interstitial zone of Sambok Dung, an adoptive and caretaking relationship is cultivated with the powerful Owner of the Land and the Ancient Ones who never stopped being part of the morally infused physical world. The story is not one of great cosmic significance but rather of local subsistence. In this context, social relationships remain tinged with the possibility of malice and caprice, but they cultivate and offer kinship and care (Forest 2012: 196; P”unn 1999, 1:186; Pou and Ang 1987: 66). Buddhism does make Brahminism, and if people stop interacting with the Owner of the Water and the Land, the social relationships will cease. But that does not seem to mean that the energetic force classified in Cambodia as neak ta disappears. In Sambok Dung, the chthonic sovereign was there before the people and will remain after they are gone. Social relationships with humans are not necessary for neak ta existence, but my friends in Sambok Dung understood clearly that for their existence, they needed social relationships with maja tuk maja day. As the state strengthens and the roads and markets of empire move deeper into people’s lives, lok ta loses connectivity to key relationships, especially with resources and the state, but the Owner of the Water and the Land never seems to go away.

Notes 1. This word translates literally as “hut.” It refers both to the impermanent structures built in the forest and fields for sheltered rest and short-term living, and the small structures for neak ta that house representations and offerings. 2. The term lok ta is most often used to refer to a specific entity, while neak ta refers to the abstract category of such entities and is used in the same register as arak or maja tuk maja day. 3. It must be noted, although it is not significant for this discussion, that Jayavarman VII adopted Mahayana Buddhism and Theravada Buddhism was dominant in the middle period after the fall of Angkor. 4. She prepared tobacco wrapped in betel leaves, a chicken neck (part of the special dinner being prepared at the house), orange Fanta, green tea (lok ta also drinks wine, but Yay Som does not!), and various fruits.

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5. Later work with indigenous communities expands this injunction to include all members of the biological community, insects, plants, and other animals. 6. The conflation of ancestors with elements, requires deeper excavation. None in Sambok Dung were concerned with the distinction, and work from other places in the world suggests that elements are ancestors, in the Australian Aboriginal Dreamtime, for example. This is an important archeology of knowledge, and there is every reason to believe that everywhere academics encounter “ancestors,” they may have been blinded by their own classificatory system and assumed this entity of “ancestor” was of human origin. Of course, burial grounds are powerful places (Bloch and Parry 1982), but there is a contact zone here that has not been fully excavated. 7. Anne Yvonne Guillou has done the most work excavating this term, but a proper archeology in texts and archives across Theravada Southeast Asia has yet to be done.

The Cham: History, Memory, and Practice

4 The Cham

1

History, Memory, and Practice History vacillates between two poles. On the one hand, it refers to a practice, hence to a reality; on the other, it is a closed discourse, a text that organizes and concludes a mode of intelligibility. —Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History So you want to know about the history of us that are the Islamic race? You want to know what we of the Cham race do. We pray five times each day. We only eat certain foods, foods that have been offered and properly slaughtered. —Tun Di, village elder, Sambok Dung The landscape of the ancient Champa kingdom is littered with potent places that embroil the power of kings with that of the land and remain in use in the present era (Schweyer 2017). This history notwithstanding, the Cham of Sambok Dung do not cultivate social relationships with the land, and all profess to have left behind their respect for ancestors and shrines of the saints associated with the land. This leaving behind has an oscillating history throughout Muslim-influenced Southeast Asia (Féo 2004; Pemberton 1994), and a good study of its recent reentry into Cambodia has not yet been done (one could begin with Bruckmayr 2019; Pérez Pereiro 2012; Stock 2004). I offer here only pieces of stories I gathered from the Cham in Sambok Dung, who came from the forested edge of Pursat Province and from the shores of the Tonle Sap River that flows from the Mekong through Kandal, Kompong Chhnang, and Pursat Provinces. Their history speaks to intimate and disparate tendrils of empire, that wind through generations of woodcutters and cattle dealers, rice farmers and fisherfolk. Endnotes for this chapter begin on page 105.

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Map 4.1. Mainland Southeast Asia with details of ancient Champa state, map created by Gunkarta. Wikimedia Commons, published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

With origins in the Champa Kingdom, an early Brahmanic state once powerful in the region today known as central Vietnam (map 4.1), the history of the diasporic Cham movement started around the ninth century and is thick with the detritus of empires past and present. Stories of conquest and diaspora, of ancient Brahmanic kings and Islamic conversion inform the scholarly literature on Cambodia’s Cham, but not the stories that my friends in Sambok Dung tell about themselves. I hear about Khmer Rouge displacements and the subsequent search for land, of depleted and now growing families, of marginalization by the Khmer state, of growing rice, fishing, and communal labor. People also talk a great deal about the global flows of capital and ideas from international and diasporic Islamic aid, which constructs current Islamic practice and new prayer houses, while facilitating access to resources and education. Global Islam is the most recent in a long line of imperial tides that washed into the lives of the people

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I met and, like the others, will leave its mark long after collapse. For now, its global flow of symbols and capital offers avenues to resources, group identity, and forms of protection that many Cham minorities in Cambodia welcome. These are deeply social and intentional actions as people enter relationships of unequal power and trade the power of the saints for international education, buildings for worship, and community support. The Cham are not passive victims of imperial tides. On the contrary, with each incoming tide, they drag their desires along and grab onto new systems of domination, power, and protection. It is not religion that changes in these engagements but social embeddedness and practice, with new containers for identity and belonging and new vectors of power and protection. In the twelfth to fourteenth centuries, the Champa kingdom was a powerful rival, an adversary from which both Khmer and Viet rulers had to protect themselves, and then to wash over in typical mandala expansion (Lockhart 2011;Vickery 2005). In French colonial scholarship, the Cham are defeated and displaced victims, remnants of the once great Champa kingdom (Aymonier 1920). They traveled over the mountains, across the plains, and up the rivers from the peninsular coastline to settle predominantly in Cambodia. They transplanted skills as boat builders, traders, and fishermen and found a niche as butchers in a Buddhist kingdom (Scupin 1995). They settled along the riverbanks of the Mekong and Sap Rivers, following a leader who took refuge under the Khmer king and created a social landscape that persists into the present. The Cham are linked to the past of this region and to the routes of trade and ideas that continue to flow across it. This is a globalized moment, but at the time of my research contemporary rural Cambodia was a media scarce environment. Arjun Appadurai’s (1996) notion that the images of visual media are the primary vectors for globalized imaginaries has no purchase here. Nonetheless, the never-ending planetary movement of people, capital, trade, and ideas reaches and informs village imaginaries today just as in empires past. Visions of the modern world come to the Cham I know along the gossip road, and via Muslim merit-makers and proselytizers who help revive and develop Islam in Cambodia. They come from Phnom Penh, Malaysia, and the Middle East to build mosques, sponsor holy-day feasts, and help fund transnational pilgrimage and education. Images of the global empire arrive in Sambok Dung via individual persons, with new depictions of Islamic tradition. They are worldly and wealthy, and through them, rural Cham become modern subjects connected to the larger movements of people and ideas. When I visited with and interviewed the Cham in Sambok Dung, people told me about their difficult lives today, the hardships of village life, the encroachments of government concessions,1 and how their neighborhood of Cham worked together to plant and harvest everyone’s fields, to raise the road for rice, and to build the prayer house. Addressing my surprise at the claim they had built the

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bright new concrete prayer house themselves, one man said, “Yes, we built it, the old one [a small wooden hut on stilts]; the new one was built by them . . . the international Islamic organizations [`angkar Islam `antarajāti].”2 The reciprocal world of this man moved from the tight network of neighborhood work groups directly out to the international community. “Those who have, always give to those who don’t. That is how the Islamic people do it” (Cham woman, aged fiftytwo). This notion of charity often opened our conversations to religion, and when I had to directly ask, the stories of poverty, displacement, and minority status took a different tone. The Cham in Cambodia today are connected; they have some powerful representatives in the government’s Ministry of Cults and Religion and receive funding from international Islamic aid programs. This connection to global flows is at once material and immaterial. None in Sambok Dung traveled along these global circuits and few were literate, but visits by proselytizers who confidently teach “correct” Islamic practice and the small prayer house they built enfold villagers into the ideas of global Islam and ground that practice in a concrete structure. “We, brothers and sisters in Islam, we take care of each other” was a common phrase when describing this relationship. But their stories of themselves did not return to Champa. My notes had nothing about the story of Champa, diaspora, or of the spirit practices that filled the literature and the Khmer discourse about the Cham (Pérez Pereiro 2012; Stock 2016; Trankell 2003). So, in the interest of finding what was missing, I went looking for these stories. What I found will facilitate a discussion that self-consciously replicates and critically invokes the deep history of Champa rendered through scholarly productions of the past and the present to which I will add an outline of twentieth and twenty-first century history and academic scholarship, and will conclude by putting people’s words about their current lives into conversation with other’s constructions of Cham history.

Theoretical Interlude: On History The decidedly academic and imperial nature of my pursuit of Cham history beyond what was freely offered deserves a brief digression. In The Writing of History, Michel de Certeau provokes the creator of history to consider how the “history of ideas . . . manifests the unconscious of historians, or rather that of the group to which they belong” (Certeau 1988: 29). Pierre Bourdieu adds to that the admonition that it is the scholarly work of construction and representation that “makes up part of the reality of the state” (Bourdieu 1999: 55). Reflecting on the historical reproductions created at my request by my Cham friends in Sambok Dung, I notice first the way they manifest elements of contemporary life expressed through each particular telling of the same history and reveal the

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concerns of individual historians through the versions of the story each recounts. In addition to the multiple state apparatuses discussed in chapter 2, transnational religion opens this chapter to another type of state formation that, unlike an NGO or development donor, makes space for identity and belonging that colors the stories people tell. Within the stories offered at my request were the subtle outlines of an existing framework of imperial fascination that goes along with kings, religions, and their respective projects of extraction and purification and the boundary-marking required of each. Bourdieu sees the social scientist as an actor whose scholarly works address, illuminate, critique, or advance state projects, producing the “performative discourse on the state which, under the guise of saying what the state is, caused the state to come into being” (1999: 71). The stories I solicited and heard, tapped into the unconscious concerns of local historians who told them and were depicted in terms of various imperial logics: the strictures of Islamic practice, the magic of Champa’s kings, and the contemporary concerns of economic encroachment and globally dispersed citizenship. As I compared the homespun stories of my interlocutors to the available knowledge produced in royal chronicles, colonial era productions, and contemporary historiography, they began to take on certain concerns of the present system of politically organized subjection (Abrams 1988)—especially with regard to territory, religious identification, and education. They also leaned toward the productive interactions between people and state effects visible in the “fragmented globality” of the contemporary moment, in which the national state of Cambodia does not really contain the identities of its Muslim population (Trouillot 2001: 129). Empire is co-produced, not only through the constructions of social scientists and historians, but also through local acts ensuring power and protection. From there, stories are told about the contact zone where empire meets the land and its people. As I move through the rest of the chapter, I present the stories people tell about themselves and their histories, and situate them within contemporary constructions of history.

The Stories In pursuit of the Cham “history” missing from my field journals, I went to visit my friend Slieman, one of the elders in the community and a very observant Muslim man. I chose him to answer my question of historical origins because he was a lively and respected character in the neighborhood. He was not a tuen, but he was well liked and articulate.3 I arrived with my assistant one morning and two of the village tuen, Tuen Tun Dī and Tuen Ja, were at his house drinking tea and visiting. I was happy to find them in their typical visiting mode and to have such a good representation of village wise men with whom to discuss this problem of history.

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I was warmly greeted and offering my host a package of tea, I sat down, and we traded gossip for a bit. After a little small talk, I asked Slieman if he could tell me the history of the Cham people in Cambodia. Slieman did not answer. Instead, the youngest in the group, Tun Dī, spoke up. So you want to know about the history of us that are the Islamic race [Janajāti Islām]? You want to know what we of the Cham race do. We pray five times each day. We only eat certain foods, foods that have been offered and properly slaughtered. We, husbands and wives, keep our homes clean and especially the area where we pray, at the mosque it is already clean, but in the home we must take care to clean it. . . . We don’t eat pork, mainly we eat the chickens that we raise here at the house. If you, my sister, came here visiting to share in a neighborly way [râp `ān] and brought me a chicken or had prepared food and brought it here to me, I couldn’t eat it. It must be prepared in the proper way. We hold the month of fasting, during which time we cannot eat or drink in the daytime, until 6 o’clock in the evening we cannot eat . . . We observe the birthday of Muhammad and the hajj. During these times, the wealthy come to make offerings to the poor. If we have money, we will go to Mecca, but those who have enough money also come here to give money to the poor. The Malaysians and the Kuwaitis come to help us during these celebrations to follow the rules of Islam and to help us and make merit. We went on like this for some time, with everyone joining in to explain the various observances of the year and the kinds of offerings they make and receive, which I already knew. After about forty minutes discussing rites and observances, I asked again about the history of the Cham, this time attempting a different tack to get us to the ancient history I was looking for. I asked about the Cham language and how long they have been using it. Again, Tun Dī answers. “We have spoken the Cham language since ancient times; since the times of the Kingdom of Champa.” I waited for elaboration, but had to ask another question: “Do you have any stories from this period?” “Stories from Champa? Yes, from the beginning the Cham had a country and a king. The Cham king had a Cham wife. Then a group of Yuan [Vietnamese] maidens came to make offerings to the king and the king took one of them as his wife. This was how the Cham kingdom fell from above the Yuan and had to run. They ran to all the countries, Kampuchea, China, Malaysia, India, and America.” He was going to end his story there, but the eldest, and frailest, of the group, Tuen Ja, chimed in and said:

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“There was a war. The Yuan king invaded Champa, saying, ‘Now that Yuan is the wife of Champa, we are all one country.’” Tun Dī breaks in to add: “Yuan had no king at this time, there was no country: there was only the king of China and the king of Champa. Yes, there was war and then they ran to the other countries and now there are Cham in all the countries, since the oldest times: in Kampuchea, in India, in America we have Cham.” He said this with finality, his story was over. This is the explanation. I wait, and then ask, “Why was there a war?” Tuen Ja comes in at this point to clarify the Vietnamese intention. “We had a war because the Yuan wanted Cham territory. When the Cham king married the Yuan maiden then they came. The Yuan invaded Champa and the Cham fell. The Cham king fell to the Yuan and the Cham had to run to other countries.” Tun Dī answered again. “Yes, this is how the Cham came to Kampuchea. They had no state and they ran.” Then I ask about the different types of Islamic practice we see in Cambodia today and how that came about. This is when my friend Slieman joined the discussion, he said: The Cham practiced only one kind of Islam in Champa: this is the Original Cham. If you’re asking about the old story, this is how it goes:   The Yuan came in a boat to the country of Champa and they asked the king for an island on which they could settle. The island was given and after a few generations they prospered with many children and had to spread from the island. The Yuan began to move into the country of Champa and the Cham King became enamored with one of the maidens. The girl was then sent to the king in tribute and he took her as his wife.   The girl begins to work magic [dhvoe `ampoe] on the king and make him sick. He gets sicker and sicker . . . they call many healers to no avail, the Yuan kru is called and says: ‘if you want to get well, you have to chop down the tree in the center of your garden in front of the royal palace.’ [This tree is the g’rek tree and is the legendary center of the Cham king’s power.] The king sends his soldiers to chop down the tree. They can’t. Finally, the king goes to chop the tree himself. The tree bleeds and cries out and then falls. The king then takes the tree and makes a boat of it and sails the boat to meet the Yuan king. He sails into a trap and has to cut off the head of his boat to escape. His army is fractured and the king runs alone through the woods, hiding in a well from the Yuan army. Spiders come and cover the mouth of the well with a thick web and the Yuan soldiers pass by many times before one hears a gecko cry at the spot of

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the well. The soldier cuts the web and finds the king, severs his head and brings it back to the Yuan king. The body and the head were dismembered, but did not die or rot. The king’s head searched for its body, which was also searching for the head. They were soon reunited and the king, newly animated, escaped through the mountains and the people of Champa fled to China, India, Malaysia, Kampuchea . . . In Kampuchea, they were given land and protection from the king, which is why there are more Cham in Kampuchea than in other countries. At that time, I was told, there was no Islam. Only the religion of the original Cham, also called Jahed, sasana Ta San, or sasana Imam San. At the end of our discussion Slieman makes an interesting comment: “We are all one people, all children of Adam, but some are older siblings and some are younger. The phnang are the oldest, the Asians are the middle child, and the Europeans are the youngest.” The term phnang in this context is a generic term that refers to indigenous people of the hill tribes that inhabit what is now Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand. With this comment, my friend Slieman disrupts the teleology of the state narrative even as his story enacts it. By using kinship terminology that explicitly represents hierarchal social order, he puts the “primitive” hill people at the top of the social order. But, his story shows how the Cham fled not to the mountains and the wisdom of their elder siblings; rather they fled to other states and settled in the largest numbers under a protective Buddhist king. The literature also suggests some ambivalence in the relationship between the hill people and the Cham. William Collins notes that when Champa fell, the royal treasures of the kingdom were distributed to locations in the highlands for safekeeping, where they remain protected by highland chiefs (1996; see also Noseworthy 2013). In a further twist, Arturo Pérez Pereiro followed a Chamorganized conversion campaign into the northeast highlands, where an isolated, non-Muslim, ethnically Cham community is being proselytized; at once ushered into the light of Islam and enacting the role of younger sibling to be brought into the fold by their cosmopolitan elders (2012: 70, 251). Pereiro encountered similar nostalgia with regard to the Imam San group, whose history and practice are valued by some converted Cham as “the original Cham people and their Champa traditions” (2012: 78). This theme comes up in the literature as well and seems to relate to both the close relationship that the Cham, and other Southeast Asia trading centers, shared with their highland neighbors, as well as a trend in global Islam to favor what Cynthia Mahmood calls “indigenous patterns of culture” (Mahmood 2012: 5). I might suggest that the conversion from and valorization of Champa traditions it is a bit of imperial nostalgia. What is visible in the other must be purged, but not lost.

