Library Guides: Age of the Kampuchea Picture: Bibliography

Selected Works of Elizabeth Becker

Books

Becker, Elizabeth. (2010). Bophana : Love in the time of the Khmer Rouge. Cambodia]: Cambodia Daily Press.

———. America's Vietnam War : a narrative history. New York : Clarion Books, 1992.

———. When the war was over : the voices of Cambodia's revolution and its people. New York : Simon and Schuster, 1986

Articles

Becker, Elizabeth. “Opinion: The Women Who Covered Vietnam.” The New York Times, November 17, 2017.

———. “Reporting Massive Human Rights Abuses behind a Façade.” Columbia Journalism Review, October 3, 2016.

———. “Journalists Don’t Always Testify at Tribunals. Here’s Why I Did.” Washington Post, March 6, 2015.

———. “For Cambodia, an Oscar Nod Means Much More than Box-Office Gold.” Los Angeles Times, February 27, 2014.

Reporting from her 1978 Visit to Democratic Kampuchea

———. “A Journey Into the New Cambodia: ‘But We Are at War, We Have Enemies’ Cambodia’s Leaders Step Away From Modernity.” The Washington Post, December 26, 1978.

———. “Cambodia Offers To Open Border To Westerners: Cambodia Offers to Open Borders to Western Observers.” The Washington Post, October 14, 1978.

———. “Cambodia Totters.” The Washington Post, January 7, 1979, sec. OUTLOOK COLUMNISTS EDITORIALS.

———. “Minor Characters.” The New York Times, August 28, 2005, sec. Sunday Book Review. https://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/28/books/review/minor-characters.html.

———. “Pol Pot Interview Turns Into 90-Minute Lecture.” The Washington Post, December 31, 1978.

———. “Rebels Threaten Phnom Penh: Offensive Threatens Cambodia’s Capital.” The Washington Post, January 6, 1979.

———. “Vietnamese Invasion Of Cambodia Draws Criticism by U.S.” The Washington Post, January 4, 1979.

———. “Cambodia: A Look at Border War With Vietnam: Artillery Thumps on Cambodia-Vietnam Border.” The Washington Post, December 27,1978.

———. “Deterioration Threatens Angkor Wat: Cambodia’s Political Needs Undercut Ancient Temple’s Upkeep” The Washington Post, December 28, 1978.

———. “The Cambodian Experiment: Great Change at Heavy Cost: Cambodia’s Experiment: Changes at Heavy Cost.” The Washington Post, December 29, 1978.

