SPRING 2012 CSEAS SPEAKER SERIES
A Presentation by Professor Jonathan Padwe, assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at UH M­­ānoa.

Upland Agriculture Under the Khmer Rouge: An Incomplete Project of Rule in Cambodia
Location: Tokioka Room, Moore 319; UHM
Friday, March 9, 12:00 P.M.

Scholars of Southeast Asia have long noted the assiduousness with which modern lowland states have sought to extend national structures of power and control to the highland peoples on their peripheries. Programs designed to modernize and develop highlander agriculture belong to a varied set of techniques pursued by regimes throughout the region, techniques that seek to impose new rationalities of social organization on populations considered restive and unruly. While these projects of rule are never fully realized, they nonetheless have far-reaching consequences for their targets of intervention. The case of Khmer Rouge agricultural planning, as it was implemented in Cambodia’s northeast highlands, provides a useful illustration. In 1971, Jarai swidden farmers living in the hill region along Cambodia’s border with Vietnam were forcibly resettled from farming villages in the forested uplands to the floodplain of the Sesan River. Instructed to grow “wet” rice in permanent inundated fields, they were among the first to participate in the agricultural collectivization program that would prove so devastating to Cambodia’s agrarian populace over the next ten years. Yet while stories about the collectivization of Jarai agriculture often conform to narratives about the total, revolutionary nature of the Khmer Rouge intervention in social life, in fact this project of rule was incomplete in many ways. This talk explores the nature of that incompleteness, and its significance for our understanding of the Khmer Rouge regime and of the relationship between lowland and highland societies in Southeast Asia.

Jonathan Padwe is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at UH M­­ānoa. His current research investigates historical transformations of agrarian social relations in highland Cambodia from an ecological and anthropological perspective.

Center for Southeast Asian Studies
For more information, please contact The Center for Southeast Asian Studies at cseas@hawaii.edu.

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The scars of Cambodia’s wars and genocide are more than psychic: this little nation in the heart of Southeast Asia is one of the most densely mined places on earth. And like those mines, the legacy of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge exacts a constant — and hidden — toll, leaving the country mostly poor, politically repressive, corrupt and violent.

It was only last month that a trial of the three surviving Khmer Rouge leaders got under way, reviving buried memories for many traumatized Cambodians.

In her meditation on the scars of war in Cambodia, “War Remnants of the Khmer Rouge” (Umbrage Books, October 2011), the photographer Maureen Lambray has chosen to emphasize portraits of badly maimed victims of the land mines that were mostly laid during the wars that preceded and followed the Khmer Rouge rule. The quiet mood of her carefully composed and lit portraits of land-mine victims, as they stare intently into the camera, belies the horror of their mutilation.

“I began documenting the people and haunted sites,” she wrote in the book’s preface. “It seems half the population are still missing arms, legs, fathers and mothers.”

Over the last three decades, land mines have caused more than 63,900 deaths and injuries, Helen Clark, the development chief of the United Nations, said at a major international conference on land mines now under way in Phnom Penh.

Apart from these broken bodies, Ms. Lambray’s camera also captures the desolation of ruined buildings and forbidding forests in a land populated by ghosts. In a more direct reference to Pol Pot’s atrocities, she shows an empty corridor at Tuol Sleg Prison, where thousands of people were tortured and sent to a killing field, enclosed by barbed wire to prevent them from jumping to their deaths.

Like her other work, Ms. Lambray’s photographs combine journalistic coverage — sometimes at personal risk — with artistic composition.

In 1979, Yassir Arafat invited her to Beirut for an in-depth look at the Palestine Liberation Organization. The following year, she covered the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, disguising herself at one point as an Afghan man. And in 1994, she was caught up in the Zapatista uprising in Mexico during a project to document obscure Indian tribes.

Her first encounter with Cambodia came in 1979 when she chronicled the lives of refugees in camps along the Thai border where hundreds of thousands of people had fled as the Khmer Rouge regime collapsed. She returned to Cambodia in 2003 and said she was stunned to see how little the country had recovered.

“The government has begun spiriting away the maimed Cambodians as more tourists flock to their country,” she wrote in her preface. “We need images as reminders of how quickly genocide can happen, and the past become the present.”

Photography and the article were taken from a piece by journalist, Seth Mydans, for the New York Times. The original article was originally released on December 1, 2011, at 1:00 pm.