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Making History The stories from the three Cham elders in Sambok Dung satisfied my imperial desire to classify and compare my data in light of the corpus of produced knowledge about Cham history, founding and recreating the established narrative in my own way. It also plays with history a bit as the tellers of the story pull the past into the present, and perhaps imaginatively alter the present through the telling. Using my power as the arbiter of narrative, I will arrange what I know of the local historians quoted above and use those personal histories to highlight the frontiers established and crossed in their production of a globalized history. Michel de Certeau suggests that the story is “delinquent”; it exists in the interstitial zones of structuring logics and separations, exposing the interacting subjects through the act of delimitation (Certeau 1984: 127–30). Supplementing the intimate stories my friends produced with my knowledge of their personal histories and adding this to the corpus of knowledge produced by academics and colonial masters, I will also attend to the structuring logic of empire made visible by the delinquent story. I am an interacting subject in this unfolding and the story above is, of course, situational: all the data I offer here was acquired using the Khmer language during informal visits at people’s homes and chance encounters and meetings in the neighborhood. At the time of the above conversation, I was a known entity at Slieman’s house and in the village in general, so the talk was open and friendly. But I always had my notepad and my tape recorder and this time we were talking about “History.” I will take a moment here to introduce my primary interlocutors and discuss the diversity of Islamic practice among them in light of what social scientists say about contemporary Islamic practice in Cambodia. The men in this group are all Cham and identify with the Kingdom of Champa that disintegrated finally in the nineteenth century. The eldest, Tuen Ja is a 75-year-old rice farmer whose family came to Sambok Dung from the neighboring village in Pursat Province in the late 1990s, claiming rice land from the newly quiet forest. The youngest, Tun Dī is fifty-eight and a fisherman whose family came from the Tonle Sap. Previously landless, they claimed concession land here in 2004, but keep their fishing boat on the river and take it to the lake in the dry season. Slieman is seventy-two and came to Sambok Dung from Phnom Penh with his forty-year-old Khmer wife in 2005. They claimed concession land as well, but live largely off his soldier’s pension: he fought for both Lon Nol and Hun Sen during their respective eras of military mobilization. They all pray five times a day and claim no relationship with ancestors, non-human entities, or power practices; the eldest, Tuen Ja, followed his parents to more conservative practice as a young man in the 1950s. The youngest, Tun Dī, was exposed to reformed practices as a parentless young man after Pol Pot along the river in Kompong Chhnang, he had always prayed five times a

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day, but his parents kept protective amulets and made offerings to their recently dead, practices he now leaves behind. Slieman also converted in the early 1980s from the Jahed tradition to more conservative practice through the influence of Malaysians offering alms in Phnom Penh. I will say more about conversions below, but continue here with more thorough descriptions of Islamic practice in Cambodia. Slieman was raised in the Jahed tradition, also known as the religion of Ta San or Imam San and his story of the fall of Champa closely resembles others I have heard from followers of Imam San. William Collins (1966) suggests that the term Jahed comes from the Arabic word zahid meaning pious, ascetic, and devout. It refers to the community’s orthodox stance in a Sufi style of Islam preached by the nineteenth-century leader Imam San. San forged close ties with the Khmer king at Oudong and was given a place for his mosque and subsequently his grave on Chetrya Mountain in Oudong. On this mountain, the bones of many Khmer kings rest in their chedi (Collins 1996: 37b) and the cult of the Cham kings is enacted each year (Trankell 2003). The Jahed speak Cham and Khmer and many maintain the Cham script. Tuen Ja and Tun Dī are both from the majority sect who self-identify as Cham. This group holds the reformed conservative practices of five daily prayers, circumcision, and Arabic recitation of the Qur’an when possible, but group practices can differ widely. The current state of “reformed” practice among Cambodia’s Cham reveals the traces of imperial impositions on religious practice that tie the Cham to Malay and Arabic Muslims through many generations. It is common in Cambodia for Cham to retain non-conservative traditions that vary from engaging in cults of powerful saints at their burial sites, to wearing amulets, and making offerings to personal ancestors.4 Others ascribe to more conservative practices like wearing the woman’s robe (purdha) and the man’s turban (imamah) and purging all power relationships beyond the Islamic god. They speak both Cham and Khmer, many speak and read Malay, and a few know Arabic. This places the storytellers in their subject positions according to the literature at hand, which unsurprisingly focuses on separation, classification, and delineation, which is never quite so clean on the ground. For my friends, the group identity as Cham and Muslim homogenized them, and people self-identified using the term junjiet cham (aw, janajāti chām). Junjiet translates as race. This term comes from the Pali meaning “birth” and through history encompassed multiple concepts, including ethnic identity and social status. It transformed in the early twentieth century to harmonize with the more codified colonial classifications of race, it now also designates nation and alignment with a political body, which magically folds into the notion of birth and ethnic origins (Edwards 2007: 12–15). The way the Cham use it today highlights Cham ethnicity and I suggest it retains its nationalist overtones when people tell me they are junjiet Islam. In this context,

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Islam retains its association to religious practice, but also signals attachment to Islam as a sovereignesque entity. The penchant for deep classification is not, however, salient among the Cham of Sambok Dung. They acknowledge educational differences and variations of Islamic practice, but consider themselves a cohesive group. In a personal communication, Pereiro recalls people laughing when he attempted to get specific Islamic group identity (like those I just trotted out to classify my interlocutors: Jahed and Cham); people simply insisted that they were Cham dhammatā (regular Cham).

Theoretical Interlude: On Globalization My story thus far foregrounds the fraught worlds of history created by academic production as much as by individual tellers of their own stories. This theme remains and will continue to help me excavate the imperial logics of historymaking that in the current era privilege the nostalgic gazing at kings and their archeological debris and the boundary marking of ethnicity and territory. From this vantage point, I discuss relations of power and protection between the Cham living in Cambodia and the ideas, practices, and the capital flows of transnational power. The strong influence of global Islam dominates much of the recent literature on the Cham of Cambodia, a product of its disruptive potential for other claims to sovereignty and control. For my interlocutors though, it strengthens their group identity and is an important means to access resources and education. Islamic authority among the Cham has always come from the outside, and the long linguistic and social roots of Cham relations with the maritime Malay entwine religious, political, and trade relationships that go back many generations, and take multiple forms (Bruckmayr 2019; Taylor 2007: 53–58). Influence from the Middle East is new in this most recent tide of the Islamic empire, stretching the lives of Sambok Dung villagers into wider global networks. Jonathan Friedman thinks of globalization not as an era, as many suggest, but a phase. Globalizing processes, he says, are “historical, not evolutionary” (2003: 2). Friedman points to periods of centralized accumulation and trade followed by decentralization and localization. This example from Sambok Dung shows how these are happening simultaneously. The Cambodian state is strengthening with the tide of development and democracy, but for marginalized Cham citizens it cannot contain them as ideological, social, and political communities. MichelRolph Trouillot describes this phenomenon in terms of a “fragmented globality” in which the national state is an insufficient container for the entities living within its boundaries (2001: 130). In the situation I describe here, this fragmentation makes a space for another node of an “imagined community” that provides resource access, power, and protection. In Sambok Dung, the global is sometimes present and sometimes not, but the Cham are not Cambodian—they are Cham,

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junjiet Islam—and their access to resources and education is a part of global flows of capital and ideas. The not-newness of this phenomenon must be kept always out front. Mission trips from Malaysia reached the market town north of Sambok Dung in the early to mid-1950s, in that period Tuen Ja says that villagers were encouraged to leave behind the shrines to the saints and stop the offerings to the dead. With uncanny mimesis, two large, concrete mosques were constructed to replace the thatch structures that had served the Cham in this rural region (see also Scupin 1995: 301–28). Global Islam did not return until 2004 when mosque constructions and reconstructions began again accompanied by renewed concern over modes of Muslim practice. This is what I mean by the metaphor of tides. Cham history, as told by themselves about themselves and as produced as an object of study, demonstrates the ebbs and flows of transnational connections and disconnections over time. The ideational flows of the globalized economy are certainly speeding things up, quickening the “glacial force of the habitus,” as Appadurai suggests (1996: 6). The imaginative constructions of social life, however, are in no way new, as Appadurai would have it, neither do they only travel along the mediated routes that he describes. I do not take issue with the very real way that mechanically produced images, imagined communities, and imaginaire created by the interplay of text and practice conspire to imagine the world into being (Anderson 2006; Appadurai 1996; Benjamin 1968a; Castoriadis 1997). What I question is the application of its mediated nature to all inhabitants of the global empire and the fictional smoothness of the suggestion that this is some new invention supplied by modernity. Such an act totalizes the “longer networks” of contemporary technology and misses not only that the network is “local at all points,” as Bruno Latour points out (1993: 117–20), but also that even without the network, the local is present and imagining the world with every foray into the forest and the fields. The longer networks of the current empire are not, however, a mere trifle and this particular tide of the transnational imaginary does run high. Multiple sites of imaginative world-making are attended by flows of capital that supply the imagery and groom potential consumers, “spreading individual liberty to areas that have been longing to embrace it for years” (Micklethwait and Wooldridge 2000: 336; see also Li 2007). I add this quote from Micklethwait and Wooldridge tongue in cheek because the individual liberty to embrace a purified form of global Islam is not at all what these authors had in mind with this statement; they were thinking of liberal democracy. Such slippage is emblematic of Trouillot’s notion of a “fragmented globality” in which the global production of desire has multiple nodes upon which it can be satisfied. The empire of liberal democracy and global capital, nicely described and vilified by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in their book Empire, highlights the

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smoothed-over tension between deterritorialized capital and the bounded striations of the physical and social fields enacted through modern sovereignty (2000). Despite their insights into the processes of empire, they seem to take as real the illusion of smoothness created by the longer networks of global capital and the mobilities they entail. For example, the suggestion that the “biopolitical control” devaluing labor affects all laborers in the same ways (Hardt and Negri 2000: 344) enhances the illusion of smoothness also cultivated by Appadurai’s mediascapes, which hold the key for all social imagining (1996: 34). Such suggestions read to me like products of the mediated imaginaire of modernity created by people who never leave the air conditioner far behind. The empire is always under construction, and incoming tides wash over existing structures through multiple mediums. The residents of Sambok Dung are semi-mobile subjects who have limited access to mediated forms of communication. They are loggers, subsistence farmers and fishers, who sometimes use car batteries to run a light or charge a cell phone. In this context, Cham identities are only lightly mediated through television or radio and the problem they describe is not that their labor is devalued, but that their access to land and resources is curtailed. As part of my critique of the smoothness of contemporary global forms, I attend to the messy contact zones at the boundaries of empire where, contrary to what globalization theorists suggest, the people maintain some of the means to their own production and the nationstate and nationalism seem to be quite salient, if insufficient. Hardt and Negri suggest that the strength of local agents of the state serves the ends of empire (2000: 342). This may be the case, but the ways that the informal power of local actors thwarts the decentralization agendas of global governance while enacting their own agendas on local populations suggests their continued salience in people’s lives (Beban, So, and Un 2017; Hughes and Un 2012; Ong 2012). My story shows the continued salience of the territorial state in terms of force, resource access, and distribution, but also the strength of the place-making initiatives of global Islam. In this moment, at the edge of the Cambodian forest, individuals and groups are connecting to particular identities not as part of an imaginative circus in which all things are possible, but with intentional moves that engender stability, resource access, and preserve salient identities. It also shows connection to rather than radical separation from the long history of empire to which people in this region have grown accustomed. A common theme in the literature on globalization is its Western origins. This is a myth that I suggest reveals the uncanny haunting of Western scholarly unconscious, as if by ignoring other imperial histories their influence can be erased. This smoothing of history goes hand in hand, I suggest, with the devaluing of non-Western global processes. Globalization should not be confounded by westernization (Duara 1995; Sen 2002), both because the conflation assumes a single node to a plural process and because it leaves non-Western forms of

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capital open for vilification. When we “brush history against the grain” as Walter Benjamin suggests we do (1968b: 257), we find the silenced bits of imperial debris, transformed by its continual smoothing. What I have presented thus far of imperial spread and global processes in the east not only confounds Eurocentric scholarship but also illuminates the new ways that the Cham of Cambodia identify with and attach to the imperial forms of global Islam that have long been at their disposal. The debris of the Islamic empire haunts much contemporary research that recounts with alarm the growing influence of global Islam among Cambodia’s Cham, as if the tyranny of democracy and development that engendered the United States’ war in Vietnam were not a concern. Benjamin Barber (1995) makes a productive comparison between jihad and McWorld along these lines, suggesting that they are both anarchic, mutually constitutive, and equally exploitative. My Cham interlocutors are being asked to conform to a purified practice of Islam and give up their place-based ancestor shrines, in exchange for which they will receive religious infrastructure and access to education. This also happens with Buddhists (Harris 2006), and both Cham and Buddhist are being asked by the global market to give up their land for subsistence farming in exchange for market infrastructure, access to market crop producing, and plantations and factories where they can sell their labor. The exploitation of both is apparent. Nonetheless, there is a very real desire the disenfranchised have for the material and ideational productions of imperial forms and also for their protection in acts of daily subsistence amid relationships of unequal power. Samuel Huntington famously suggests a “clash of civilizations” where the empire of development and democracy meets global Islam. A clash from which the coming world order must protect itself (Huntington 1996). The similarities between the various civilizations that Huntington presents seem, however, to outweigh the differences. I suggest warping Huntington’s idea of the clash to present something more like a civilizational marketplace, in which actors can choose to attach themselves to various forms of institutionalized domination. This is not necessarily new, especially in Southeast Asia where detaching from a bad king could be accomplished through a change of location (Wolters 1982), but typically involved attachment to another. This was the case with the Cham who fled Vietnamese rule to become subjects of the Khmer king rather than face assimilation. Of course the technological networks of today’s empire are wider and people are forced into choices; opting out of imperial domination is not really on the table. There is a homogenizing tenor to the choices of domination, despite the differences of dress and comportment. For the Cham in Sambok Dung, they have attached themselves to a source of power that enhances their material existence on the ground, fosters group identity, and alters their history.

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The Clash of Civilizations? The Cham history of imperial conquest, contact, and disruption mocks contemporary scholarship that marvels at the disjuncture and displacement of the current phase of globalization. There is some contestation about when and how the majority of Cham began to identify with Islam, but the globalizing processes of multiple expanding empires created a contact zone in which this identification was possible. My friend Slieman tells us that when the king fell, there was no Islam, only the religion of the original Cham. Scholars agree that the expanding Viet force that finally marked the fall of Vijaya gave rise to the first mass immigration to Cambodia (Aymonier 1920; Maspéro 1928; Vickery 2005), but William Collins also attributes to this period the large-scale conversion of the Northern Cham to Islam, citing as cause the rise of the Mughals in India and increased missionary and trade activities in the same era (1996: 7–8a). Rie Nakamura, however, finds Islamic influence in the area of northern Champa as early as the fourth century, well before their defeat at Vijaya (2000), and Anthony Reid cites Champa as the earliest Southeast Asian center of Islamic influence starting around the tenth century (1988). Regardless of the timeline, the globalizing tendencies of imperial formations unmoored residents in the Champa kingdom and sent them travelling into a region already filled with imperial movement and disjuncture. Once dispersed, many Cham settled along the rivers of Cambodia. Their routes of migration are unknown, but it is likely that they encountered the Malaysian communities that spread by that time along the coastlines of what is today the gulf of Thailand (Mutalib 1990: 6). Some scholars agree with Slieman and contend that the first wave of Cham migrants were not Muslim, but became Muslim when they met with the already established Muslim Malays in southern Cambodia (Maspéro 1928: 14–15), but the majority contend that the first migrants to Cambodia were already Muslim converts (Aymonier 1904; Dharma 1987; Phoeun 2003). All these assertions must be tempered by the fragmentary evidence of early Islamic influence on the Cambodian side, and as Collins points out, Islamic conversion in Cambodia was not an event, but rather “a long, slow process of cultural contact” (1996: 12a). The concern with Islamicity manifests the concerns of contemporary historians producing knowledge for the current empire, perhaps unconscious as Certeau suggests, but certainly at odds with the data created and compiled by imperial players during the era of disruption, which attended to issues of history, magical prowess, trade, territory, and power (Noseworthy 2011; Phoeun 1981). The long and slow process of cultural contact between the Cham, the Khmer, and the Muslims of Malaysia reached its height in the sixteenth century when the Cambodian Cham were acknowledged as an economic force in the region (Leclère 1914: 348). The significance of this era of powerful Cham traders remains in

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the word Kompong, the Cham word for trading port, used in three major central Cambodian provinces along the Mekong and Sap Rivers: Kompong Cham, Kompong Thom, and Kompong Chhnang. The conversion of the Khmer King Ramadhipati to Islam, becoming King Ibrahim in the seventeenth century, attests to the rising influence of Islam and the Cham in the region (Bruckmayr 2006). Malaysia was and remains the Southeast Asian center for the dissemination and interpretation of Islam. Many texts were translated from the Arabic and Persian into Malay (Ricci 2011: 50), and it is suggested that the final fall of the Champa kingdom at Panduranga in the nineteenth century was exacerbated by Malay missionaries. At the time, there was great Viet pressure on the Cham to culturally assimilate, and the missionaries who went to Panduranga lead a revolt that failed and brought about the final collapse of Champa (Bruckmayr 2006). Cham resistance to cultural assimilation reverberates in the colonial era and during the early years of Khmer Rouge influence in eastern Cambodia. But interestingly, Malaysian assimilations caused less discomfort, and many Cham sought refuge from Pol Pot in Malaysia, joining a small, but established and nationally recognized community of Cham. Since the fall of Pol Pot, the enlarged Malaysian community of Cham increased Malaysian influence among Cambodia’s Cham through efforts to rebuild religious infrastructure. None of my friends in Sambok Dung claimed Malay descent, but there is linguistic and archeological evidence for such a claim (personal communication, Lorraine Aragon). Cham population dispersal in Cambodia has changed little through the twentieth century. Even after the forced migrations of the Khmer Rouge, the Cham returned to natal villages and livelihoods along the Mekong and Sap rivers and self-segregated into groups reflecting historical practice. In this century, we have Cham all over the globe, as Tun Dī tells us, but in Cambodia they occupy the same territories as in generations past. Further, as discussed in chapter 1, current migrations and displacements seem to favor community cohesion rather than dispersal into the wider Khmer landscape, which serves to maintain rather than dissolve Cham territoriality and identity, disrupting again the rumored disjuncture of empire. In the colonial era, the Cham went from being regionally recognized as successful traders along the rivers of Cambodia to marginalization and disenfranchisement largely due to their resistance to French assimilationist maneuvers. The Cham minority were unwilling to send their children to the French schools; fearing culture loss, they refused to give up their Cham language instruction. Diasporic communities are zones of both separation and entanglement; at once here, with them, and decidedly from there and separate (Clifford 1997: 257). Maintaining the cultural markers that define the Cham as a group remains important into the present and informs their separations from and entanglements with various waves of imperial power. The decision to privilege the Cham

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language over French kept an entire generation from access to elite positions in the bureaucracy. My conversations with Cham in Sambok Dung included reference to their parent’s generation, but the two references I heard of grandparents both involved subjugation to French colonial extraction; one did factory work in Phnom Penh and the other was a woodcutter in Pursat province. The absence of Cham from the imperial machine seems also to engender an absence from history, both the history produced in the scholarly arena and in their own retellings of their pasts. They reenter history during the Sangkum period, when Sihanouk affixed the label “Khmer Islam” upon the Cham and all Cambodian Muslims in a nationbuilding move to include the excluded populations; also known as assimilation. This assimilation was not strongly opposed at the time and the term “Khmer Islam” remains in use. It was used self-referentially by a few of my informants in Sambok Dung and in this context it seems to have circumvented the intended homogenizing and nationalizing effect that would connect the Cham to the Khmer. Instead, “Khmer Islam” is used fluidly alongside the more common junjiet Cham or junjiet Islam, which collectivizes Cambodian Muslims and marks them as racially separate and united. Relations between the different sects of Cham are lightly marked, and they ebb and flow over time between passive coexistence and reformist tensions.