Memoirs

First They Killed My Father by Loung Ung
ISBN: 0060856262
Publication Date: 2006-04-04
From a childhood survivor of the Camdodian genocide under the regime of Pol Pot, this is a riveting narrative of war crimes and desperate actions, the unnerving strength of a small girl and her family, and their triumph of spirit. One of seven children of a high-ranking government official, Loung Ung lived a privileged life in the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh until the age of five. Then, in April 1975, Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge army stormed into the city, forcing Ung's family to flee and, eventually, to disperse. Loung was trained as a child soldier in a work camp for orphans, her siblings were sent to labor camps, and those who survived the horrors would not be reunited until the Khmer Rouge was destroyed. Harrowing yet hopeful, Loung's powerful story is an unforgettable account of a family shaken and shattered, yet miraculously sustained by courage and love in the face of unspeakable brutality.
Stay Alive, My Son by Pin Yathay; John Man
ISBN: 0671663941
Publication Date: 1988-10-15
Survival in the Killing Fields by Haing Ngor; Roger Warner (As told to)
ISBN: 0786713151
Publication Date: 2003-12-26
Nothing has shaped my life as much as surviving the Pol Pot regime. I am a survivor of the Cambodian holocaust. That's who I am," says Haing Ngor. And in his memoir, Survival in the Killing Fields, he tells the gripping and frequently terrifying story of his term in the hell created by the communist Khmer Rouge. Like Dith Pran, the Cambodian doctor and interpreter whom Ngor played in an Oscar-winning performance in The Killing Fields, Ngor lived through the atrocities that the 1984 film portrayed. Like Pran, too, Ngor was a doctor by profession, and he experienced firsthand his country's wretched descent, under the Khmer Rouge, into senseless brutality, slavery, squalor, starvation, and disease--all of which are recounted in sometimes unimaginable horror in Ngor's poignant memoir. Since the original publication of this searing personal chronicle, Haing Ngor's life has ended with his murder, which has never been satisfactorily solved. In an epilogue written especially for this new edition, Ngor's coauthor, Roger Warner, offers a glimpse into this complex, enigmatic man's last years--years that he lived "like his country: scarred, and incapable of fully healing."
To Destroy You Is No Loss by Joan D. Criddle
ISBN: 0963220519
Publication Date: 1998-01-01
Often called the Cambodian Diary of Anne Frank, this authoritative, highly readable biography chronicles four years of hell the Cambodian Holocaust and its effects on one family and the millions like them who were enslaved by their countrymen, the Khmer Rouge. Set against a nightmarish background of degradation and terror it is about the ability of individuals to rise above even these conditions to find moments of peace and joy amid the turmoil and to ultimately escape that war-ravished country to start from scratch in a new homeland.
Cambodian witness : an autobiography of Someth May by Someth May, 1958-
Publication Date: 1987
Khuk kānmư̄ang : banthưk khō̜ng phūsawǣnghā ʻitsaraphāp čhāo Khamēn Bounchan Mol. Kǣo ʻItsara.; Mūnnithi Sathīankōsēt-Nakhaprathīp.
Publication Date: 1985
Cambodia Calling by Richard Heinzl
ISBN: 9780470153253
Publication Date: 2008-03-03