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Ros Sereysothea (Khmer: រស់ សេរីសុទ្ធា) (1948 – 1977) was a famous Cambodian singer during the nation’s thriving cultural renaissance. She sang from a variety of genres but romantic ballads emerged as her most popular works. Despite a rather short career she is credited with producing hundreds of songs and even starring in a few movies. Details of her life and fate during the Khmer Rouge is relatively unknown but it is generally accepted she did not survive.

With the cultural upheaval by the Khmer Rouge, scant evidence of Ros Serey Sothea’s life remains. Her master recordings were either destroyed by the regime or deteriorated rapidly to the tropical environment due to lack of preservation. However, many vinyl recordings have survived and have gained reissues initially on tape cassettes and later on compact discs. Unfortunately many of these reissues are also remixed with extra beats usually overriding the original score. The vinyls from the master sources are thereby highly sought out by preservationist and collectors.

Nonetheless Sothea remained extremely popular even after her death in Cambodian communities scattered throughout the United States, France, Australia and Canada. Western interest in Sothea would not dawn until songs by Sothea, Sinn Sisamouth and other Cambodian singers of the era such as Meas Samoun, Choun Malai and Pan Ron, were featured on the soundtrack to Matt Dillon’s film City of Ghosts. Tracks by Sothea are “Have You Seen My Love”, “I’m Sixteen” and “Wait Ten Months”. The Los Angeles band Dengue Fever, which features Cambodian lead singer Chhom Nimol, covers a number of songs by Sothea and other singers from the short-lived but rich Cambodian rock and roll scene. The advent of the internet, undoubtly saved what was left of her discography while spreading and garnering interest in her music even after almost half a century later.

Biography Blog | Last.fm | Ros Serevsothea Film | Khmer Music Page

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* Love and Dread in Cambodia: Weddings, Births, and Ritual Harm under the Khmer Rouge

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The Center for Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa supports
The Royal Thai Embassy, The Royal Cambodian Embassy, The International Red Cross, & Other Groups Collecting Donations for Flood Victims in Thailand & Cambodia

The flood crisis over the past two months is Thailand’s worst in 50 years and has continued to affect one- third of the country’s provinces, with more than 400 people dead and damaged millions of homes.

People in the U.S. who wish to help flood victims in Thailand can donate through the Royal Thai Embassy in Washington, D.C. by sending a money order (payable to Royal Thai Embassy) to Consular Affairs Section, Royal Thai Embassy, 1024 Wisconsin Avenue, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20007. A donation box has also been set up in front of the Consular Affairs Section of the Embassy.

The Embassy has updated information on donation on their Facebook page (Royal Thai Embassy, Washington, D.C.) and Twitter (@ThaiEmbDC). Additional questions about the donation request can be addressed to First Secretary Nipatsorn Kampa at 202-285-1547.

- International Red Cross: Both the Cambodian Red Cross and Thai Red Cross are accepting donations for relief efforts though their respective websites.

- Royal Thai Embassy: Donations to flood victims in Thailand are being accepted through the embassy. Send checks or money orders (payable to Royal Thai Embassy) to Consular Affairs Section, Royal Thai Embassy, 1024 Wisconsin Ave., N.W., Washington, DC 20007. See the embassy’s Facebook page (Royal Thai Embassy, Washington, D.C.) for donation updates or call the embassy’s First Secretary Nipatsorn Kampa at 202-285-1547.

- Save the Children: International aid organization is accepting donations for flood relief in Thailand through its Thailand Floods Children in Emergency Fund. See the Save the Children website.

- Royal Embassy of Cambodia: Contact the embassy at 4530 16th St., N.W., Washington, DC 20011; phone 202-726-7742.

- World Vision Cambodia: International aid group is distributing rice to affected communities where rice fields and other food sources have been compromised by flooding. See the Save the Children Cambodia website.

http://www.cseashawaii.org/wordpress/2011/10/photography-thailand-flood/

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* Folk Stories of the Hmong: Peoples of Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam
* A Glimpse of Vietnamese Oral Literature: Mythology, Tales, Folklore
* Cambodian Folk Stories from the Gatiloke
* In Grandmother’s House: Thai Folklore, Traditions, and Rural Village Life
* Indonesian Folktales

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