Conversions After the UN-sponsored elections in 1993, many exiled Cham returned from Malaysia, and contacts between Cambodian Cham and Malaysia renewed and expanded as did relations with many Arab countries, especially Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Although all are engaged in teaching and mosque building, they seem to have distinctive roles. The Malaysian Dakwah Tabligh movement is now considered a “major force” influencing Islamic practice among Cambodian Cham (Farouk and Yamamoto 2008). Among the donors from Arab countries, the Kuwait organization Revival of Islamic Heritage Society (RIHS) is the most prolific mosque builder and is also involved in publishing religious texts in the Cham language. The RIHS is responsible for the bright new prayer house in Sambok Dung. But, for all Islamic based international funding, there is no money or offerings for communities whose practice is not in line with the funders. This, I suggest, is not a clash of civilizations, as Huntington suggests. It is rather the competition of imperial grammars, presented on the market for intentional actors to purchase and align themselves with if they can fit the mold. This fact of funding is leading to substantial conversions among Cambodian Cham from both the Jahed sect and from the less purified Cham. It is funding, but more importantly, it is the way that funding buttresses faith and connects people

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to God through the markings of modern prosperity, education, and mobility. The Cham of Cambodia are adopting conservative forms of practice that result in group inclusion, financial support, building projects, student scholarships, and sponsorship for the hajj. I was told in the towns of Battambang and Pursat, eight villages that once were adherents of Imam San are now practicing a more conservative form of Islam, and that there remains only one Imam San village in Pursat and two in Battambang. Conversion is on the rise and all three of our storytellers from the village had attended the ijtima’ah (pronounced istema), an event held annually by the Dakwah Tabligh at its original site in the village of Trea, in Kampong Cham, and also in villages of Battambang and Kampong Chhnang. The ijtima’ah was described to me as a sort of religious revival. It is a three-day event and some said it was the most important annual celebration. In describing this event, one fortyyear-old rice farmer told me, “It is where we go to purify ourselves and cleanse our sins. We listen to them talk and we make merit. They do this all over the Arab world, but now we do it here in Cambodia. The Thai do it too, in Thailand.” So, people are attending these ijtima’ah and purifying their practice in accordance with “international standards,” yet despite international pressures and reform movements, individual practices continue to show wide variation. Cham dress in Sambok Dung exhibits this: women can be found wearing hijab head scarfs, the traditional Khmer krama, or the black purdha and men wear fez, krama, or turbans, as they choose. There were none from Sambok Dung who wore the full purdha, but in the neighboring market town I did see a few women wearing it. Beyond outward expressions of Islamic allegiance through dress, differences in practice were also evident. Because I did not live with a Cham family in the Cham neighborhood of Sambok Dung, my data are not conclusive. People reported to me that they prayed five times a day; they also missed prayers without concern while sitting talking with me for hours. When I noticed the ignored call to prayer, I was informed that one can pray or not as is convenient. One thirty-year-old mother of three told me, “We want to pray five times, but it is really only the old ones who can do that. Most of us are too busy. The most important is in the evening.” This sentiment echoes the Khmer approach to the five precepts of Buddhism, it is really only expected of the old—nobody else has time. In only one household did anyone excuse themselves when the call to prayer sounded, and that person was over sixty. The multiple expressions of Islam in Cambodia speak to a long engagement with the practice that is shifting now with the winds of conservative reform. That shift is not without tension, which peaked in the early 2000s between Cambodia’s majority Sunni Muslims and the RIHS groups funded through Kuwait. The Sunni majority were displeased by the aggressive reforms instituted by international donors and a statement by the mufti is worth quoting:

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Before the Pol Pot regime, we had only two branches of Islam. We had custom and the religion mixed together and we had the branch which follows Champa . . . In 1993, we got the new religion from Arabia. When it came, the believers of the new religion accused all Muslims . . . of having a religion which was no good. Only the Arab group is good. (Cited in Blengsli 2009: 188) Reformist tensions were put down by the mufti, and the leaders of RIHS pledged loyalty to the local authorities and joined the Cambodian People’s Party (CPP). This incident presents both the purified cosmopolitanism that seems to adhere to empire in general, and an important and largely ignored attribute of the CPP’s strict patrimonial system. The patronage ties that inform the political economy of Cambodia are a powerful tool to force external concerns to join with the ruling party if they want to get anything done. In this way, Cambodia has been able to mandate moderate action in relationships with religious organizations.5 The Cham I know from Sambok Dung align themselves with the more conservative practice associated especially with the Dakwah Tabligh from Malaysia. While they advocate for a certain type of practice, a peaceful, if disdainful, stand is taken toward those who choose differently. The evening prayers chanted over the loudspeaker each night in Sambok Dung preach coexistence and forgiveness for those who “do not know” the true path. When Slieman talked about his conversion, he said, “It was simple. I joined them and they taught me, so now I know. Before I didn’t know.” Along this line, my interlocutors translated the term Jahed, not as pious or devout, as I found in the literature, but as “those who don’t know.” This distain folds into the hierarchies floating on the incoming imperial tide, defined by access to resources and education. None of the Cham I met in Sambok Dung or in the surrounding towns could speak Arabic, but I was repeatedly told that the most pious Muslims chant the Qur’an in Arabic, if not Arabic, then Malay or Cham. With access to education and deep religious training, the ignorance of others becomes salient. The stories about what is proper, what a true Muslim should know, found the boundary between the reformed and the ignorant that is enunciated by practice. These stories, Certeau suggests, “authorize the establishment, displacement or transcendence of limits” (1984a: 123). The stories of education and the value of Arabic help to redefine the limits of Muslim practice, but the acts that bring reformed practice into being are acts of empire. International Islamic aid founds schools, builds mosques, and grooms citizens through education and training in the places from which the capital flows, echoing European colonial practices in the region and folding into the long-standing relationship between Malaysia and Cambodian Chams. Coupled with the folding of chthonic entities into the term “religion,” the activities of global Islam cause me to wonder what this term is doing. What does

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“religion” mean in this context? The critique of “religion” as a category is not new (Asad 2003; Masuzawa 2005; McCutcheon 1997), and the disarticulation of institutions deemed religious from those deemed political despite their profound interconnectedness continues to haunt the stories of social scientists and political philosophers (Agamben 1998; Derrida 2002; Schmitt 1985). “Religion,” like nationalism, fosters a distinct undercurrent of belonging and community that, along with access to resources and other symbolic capitals, attends Cham connections to Malaysia and to the Arab world. The idea that the Cambodian Cham are connected beyond Cambodia is very important to people. My friend Tun Dī tells us that the Cham left Champa with the fall of the king, “and now there are Cham in all the countries, since the oldest time: in Kampuchea, in India, in America, we have Cham.” The Cham are in the world. This cosmopolitan existence, for my interlocutors, is an important part of the stories they tell about themselves (see also Taylor 2007). The need for assistance born of the destruction of Islamic material culture by the Khmer Rouge, coupled with the profound displacements of that same rupture, introduces a new sense of being part of a larger Islamic world. I think it is important that Tun Dī brings up this larger world twice, and in two historic registers: the violence that sparked the first Cham diaspora is conflated with the violence of their most recent dispersal after the Khmer Rouge, and through both, the Cham now touch many communities in the world. The touch has a personal quality for the Cham I know and their sense of belonging to a wider Islamic world is transmitted through traveling persons engaged in charitable works: a register that is far different from Appadurai’s mediascape, and also the NGOs, banks, and development projects that villagers conflate with the Cambodian state. Despite their similarities, global development and global Islam tell very different stories about themselves. Charity is an important part of the yearly cycle of Islamic observance among my Cham interlocutors; the land poor help the landed with their rice harvests and in turn receive a portion of the rice. Those who have enough are obligated by Islamic law to give to those in need. “We Cham help each other” was a common refrain, from road building to rice harvests. They describe offerings at the mawlid, the New Year celebration of Muhammad’s birthday, and Ramadan, the annual month of fasting, as times when the rich give to the poor. The rich in the village give to their poor neighbors, and international Islamic organizations give to the village as a whole. These are not faceless donations, however, and members of the organization come personally to give to the people. Tuen Ja describes the annual donation of a cow for the feast on the last day of Ramadan by describing the people who brought the cow: They came from Malaysia. They traveled here to the village along the difficult roads to bring us the cow for our feast. There were eight or ten of

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them, and they came here to share with us. We are all in the same family. They helped us to build our prayer house, and now we are like family. They come every year to help us. Many of the donations made by the international groups are not seen as institutional, bureaucratic functions. These are personal relationships forged along the tenets of Islamic law. The sentiment among the villagers I worked with is one of community, peace, and mutual caretaking. The transnational communities create a world in which the Cham people—dispersed and disconnected through successive acts of war—are now in Malaysia and the United States. This is a good thing because now they can come together in a system of mutual support. This is not to say that the projects of the Dawah Tabligh or the RIHS are not at all self-serving in their acts of generosity, but they are no more suspect than any other “life bettering” scheme looking for members. The economically marginal Cham of Sambok Dung are called into relationships that require certain religious practices and in turn are offered material support from the more knowledgeable Islamic teachers, just as they are called to wage-work on the plantations—giving up subsistence lifestyles to be part of a larger more advanced system of production. Pick a state any state; exploitation awaits. Philip Taylor’s interlocutors in Southern Vietnam voice the majority sentiment among the Cham I encountered, which says, “we have always been Muslim—from the beginning to now.” But, Taylor points out, and this is true in Kampuchea as well, Islam is but one of the religions to which the Cham have been exposed (2007: 76–77). I encountered great variety of practice in the small region surrounding my field site, even among the men in this story we find different experiences and individual adherence to particular stories. Others I met say there have always been two types of Islam, one that prays five times a day and another that prays only once per week: the latter holds religion in their heart and the former in the book. In contrast, another man said, “All Cham follow the king, but only the Cham who follow Malaysia put Allah first.” Still others tell me, “We hold our religion in our hearts and we are Islamic more than we are Cham. We are all brothers and sisters with the same mother.” These sentiments compliment and complicate scholarly explanations of identity choices between history and religion, which all speak to the problem of dislocation and immigration and the ways that identification with Islam, rather than with the fallen kingdom of Champa or the adopted kingdom of Cambodia, offers a wider field through which to maintain cultural identity. Taylor suggests that the anthropological question of origins is unimportant to most of the Cham, saying, “The emphasis on Islam over other identities is a means of overcoming differences between members of a local community who maintain diverse connections to other places but who also may be divided by them . . . solving the

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problem of too much diversity” (Taylor 2007: 80). This does not fit with all the diverse Cham groups in Cambodia: the Jahed doggedly retain Cham history and language and insulate themselves and their group identity in the face of sweeping change. Nonetheless, the many references I heard that encompass us all in one family could certainly be addressing “the problem of too much diversity” (ibid). One Hakim in Siem Reap suggested “anything that preceded Islam must be forgotten” (cited in Féo 2004: 11). There is a forgetting among the Cham I met in Sambok Dung, which I think is evidenced by the difficulty I had in getting at the stories of the fall of Champa and the migration to Cambodia. One man told me, “I can’t remember any of the history. I remember the old ones telling it, they all knew the stories. But, I don’t know any of them.”

Conclusion There is a haunting smoothness to Cham forgetting that reconciles history and religion. The stories of ancient kings and connections to the gods of Indic influence disappear and reappear under the ebb and flow of global Islam, but not completely. The stories told of each found spaces where the hardships of the present and the traumas of the past come together. With this chapter I play with history and make a small intervention into the literature on globalization. With history I make two moves: the first pulls a mythohistoric narrative out of people who did not offer it, and the second places that narrative and other, freely offered, ethnographic data in conversation with scholarly representations of the Cham. Both these moves are underlined by consideration of the problem of historical constructions: theirs, mine, and other knowledge-producing imperial academics. The current historical phase of globalized imperial domination is in many ways unprecedented, but the histories constructed by many astute scholars often ignore, obscure, or downplay some of the salient processes at play among my friends in Sambok Dung. By articulating the stories of past and present over and in relation to the flow of imperial projects I present one way that history serves the present and I shed light on some of the obscured parts of the imperial story being told and contested. My reading of Cham migrations shifts attention away from the agentive forces of empire that inform the stories of Vietnamese expansion and Islamic influence to focus more on the strategic ways the Cham attached themselves to interventions. Contemporary treatments of the Cham often focus on imperial exploitations, specifically Khmer Rouge brutalities and the encroachments of strings-attached funding offered by the capital flows of global Islam. This reading is informed, unsurprisingly, by the present. What I bring forward are the conditions of daily existence that underlie Cham strategies to access resources and in this way shift the narrative from domination to strategy.

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Ideas of land and location were more prominent in the stories I heard than those of exile and dislocation. All in Sambok Dung came there for the land; something global Islam does not have to offer. What people told me Islam did offer was a community, and one powerful enough to give the Cham state-like protections similar to the Khmer. Land is the thing the national state controls and is a string that binds chthonic sovereignty through the stories of imperial history, and continues to bind the Cham to Khmer sovereigns against Vietnamese encroachment (see note 1 below). Relations with the Cambodian government are not antagonistic, but neither are they paternalistic. The frontier that marks the boundary between the Cham and the Khmer has stood for so long that the bridge is well traversed. I think my Cham and Khmer friends would say that this bridge welds them together, but also opposes them. It does not gather them together into the same neighborhood, rather it marks the line between neighbors and “allows the alien controlled within to appear on the other side” (Certeau 1984a: 128). The imperial contact zones made present by the stories and the forgetting of the Cham in Sambok Dung is filled with repression and obfuscation. Loving some ruins more than others, their stories are haunted by boundaries that refuse to speak of what crosses them.

Notes 1. The economic land concessions were accompanied by fishing concessions, and the fishing families in Sambok Dung suffered under Vietnamese control over large sections of the Tonle Sap Lake to which they no longer had access for subsistence fishing. These lots were officially abolished in 2010 but remain part of a patrimonial system that determines access to prime fishing locations on the lake. 2. The majority of Cham speak Khmer, but all speak Cham in their homes. I do not speak Cham and all interviews were conducted in Khmer. 3. A tuen is a learned man, teacher, and often leader of the Muslim communities. The word comes from Malaysia. 4. None that I met admitted or exhibited such practices, but Sambok Dung has a very small number of Cham families (forty in all, one third of the families in Sambok Dung). It is significant that the burial sites of saints and the creation of amulets, spells, and healing techniques are sites where Khmer and Cham acknowledge the same power and speaking together in Khmer, they call it parami (personal communication, Emiko Stock, March 2014). 5. This is true of Christian groups and development donors as well.

Merit in Motion: Temple Building and Other Powerful Acts

5 Merit in Motion

1

Temple Building and Other Powerful Acts The wat1 can be thought of as the expression of a sort of collective ideal, built, and operated by all for the benefit even—or especially—of those who are otherwise marginal to society . . . those who are defined by their liminal position between the wild and the civilized. The wat harbors outcasts within. —Ashley Thompson, “Buddhism in Cambodia” It’s like we have a real village now. We have the temple and the monks and a place where we can make merit. — Khmer village mother, aged forty-eight The incoming tide of global capital currently influencing Buddhist practice in Sambok Dung takes a markedly different shape than that described in the previous chapter. The Cham Muslims of Cambodia are open to the development aid of international Islamic organizations, access to which requires the secular purification of local practices. Buddhism in Cambodia is not immune to the issue of purification and divisions certainly exist (Marston 2008b), but purifying Buddhist practice does not determine access to power or resources to the same degree it did under colonial influence (Edwards 2007; Hansen 2007). In fact, Cambodian elites are using their newly acquired capital to court and cultivate the ancient practices, sasana boran, and the elemental power they signify (Edwards 2008b; Guthrie 2002). At the mundane level of the village, Khmer Buddhists gain access to global capital through powerful monks and national elites, as well as contributions from the Cambodian diaspora. Village-level fundraising remains important, but does

Endnotes for this chapter begin on page 129.

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not generate capital quickly or in sufficient abundance to make “real villages” out of the forest. In ways that seem to benefit all, from the powerful patron to the supplicant client, multiple actors are currently directing large portions of their profits into merit-making and power-seeking activities. Diasporic contributions are not salient in Sambok Dung,2 and while village-level contributions and energies are very important, the rising tide of capital reached Wat Phnom Ta Oh through two Buddhist monks well-patronized by the growing urban middle class. The imperial tide also brings individual elite merit-makers directly to the region in search of monks and achar cultivating the ancient power of an unpurified Buddhism, techniques explicitly connected to the forest and the Ancient Ones; techniques that require an abundance of merit. Merit is a flexible idea and a fluid substance. In this chapter, I attend to Buddhist notions of merit and practices of merit-making as I experienced them in the village and also to powerful projects that require the possession and acquisition of merit. I highlight the ways that temple offerings and building projects make merit and inform social hierarchies and projects of political power. Connected but separate, merit also articulates individual and ephemeral cultivation of effective power to create neak mien bun (aw, `anak mān punya), a person with merit who can turn the wheels of the world (Tambiah 1976). In this way, merit is implicated in claims to kingship and Buddhist moral hierarchies that confound the conceptual boundaries of religion and state, and expose the unpredictable and untamable forces of death and regeneration that Buddhist merit attempts to bind (Davis 2016). Merit, like death and life, refuses confinement and persists through time, but leaves traces where it travels and shines brightly where it rests. The substantive nature of merit marks the boundary where subsistence meets empire; it founds temples and hovers around those who can build and sustain them; it infuses monks who perform efficacious healings and protective rituals; and it underlies the power of neak mien bun, people with (moral) power. These can be kings, monks, or adepts who communicate with chthonic powers of the village and forest and harness unbound and unpredictable power toward particular projects. What I draw out in this chapter are the many layers of empire’s purifying effects that are visible by tracing local deployments of merit that adhere to social hierarchy, contribute to the material effects of temples and healing, and underlie the skills of traditional healers, craftsmen, and musicians. This opens a discussion about the slippery boundaries between religion and magic that articulate with empire in ways that I suggest serve to mask, or perhaps to purify, the violence of imperial power. Attending to merit and its prominent placement in Buddhist doctrine and practice makes it visible as part of the connective tissue of empire that attaches people and land to imperial projects through the complimentary registers of domination and care.

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Having merit explains personal power and hereditary privilege, making merit opens that power and privilege to everyone through acts of domination and care. Temple building is one such act, and this chapter grew out of an initial unease at two levels. The first came from the profound material effects of external merit donations that transform grass huts into concrete structures and abused temples into bright and upright places for making merit. The second emerged more slowly, amid the paucity of village capacity to make such transformations. Closely examining the work of merit in temple-building, however, brought the slippery incongruities of the idea and practice of merit into view. Merit flexes to accommodate lived experience, changing through time, but also remains attached to its previous incarnations. Universally accessible, open to accumulation, and transferable, merit forges intimate social bonds of care, inclusion, and exclusion, and founds physical space through the building of temples. Acting as both substance and notion, merit illuminates the performative and binding elements of patronage, and it adheres in those with effective power, political power, financial power, and magical power. When I asked villagers directly, they were quite clear that making merit was their primary objective at the temple, with the goal of obtaining a higher rebirth. But, through my time with them, I began to see the multiple ways that merit was deployed as a concept that resonates through a variety of powerful projects that touch people’s lives. Thus, on the surface, temples are centers of meritorious action where communal donations and prayer create community bonds and affect the afterlives of individuals and their ancestors. The temple is at once signifier and magnifier, materializing productive social forces and pointing them away from the earth and toward transcendence. But merit goes beyond the temple, and the moral authority of merit is the string that pulls people into relationships of unequal power with other people (and away from neak ta, as described in Chapter 3), creating khsae (literally, strings) of association and obligation marked by making merit. There is an iterative capacity to merit, the rhythms of merit-making projects define and create social power in the present and for the next life. These rhythms also reveal contradictions that entangle the attributes of neak mien bun (people with merit). In this chapter, I examine merit using contemporary ethnographic data supplemented with stories from other villages, other places, and other times in the Theravada Buddhist world, as well as from theoretical and philosophical treatments found in the Pali Canon of Theravada Buddhism, the traipitak. These various sources will help describe the nuanced work of merit that emerged through my observations and questions, taking merit beyond the sacred boundary of the temple and saffron robes of the monk into social and spiritual projects that disrupt the conflation of morality and power implied by sacred boundaries. Villagers articulated boundaries with the Ancient Ones by cutting fields from the forest.