A celebrated doctor's coming of age story in Cambodia It was while in Uganda as a young and idealistic physician that Dr. Richard Heinzl finally heard his true calling: to set up a chapter of Doctors Without Borders in his native Canada. As a prerequisite to fulfilling his Medecins Sans Frontieres dream, Dr. Heinzl was sent to a war-ravaged town in Cambodia to work a year in the field. Cambodia Calling is this young doctor's harrowing personal story of setback and accomplishment in the dangerous and inhospitable environment of a remote Cambodian village. His compelling narrative details how he confronted his own illness and self-doubt, as well as the reality of treating those who could not be saved. Richard Heinzl, MD (Oakville, ON, Canada) founded the Canadian chapter of Doctors Without Borders (Medecins Sans Frontieres), the Nobel Prize-winning humanitarian relief organization. He studied medicine at the University of Toronto, Harvard, and Oxford.
Seeds of Lotus Vietnamese and Cambodian by P. Rambach
ISBN: 0977315665
Publication Date: 2006-08-01
Seeds of Lotus had its origin in a controversial war we are still debating today--fifty years later. In America, we call it the Vietnam War. In Vietnam, they call it the American War. In truth, the political aftermath of that war destabilized the entire region of Southeast Asia and displaced a tangled mass of humanity. The flight of refugees from Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos passed through many exotic destinations-Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines-this was no leisure journey. These travelers were burdened not with holiday luggage, but with the enduring and haunting memories of the trauma of war. Their destination was unknown and their future uncertain. In every case, they escaped with one precious jewel-their life stories.
Interactions with a Violent Past by Vatthana Pholsena (Editor); Oliver Tappe (Editor)
ISBN: 9789971697013
Publication Date: 2013-07-01
There has been little research on the lasting impact of the violence of Second and Third Indochina Wars on local societies and populations, in Vietnam as well as in Laos and Cambodia. Today's Lao, Vietnamese and Cambodian landscapes bear the imprint of competing violent ideologies and their perilous material manifestations. From battlefields and massively bombed terrain to reeducation camps and resettled villages, the past lingers on in the physical environment. The nine essays in this volume discuss post-conflict landscapes as contested spaces imbued with memory-work conveying differing interpretations of the recent past, expressed through material (even, monumental) objects, ritual performances, and oral narratives (or silences). While Cambodian, Lao and Vietnamese landscapes are filled with tenacious traces of a violent past, creating an unsolicited and malevolent sense of place among their inhabitants, they can in turn be transformed by actions of resilient and resourceful local communities.
A Nation to Ruin - Cambodian Republic - Silent No More by Navy Ung-Lancaster
ISBN: 9781480042582
Publication Date: 2013-01-30
Take the journey! This is a masterly scripted novel relating to all the political ills, still infesting this world today, told from a woman's point of view - and nothing less! A Nation to Ruin is based on a true story by the author, Navy Ung-Lancaster. She is one of many who barely survived Cambodian genocide - yet one of a few remaining able to properly recount the actions and real intent behind the founders of the first Cambodian Republic back in 1970.