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The temples, monks, and captains of industry came behind them, re-founding place with the excess of a long-since-appropriated promise. In the interstitial spaces of that imperial appropriation, the concept of merit shifts and undulates between the constructed categories of religion and magic, forest and village, and of domination and care.

Theoretical Interlude: On Merit The circumambulation of merit as both substance and concept moves along acts of sociality that happen with or without the state, like generosity and mindfulness. Merit moves through powerful acts attached to previous empires and the signifiers of access to chthonic power they co-opted, like mind travel or levitation; it adheres in the bodies of kings and informs the Buddha’s power; it also provides the foundation for the naturalization of social hierarchy and disproportionate access to resources. People in Sambok Dung spoke of merit both as something one has and as something one makes. Merit as something one has determines or explains access to metaphysical powers, inherited wealth and power, or abilities to acquire power. In northern Thailand, Charles Keyes found that “merit is conceived almost as a substance that can be possessed . . . translated into this worldly virtue or power as well as stored up to be used at death to ensure a good rebirth” (Keyes 1983: 270). A traveling adept of effective power was described as neak mien bun, as was I who wielded inherited power, and one of the military men whose power and influence came from his protective tattoos (yuon, described below) and his prowess running timber and grabbing land. The boundary markings and transgressions of merit, who has it, how it is made, and how we know if someone has it, are constantly reconfigured through the ebbs and flows of imperial power and individual circumstances. Anne Hansen describes a merit shift in early nineteenth century Cambodia. In the story she recounts an orphaned child of indigenous people becomes a neak mien bun. The low-born child is transformed, through kindness, kinship, and education, into a monk, “content and happy” living off lay donations and religious morality (2007: 168–71). What this story describes is a shift in the social use of merit and kamma away from the attributes of political and magical power toward modest and personal moral transformations. The focus on temple building and donations in the current era shifts the qualities of merit once again toward social power. But, the doctrinal descriptions of merit-making require neither temple nor monks: in canonical texts there are “three ways of making merit . . . by giving, by moral discipline, and by the development of meditation” (from the Anguttara Nikaya 8:36 IV 241–43, translated in Bodhi 2005: 167).

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The last, the development of meditation, must be understood here not strictly as the act of sitting in silence for long periods, but rather the work of mindful engagement with one’s activities and the cultivation of presence in the mind and thus in the world. This resonates with the orphan story mentioned above, with technical acts toward effective power, and also with the idea of making meritorious offerings at the household ctum described in Chapter 3. But the purification efforts of King Asokā that gave rise to the three baskets, the traipitak, of the Buddhist Pali Canon from which the above quote comes were themselves attempts to define and contain powerful ideas and practices. Steven Collins describes the textual worlds created by the Pali traipitak as “an unchanging ideology, which was repeatedly adopted by kings in changing circumstances” (1998: 87). The texts of empire create enduring mental worlds by prescribing certain practices, like mindful engagement with the world. Mental worlds are also adjusted to rectify existing material practices like ancestor worship and changing circumstances like ordination as a Buddhist monk. As described in Chapter 3, ancestors receive merit rather than material sustenance when Buddhist monks consume their offerings. And when ordination into the monkhood consumes the productive labor of sons, a large merit-transfer to the young man’s parents ameliorates their loss (Keyes 1983: 279) and transforms common parents into people with merit. Anyone can make merit and move into a higher social position through the cultivation generosity, morality, and mindfulness (Hanks 1962). The world is always unstable, and the various uses to which merit is put and its constantly shifting attributes are tangible manifestations of the environment in which empire attempts to survive. In the next section, I discuss the contact zone where subsistence meets excess, and where certain manifestations of power are privileged over others.

Merit and Patronage: Temple Building, Domination, and Care Accumulating merit in Sambok Dung is unequivocally directed toward achieving a higher rebirth through temple donation: “We make merit to have a better next life.” This is the most reported reason for making temple offerings. I do not doubt what people report, but just beyond this statement are competitive, status-oriented merit-making projects in which the number of celebrants travels along village gossip and the amount of money raised is written on the temple walls. Meritmaking coordinates real-time projects of power. It invites productive relationships with powerful outsiders that create khsae of connection and status: institutional effects that both facilitate and force entrance into systems of gifting and extraction. Khsae are powerful strings of influence that connect people, temples, and the physical world. The word khsae translates literally as string and is used in all

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the same mundane ways. Khsae also refers to the invisible ties that bind humans in relationships of unequal power and influence. Khsae also bind, sanctify, and protect the boundaries (sīmā) of vihear (the sanctified building in the temple complex). One can get a good job with the government through personal khsae and create consecrated space with khsae sīmā whose great power remains after the string is distributed. Each manifestation of khsae creates invisible, but substantive, energetic fields through accumulated merit, bun (aw, punya). Judy Ledgerwood suggests that the reciprocal relations of giving and receiving, making merit on the holy days, twer bun (aw, twoe punya), create khsae that “literally bind the community together” (2008b: 159). In Sambok Dung, despite the competitive nature of temple offerings, those who twer bun at the temple also attend and make offerings at one another’s p­ rivate ceremonies. This khsae cuts across class boundaries, political ­boundaries, and through the divisions of economic production that structurally define the ­village as described in chapter 1. For example, when one merit-making, economically challenged wife of a hard-drinking soldier opened an egg stand in front of her house by the railroad, regular temple attendees purposefully frequented her stand. They also helped a member plough his field at no cost after his buffalo died. These favors travel along the strings of merit and cross the constructed and flexible boundaries of social hierarchy. In some places and in some eras in Cambodia, the temple is a hub of social interaction and the organizing point for communal projects (Ang 1990; Ebihara 1968; Thompson 2006). In Sambok Dung, the temple is often empty of lay people and is only marginally and situationally a site of such cohesion. Although temple activity does foster connections in the community, people often bickered about who would feed the monks and complained about the personal expense. Village projects that would have been organized by the temple association in the prewar years, like road and temple building, were externally driven operations. The roads were funded by a World Food Programme (WFP) project described in chapter 2 and the temple building is being funded by two powerful monks: one from the provincial town of Kompong Chhnang and one from Phnom Penh. These powerful and externally grounded strings disrupt the idea of the temple as the common property of ordinary people while confirming the temple as a symbol of village prosperity. Connections with these two monks facilitate access to a broader sphere of goods and services (Heng 2008). The monastic desires for merit and influence conspired with community desire to have a temple, and the village is “made complete” through salient symbols and the creation of “appropriated space” (Lefebvre 1991: 163–64). This is not quite the technological utopia that Lefebvre describes (1991: 6), but it is a certain kind of “topia” that holds the stories of ancient kings, universal religions, and modernity manifest in this small rural temple.

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The monk is not a king; but in this context of founding space and building temples, the king haunts the actions of the monk. Not only is the founding violence of the king’s appropriation of chthonic power at the center of the sīmā ritual described in chapter 3 (see especially Davis 2016: 115–37), but each monk lives off the extraction at the heart of empire. Both of the temple-building monks in Sambok Dung had large followings in their respective cities of Kampong Chhnang and Phnom Penh. Each monk had his own specialty, one was a healer who created effective amulets and the other was an organizer who established schools and trained novice monks. In Cambodia, the number and size of monastic offerings have increased markedly since the early 2000s, when the incoming tide of capital fortunes began to accumulate and spread, enhancing both the ­reputations and effective capacities of monks. Typically, monks are “fields of merit” and through their virtue are worthy of receiving gifts that will bear fruit: “give to the noble and the pure / Only then does your gift flourish” (from the Anaguttara Nikaya 3:24 II 122–23 translated in Thanissaro 2000: 122–23). In this way, excessive extraction can be cleansed through meritorious temple offerings and villagers can achieve such wealth in their next life. Opportunities to make merit follow the Buddhist calendar, but can also be spontaneously arranged by patrons. Monks, in addition to being fields of merit, can also be patrons of lesser monks and temple communities. The two monks that funded and facilitated temple construction in Sambok Dung helped their patrons make merit at the poor rural temple, while also cultivating their own merit. This was especially visible at the katin (robe offering) ceremony. Katin is the one time of year monks can make merit on their own behalf. Performed after the rainy season retreat, monks receive new robes and supplies for the coming year. Each of the above mentioned monks brought two vans full of urban merit-makers to Sambok Dung. This was part of the general practice of traveling to make merit at as many temples as possible—maintaining old and creating new khsae. One village grandfather bragged about the monk under whom he studied as a young man saying, “with him I traveled all over the country! He was neak mien bun and they called him from far away temples to come to their katin ceremonies.” The difference between these merit-making monks and the monk in Hansen’s story who was content with the meritorious profits of the temple, speaks to the increased importance, and I will suggest the increased potential, of acting the patron in contemporary society. The energy of meritorious gifting and social status disperses through the physical location of the temple, but is also lodged in the building of the temple itself. Steven Feld and Keith Basso suggest that “as people fashion places, so, too, do they fashion themselves” (1996: 11). After hosting a ceremony, one woman took the monk aside to point to the offerings she generated marked on the temple wall. She said, “I made more merit than all of them. Make sure it all

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goes to building the vihear.” This act of building a vihear earns more merit than any other. It goes beyond even ordination and drives contemporary monks to be temple-builders. A book called `ānisangs punya (The results of merit), outlines how merit translates literally and immediately into a rebirth that will last a given number of eons (kapb) in the higher realm of the angels (see also Keyes and Daniels 1983: 275–778). Holding the moral precepts of Buddhism provides five kapb, and building a vihear provides thirty-four, which translates into 34,000 rebirths in the heavenly realms. “That’s a well-stored fund. It cannot be wrested away. It cannot be stolen by thieves. So, enlightened, you should make merit, the fund that will follow you along. This is the fund that gives all they want to beings human, divine” (translated from the Khuddakaptha 9 in Thanissaro 2000: 25). Seeking enlightenment is uncommon among Theravada Buddhists, as is holding the moral precepts. Laypersons hold five precepts that prohibit killing, stealing, lying, sexual misconduct, and intoxication. These are not really expected of anyone except the elders, they are simply not practical, like praying five times a day for the Cham. More than that, one does not really accumulate much merit by holding the precepts, and the people I know make merit to be “reborn among . . . affluent nobles, Brahmins, or householders . . . provided and furnished with the five objects of sensual pleasure” (translated from the Anguttara Nikaya 8:35 IV 239–41 in Bodhi 2005: 171). Some wanted to be reborn among the gods, but most hoped to be powerful and wealthy humans (men) in their next incarnation here on earth. One middle-aged man lightly bantered, “I help out and make offerings at the temple because in my next life I want to be powerful, like King [stec] Hun Sen.” This was met with scolding and scoffing by the group and marks an important contact zone. The slippage between rebirth in the heavenly and earthly realms of power is significant in the same register as that between prime minister and king in Cambodia (Norén-Nilsson 2017). To the comment by the temple-goer above, the achar rebuffed him saying, “We can’t know what kind of spell [sot b’lay, aw, sūtr plī] he used, but it [Hun Sen’s power] didn’t come from merit.” The reference to Hun Sen’s current social power as it reflects the possible outcomes of meritorious offerings also pulls at the strings that connect the idea of merit with real-world acts of power and magic. The monk-sponsored temple building project I describe below was inspired by a variety of collective desires. There was the general thrust across Cambodia to rebuild Buddhism after deliberate destruction and years of neglect, there were individual projects to cultivate charismatic power, but the driving force behind this act of temple building was the growing Khmer population in the area and their lack of funds for concrete walls. The idea that a small rural temple should have concrete walls is a tangled bit of imperial debris. It connects the temple complex construction boom of the prosperous Sihanouk years to the

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destruction and neglect of the Khmer Rouge era through memetic acts of temple building amid the uneven and self-conscious prosperity of the current moment. According to elders, the transformation of Wat Phnom Ta Oh from one grass hut to its current configuration would have taken twenty years or more in the prewar years. This fact was shared with a hint of suspicion about contemporary prosperity, but inside the logics of merit, visible status accrues through the lists of offerings posted on temple walls and through the patrons who helped build those walls. The temple proliferates merit: it is a node for local and translocal acts of caretaking that rebuild Cambodia’s decimated monastic infrastructure, build up individual stores of merit for better rebirth, but most visibly, it bolsters individual claims to status and social power.

Theoretical Interlude: On Founding Space Merit, I argue, is an effect of empire. An abstraction produced by the “reordering of space, time, and personhood,” which Timothy Mitchell suggests is what makes a bureaucratic system seem like cohesive entity that can be called “the state” (1999: 91). As an imperial effect, it illuminates the contact zones of empire and the unending rhythms of the production of space amid alternating structures of power (Lefebvre 2004). Kun Trie, a 48-year-old mother of four told me, “It’s like we have a real village now. We have the temple and the monks and a place where we can make merit.” The plains at the base of the mountain where the temple sits are ideal for seasonal rice production, and the powerful parami of the mountain protects the temple. “Place is no empty substratum,” as Edward Casey suggests, “it is an already plenary presence permeated with culturally constituted institutions and practices” (1996: 46). I was told that forest energies and the unknown ghosts of war dead were silenced by the temple and the presence of the monks. The temple marked integration. Temple building creates order from chaos, or so the imperial story goes: the temple founded the king’s original claim to territory and Angkor Wat was the sovereign center of the Khmer empire. Angkor fell to Ayutthaya, but the empire rose again in the middle period and was ravaged by the Vietnamese. Reconstruction involved elaborate temples with powerful messianic cults that connected monks and patrons across the region (Chandler 1996; Thompson 2004a). During the French protectorate, the great temple Angkor Wat became a founding and enduring symbol of Cambodia as a modern nation (Edwards 2007). Buddhism was again destroyed by the Khmer Rouge, after which rebuilding temples and training new monks intertwined with national and psychological reconstruction that accelerated in the post-socialist era. Temples often make explicit connections between the charismatic power of the leader, the ancient temples of the Angkorian era, and

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the re-founding of cosmic order in the wake of mass destruction (Marston and Guthrie 2004; Marston 2008a). In present-day Cambodia, temples and monks are important nodes in the rhythms of merit and in the reconstruction of Cambodia; their presence interrupts the flow of gifts between villagers and spirits and creates a space where villagers, monks, kings, and prime ministers can display their accumulated merit. It may not always be an abiding residence, and the temple at Grandfather Stream’s Mountain is often empty: empty of monks and empty of villagers. My concern over this was not shared by the Buddhist residents of Sambok Dung, even though a more “typical” village temple may have monks, novices, nuns, and elders residing and mothers and small children visiting and playing every day. For them, the absence did not detract from the presence. “Place is not; place is to be: if not entirely projectable, it is at least promised . . . Architecture is a making of place by the very promise of giving place” (Casey 1997: 320).

Merit, Class, and Local Power Making merit is, among other things, a class-based activity and the various social classes of Sambok Dung have particular strategies for making merit. Stanley Tambiah notes that merit-making is “directed to the achievement of ends” (1970: 53). It has effect in the world and people employ strategies of merit according to their abilities, their ends, and, I suggest, according to the grammar of dominant imperial forms—sometimes this means not making merit. The very poor in the village are quick to say they do not go to the temple to make merit. They tell me they have no money to make food fit for the monks, no money for gas to get to the temple, and no money to give for building projects. As already noted, however, making merit requires neither temple nor monk. One grandmother, aged fifty-six, told me, “I am too poor to go to the temple, too poor to make merit.” I asked how she could be too poor to make merit, as I had already been told many times that when I sat in proximity of the chanting monks, whether I understood the words or not, I was making merit. It took no money or any special skills at all to make merit, one simply had to show up. To this observation, she made a derisive sound and said, “When we go to the temple, if we have no offerings to make merit, we go to eat merit, like a dog.” When I translate this sentiment, I add the phrase “like a dog.” The specific form of the verb “to eat” that she used is typically reserved for use with animals and occasionally with children. For this woman, social status is implicated with making merit. Receiving merit—“eating merit” like a beggar or a monk (or an ignorant anthropologist)—or cultivating merit by minding the precepts or listening to the dhamma is not a valorous stepping away from the world, but a degrading stepping down in the world. This is not making merit, but eating it like

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an animal. The value of merit for this woman, acknowledged by others in proximity while we were talking, was patronage: making merit. This woman’s sentiment highlights her poverty, but more importantly puts forward the widely held notion that poverty excludes her from making merit. At least from making the kind of merit she wants, the kind that creates social power. Merit-making and attendance at temple celebrations are long-standing vehicles for social and political power throughout Theravādin Southeast Asia (Ebihara 1966; Forest 2008). What is distinctive about this era, I suggest, is that the idea of merit-generated patronage, of being a patron, is at once more accessible and less required then in previous generations. Today’s voracious capitalist system rapidly generates visible fortunes that can disappear just as quickly. The woman quoted above arrived with her two nearly grown sons in 1997 to load wood on the rails. She had some money from selling land in Prey Veng Province and the family added that to their railroad earnings and invested in a sound system (CD player, speakers, microphone, and wiring). This was initially an excellent investment as such equipment was scarce and in high demand for local celebrations. Capital continued to flow into the region and by 2006 her special equipment became commonplace and demand fell along with her rising fortunes. In the not-so-distant past, this woman could aspire to patronage, but there was no temple at that time. Had there been, she may or may not have worked to accumulate merit. There is a distinct line that separates the wealthy land owners who are all members of the temple association and the local officials and business people connected to the government. The latter do not cultivate clients through merit-making activities, but rather through their capacity to arrange access to land and to the means of subsistence in the market economy. The soldiers received government land concessions and grabbed larger tracts through extra-legal means. Soldiers then ‘helped’ most migrants find access to land. They also arranged jobs in the wood trade, well-priced lumber for building projects, and protection from other authorities. The village head provides access to micro-finance and to the deeds and papers that solidify land claims, property sales, marriages, and migrant labor. The large land owners wield power through their temple associations and are the leaders who solve everyday problems of the village: when someone is short on rice, they never go to the village head. Instead the person approaches the landed members of the temple association; when a bridge needs repair, it is the head of the temple association who gathers the labor and the tools and makes a deal for wood. The extent to which this leadership configuration is particular to Sambok Dung is difficult to know. Thus far, very little has been written on the interplay between religious and political power in the contemporary nonurban regions of Cambodia, but my data suggests that there may be some important questions

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to ask about the contemporary relationships between political power, chthonic power, and temple power in the exercise of local authority (Harris 2008; Hughes et al. 2012). My observations suggest ongoing tensions between sasana boran (aw, sāsanā purān), literally, ancient religion also commonly glossed as Brahmanism (brahmaññasāsanā), and sasana samay (aw, sāsanā samăy), reformed or modern Buddhism (buddhasāsanā), and the ways that these distinctions are mapped onto political enactments. The categories of “traditional” and “modern” were constructed in the late nineteenth century in conversation with the incoming “modern” political forms. In the early 1990s amid the socialist retreat from Cambodia, the ruling party staged Brahmanist rituals of kingship (Ledgerwood 2008a), and rebuilt the old royal palace at Oudong, well known for its stores of parami (Thompson 2004a). Post-socialist political leaders were actively cultivating Buddhism, but not necessarily the reformed Buddhism purged of its association with magic. Marston suggests that attention to the ancient practices implies a reform of the purified modern practice, which was reinstated with other Cambodian “traditions” after Pol Pot (Marston 2008b: 99–121). In Sambok Dung, distinctions between boran and samay were difficult to map. In terms of temple practice, the distinction had little meaning and people told me that the only difference was that with sasana samay the Pali chants were also chanted in Khmer. This was important, because people now understood the meaning of the liturgy. There were practices that people considered boran, or Brahminism, but these were varied according to my interlocutor. Some equated all relations with neak ta to be boran, some included family ancestors in this category, and others added the practices of healers or others with spirit teachers as part of Brahminism. In a rural region of Kampong Thom, Satoru Kobayashi finds tension between the ancient and modern practices in the execution of particular rituals, notably pchum ben, the yearly celebration for feeding the ancestors and hungry ghosts (Kobayashi 2005). He also finds that for the average member of the temple community there was little concern with the distinctions, in Sambok Dung this was the majority: both were Buddhism and both were vehicles for making merit. Missing from contemporary conceptions of the distinction between the “traditional” and the “modern” versions of Buddhism is the tension between the practice of power and the practice of morality that maps onto the distinction. I will discuss this mapping below. Merit-making involves the cultivation of social power. It is a practical idea that has material effects in the world. It also articulates ideational effects through which a barely educated woman with a savvy capital investment aspires to patronage, and Cambodia’s political elite aspire to kingship. In Sambok Dung, the political elite also aligned themselves with the Buddhism of ancient kings and they shunned the local temple where the achar is a well-educated

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man who enjoyed speaking French and attended to the modern practice. When they needed religious adepts, especially for weddings and engagements, they called the achar from the northern market town, skilled in the arts of boran practice.

Temple Building: Power and Protection It has been argued that monks and religious adepts who claim powers of the ancient traditions are in league with or are being dominated by Cambodia’s governing elites (Edwards 2008b; Guthrie 2002; Harris 2006). While patronage is certainly flowing from powerful and corrupt elites to rural temples, the ruling elite do not have a monopoly on the powerful ascetic practices associated with Buddhist/Brahmanist techniques. Additionally, those who oppose the current administration and fight for political change also cultivate the ancient techniques. The temple-building monastic patron of Wat Phnom Ta Oh was quite adept and respected for his capacity to “see beyond” the immediate physical plane and for his powerful nonhuman teacher who helped him heal and who infused his amulets with protective power—attributes all associated with Brahminic practice. Nonetheless, he takes a strong stance against the current administration and is a powerful advocate for democratic reforms. It is also not the case that the line separating the educated from the others marks the ancient from modern practice. I make this point because the ancient powers associated with religious and royal power are most certainly being cultivated by Cambodia’s ruling elite, a typical element of political power across Southeast Asia (Ayuttacorn and Ferguson 2018; Willford and George 2005). This patronage brings rural temples under political control, which will be discussed below. But, the propitiation of neak ta, the cultivation of powerful nonhuman teachers, the collecting of power amulets, and the patronage of powerful monks and adepts is very much a part of the lives of educated and elite Cambodians, regardless of their political affiliation. Of the three temples that serve the market town to the north of Sambok Dung, two of the 1950s era vihear were razed on purpose by the Khmer Rouge, and the third was used as a hospital for ranking Khmer Rouge cadre. Of the three, the one that was not destroyed is today the most dilapidated. I attend here to the stories of the two rebuilt complexes. At the first, the senior monk and administrative head of the temple was ordained thirty years earlier at the age of sixty-two as part of the first wave of ordinations in 1980 after Pol Pot was overthrown (Harris 2008: 191–92). He told me that the rebuilding of the temple started immediately after Pol Pot fled and progressed slowly over the years into its current manifestation. The achar, known for his knowledge of the ancient boran practices, tells a ­different story about reconstructing the temple:

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I arrived here in 1992 and started building up the temple . . . This temple had nothing, not even one kut [house for the monk] . . . just a small little hut. That bastard Pot destroyed it all, all that was left was the concrete foundation from the old vihear and the Po tree . . . I raised money here, in the market, in the village . . . We didn’t have just one powerful person come and give us all the money; no, it was not like that. Through my own sweat and energy, we raised the money to build the temple . . . Powerful people came to find me. People came for protective spells: I performed water blessings for them, blessed their cars and phones. When they had a baby they called me to help. Powerful people came looking for me, people trusted me . . . I have the boran religion and had been a monk for fifteen years before that bastard Pot. I studied the Pali; I know the `Abhidhamma3 and can perform the rituals that people want. I awaken amulets and draw yuon [magical drawings on cloth or tattoos]. When I helped them they helped me in return; sometimes they would bring people, ten to twenty people to make offerings at the katin. By 2002 we had built everything again. This story of the achar well versed in the esoteric practices of the old tradition who, according to him, almost single handedly raised the funds necessary to rebuild the entire temple complex in ten years is in contrast to the other temple destroyed during the Pol Pot years. This temple had no one versed in the boran tradition. For them, the work was slow, and according to the head monk, by 2003 they had only rebuilt the kut and done repairs to the sala chan (the monk’s residence and celebration hall respectively), which remained standing after the Khmer Rouge years. The following year, they began to excavate the ground by hand to rebuild the vihear, and when I visited in 2012, the finishing exterior touches were being added to the vihear. Over the course of thirty-five years, they rebuilt the temple little by little, from near destruction to near completion. This was a locally produced temple and each mural painting, each piece of the vihear was marked with the name of the individual donor and the cost of the production (figure 5.1). The first temple I described was notable for having no names attached to the various components of the structure, as if it were constructed by magic. The potent magic of the achar sought after by urban elites did open a channel for meritorious donations, and when I asked about the lack of patron names on temple constructions, I was simply told that the donations “were not named for specific purposes.” While anonymous merit-making is uncommon, there is nothing new about urban elites patronizing powerful monks and achar in the countryside. Patronage founds the circulation of funds that support temples and monks; “big temples call big friends, little temples call big temples” (Kobayashi 2008: 184). The speed with which new temples are erected and the anonymity

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Figure 5.1. Name of donor and donation amount on temple pillar, photograph by the author.

of donors seem to be new, but what Marston calls “a competition for spiritual energy” (Marston 2008b: 104) among temples in the countryside is part of the long-standing connection between effective potency and political power. In the current era, however, political patronage is used both explicitly and tacitly to silence monastic objections to state abuses. Sambok Dung and the market town that holds the rebuilt vihear are at the eastern edge of a large and controversial economic land concession, as discussed in the introduction and in chapter 1, and unlike in other areas where large-scale forest extraction has called Buddhist monks from their temples to protect the forest and local livelihoods (Beban and Work 2014; Buddhasāsanapandity 1999; Darlington 2012), in this town, the monks are silent inside their beautiful new temples. The head monk at the magically constructed temple did not discuss the problems of dispossession or plantation abuses that I heard from so many others in the region, rather he said, “It is so much better now. The people come to make merit; they have money to donate and support the temple. They have motorcycles. There is a better life now.” Penny Edwards calls these new strings of patronage “chains of merit and menace” in which political patronage is more like a protection racket in which the “merit-worthy . . . display of material support” depends on appropriate monastic comportment and can disappear at the least provocation (2008b: 220). The old monk did not seem coerced, but rather complacent and content, ­facilitating nonetheless the violence of economic intensification in the region.

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Beyond the menace of politically charged merit-making and temple-building, there is the fact of elite patronage of the old religion and the more magical aspects of Cambodian Buddhism. Peter Gyallay-Pap suggests that these powers represent the “core element of cosmic energy” that fuses and articulates Buddhism with everyday practice (2007: 81). Of course, the idea of an “ancient” religion is only salient in relation to the debris of systematization and purification that engendered the “modern” samay tradition. That Cambodia’s political elite are currently cultivating boran practice suggests a slight twist in the imperial logic of purification. Hun Sen and members of his Cambodian People’s Party actively cultivate the potent power of parami, in a move that flouts the modernist purification project still underway in which rational science trumps spirit interventions and ­bureaucratic salaries are valued over personal allegiances. By purposefully acting outside the prevailing logic of Western donor nations, Hun Sen performs his own purification and calls on the power of the ancient religion to maintain legitimacy and to protect his authority inside the imposed system of electoral politics, and to recapture a Buddhism that is aligned with the effective powers of the king.

Theoretical Interlude: On Power Temple building is just one way to demonstrate parami and accumulate merit. In chapter 3, I discussed the ways the king appropriated territory from the locally recognized chthonic entities, neak ta, and made his claim to the space by building a temple. This founding move required the capacity to communicate with the “fecund energies of the soil,” and the power to withstand the possible repercussions from such a dangerous act (Ang 1995; Mus 1933: 10). These early acts of kingship in Cambodia were the explicit result of charismatic and martial prowess and the harnessing of power through ascetic practice (Wolters 1982), now deeply entangled with religious merit through Brahminic, Buddhist, and now capitalist configurations of power. I will not unravel the threads of power winding through Cambodia’s deep history, but rather point to the entangled layers of attempted separations, each creating classificatory fields. Neak mien bun, kings, politicians, powerful ascetics, and business people wield the effective power of merit. The boundaries erected and crossed as these contradictory characters claim merit and access to parami is revealing of both animating power and the obfuscation of violence. The merit of the king is conflated with the power of maja tuk maja day, the Master of the Water and the Land, responsible for both life and death. The king’s violence and power over death is delivered in a different register than the Ancient Ones, who extract life through illness and accident, or the withholding of game, rain, or sun. The king’s deathdealing power is purified through attachment to the moral universe of Brahmin

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or Buddhist deities. Erik Davis suggests this places the king and the monk in “a moralized alliance against the witches and untamed spirits” (2016: 212). This creates an unstable boundary of imperial logic that slides uneasily over contemporary entanglements of morality with power. In Marcel Mauss’s A General Theory of Magic (1972), he notes that “[a] religion designates the remnants of former cults as ‘magical’” (22), but finds that the “idea of the sacred” runs through each (10). This is a contact zone where difference is constructed and reciprocity repressed. Following recent critiques of the idea of “the sacred,” which segregates contiguous and analogous activities (Arnal and McCutcheon 2013), I suggest that merit works in the same register. Mauss shows how classifications do not arise from “intrinsic qualities” of either religion or magic, nor are they solely the result of public opinion (1972: 149). Rather, they arise from the idea of relative values and the idea of differences in potential suggested in the dichotomies moral and immoral, of traditional and modern. This designates the boundary between “ancient” practices and “modern” religion. There is a lot of debris covering the unstable boundary where contemporary extraction meets the ancient power that continues to emanate from the land. Mauss never directly asks why religion might be concerned with abstractions and magic with nature, but he lays the groundwork upon which to ask such a question. “Magic,” Mauss suggests, “like religion, is a game, involving ‘value judgments’, expressive aphorisms which attribute different qualities to different objects entering the system. . . . which imposes a classification on things, separating some, bringing together others, establishing lines of influence or boundaries of isolation” (1972: 149). In chapter 3, I discussed this as connectivity (Sprenger 2017b), and here, I draw out how my friends in Sambok Dung use the idea of merit to illuminate the various waves of imperial power through their respective judgments about the value of merit. The detritus that collects along those lines of influence and boundaries of isolation are instructive, I suggest, of the ground upon which our current system of morally charged destruction rests. The power to which merit (as well as magic and witchcraft) is attached is bound by laws that serve the common good, and self-serving agendas disperse rather than cultivate that power (Anderson 1990; Kent 2008). The idea of merit, however, can turn into what Tambiah calls an “ethical force” (1970: 57) and what is ethical, good, and desired can be determined by those who created merit. This goes some way to understanding how merit can have multiple manifestations that change through time and cut across collective notions of power, morality, and authority. Making merit manifests a rhythm and articulates the unstable boundary between religion and power, and between village and forest. This rhythm moves to the undulations of local knowledge, to the tides of imperial projects, and resonates with the Buddhist doctrine of dependent arising and the various capacities of merit.

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The doctrine of dependent arising informs the Buddhist phenomenal universe, a place in which no thing has self-nature or self-existence. This does not mean that it does not exist or that it has no nature. The point, rather, is that the existence of anything, like a tree, for example, or an idea, is dependent on other phenomenal occurrences like soil, sun, or electrical currents in the brain; “there can be no inner core, no substance, no ultimate residuum, at the heart of the tree,” or of the idea (Puligandla 1996: 176). Arisings can also be laced with intentionality. The phenomenal world is not one of purely random collisions, “it is the desire to see that tends to develop the sense of sight” (Narada 1956: 329). It is the desire to be acknowledged as a powerful patron that develops the practices of temple building or temple avoidance. Invoking Buddhist theory here deepens academic theory, but more importantly, better situates that theory into the social context of the actors in this study. Merit in this phenomenal universe of dependent arising is thus always and unproblematically embedded with other processes at hand. My incredulity at the woman who would not go to the temple to receive merit, but only to make merit, is ridiculous when I leave aside what I believe about Buddhist merit and attend to the phenomenal space of capitalist frontier in which merit was deployed. I suggest that the idea of merit in the current era arises interdependently with the logics of contemporary globalized capital accumulation, which can rapidly confer power on all who engage, but is unstable. In the following section I will discuss manifestations of merit that arose amid different processes.

People with Merit: Neak mien bun Having merit founds the perfected power of the Buddha, as well as divine kingly power. Such merit is accumulated through many lifetimes by the ascetic practices of generosity, morality, and meditation that enable the harnessing of earthly power toward moral ends. Neak mien bun is a term used to refer those with such power. I have also heard the word for merit (bun) exchanged with the word for moral precepts (sel) in the same configuration: neak mien sel. These appellations mark a particular kind of power that separates the moral power of kings, monks, and healers from the self-serving and immoral power of witchcraft. And yet, the power that invests witchcraft with its effective capacity is exactly the same as that of monks, healers, and kings. My friends were quite clear about that. It is not the character of the power, but the character of the practitioner that marks the difference. There are spells (mant) sent by witches to enter another person (`āgam) and take effect (`amboe). Magic is often called `amboe and to cast a magical spell is monagoum (aw, mant`āgam). According to my sources, these spells are spoken in Pali and are always kept secret. Here, Khmer villagers lend credence to Mauss’s theory that magic is secret; anyone who engages in monagoum would never

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identify themselves or talk of their practice. Unlike the divide between the metaphysical power of the ancient religion that has effects in the momentary world and the purified power of the modern religion whose effects are directed toward a better rebirth, witchcraft, while not always evil, tends toward personal gain by visiting illness or misfortune upon others; it is not bound by merit, but those who wield it have power. This problem of “witchcraft” as the immoral side of sasana boran, itself a sort of primitive and uneducated cousin of sasana samay, is a tricky triumvirate that I only begin to unpack here. I will return for a little more excavation below, for now, I proceed to explore contemporary manifestations of charismatic and effective power that are entwined with merit and moral perfection, bun, sel, and parami, and the unstable boundary between the ascetic, the king, and the Buddha as it appeared to me at the edge of the forest and the frontier of empire. The first time I heard the term neak mien bun used outside a textual reference to kings or warriors was at the home where I lived. The man, whom I’ll call Ta Jain, was traveling through the region and the woman I lived with, Yay Som, called him to come to the house. He was a reputed kru teeyay (aw, grūdāy), fortune teller, and she wanted advice on the upcoming ceremony she was preparing. Some of Som’s neighborhood friends came by to meet him and listen to his advice. The evening started with small talk about the rice harvest, the roads and local development, bank loans, and access to the forest, the usual topics. Discussions of people’s dwindling access to trees and their mounting fear of “the Chinese companies” and the soldiers and police that protect them were common to an evening’s visit with strangers becoming friends. Talk of the forest gave Jain an opportunity to tell of his recent meeting with a large snake while walking deep in the Aural Mountains, a story that changed the tone of the gossip. The diminishing power of the forest is a common theme when gossip turns to stories of powerful acts. “Before. . .,” people would say. On this evening when talk turned to the forest, Jain asked if there were tigers or big snakes in this forest. Ta Chen, whom we met on our trip into the forest in chapter 2, spoke up immediately. Chen is considered, and considers himself, knowledgeable about the forest and he cultivates relationships with the powerful entities that reside there. “Before. . .,” he said, “there were many parami in those mountains. Tigers, snakes this big [illustrated by grabbing his thigh]. The elephants are long gone, and now the tigers . . . I used to see tracks, but no more. There are still snakes.” And he told of the nearby snake den where none dare cut the trees. Jain was interested and asked questions about the snakes. Others joined in, telling their own and other’s stories about powerful encounters in the forest. The power of the Cambodian forest may be diminishing, but the stories continue to proliferate, marking a boundary that keeps power present despite empirical changes to the environment. Then Jain turned to me and asked whether I had

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yet walked in the mountains. When I answered in the negative, he grinned and asked if I wanted to walk there with him. This was said as a kind of taunt, a dare in the context of stories invoking tigers, snakes, and magic. When I answered with an enthusiastic “Yes! I want to go!” Som interceded immediately, explaining that I could not possibly go into the forest, it was far too dangerous. I exchanged a sly glance with the old man, who proceeded to tell us about meeting a large snake deep in the mountains. I climbed the small rise looking for medicine that I knew grew there. When I turned my head to look for the plant, a big cobra was there, sitting on a rock ledge watching me. He was huge, this big [grabbing his thigh], and long—from here to there [about three meters]. I was stunned still, just looking at the snake, then I gave respect to the snake [gorab]. I chanted a spell [sot b’lay] to offer respect and to let my heart be in the heart of the snake and the snake’s in mine . . . I did not come to harm, only looking for medicine. After a moment like that, together, the snake slid off the rock and through the bush, right past the plant that I sought. For the villagers of Sambok Dung, there are people who use powerful incantations, b’lay (aw, plī), which can call spirits, calm wild animals, heal bodies, and make other effects in the world. This word, b’lay, comes from the word for the Pali language, pronounced balee, and these spells come from the Pali texts of the Buddhist Canon, especially the phenomenological writings in the `Abhidhamma. This term is, I suggest, another bridge, like parami, that shows an ancient contact zone where human power met chthonic power. Here, Buddhist dhamma was chanted toward the goals of entanglement and containment. Transformed spellings and modified pronunciation are, I suggest, effects of colonial era purifications that did not extend into Cambodia’s vast forests and rural areas. Chanting this sacred language opens fields closed to ordinary speech and creates material effects in the world. Monks chant the dhamma, sot toa (aw, sūtr dhamma), and adepts sot b’lay (aw, sūtr plī). The mant used by the witch is also from the Pali meaning mantra. It is different, but not in terms of the spelling, the words are the same, but the effects (`amboe) of its entering (`āgam) its intended target are different. There is a long and intimate history that connects the Pali language to efficacious spells written on cloth, on bodies, on money, and on paper inserted into talismans worn around the waist or neck—all considered part of the ancient religion, Brahminism. The most effective of these drawings, called yuon (aw, yănt), is drawn while chanting spells, sot b’lay. I do not fully understand the convoluted strings that entwine these concepts to each other at the local level, and explanations shifted depending on the regional and social location of the posed question. I find the connection between the spells of the adept, the mantras of