History and Politics

From the Land of Shadows by Khatharya Um
ISBN: 9781479804733
Publication Date: 2015-10-16
In a century of mass atrocities, the Khmer Rouge regime marked Cambodia with one of the most extreme genocidal instances in human history. What emerged in the aftermath of the regime's collapse in 1979 was a nation fractured by death and dispersal. It is estimated that nearly one-fourth of the country's population perished from hard labor, disease, starvation, and executions. Another half million Cambodians fled their ancestral homeland, with over one hundred thousand finding refuge in America. From the Land of Shadows surveys the Cambodian diaspora and the struggle to understand and make meaning of this historical trauma. Drawing on more than 250 interviews with survivors across the United States as well as in France and Cambodia, Khatharya Um places these accounts in conversation with studies of comparative revolutions, totalitarianism, transnationalism, and memory works to illuminate the pathology of power as well as the impact of auto-genocide on individual and collective healing. Exploring the interstices of home and exile, forgetting and remembering, From the Land of Shadows follows the ways in which Cambodian individuals and communities seek to rebuild connections frayed by time, distance, and politics in the face of this injurious history.
Cambodia's Second Kingdom by Astrid Noren-Nilsson
ISBN: 9780877277989
Publication Date: 2016-07-15
Cambodia's Second Kingdom is an exploration of the role of nationalist imaginings, discourses, and narratives in Cambodia since the 1993 reintroduction of a multiparty democratic system. Competing nationalistic imaginings are shown to be a more prominent part of party political contestation in the Kingdom of Cambodia than typically believed. For political parties, nationalistic imaginings became the basis for strategies to attract popular support, electoral victories, and moral legitimacy. Astrid Noren-Nilsson uses uncommon sources, such as interviews with key contemporary political actors, to analyze Cambodia's postconflict reconstruction politics. This book exposes how nationalist imaginings, typically understood to be associated with political opposition, have been central to the reworking of political identities and legitimacy bids across the political spectrum. Noren-Nilsson examines the entanglement of notions of democracy and national identity and traces out a tension between domestic elite imaginings and the liberal democratic framework in which they operate
A History of Cambodia by David Chandler
ISBN: 9780813343631
Publication Date: 2007-07-31
In this clear and concise volume, author David Chandler provides a timely overview of Cambodia, a small but increasingly visible Southeast Asian nation. Praised by the Journal of Asian Studies as an "original contribution, superior to any other existing work," this acclaimed text has now been completely revised and updated to include material examining the early history of Cambodia, whose famous Angkorean ruins now attract more than one million tourists each year, the death of Pol Pot, and the revolution and final collapse of the Khmer Rouge. The fourth edition reflects recent research by major scholars as well as Chandler's long immersion in the subject and contains an entirely new section on the challenges facing Cambodia today, including an analysis of the current state of politics and sociology and the increasing pressures of globalization. This comprehensive overview of Cambodia will illuminate, for undergraduate students as well as general readers, the history and contemporary politics of a country long misunderstood.
Man or Monster? by Alexander Laban Hinton
ISBN: 9780822362586
Publication Date: 2016-11-08
During the Khmer Rouge's brutal reign in Cambodia during the mid-to-late 1970s, a former math teacher named Duch served as the commandant of the S-21 security center, where as many as 20,000 victims were interrogated, tortured, and executed. In 2009 Duch stood trial for these crimes against humanity. While the prosecution painted Duch as evil, his defense lawyers claimed he simply followed orders. In Man or Monster? Alexander Hinton uses creative ethnographic writing, extensive fieldwork, hundreds of interviews, and his experience attending Duch's trial to create a nuanced analysis of Duch, the tribunal, the Khmer Rouge, and the after-effects of Cambodia's genocide. Interested in how a person becomes a torturer and executioner as well as the law's ability to grapple with crimes against humanity, Hinton adapts Hannah Arendt's notion of the "banality of evil" to consider how the potential for violence is embedded in the everyday ways people articulate meaning and comprehend the world. Man or Monster? provides novel ways to consider justice, terror, genocide, memory, truth, and humanity.
The History of Cambodia by Justin Corfield
ISBN: 9780313357220
Publication Date: 2009-10-13
Includes narrative histories that provide a chronological examination of the political, cultural, philosophical, social, and religious continuities in each nation's long rich history.
Cambodia, 1975-1978 by Karl D. Jackson (Editor)
ISBN: 9781400851706
Publication Date: 2014-04-28
One of the most devastating periods in twentieth-century history was the rule of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge over Cambodia. From April 1975 to the beginning of the Vietnamese occupation in late December 1978, the country underwent perhaps the most violent and far-reaching of all modern revolutions. These six essays search for what can be explained in the ultimately inexplicable evils perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge. Accompanying them is a photo essay that provides shocking visual evidence of the tragedy of Cambodia's autogenocide. "The most important examination of the subject so far.... Without in any way denying the horror and brutality of the Khmers Rouges, the essays adopt a principle of detached analysis which makes their conclusion far more significant and convincing than the superficial images emanating from the television or cinema screen." --Ralph Smith, The Times Literary Supplement "A book that belongs on the shelf of every scholar interested in Cambodia, revolution, or communism.... Answers to questions such as `What effect did Khmer society have on the reign of the Khmer Rouge?' focus on understanding, rather than merely describing." --Randall Scott Clemons, Perspectives on Political Science