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the witch, and the prayers of the monk to be particularly suggestive through the bridge-like qualities of the terms. The spell that Jain used to speak to the snake was effective, he told me, because of the Buddha’s ability to communicate with snakes and because the snake is often considered a parami, which in this usage would refer to the snake as a moral and benevolent manifestation of chthonic power. This snake incarnation is only possible through practicing the moral precepts (sel) of Buddhist doctrine, thereby gaining a sufficient store of merit (bun) to be reborn as a morally perfected and powerful snake-spirit on the earthly plane, a parami. All of my interlocutors locate b’lay in the Pali language of Buddhist texts, but also insist on its Brahmanist history and place in the ancient religion. I proceed to make a tentative suggestion about the lines of influence that may put the effective chants of monks and adepts into the same lexical field. Both use the word sot, to chant, leaving those of the non-monastic wielders of effective power to a slippery mutation of the word for the Pali language, b’lay. My interlocutors were clear about this word b’lay; I originally mistook it for “Pali” and was corrected. I find it in only one Khmer-English dictionary published in 1997, it does not appear in older versions of the same dictionary or any of the other dictionaries I searched. The Headley 1997 Khmer English dictionary suggests that its origin is from Surin, a place at the crossroads of Lao, Thai, and Khmer people well known for its magic and traditional ways. None of my research participants suggested a Surin origin and the word was in common use, but seems to be a new addition to the lexicon. The split that severed powerful practices from “religion” (sasana) giving rise to samay and boran was a recent imperial effect that caused major divisions in the Cambodian monastic community during the early twentieth century (Hansen 2007; Marston 2008b). The split that would have severed the moral power of the king from the amoral chthonic power of the earth is much older and could account in some way for the lexical confluence of spells for witchcraft and chants for monks, both using the base term mant. This is speculative, but it is also suggestive in that the power of the king is deeply associated with healing and protection while the power of the witch delivers illness and misfortune—and the power of neak ta delivers both. Witchcraft was a strategy by which the king maintains a monopoly on the moral use of effective power, and other effective power can be contained and denigrated. Just as purified religion relegates certain types of power to the realm of make believe, the superstitions of the ignorant, and separates chthonic power from the power of political authority. Typically, neak mien bun are kings, and the Buddha in his many incarnations recounted in the jātaka tales was often a king, an ascetic, or a ­mendicant monk—occupying all powerful subject positions through multiple lifetimes. The boundary that separates the king from the witch is articulated by health and morality: the king heals with morally bound chthonic power and the witch

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sends illness using the same power—unbound. This line haunts Mauss’s analysis and perhaps the whole civilizing project of classificatory hierarchies: the smoothing over of the unbound power that embroils us all in the dance of life and death. At the contact zone of the more recent boundary between ancient and modern religious practice there is not such a clear demarcation. In fact, the overlap and undercurrents of boran and samay take many forms and follow multiple “value judgments” taking shape in the contemporary era. One boundary has not changed through time; it is found in ancient inscriptions (Coedès 1937) as well as the rites recorded by colonial (Aymonier 1900) and post-colonial scholars (Porée-Maspero 1962). It is found in folk tales that pass through generations (Chandler 1996), and into modern scholarship (Hansen and Ledgerwood 2008). This is the boundary between the sruk and the prai, the village and the forest. Anyone that I met or heard about who was adept in the arts of communing with spirits and animals, of healing, of “far sight,” or other powerful practices often glossed as Brahminism or sasana boran, claimed some connection to the forest. Sometimes, in the case of urban spirit mediums, this claim to the forest was attributed to their spirits who resided in the remote and powerful mountains of Battambang or Kampot. In the case of urban monks, this claim was made through some transformative moment in the forest or through tales of mountain pilgrimage in the country. I do not know anyone who spends all of their time in the forest, but of the monks and lay persons I met who cultivated efficacious and powerful practices, each one of them claimed time spent deep in the forest; some carried powerful objects gathered there, but all carried stories that dance along both sides of the line that marks Buddhist from Brahmanist, the ancient from the modern, and the forest from the village. Ashley Thompson suggests that the temple mediates the space between the sruk and the prai (2006: 150–55). This is very suggestive, but I might take it further and say that Buddhism, with the help of the temple, mediates that space. One could go even further and say that it is king, religion, and temple that draw power and legitimacy from the contact zone between the village and the forest in many cross-cultural contexts. Penny Edwards traces the physical and conceptual forest across both European and Khmer imaginaries and suggests that the “forest has its own cosmology” as a place of “transition and transit” (2008a: 138). The space of the temple, founded with the power of the king at its center, intercedes into the forest and the chthonic power that delivers both illness and healing in a system of justice and reciprocal care. The king delivers only healing and never illness, and the temple encourages field over forest cultivation capturing elaborate rituals that bind the fecund power of the rice toward the kingdom and Buddhism (Davis 2016). The temple marks the forest as a place apart from the field even as the sīmā, the sacred boundary of the temple, manages the fluid boundary across which many entities travel; human and nonhuman, malevolent and benign.

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Conclusion The Cambodian Buddhist temple represents the moral power of religion that binds the wild and imaginative potential of the forest. With shade trees, statues of animals, ponds and pastoral pathways, the temple “stands always as an invitation to the forest” (Thompson 2006: 150). This image of the temple inviting one into the forest reminds me of all the invitations I received to travel in the forest with those who go there. It is a taunt and a dare, but I think it is also a way of confronting the conceptual boundary erected by the “value judgments” that separate me, the white anthropologist, from them, the Cambodian villager and forest adept. Additionally, and more importantly, this conceptual boundary separates them from ordinary villagers like Som, who had no intention of going to the forest, who held the five Buddhist precepts of the layman, and engaged in competitive, self-aggrandizing merit-making with her neighbors. Between the sruk and the prai is both a physical and a conceptual boundary dotted with the discourses of empires past and present. Erik Davis suggests that sruk and prai are “ideological pure types” (2008: 132), and the stories shared with me support that claim. These types reflect a “a geography of desire” (133) in which the people get caught between the immanent power of the forest and the superficial power of political elites. Following Davis’s idea of a “geography of desire,” I suggest that the deployment of merit crosses and blurs the pure types of ideology, rubbing against and sticking to the spaces between the forest and the village, between morality and power, and through such contact it comes to represent desire. The monk’s desire to be more than a field of merit enacted through katin patronage and temple building; the villager’s desire to be a patron and not a recipient of merit, like the beggar (or the monk) who eats the merit of others; the desire of the ruling elite to present and align with magical power and to have some control over monks; and the desire of villagers for advice, healing, and protection in an always unstable world. The project of solidifying the future, of smoothing over the contradictions and uncertainties of existence toward synthetic resolution moves to rhythms of power and hierarchy that embed, but always exceed the imaginaries of empires. It adheres to temple-based merit-making and the contradictions of building up Wat Phnom Ta Oh, which exceeds the needs of the community and is more than they can support, but is desired nonetheless. The temple enacts their collective merit and provides a field where their offerings can increase their social status in this life and the next. It also provides a vehicle for monks to increase their store of merit, their collection of clients, and to contribute to the country-wide enactment of rebuilding Buddhism in a modern image, with concrete temples and large spaces for fund-raising ceremonies through which future buildings will emerge. Entangled with that future emergence is the present of the diminishing forest and the powerful animals, spirits, and potential that forest once held. Contemporary

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enactments of merit resonate with the promises of an “imaginary” created in the stories and texts of imperial projects from the Pali Canon of King Asokā to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of the United Nations. Imbedded in these promises of future stability is an entanglement of morality with power that remains connected to the structures of Buddhism. Through this, Cambodian elites represent their claims to authority with explicit engagements with the old religion and the production and renovation of temples that represent the transformation of amoral into moral power. The temple is part of the interstitial zone where the power of empire meets the power of the forest. The incommensurability of that encounter is partially visible in the deployment of power through merit. The merit that gives rise to the king is founded by the same power that founds the monks, healers, adepts, and also the witch. Moral power is the desire represented by merit, and the various permutations of morality through time stick to the words and practices of those who cultivate effective power in the contemporary world. For my interlocutors, merit marks social status and the capacity to wield effective power, which in the logic of capital accumulation can look like the same thing. But there is another kind of effective power to which merit still adheres, and further excavations along that debris-filled boundary will likely bear fruit.

Notes 1. The term “wat” is the Khmer language term for a Buddhist temple. I interchange wat and temple in this chapter. 2. For discussions of the international flows of capital between Khmer Buddhists living abroad and their in-country relatives see Ledgerwood (2011; 2008b), Marston (2008a), Kobayashi (2008), and Löschmann (2006–7). 3. The third book of the Theravada Canon, concerned with the phenomenology of ­consciousness and materiality.

Conclusion

n Dwelling The pages of this volume emerged amid the contact zones and boundaries that define the village today called Sambok Dung. The place is organized by the “determination of frontiers,” but the story that emerged was of their ephemeral nature; every frontier is a contact zone and, as Michel de Certeau suggests, the boundaries are marked only by what crosses them (1984b: 127). Sambok Dung is a contact zone where multiple ways of being in the world are simultaneously at play. The forest is becoming village and the trees are at once vehicles for chthonic energies, local resources, and transnational commodities; the roads come and go, hardening with bursts of capital investment, then dispersing with seasonal rains and the heavy trucks of industry; places of worship have transformed from thatch huts into bright concrete structures embedded in national and transnational flows of capital, influence, and care. The hard lines of ownership, portioning, and privatizing land had just begun in earnest at the end of my stay (Work and Beban 2016). People came to this place following the promise of subsistence through both the wood trade and land ownership. Once here, they began enacting the fractured mosaic of localized customs and experiences that tell of social reconstruction, debilitating memories, and resilient traditional practices (Ledgerwood 2002; Zucker 2013). The variety of local experiences that emerged through my conversations with people in their homes, at the market, at village meetings and celebrations confirms only the need for continued discussions of village life and of rural social systems in contemporary Cambodia (Marston 2011). There are however, salient zones of articulation through which local frontiers are connected to nodes of power that govern life and livelihood. I attend to power in its multiple guises in these pages and point to the ways it

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is encountered and embroiled through intentional acts of both subsistence and state. Agency works both ways in these relationships of unequal power and the individual reaches out to neak ta just as much as neak ta interpolates individuals and communities. One could suggest that the problem of subsistence informs both agents in this drama. The Master of the Water and the Land is not the only node of power from which people seek access to resources; in equal measure neither is the market-oriented, human-rights wielding system of organized subjection currently moving in to lay claim and control access to resources. I have attempted here to describe the physical and cognitive landscapes that emerged at the intersections of this dance of power.

Stories and Empire Michel de Certeau suggests that stories organize places of habitation. They describe displacements and outline the contours of the inhabited world by the use of “proliferating metaphors” that bring place into mind (1984b: 116). When people first arrived in Sambok Dung the place was “nothing but forest,” a phrase also used to describe the part of the village beyond the railroad tracks, marking the contour of the knowable and desirable world. The knowable world is one where concrete houses of worship create a recognizable village space. In response to the new Buddhist temple residents regularly remarked, “it’s like a real village now.” Both outside and inside the modes of comportment and production is the subtle rhythm of history, which influences daily activities to make them seem like the goal and the objective of the histories we recount. This “march of history” appeared to me, in the early twenty-first century at the margin of empire, less like a progression from A to B, as a march might be, and more like an ebb and a flow. This was not linear, but cyclic; empire is a tidal flow. What was visible in both the physical and cognitive landscapes of Sambok Dung were multiple tides of imperial power that washed over the land called Cambodia and carried along all the tools for making history: education, markets, and strings of global influence and care. Chthonic entities at once are, and inhabit, mountains. In stories, they are turned into mountains by kings or the Buddha, reversing the agency and reclassifying power. Thus reconfigured, morally infused religious concepts, like merit, can inform a wide variety of behaviors from laundering money via temple donations to talking with snakes and mountain entities. At the same time, merit transforms thatch and wood houses of local worship into concrete and tile nodes of inter­ national capital and influence, sometimes stretching the capacity of resource-poor villagers.

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When imperial power wanes, so, it seems, does history. The view from the edge of the forest made clear to me that we are not at the apex of an evolution of human society impelled by increasingly sophisticated and powerful technologies. Rather, human habitation and dwelling are going along, morphing and adapting to the various constraints and influences of power that effect access to the resources necessary to go along. Each wave of external and extractive power leaves its mark on the people, their practices, and the spaces they construct. Sambok Dung becomes a real village only when it erects a Buddhist temple, regardless of the debilitating excess of that endeavor. The diasporic communities of the Cham fled from one extractive empire and landed in another, but not before they adopted the practices of yet another imperial form that connected them to even wider networks of subsistence and care. And today, the displacements of the Khmer Rouge era extend those networks through Southeast Asia into Europe and North America. The contradictions of the event of temple construction and the displacements that it entails are embedded in the “proliferating metaphor” of merit. It takes merit to build a temple and building it makes merit as well. Global Islam carries its own contradictions and proliferating stories through which the wealthy give to the poor, but only the poor who behave accordingly. With proper comportment, mosques can be built, scholarships granted, and cows offered for annual celebrations. Offerings and opulent constructions feed the projects of imperial power; but remaining underneath, for both Buddhist and Cham is the understanding that before, in between, and probably after empire, power flows through careful attention to the present world. The stories of empires past and present embed the landscape in the legends of powerful spirits turned into mountains and of neighboring kings upon whose mountains the displaced can take refuge.

Sovereigns and Power The mobile landscapes of power that my story explores present interstitial boundary zones: messy, improvisational nodes of contact that attend to the bridges and the fuzzy regions at the boundaries of various ways of being in the world. By attending to the spaces in between the stories that people tell about who they are and what they are doing, the stories that tell how one should be and the proper ways of practice, I conflate what is currently discussed as religion with politics and with the natural world. At the nexus of this conflation of power sits the Owner of the Water and the Land, whose juro-political place in the lives of subsistence farmers ­gathers together the social forms that contemporary powers segregate and classify as discrete categories. Numerous imperial projects traversed the region where Sambok Dung sits today, and the legitimizing truths taught by each remain in the

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physical and cognitive landscapes alongside local beliefs, values, and practices that continue, sometimes weakened but always present, through the ebbs and flows of power. The suggestion that traditional culture is subsumed by state projects is untenable in this context, as is the carefully constructed ontology, or worldview, of the current empire that posits nature as an inert resource. Monsoon rains reclaim the expensive roads of commerce each season and local patterns of subsistence and worship continue along paths that endure through the wreckage. The “proliferating metaphor” of parami traces the interstitial boundary between the religion that legitimized earlier empires and the spirits whose power they appropriated. Parami has transformed from its original attribute of perfection to describe power: power that emerges from chthonic energies and adheres to places and people in ways that can draw productive power into intentional use. This is not the power of domination, but attaches rather to the power of care and of submission. Michael Jackson suggests that “subjection must be placed on a par with agency as a human coping strategy” and my research suggests that it is subjection to the power of life and death held by the water and the land that informs the ways of being in the world that will continue without the state (2013: 29). The social fiction of religion, (not as something untrue, but as something fashioned and purposefully created [Geertz 1973]), does not apply to chthonic energies that remain the radically other to what religion, as a social category, is supposed to be. Robert Orsi (2005) calls attention to the difficulties of studying religion and to the multiple manifestations of activities that fall under the categorical heading of religion, from community healing and support to the sexual exploitation of young boys by trusted elders. This, he suggests, is a quality of “the religious imagination that blurs distinctions, obliterates boundaries—especially the boundaries we have so long and so carefully erected” (2005: 191). It is to this blurring of boundaries that I attend in my treatment of religion and empire and religion and chthonic power, and in my attention to the historical and material traces that inform the boundaries of these social fictions. The inherent goodness of building a temple that most often stands empty, or paying road-builders in rice for roads they do not need, is a place where the categorical heading of development also “obliterates boundaries.” The chthonic sovereign of the land, I suggest, is the other to all these historical and material traces. The powerful monsoon rains wash away the road, but bring the fish and feed the rice; and the work of daily life continues amid the contours of domination and care. The spirit is always present regardless of the presence of Buddhism or the state, present in the rain, present in the land. Honoring an un-modern agenda, I attend not to the carnage of genocide or to the promise and destruction of economic extraction, but to the persistence of subsistence and the present-future oriented strategies it entails.

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Frontiers and Bridges These chapters grapple with the entanglement of subsistence strategies and religious practices that radiate into national and international development projects of care and exploitation. Through the stories I have told here, of contact, frontier, and connection, I present the political and the religious as coexisting modes of power, each with particular agendas for making subjects. I argue that the power of each grows out of basic subsistence activities and is quite literally grounded in the productive capacity of the earth—in the environment. To classify organizations that wield social power as religious or political is to invoke social fictions. Religion and politics are modes of exercising social power and their separation as distinct social entities is a historical phenomenon. So too is the conflation of religion with other kinds of worship that involve nonhuman entities a fiction; fashioned, I suggest, toward the particular end of maintaining the notion that politics and religion are distinct social forms. In Southeast Asia, the chthonic energies of the land are powerful entities in the social lives of villagers and are embroiled with the politics of resources and social organization. The earliest Khmer kings entered into land-rights contracts directly with the chthonic sovereigns and erected temples where priests would collect the offerings for both neak ta and the king. There is an intimate violence of life in which we eat and are eaten; this is a violence that the stories of empire attempt to smooth over with classificatory logic. The other is suggestively born in the act of classification and seems to aggressively haunt all attempts to smooth over the contact zone of classificatory boundaries. Orsi (2005) suggests that there is a “compulsive attraction of ­otherness—not of difference that can be bridged but otherness that cannot and that offers only the alternatives of surrender or repulsion” (182). I do not know if there is a way beyond the othering that retains and grapples with the very real work of classification. The complementary roles of surrender and domination embed what we classify as road and trail respectively. The roads of economic development come and go, hardening with bursts of capital investment, then dangerously dispersing with seasonal rains and the heavy trucks of industry. In contrast, the trails of subsistence and daily life carved by foot, motorbike, and oxcart persist; they shift and accommodate the high water and fallen trees, and they appear again through the wreckage of washed out roads. Both modes of travel require constant care; they define people’s encounters with the forces of nature and the forces of state, and feature strongly in acts of community and sociality. The land gathers. People collected and settled in the low fields at the base of Phnom Ta Oh, where the water flows and remains through the season. Chthonic energy gathers. Entering into dreams, neak ta calls people to come to the powerful

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places; they are asked to dance, feast, and play music enacting the cycle of birth and death giving their energy back to the land. People suggest this “makes lok ta happy.” Capital also gathers and the railroad tracks draw people to the routes of extraction and commerce, taking the trees and using them to feed the markets from which subsistence also comes. Buddhism and Islam gather as well and connect people to relationships of domination and care that articulate boundaries around stories of the way the world is and how one should behave, bridging the gap between people and politically organized subjection. For Martin Heidegger, the bridge gathers together two sides of the chasm, founding a place where there was none before. Certeau (1984a) suggests that the story marks the boundary, in some ways forging the divide and making each side distinct. The other becomes along this divide, over there. The bridge then is a small pathway over which one may venture. But, we travel to the other side only to discover that everything here is always and already over there. The spirit is nature, not religion. That nature becomes spirit is, I suggest, just as Marcel Mauss says, a collective representation, a fiction, fashioned according to use, but not make-believe, made perhaps so as to believe, but produced from matter. My data complicates the agentive directionality of that fashioning by describing how neak ta interpolates villagers. The community is fashioned by agents in the land. When dwelling is established they are called, “come to this place to dance and feast.” It may be time to question the suggestion that the human animal is the driving agent. It may be that the human animal is only telling stories: describing boundaries that haunt us from the other side. Chthonic power is not religion, and its continued and continuing presence haunts the stories of transcendent gods and otherworldly realms, just as it haunts the empires that claim sovereignty over it. Religion founds a divide, through both structure and stories, between the power of nature and the political projects of material accumulation.