The murderous revolution by Martin Stuart-Fox, 1939- Bunheang Ung.
Publication Date: 1986
Kampuchean occupation and resistance by Stephen R. Heder
Publication Date: 1980
How Pol Pot Came to Power by Ben Kiernan
ISBN: 0300102623
Publication Date: 2004-08-11
How did Pol Pot, a tyrant comparable to Hitler and Stalin in his brutality and contempt for human life, rise to power? This authoritative book explores what happened in Cambodia from 1930 to 1975, tracing the origins and trajectory of the Cambodian Communist movement and setting the ascension of Pol Pot's genocidal regime in the context of the conflict between colonialism and nationalism. A new preface bring this edition up to date. Praise for the first edition: "Given the highly secretive nature of Pol Pot's activities, the precise circumstances and manoeuvres that propelled him to the top of the heap will perhaps never be known. But Kiernan has come impressively close to it. . . . And he has presented it in a wide perspective, drawing interesting comparisons with communist movements in Indonesia, Thailand, Burma and India. . . . Incisive."--T. J. S. George, Asiaweek, "Editor's Pick of the Month" "A rich, gruesome and compelling tale. . . fascinating, well-researched and measured . . . a model of judgement and scholarship."--Fred Halliday, New Statesman "[Kiernan's] capacity for dogged research on three continents, and his mastery of every ideological nuance. . . [are] awe-inspiring."--Dervla Murphy, Irish Times
The Pol Pot Regime by Ben Kiernan
ISBN: 0300096496
Publication Date: 2002-07-11
What was the nature of the regime that turned Cambodia into grisly killing field and murdered or starved to death 1.7 million of the country's inhabitants? This work provides a definitive account of the Khmer Rouge revolution.
Propaganda, Politics, and Violence in Cambodia by Steve Heder (Editor); Judy Ledgerwood (Editor); David Chandler (Foreword by)
ISBN: 1563246643
Publication Date: 1995-10-31
Describes and analyses the propaganda and violence of the four Cambodian parties to the 1991 Paris peace agreements. This volume explores Cambodia during the UNTAC period and sets the events within the larger context of Khmer politics, history and culture.
Archiving the Unspeakable by Michelle Caswell
ISBN: 9780299297534
Publication Date: 2014-04-01
Roughly 1.7 million people died in Cambodia from untreated disease, starvation, and execution during the Khmer Rouge reign of less than four years in the late 1970s. The regime's brutality has come to be symbolized by the multitude of black-and-white mug shots of prisoners taken at the notorious Tuol Sleng prison, where thousands of "enemies of the state" were tortured before being sent to the Killing Fields. In Archiving the Unspeakable, Michelle Caswell traces the social life of these photographic records through the lens of archival studies and elucidates how, paradoxically, they have become agents of silence and witnessing, human rights and injustice as they are deployed at various moments in time and space. From their creation as Khmer Rouge administrative records to their transformation beginning in 1979 into museum displays, archival collections, and databases, the mug shots are key components in an ongoing drama of unimaginable human suffering. Winner, Waldo Gifford Leland Award, Society of American Archivists Longlist, ICAS Book Prize, International Convention of Asia Scholars
At the Edge of the Forest by Anne Ruth Hansen (Editor); Judy Ledgerwood (Editor)
ISBN: 9780877277460
Publication Date: 2008-05-22
Inspired by David Chandler's groundbreaking work on Cambodian attempts to find order in the aftermath of turmoil, these essays explore Cambodian history using a rich variety of sources that cast light on Khmer perceptions of violence, wildness, and order, examining the "forest" and cultured space, and the fraught "edge" where they meet.
Cambodia by Jeff Hay (Editor)
ISBN: 9780737762525
Publication Date: 2013-02-08
The Genocide and Persecution series offers readers a multitude of perspectives, allowing for a more nuanced understanding of these complex and horrific periods in world history; each volume is an anthology of previously published materials on acts of geno; Title explores genocide and persecution in Cambodia, including the historical/cultural background of the Cambodian genocide, including the rise of the Khmer Rouge; issues surrounding events such as US involvement in Vietnam and Cambodia and attempts to br; The histories of nations across the globe are marked by dark periods of mass murder, brutal repression, and unrelenting persecution. Remembering and understanding such incidents is vitally important. The Genocide and Persecution series offers students and
Pol Pot and Khieu Samphan by Stephen Heder
ISBN: 0732602726
Publication Date: 1995
Cambodia Emerges from the Past by Judy Ledgerwood (Editor)
ISBN: 189113423X
Publication Date: 2002
Bringing the Khmer Rouge to Justice by Jaya Ramji (Editor); Beth Van Schaack (Editor)
ISBN: 9780773459946
Publication Date: 2005
This book explores the legal issues surrounding accountability for the crijes of the Khmer Rouge and crimes of mass violence more generally. Comprising chapters by legal academics, lawyers, historians, artists, and others, the volume presents thorough analyses of the complex problems inherent to accountability efforts and novel ideas as to how to address them.
How Pol Pot Came to Power by Ben Kiernan
ISBN: 9780860910978
Publication Date: 1985

Arts and Culture

Deathpower by Erik W. Davis
ISBN: 9780231540667
Publication Date: 2015-12-08
Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Cambodia, Erik W. Davis radically reorients approaches toward the nature of Southeast Asian Buddhism's interactions with local religious practice and, by extension, reorients our understanding of Buddhism itself. Through a vivid study of contemporary Cambodian Buddhist funeral rites, he reveals the powerfully integrative role monks play as they care for the dead and negotiate the interplay of non-Buddhist spirits and formal Buddhist customs. Buddhist monks perform funeral rituals rooted in the embodied practices of Khmer rice farmers and the social hierarchies of Khmer culture. The monks' realization of death underwrites key components of the Cambodian social imagination: the distinction between wild death and celibate life, the forest and the field, and moral and immoral forms of power. By connecting the performative aspects of Buddhist death rituals to Cambodian history and everyday life, Davis undermines the theory that Buddhism and rural belief systems necessarily oppose each other. Instead, he shows Cambodian Buddhism to be a robust tradition with ethical and popular components extending throughout Khmer society.
Cambodge by Penny Edwards
ISBN: 0824829239
Publication Date: 2006-06-01
This strikingly original study of Cambodian nationalism brings to life eight turbulent decades of cultural change and sheds new light on the colonial ancestry of Pol Pot's murderous dystopia. Penny Edwards recreates the intellectual milieux and cultural traffic linking Europe and empire, interweaving analysis of key movements and ideas in the French Protectorate of Cambodge with contemporary developments in the Metropole. From the naturalist Henri Mouhot's expedition to Angkor in 1860 to the nationalist Son Ngoc Thanh's short-lived premiership in 1945, this history of ideas tracks the talented Cambodian and French men and women who shaped the contours of the modern Khmer nation. Their visions and ambitions played out within a shifting landscape of Angkorean temples, Parisian museums, Khmer printing presses, world's fairs, Buddhist monasteries, and Cambodian youth hostels. This is cross-cultural history at its best.
Forest of Struggle by Eve Monique Zucker; David P. Chandler (Series edited by); Rita Smith Kipp (Series edited by)
ISBN: 9780824836115
Publication Date: 2013-04-30
In a village community in the highlands of Cambodia's Southwest, people struggle to rebuild their lives after nearly thirty years of war and genocide. Recovery is a tenuous process as villagers attempt to shape a future while contending with the terrible rupture of the Pol Pot era. Forest of Struggle tracks the fragile progress of restoring the bonds of community in O'Thmaa and its environs, the site of a Khmer Rouge base and battlefield for nearly three decades between 1970 and 1998. Anthropologist Eve Zucker's ethnographic fieldwork (2001-2003, 2010) uncovers the experiences of the people of O'Thmaa in the early days of the revolution, when some villagers turned on each other with lethal results. She examines memories of violence and considers the means by which relatedness and moral order are re-established, comparing O'Thmaa with villages in a neighboring commune that suffered similar but not identical trauma. Zucker argues that those differing experiences shape present ways of healing and making the future. Events had a devastating effect on the social and moral order at the time and continue to impair the remaking of sociality and civil society today, impacting villagers' responses to changes in recent years. More positively, Zucker persuasively illustrates how Cambodians employ indigenous means to reconcile their painful memories of loss and devastation. This point is noteworthy given current debates on recovery surrounding the Khmer Rouge Tribunal. Forest of Struggle offers a compelling case study that is relevant to anyone interested in post-conflict recovery, social memory, the anthropology of morality and violence, and Cambodia studies.
How to Behave by Anne Ruth Hansen
ISBN: 0824830326
Publication Date: 2007-03-01
A cross-disciplinary study of Buddhist modernism in colonial Cambodia that offers an understanding of the history and development of religion and colonialism in Southeast Asia.
Salvage by Krisna Uk
ISBN: 9781501703027
Publication Date: 2016-10-11
In Salvage, Krisna Uk draws on extensive research in a Cambodian village she calls Leu to provide a unique ethnography of the Jorai, an ethnic minority group that lives in Vietnam and in the most heavily bombed region of northeast Cambodia. The Jorai inhabit a remote region largely beyond the reach of the nation-state but have suffered the devastating effects of battles between and within states. Uk focuses on the experience of a Jorai community that experienced violent and protracted international and domestic conflicts--the Vietnam War and the Khmer Rouge regime. These conflicts had enduring effects on the community's moral fabric, the villagers' activities, and the physical and spiritual environments with which they engage daily. Uk's ethnography is an exploration of a resilient communal life that refuses to surrender its integrity to the blind, destructive forces of modern aerial warfare and that struggles to come to terms with the unintelligible violence unleashed by Cambodia's revolutionary movement. It examines the destructive power and enduring harm that explosive remnants of war inflict on the human body and the social relations. But it also reveals how the local Jorai villagers turn these treacherous and fatal products of foreign technology into precious subsistence items as well as aesthetic and ritualistic objects that will take the souls of the dead on their journey to a better life. Uk demonstrates how the Jorai of Leu can, through their creative and traditional labor, revive the legend of the formidable Jorai warriors by transforming deadly modern weapons into their own war trophies.
Pillaging Cambodia by Masha Lafont
ISBN: 0786419334
Publication Date: 2004-09-14