Ecocide and Imperial Grammar Sambok Dung has changed remarkably from the time I constructed the preceding narrative until its publication five years later in 2020. In the intervening years, I added a new research agenda to my field of inquiry and have examined the ways that climate change policies and narratives intertwine with those of progress, development, and growth. There is an important body of work examining this new nexus and the transformation of development into its new, purified cousin: sustainable development. Based on the previous pages, it may be unsurprising that the latter is hardly different from the former. Imperial flows cover and rename powerful elements, as when social relationships with neak ta became religion.

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There is covering over, but there is also transformation, and the village of Sambok Dung as it stood in 2015 at the edge of the forest is no longer. The forest is gone, visible only where the mountains rise in the west. The massive and controversial land titling initiative that began at the end of my stay in Sambok Dung (see Grimsditch and Schoenberger 2015) was instrumental in this transformation. Designed as a measure to control Economic Land Concessions, it was extended toward the goal of issuing private land titles, but only for “productive” land, cleared and ready for cultivation (Work and Beban 2016: 38). This exception to the acquisition of private land at the edge of the forest created a terrific land rush; large tracts of previously forested areas were cleared in anticipation of acquiring titled land. The measure also made space for the company to extend their activities into recently titled, thus uncontested, spaces and capture any remaining lands at the base of mountains and the edge of villages along the boundaries of their concession. In the meantime, new roads now run alongside the railroad tracks from the southern to the northern market towns, complete with concrete bridges. Riding along this smooth road in 2016, I drove right past Sambok Dung. Not until I crossed the stream did I realize I had gone too far. It was not just the lack of trees, but the built environment had a whole new face. Three big new homes now stand along the trunk road, one with plans to be a guest house, and the new school built during my stay was now visible from the road, with no second growth forest to hide it. The buildings and businesses proclaimed a region of marked economic growth. New homes, new roads, cars, privately owned mango plantations with stone entry gates, and shops with satellite dishes. This was all visible traveling up and down the roads I knew so well. When I sat at the coffee shop and visited under the homes of my friends, however, a different story emerged. The region was in crisis. The assistant village chief talked about how they “closed the door on the forest.” Lumber no longer lined the railway or roads, and I was told that families were now unable to pay back the microfinance loans they used to buy motorbikes, tractors, and chainsaws. The debt crisis was foremost on people’s minds, and I heard multiple reports that “everyone” was in debt, while unstable rains and equally unstable market prices hindered the transformation of crops into cash, worsening their fear. Exacerbating this situation was out-migration, which was just emerging as an option during my last visit in 2012. One family sent a son for training at the close of 2011 and by late 2012 this had increased to five families. During my last visit in 2018, there were very few youths left in village. Everyone remarked how hard this made it to do the transplanting and bring in the harvests, and the wealthier families had stopped farming altogether and subsisted on remittances from faraway children. Families that came to Sambok Dung to cut and claim new land were often in search of new land for their yet-unmarried children. Some families grabbed and purchased

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land and did, in fact, secure land for all those children, none of whom stayed to cultivate it. Now the land lies fallow. Forest cleared and ready for cultivation, but the cultivators have moved on to the factories of foreign countries. Phnom Ta Oh has also been cleared and looks just like the other small mounds that spread out from the range, barren of trees, with a new road that winds around its base where the trail used to run. The long-awaited vihear was nearly complete and awaiting its final infusion of capital to finish the floor and the eaves. All the huts for visiting neak ta are gone, with one ctum built atop a boulder. This is not to house traveling neak ta, however, it is for urns that hold the bones of the dead—bound and kept within the consecrated boundary of the vihear. The other huts for lok ta around the village were all three in states of decline and disuse. The religious structures are not in decline, and the Cham neighborhood also has a new vihear, halfway built next to the small prayer house, and there are two new Christian churches. The churches look like houses, save for their distinctive crosses above the doors. People report they do not have many members now, but the scholarships and English language instruction they offer is increasing local interest. The village no longer has a transitional feel, and while still under construction, it carries many of the hallmarks of what people want from their village. The imperial tide brought roads, television, coffee shops, and solid buildings for education and worship. What I did not realize about the data gathered here while I collected it, is that my interlocutors were themselves part of the imperial tide—settler colonists. Not settling on top of land claimed by other humans, as is often the case, but in the service of converting land toward both subsistence and market accumulation: clearing the forest and altering the landscape to make it fit the grammar of the empire of consumer capitalism (Work and Beban 2016) while new climate change mitigation and adaptation initiatives were rolling in to further shore up Cambodia’s bloated bureaucratic structures (Work et al. 2019). While social lives are not taking the turn expected by my colleagues in the village, and the state of human progress seems to be at its most contradictory in Cambodia, I end this collection of stories on a hopeful note whose discordant refrain I will continue to explore: the coming effects of our current crisis, emerging at the contact zone of development and planetary limits, confirm the quandary of kingship and sovereignty. Ecocide, climactic instability, and the weather events these conjure make absolutely clear the truth of Carl Schmitt’s (1985) claim: “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.” A state of exception has been called. The biosphere is transforming in wild and unplanned ways and the rhythms of life and death will change along with it. For me, this is hopeful. We are in good hands. The water and the land of this planet, truly experienced in the rhythms of life and death, will sustain, persist, and continue.

Glossary

Glossary of Non-English Terms

n adjar

A ritual specialist at the Buddhist temple. Typically an elder who was a monk as a young man. This person knows the proper sequence of the ceremonies and necessary prayers, artifacts, and practices. Often knows the ancient power practices associated with Brahminism. `amboe Magic, literally an action or an effect. arak A nonhuman guardian of the territory. Indigenous people say all mountains are arak. Often conflated with neak ta, but also the subject of a ceremony called larng arak, in which an individual is possessed by spirits, called arak. attipol Power, influence. bun Merit. baisay An object used to hold a nonhuman entity in the human realm. Often made of banana stalks, coconuts, or sugar palm leaves. Brahminism The ancient practices associated with Buddhism. Cham An Austronesian people associated with the Champa kingdom, an ancient Hinduized state in what is today central and southern Vietnam. Adopted Islam and were dispersed when Viet expansion led to the fall of Champa. Cambodia has the majority Cham population in the region. ctum A hut. The small dwelling places for lok ta are called ctum, but so are regular huts and any small dwelling structure. hijab Traditional Islamic headscarf. ijtima’ah An annual ritual of Islamic purification and teaching, attended by Cambodian Cham who have converted from the Jahed practice. imam Ritual specialist of Islam, leader in the Cham community.

Glossary | 139

Jahed

A type of Islam practiced by some Cham, also called sasana Ta San, or sasana Imam San. junjiet Race or nationality. junjiet Islam The race of Islam, used by Cham to refer to themselves. Also common was junjiet Cham, or Khmer Islam. kamma The effects of action. krama Scarf. Typically refers to the Khmer-style checkered cloth scarf. kru A teacher. Can be a human teacher, but often refers to a nonhuman teacher that accompanies people with great skill, like healers, musicians, dancers, or carpenters. kru parami A possessing entity, understood to be neak ta that has been perfected by Buddhism. Kru Teeyay Diviner, astrologer, dream interpreter, and fortune-teller. khsae String. The term is often used to describe social connections of patronage and privilege. Larng Neak Ta Raise the Ancient Ones. A ceremony done at the onset of the rainy season to ensure a good harvest. Typically done in advance of plowing (between May and August) and preparing the fields to honor neak ta. lok ta A single neak ta that is named and propitiated by a group of people. Neak ta is the general term for all such territorial entities, lok ta is that entity that lives in the neighborhood. Conjugated as singular. lorry/ies Makeshift railroad cars that run on the defunct railroad. manuss moel Invisible people. Nonhuman entities with agentive capacity to   min ghoeñ act in the world of humans. Spirits. maja tuk maja The Owner of the Water and the Land, neak ta.   day mawlid The celebration of profit, Muhammad’s birth. Me Prie Official from the Forestry Administration, literally mother of the forest. Ming Aunt. monagoum A magic spell. Monsoon Asia The rice-growing region of Asia affected by monsoon rains, includes Southern China, Northern India, and Southeast Asia. meuang Meaning city in Thai, the term is also associated with the pillars often found at the center of ancient cities across Thailand and Laos. naga A dragon-like entity that lives underground, guardian of territory and often associated with water. The naga is the

140 | Glossary

owner of the water and the land, like neak ta and arak, and is deeply entangled with the Buddha in Southeast Asia. neak mien bun A person that has merit. Someone with power and/or privilege that comes from accumulated merit. neak mien sel A person with Buddhist precepts. A variation of neak mien bun. neak ta A territorial nonhuman entity associated with land, water, mountains, and islands. Has juridical authority over habitation and resource use within particular territories. Also referred to as the Owner/Master of the Water. In Indigenous communities and among some Khmer, also called arak. Best English translation is Ancient Ones, conjugated as plural. Pali An Indic language, derivative of Sanskrit. The language of the Buddhist Canon. parami Perfection, power, and neak ta. The term comes from the Pali language and is associated with Buddhism, referring to the perfections achieved by the Buddha through multiple lifetimes by which enlightenment was achieved. This term is entangled with the power of neak ta, as explained in Chapters 3 and 5. phnom Mountain (or hill). phnom srou The rice mountain. A harvest celebration held at the beginning of the dry season around January. prie Forest. Pu Uncle. purdah Full-body covering worn by more conservative Muslim women. Qur’an Holy book of Islam. ratth The state. sasana religion. sasana boran The ancient religion, also called Brahminism. sasana samay The new religion (adopted in the colonial era), a purified form of Buddhism that has no magical or powerful elements. sel Buddhist precepts. There are five for laypersons: do not kill, lie, engage in sexual misconduct, steal, or consume intoxicants. For Buddhist monks, there are 277 precepts. sima Literally a boundary in the Pali language. The vihear is sanctified by creating a power-infused boundary around it. That boundary is called a sima. sot b’lay To chant a magic spell. sot toa To chant the dhamma.

Glossary | 141

sruk

The village or the field. The term is used in opposition to prie, the forest, to mean cultivated and settled area. It is also used in opposition to krong, the city, to mean the countryside. Ta Grandfather. thamabal Energy. traipitak The Three Baskets, which are the three books of the Pali Canon of Buddhism, the vinayas (laws), the suttas (poems), and the abidhamma (explanation of the dhamma). Tuen Knowledgeable elder in Cham community. vihear The sanctified building of a Buddhist temple complex where ordinations and other special rites are held. Yay Grandmother. yak A giant, a protector of the king. Associated with arak and by extension with neak ta. yuon A magical drawing based on the Pali language, often used for tattoos and other talismans. wat The Buddhist temple.

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Index

n adjar (ritual specialist), 11–12, 27n1, 76, 138 agricultural ceremonies, 71–72 Larng Neak Ta, 76, 139 Phnom srou (rice mountain), 68, 140 `amboe (magic), 123–24, 125–26, 138 ancestors, 80, 82n6, 110 deterritorialization through Buddhism and, 68 neak ta and, 54, 57, 59–60, 63, 67, 68, 77–78 the Ancient Ones. See neak ta (territorial entities) Angkor Wat (temple), 114 animism, 5, 55–58 Arabic language, 92, 101 arak (nonhuman guardian), 27n3, 54, 79, 138 Asokā (king), 110, 129 attipol (power, influence), 74, 138 “places which have influence,” konlieng mien attipol, 65 aunt (Ming), 139 Basso, Keith, 12, 112 bio-geo energy, 71, 72 b’lay (powerful incantations), 113, 125–26 Bourdieu, Pierre, 31, 40, 86, 87 Brahminism, 65, 67, 72–73, 81, 117–18, 138 bridges, 22, 32, 56, 105, 125–26, 135 frontiers and, 15–16, 130, 134–35

gathering effects of, 22, 56, 125–26, 135 of Sambok Dung, 44–45 the Buddha (Siddhartha Gautama), 21, 59, 71, 123 Buddhism Brahminism and, 65, 67, 72–73, 81, 138 chthonic energies and, 57–60, 65, 71–72, 80, 112, 121, 126–7, 133 Kings and, 12, 15, 22, 59, 67, 71, 74, 77, 112, 121–22, 126–27 maja tuk maja day and, 65, 73 meditation and, 7 merit and, 106–9, 110–14, 122–23 neak ta and, 56, 57, 59–60, 66–67, 74–79 precepts of (sel), 6, 74–75, 79, 123–24, 140 sima ceremony of, 67, 71, 74, 77, 112, 140 Theravada, 59, 81n3, 108, 129n3 building, of temples, 108, 111, 113–14, 118–21, 132 built environment, 22–26 bun. See merit Cambodia decentralization in, 45, 46–47 development in, 40–42, 48–49, 51n1, 134–35 genocide in, 3–4 government offices of, 30–33

158 | Index

Cambodia (cont.) injustice against people of, 39–40, 50–51n3 Islamic practices in, 91–93 land distribution in, 17, 19–20, 24–25, 83 map of, 10 migration to, 97, 103–4 modern influence in, 85 political power and economic access in, 46 war (1970-1999) in, 29, 63 Cambodia Development Research Institute (CDRI), 40 Cambodian People’s Party (CPP), 101 Cardamom Mountains, 2, 11–12 CDRI. See Cambodia Development Research Institute (CDRI) celebration of Muhammad’s birth, 28n10, 102, 139 for neak ta, 76 ceremony agricultural, 71–72 Larng Neak Ta, 76, 139 sima, 67, 71, 74, 77, 112, 140 Certeau, Michel de, 20, 86–87, 91, 130, 131 Champa kingdom, 83–84, 85, 98 Islam and, 89–90 war and, 88–89 the Cham people, 1, 15, 94–95, 138 clothing of, 92, 100, 140 as diasporic, 9, 27n7, 84, 86, 98, 102, 132 displacement of, 85, 90, 98, 103, 105 French colonial tide and, 98–99 history of, 88–90, 91–93, 97–99, 103–4 Islam and, 27n7, 84–85, 96, 97–98, 99–105 junjiet cham race of, 92 Khmer and, 34, 99 land and, 19–20, 83 language of, 88, 98–99, 101, 104, 105n2 migrations by, 90, 97, 103–4 mosque of, 26, 99 original religion of, 97 Vietnam fled by, 96 chant the dhamma (sot toa), 125, 141 charity, as part of Islam, 86, 102–3

the Chinese company, 4–5, 7, 13, 48–49, 105n1 Christian churches, 137 chthonic energies, power, 58, 131, 133 Buddhism and, 57–60, 65, 71–72, 80, 112, 121, 126–7, 133 the Development State and, 15 empire and, 4–6, 58–60, 80, 105, 112, 133–35 human power meeting, 6, 121, 133–5 neak ta as, 55, 56, 60 religion and, 57–60, 80, 101, 105 city with pillar (meuang), 66, 67, 139 clash of civilizations, 97–99 climate change, 1–2, 135 clothing, of the Cham people, 100 collapse, of Khmer empire, 59 commune chief, 45–47, 50 companies, 4–5, 7, 13, 16, 25, 34 employee wages and, 49 land claims and, 14, 136 of roads of Sambok Dung, 48–49 the state and, 35, 48 contact zone, 1–2, 13, 55–56, 65, 72, 114 between the Cham and Islam, 97 depolitization in, 32, 49 parami as, 64 between religion and elemental forces, 67, 73, 122 Sambok Dung as, 14–15, 21, 95, 130 conversions, to Islam, 99–104 corruption, of Development State, 46 CPP. See Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) ctum. See hut Dakwah Tabligh, 99, 100, 101 dangers, of railroad, 43–44 Davis, Erik, 67, 72, 73, 122, 128 the dead, managing, 67–68 debris, imperial, 2, 14–15, 21 of Islamic empire, 96 parami as, 22 railroad as, 30 stories as, 40, 96, 113 decentralization, in Cambodia, 45, 46–47 deforestation, 5, 6–7, 13, 33–36, 130, 137 democracy and development, as imperial tide, 93–95, 96

Index | 159

Democratic Kampuchea (DK), 3, 16–17, 25, 33–34, 89, 90 depolitization, in contact zone, 32, 49 Descola, Phillippe, 5–6 development, in Cambodia, 134–35 framework for, 40– 41 imperial expansion and, 59 infrastructure of, 48–49 initiatives for, 40, 50n1 of the railroad, 41–42 temples and, 68, 74, 108, 114, 118–21 the Development State, 14 chthonic energies and, 15 corruption of, 46 diaspora, 106–7 Cham, 9, 27n7, 84, 86, 98, 102, 132 Khmer, 7 displacement, of the Cham people, 85, 90, 98, 103, 105 divinization, 57–59 DK. See Democratic Kampuchea (DK) donations, for temples, 119–20 dragon-like entity (naga), 74, 140 dreams, involving neak ta, 63, 69, 81 early days, of Sambuk Dung, 29–30, 56 ecocide, and imperial grammar, 135–37 Economic Land Concession (ELC), 4–5, 7, 13, 48–49, 105n1 elder (Tuen), 105n3, 141 empire chthonic power and, 4–6, 58–60, 80, 105, 112, 133–5 the forest power meeting, 127–29 fragility and, 2, 50 merit as result of, 114 stories and, 131–35 as tides, 1, 2, 4, 131, 132 the Yuan, 88–89 Empire (Hardt, Negri), 94–95 energy bio-geo, 71, 72 chthonic, 4–6, 15, 55–60, 58, 65, 72, 125, 131, 133 thamabal, 65, 141 English teaching, 8 enlightenment, 113

entities, nonhuman holder (baisay) of, 77, 78, 138 legal structures of, 62 of the soil, 57, 59 See also arak (nonhuman guardian); lok ta (nonhuman entity, neak ta); maja tuk maja day (Owner of the Water and the Land); neak ta (territorial entities) environment, built, 22–26 European colonialism. See French colonial tide fall, of Pol Pot, 98 farmers, rice, 3, 15, 18, 26 fishing, 105n1 Forest, Alain, 52, 59–60 the forest (prie), 6, 13, 14, 140 Buddhist temple (Wat) and, 128 as diminishing, 124–25, 130 empire meeting, 129 neighborhoods in, 24–25 respect for, 20–21 soldiers in, 34–35 the village and, 127 Forestry Administration official (Me Prie), 35, 139 fortuneteller (Ta Jain), 124 founding space, 114–15 French colonial tide, 4, 41 the Cham people and, 98–99 the railroads and, 29 violence of, 32 Friedman, Jonathan, 31, 93 frontiers and bridges, 15–16, 22, 56, 105, 125–26, 134–35 genocide, in Cambodia, 3–4 ghāt samara (memory), 33 global capital, imperial tide, 106–7 globalization, 93–94, 96 communication in village and, 95 government offices, of Cambodia, 30–33 Graeber, David, 58, 59 grammar, imperial, 3–4, 15 ecocide and, 135–37 parami and, 21–22 grandfather (Ta), 141