The illicit traffic of art is an important problem that affects modern life all over the world. This work addresses this issue using the showcase of Cambodia, where looters systematically destroy cultural heritage. Beginning with an overview of Cambodian history and culture, it explores every aspect of the illicit traffic of Cambodian art. It analyzes the history, size, and structure of art trafficking in Cambodia, its growth and profit margins, and the participants and international crime syndicate involved. It also describes the ""demand"" side of the story: antique dealers, collectors, auction houses, and museums. The work deals with the impact of the illicit trafficking on the legal, political, and economic systems of Cambodia, as well as its effect on archeological, historical, and religious values and the cultural identity of the nation. The work also analyzes the current long-term and short-term policies proposed by the Cambodian government and suggests policy alternatives that may be implemented by the Cambodian authorities. An appendix includes the description of all cases of the restitution of objects of Khmer art and official documents issued by various governments concerning its protection.
History, Buddhism, and New Religious Movements in Cambodia by John Marston (Editor); Elizabeth Guthrie
ISBN: 0824826663
Publication Date: 2004-06-30
This volume showcases some of the most current and exciting research being done on Cambodian religious ideas and practices by a new generation of scholars from a variety of disciplines. The different contributors examine in some manner the relationship between religion and the ideas and institutions that have given shape to Cambodia as a social and political body, or nation. Although they do not share the same approach to the idea of "nation," all are concerned with the processes of religion that give meaning to social interaction, which in some way includes "Cambodian" identity. Chapters touch on such far-reaching theoretical issues as the relation to religion of Southeast Asian polity; the nature of colonial religious transformation; "syncretism" in Southeast Asian Buddhism; the relation of religious icon to national identity, religion, and gender; transnationalism and social movements; and identity among diaspora communities. While much has been published on Cambodia's recent civil war and the Pol Pot period and its aftermath, few English language works are available on Cambodian religion. This book takes a major step in filling that gap, offering a broad overview of the subject that is relevant not only for the field of Cambodian studies, but also for students and scholars of Southeast Asian history, Buddhism, comparative religion, and anthropology. Contributors: Didier Bertrand, Penny Edwards, Elizabeth Guthrie, Hang Chan Sophea, Anne Hansen, John Marston, Kathryn Poethig, Ashley Thompson, Teri Shaffer Yamada.
Expressions of Cambodia by Leakthina Chau-Pech Ollier (Editor); Tim Winter (Editor)
ISBN: 9780415385541
Publication Date: 2006-11-22
Taking a theoretical and multidisciplinary perspective, the essays in this collection provide compelling insight into contemporary Cambodian culture at home and abroad. The book represents the first sustained exploration of the relationship between cultural productions and practices, the changing urban landscape and the construction of identity and nation building twenty-five years after the fall of the Khmer Rouge regime. As such, the team of international contributors address the politics of development and conservation, tradition and modernity within the global economy, and transmigratory movements of the twenty-first century. Expressions of Cambodia presents a new dimension to the Cambodian studies by engaging the country in current debates about globalization and the commodification of culture, post-colonial politics and identity constructions. Timely and much-needed, this volume brings Cambodia back into dialogue with its neighbours, and in so doing, valuably contributes to the growing field of Southeast Asian cultural studies.
People of Virtue by Alexandra Kent (Editor); David P. Chandler (Editor)
ISBN: 9788776940379
Publication Date: 2009-01-31
Much attention has been given to the "killing fields" of Cambodia, far less to how the country can recover and heal itself after such an experience. Crucial to this process has been the formation of a new moral order in Cambodia and hence the revival of religion in the country. However, this process requires that the representatives of religion and of morality do have credibility and moral authority, something that may be called into question by their past and present involvement in hegemonic political and secular affairs. The importance of this volume, therefore, is not only that it contributes to the new interest in religion in Cambodia but also because it places the religious revival in a nuanced social, cultural and political context and shows how Cambodia pursues order in large part through reference to her past.It also addresses major questions of interest to a global audience. These include such topics as how a community may be repaired after violent conflict, how religion and politics are interwoven and how moral order and historical change impact upon one another.
Dancing in Cambodia by Amitav Gosh
ISBN: 9788175300170
Publication Date: 1998
Beyond the Apsara by Stephanie Burridge (Editor); Fred Frumberg (Editor)
ISBN: 9780415564458
Publication Date: 2010-01-25
This book celebrates and documents the resurgence of dance in Cambodia after the fall of the Khmer Rouge and the infamous Pol Pot regime. It honours the remarkable commitment of the few remaining masters of the art of dance who are reviving and preserving the famous classical dances, as well as the courage and resolution of young artists who are imaginatively pursuing their passion to forge new paths in contemporary dance. n 2003, Cambodian classical dance was awarded world heritage status by UNESCO - this confirmed the importance, and perhaps the burden, of the task of preservation. This volume includes contributions from the royal family, eminent writers and commentators and the dancers themselves. Monuments and reminders of the Killing Fields abound in the city of Phnom Penh. Nearly 2 million Cambodians, including many artists, perished during the killings or died of starvation and disease during the Khmer Rouge years. Today, the dancers, both young and old, move towards the future while respecting and honouring the past. This volume documents their journey.