160 | Index

Grandfather of the Lake of Buried Treasure (Lok Ta Beung Komnap), 62–63 Grandfather Revenge and Grandmother Duck (Lok Ta Gum Lok Yay Tia), 63, 69 Grandfather Stream (Lok Ta Oh), 63 grandmother (Yay), 141 Guillou, Anne Yvonne, 66, 82n7 habitation, followed by neak ta, 71 Hardt, Michael, 94–95 Heidegger, Martin, 15, 22, 45, 135 highland people, 57, 67, 90 hijab, 100, 138 hill people (phnang). See highland people history of the Cham people, 88–90, 91–93, 97–99, 103–4 theories on, 86–87 holy book, of Islam (Qur’an), 92, 140 human power, meeting chthonic energy, 6, 121, 125, 133–5 Huntington, Samuel, 96, 99 hut (ctum), 52, 62, 69–70, 81n1, 138 for lok ta, 61, 68 for maja tuk maja day, 53, 54 for neak ta, 23, 24, 76 ijtima’ah (Islamic ritual), 100, 138 imam (ritual specialist of Islam), 19, 138 imamah (turban), 92 Imam San group, 90 imperial tide, 1, 2, 131, 137 democracy and development as, 93–95, 96 French colonial, 4, 98 global capital as, 106–7 Islamic, 84–85, 93 Khmer Rouge, 4, 98 mission trips as, 94 religion and, 67 Vietnamese socialism, 4 See also debris, imperial incantations, powerful (b’lay), 113, 125–26 Indic cosmologies, 4 Indic language. See Pali

indigenous religions, intersecting Buddhism, 72 indrakhila (Indra’s stake), 67 influence attipol (power), 65, 74, 138 Malaysian, 98 modern world, 85 Muslim, 4, 83, 93 Vedic traditional, 59 Western, 58, 95–96 infrastructure of development, 48–49 as local, 50 Ingold, Tim, 21, 33, 50 injustice, against Cambodian people, 39–40, 50–51n3 international Islamic organizations, 86, 101 Islam in Cambodia, 91–94 Champa kingdom and, 89–90 the Cham people and, 27n7, 84–85, 96, 97–98, 99–105 charity as part of, 86, 102–3 conversions to, 99–104 democracy and development meeting, 96 imperial tide of, 84–85, 93, 96 Jahed, 92, 104, 139 Junjiet Islam, 92–94, 99, 139 Khmer people and, 99 Qur’an, 92, 140 ritual of, 100, 138 ritual specialist of, 138 Jayavarman VII, 59, 81n3 junjiet (race), 92, 139 Junjiet Islam, 92–93, 99, 139 kamma (effects of action), 109, 139 Kampong Chhnang Province, 2 Kampuchea. See Democratic Kampuchea (DK) Khleang Muang (famous neak ta), 66, 76, 77 Khmer people Buddhism and, 15, 59 Cham and, 34, 99 as diasporic, 7

Index | 161

empire collapse of, 59 Islam and, 99 language of, 8, 105n2 Khmer Rouge, 3, 16, 29–30, 84 imperial tide of, 4, 98 the railroad and, 42–43 khsae (strings, social connections), 46, 108, 110–11, 139 kingship, 51n6 dismantled, 4 neak ta and, 12–13, 15, 22, 57, 59, 66–67, 71, 74, 77, 80, 121, 126–27, 134 as neak ta bun, 126 in Thailand, 66 krama (scarf), 139 kru (teacher, non-human), 38–39, 117–18 kru parami (powerful teacher), 22, 65, 139 kru teeyay (fortune-teller), 63, 124 neak kru, 28n13 krum sāmaggī (solidarity groups), 16–17 land distribution, in Cambodia, 17, 19–20, 24–25, 83 language Arabic, 92, 101 Cham, 88, 98–99, 101, 104, 105n2 Khmer, 8, 105n2 Malay, 92, 101 Pali, 21–22, 117, 123, 140 Larng Neak Ta (Raise the Ancient Ones, ceremony), 76, 139 Lefebvre, Henri, 15, 21, 30, 74, 111 local labor, machine use over, 46–47 local power, and merit, 116–17 logging practices, 3, 8, 30, 34–35, 36, 136 lok ta (nonhuman entity, neak ta), 11, 54, 81n2, 139 hut for, 61, 68 land claims and, 63–64 laws and, 62 meeting of, 60–64 monks blessing, 76 offerings to, 60–61, 78–79 protection by, 79–80 respect for, 62–64 the state and, 81 village activities by, 74–75

Lok Ta Beung Komnap (Grandfather of the Lake of Buried Treasure), 60, 62–63, 69, 70, 75 Lok Ta Gum Lok Yay Tia (Grandfather Revenge and Grandmother Duck), 63, 69, 70 Lok Ta Oh (Grandfather Stream), 63, 69, 75 Lok Yay Krape Samot (Honored Grandmother Who Sips the Sea), 76, 77 lorry/ies (railcars, makeshift), 43–44, 51n5, 139 machine use, over local labor, 46–47 magic (`amboe), 89, 138 Buddhism and, 124–26 magical drawing (yuon), 109, 119, 125, 141 magic spell (monagoum), 123–24, 139 spell chant (sot b’lay), 125–26, 140 maja tuk maja day (Owner of the Water and the Land), 11, 24, 56, 68, 132, 139 Buddhism and, 65, 67, 71, 73 huts for, 53, 54 kings and, 12–13, 15, 22, 57, 59, 66–67, 71, 74, 77, 80, 121, 126–27, 134 land claims and, 13, 52, 63–64, 80 ontological transformations and, 57–58 social relationship to, 80–81 See also lok ta; neak ta making merit, 108–10, 116 Malay language, 92, 101 Malaysia, 98, 99, 101 managing the dead, 67–68 manuss moel min ghoeñ (spirits), 38, 139 map of Cambodia, 10 of Southeast Asia mainland, 84 Mauss, Marcel, 122, 135 mawlid (celebration of Muhammad’s birth), 28n10, 102, 139 meditation, 109–10 meeting lok ta (nonhuman entity, neak ta), 60–64 memory (ghāt samara), 33 Me Prie (Forestry Administration official), 35, 139

162 | Index

merit (bun), 138 Buddhism and, 106–9, 110–14, 122–23 empire resulting in, 114 local power and, 116–17 making, 108–10, 116 monks and, 112, 115 patronage and, 110–14 people with, 123–27, 140 power and, 107–9, 121–27, 129 temples and, 110–11, 114, 118–21, 128–29 vihear building and, 113 meuang (city with pillar), 66, 67, 139 migrant laborers, in Sambok Dung, 18, 27n9 migrations, by the Cham people, 90, 97, 103–4 mindfulness, 110 Ming (aunt), 139 mission trips, as imperial tide, 94 modern influence, in Cambodia, 85 monagoum (magic spell), 123–24, 139 monk, Buddhist, 4, 27n1, 78 lok ta blessings by, 76 managing the dead, 60, 67–68 merit and, 112, 115 ordination as, 110 parami recited by, 65 “monk’s road,” 36 Monsoon Asia, 139 morality and care, and neak ta, 79–80 moral precepts (sel), 6, 74–75, 79, 123–24, 140 mosque, of the Cham people, 26, 99 mountains (phnom), 22–23, 140 mountain lore, 12–13 Mountain of Grandfather Stream (Phnom Ta Oh), 12 Muhammad, birth celebration (mawlid), 28n10, 102, 139 Mus, Paul, 55, 56, 57–58 Muslim influence, 4, 83, 93 naga (dragon-like entity), 67, 71, 74, 140 nature, connection to, 5–6, 13–14, 16, 135 neak kru (teacher), 28n13 neak mien bun/sel (person with merit), 107, 109, 123–27, 140

neak ta (Ancient Ones, territorial entities), 8, 11, 52, 54, 140 Buddhism and, 56, 57, 59–60, 66–67, 74–79 celebrations for, 76 as chthonic energies, power, 55, 56, 60 as domesticated, 27n3 dreams involving, 63, 69, 81 habitation followed by, 71 huts for, 23, 24, 76 Khleang Muang, 66, 76, 77 kingship and, 12–13, 15, 22, 57, 59, 66–67, 71, 74, 77, 80, 121, 126–27, 134 Larng Neak Ta, 76, 139 lok ta as, 60, 81n2 morality and care and, 79–80 offerings to, 64, 78–79 origins of, 63–64 Phnom srou (rice mountain), 68, 140 principles of, 56 religion and, 55, 57, 66–68 of Sambok Dung, 56, 63, 71, 72, 77, 80–81 social positions of, 57 social relationship with, 79–80, 131, 135–36 See also lok ta (nonhuman entity, neak ta); maja tuk maja day (Owner of the Water and the Land); parami (perfection, power and neak ta) Negri, Antonio, 94–95 neighborhoods, 26 of the forest, 24–25 of Sambok Dung, 22–24 NGO, 8, 31, 87 nonhuman guardian. See arak offerings, 78–79 to lok ta, 60–61 to neak ta, 64 old village, of Sambok Dung, 18, 26, 38–39 ontology, 5, 68, 73, 133 ontological effects, 58, 72 ontological transformations, maja tuk maja day (Owner of the Water and the Land), 57–58

Index | 163

origins of neak ta, 63–64 of religion, 58–59 theory of parami, 66 Orsi, Robert, 80, 133, 134 Owner of the Water and the Land (maja tuk maja day). See maja tuk maja day (Owner of the Water and the Land) Pali (Indic language), 21–22, 117, 123, 140 Pali Canon, 108, 110, 129, 141 parami (perfection, power and neak ta), 21, 62, 65, 105n4, 133, 140 Bodhisattva and, 66 Cham and, 105n4 as contact zone, 64 as debris, imperial, 22 origin theory of, 66 snakes as, 124–26 temple building as, 121 patronage (khsae), 108–21, 128 peace agreements (1991), 4 people highland, 57, 67, 90 with merit, 123–27, 140 of Sambok Dung, 17–20 Pérez Pereiro, Arturo, 90, 93 perfection (parami). See parami (perfection, power and neak ta) Pheapimex company, 5 phnang (hill people), 90. See also highland people phnom (mountain), 12, 140 Phnom Gok (Prison Mountain), 11 Phnom Ta Oh (Mountain of Grandfather Stream), 7, 12, 26, 66 Phnom srou (rice mountain, harvest celebration), 68, 140 political ontology, 73 Pol Pot, 16, 18–19, 20, 27n8, 44, 118–19 fall of, 98 power (attipol), 65, 74, 138 merit and, 121–23 sovereigns and, 132–33 See also parami (perfection, power and neak ta) powerful teacher (kru parami), 22, 65, 139

precepts, Buddhist (sel), 6, 74–75, 79, 123–24, 140 prie (forest). See the forest (prie) Prison Mountain (Phnom Gok), 11 private property laws, 17 protection by lok ta, 79–80 protector of the king (yak), 12, 27n3, 141 Pu (uncle), 140 Pum Ta Porn (neighborhood), 25–26 purdah (full-body covering), 92, 100, 140 Pursat Provinces, 16, 18–20, 33–34, 77, 83 Qur’an (holy book of Islam), 92, 140 railcars, makeshift (lorry/ies), 43–44, 51n5, 139 railroad as dangerous, 43–44 development of, 41–42 Khmer Rouge and, 42–43 in Sambok Dung, 23, 29–30 from Thailand, 41 rainbows, 12, 27n4 Raise the Ancient Ones, ceremony (Larng Neak Ta), 76, 139 ratth. See the state rebirth (sansāra), 65, 108, 109, 110 red roads, the, 47–48 religion (sasana), 101–2, 135 Brahminism, 65, 67, 72–73, 81, 117–18, 138 Buddhism, 1, 6, 7, 15, 56–57, 59–60, 65, 66–68, 71–73, 74–79, 81, 81n3, 106–9, 110–14, 113, 129n3, 138, 140 chthonic power and, 57–60, 71–72, 80, 112, 121, 126–7, 133 imperial tides and, 67 Islam, 27n7, 84–85, 89–90, 91–93, 96–105, 101–2, 138, 139, 140 neak ta and, 55, 57, 66–68 original Cham, 97 origins of, 58–59 sasana boran, 55, 106, 117–18, 124, 126–27, 140 sasana samay, 117–18, 126–27, 140 scholarship and, 57 superstition, 55, 58, 65–66, 73 Revival of Islamic Heritage Society (RIHS), 99, 100–101

164 | Index

RGC. See Royal Government of Cambodia (RGC) rice farmers of, 3, 4, 15, 18, 26 roads built in exchange for, 36–37, 38, 39–40, 50n2 rice mountain (Phnom srou), 68, 140 RIHS. See Revival of Islamic Heritage Society (RIHS) ritual specialist (adjar), 11–12, 27n1, 76, 138 ritual specialist, of Islam (imam), 19, 138 roads, of Sambok Dung, 29–31, 33–35, 44, 50, 136 company, 48–49 in old village, 38–39 promise of goods and services increased by, 47 the red road, 47–48 rice exchange for building, 36–37, 38, 39–40, 50n2 to southern market town, 45–46 trails as, 46, 48 villagers building, 36–37, 38–39 Rochester, Minnesota, 7 Royal Government of Cambodia (RGC), 32 Sahlins, Marshal, 58 Sambok Dung (village), 1, 2, 11 access in, 47, 95 Buddhist temple in, 6, 15, 26, 74, 75, 131 as contact zone, 14–15, 21, 95, 130 lok ta sites in, 62, 71 migrant laborers in, 18, 27n9 neak ta in, 56, 62–63, 71, 72, 77, 80–81 neighborhoods of, 22–24 old village of, 18, 26, 38–39 peoples of, 17–20, 116 railroad in, 23, 29–30 roads of, 29–31, 33–40, 44–50, 50n2 spatial production within, 68–72 stories creating, 20–21 youth leaving, 136–37 San, Imam, 92 sansāra (rebirth), 65, 108, 109, 110 sasana. See religion

sasana boran (religion, ancient), 55, 106, 117–18, 124, 126–27, 140 sasana samay (religion, new), 117–18, 126–27, 140 scarf (krama), 139 secular, 54–55, 60, 65, 67, 74, 80, 106 secularization, by the state (ratth), 54–55 sel (Buddhist precepts), 6, 74–75, 123–24, 140 Sen, Hun (prime minister), 27n8, 113, 121 Siddhartha Gautama (the Buddha), 21, 59, 71, 123 Sihanouk, Norodom, 40, 41, 99, 113–14 sima (Buddhist ceremony), 67, 71, 74, 77, 112, 140 Slieman, 87, 89–90, 91–92, 97 snakes, 34, 124–126 social connections (khsae), 46, 108, 111, 139 socialism, Vietnamese, 4 Social Land Concession, 16, 25 social positions, of neak ta, 57 social relationship with maja tuk maja day/neak ta, 79–81, 131, 135–36 the soil, entities of, 57, 59 soldiers the forest and, 34–35 in Sambok Dung, 17–18, 116 solidarity groups (krum sāmaggī), 16–17 sot b’lay (spell chant), 125–26, 140 sot toa (chant the dhamma), 125, 141 Southeast Asia, mainland map, 84 southern market town road, 45–46 sovereigns and power (attipol), 132–33 spacial production, 21, 30 neak ta and, 68–72 “Spatial Stories” (Certeau), 20 spirits (manuss moel min ghoeñ), 38, 139 Sri Lanka, 78 sruk (village), 127, 128, 141 the state (ratth), 31–33, 40–41, 44, 49, 140 (imperial), 107, 114, 126 agents of, 95 companies and, 48 effects of, 40–41, 87 lok ta and, 81 secularization by, 54–55 Stoler, Ann Laura, 14, 30, 41

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stories and empire, 131–32 strings (khsae), 46, 108, 111, 139 supernatural, 5, 72, 81 systems, of religion, 2 Ta (grandfather), 141 Ta Chen (villager), 33–34, 38–39 Ta Jain (fortuneteller), 124 Tambiah, Stanley, 72, 73, 74, 115, 122 Ta Mien, 11–12, 13 Ta Porn (village chief), 37, 39–40 tattooing practices, 58, 109 Taylor, Philip, 103 teacher kru, non-human spirit teacher, 22, 38–39, 65, 117–18, 139 neak kru, female human teacher, 28n13 tuen, Muslim human teacher, 103, 105n3 temple, Buddhist (Wat), 7, 129n1, 141 building of, 108, 111, 113–14, 118–21, 132 donations for, 119–20 the forest (prie) and, 128 kingship and, 59 merit (bun) and, 110–11, 114, 118–21, 128–29 offerings in, 78, 112 in Sambok Dung, 6, 15, 26, 74, 75, 131 village and forest mediated by, 127 Thailand, 29, 109 the Cham people migrating to, 90, 97 kingship in, 66 railroad from, 41 thamabal (energy), 65, 141 theories, on history, 86–87 Theravada Buddhism, 59, 81n3, 108, 129n3 The Writing of History (Certeau), 86–87 The Three Baskets [of the Pali Canon] (traipitak), 108, 110, 141 tides. See imperial tide traipittak (The Three Baskets [of the Pali Canon]), 108, 110, 129, 141

Tuen (elder, teacher), 105n3, 141 Tuen Ja, 87, 88–89, 91, 92, 94, 102 Tuen Tun Dī, 83, 87, 88–89, 91, 92, 98, 102 turban (imamah), 92 uncle (Pu), 140 United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC), 35, 43 Vedic traditions, 59. See also Brahminism Vietnam, 84 the Cham fleeing, 96 socialism of, 4 vihear (part of Buddhist temple), 74, 75, 76, 141 merit and, 113 preparations for, 77, 78 village (sruk), 127, 128, 141. See also Sambok Dung (village) village chief (Ta Porn), 37, 39–40 war in Cambodia (1970-1999), 29, 63 Champa kingdom and, 88–89 Wat (temple, Buddhist). See temple, Buddhist (Wat) Western influence, 58, 95–96 WFP. See World Food Programme (WFP) witchcraft, 122–23 Buddhist monks and, 125 the king and, 126 neak ta and, 126 sasana boran and, 124 World Food Programme (WFP), 33, 36–37, 39 yak (protector of the king), 12, 27n3, 141 Yay (grandmother), 141 Yay Som (villager), 60–61 youth, leaving Sambok Dung, 136–37 the Yuan empire, 88–89 yuon (magical drawing), 109, 119, 125, 141