TIDES OF EMPIRE: MERIT, MORALITY, AND DEVELOPMENT IN RURAL CAMBODIA A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Courtney Work August 2014 © 2014 Courtney Work TIDES OF EMPIRE: MERIT, MORALITY, AND DEVELOPMENT IN RURAL CAMBODIA Courtney Work, Ph. D. Cornell University 2014 Abstract Set in Sambok Dung, a small rural village in Western Cambodia, this ethnographic study attends to the physical and social landscapes over which empire rolls and to the detritus that remains through its ebbs and flows. This is an intimate picture of social life at the edge of the forest and the frontier of empire; it is also a critique leveled from the margins of a marginal state that attempts to re-member the social categories of religion and politics and of nature and culture. I attend to the interstitial zones of these externally constructed categories and excavate the discursive, historical, and practical boundaries they attempt to describe: boundaries rendered null, I argue, by practices of subsistence and community that extend beyond the human actors and persist within and through the imperial classifications. Cambodia’s return to the market economy after thirty years of war is remarkable for the intensity of both its economic success and its authoritarian brutality. When the country opened to the global market in the late 1990s, the government awarded large-scale Economic Land Concessions (ELCs) to development companies. Violent dispossessions and equally violent protests marked this adventure in primitive accumulation, and Social Land Concessions (SLCs) were issued as a palliative for Cambodian citizens. One of these SLCs brought landless and land-poor farmers to cut the village of Sambok Dung out of the forest in the middle of the country’s largest ELC. Sambok Dung is a contact zone where multiple ways of being in the world are simultaneously at play. The dissertation attends to the intimate dwelling of heterogeneous villagers, and to the structural forces of states, development projects, and universal religions, but also allows the mountains, the forest, and the spirits of the land into the stories as agentive actors. The mountains and weather world expose the fragility of development projects and the low wages of plantation work renders null their legitimacy. The temples and roads are expensive in excess of capacity, yet the people in Sambok Dung desire these hallmarks of empire and point their productive energies toward them, dragging the forests and spirits into the rising tide. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Courtney Work received her MA in Anthropology and Women’s and Gender Studies from Brandeis University in 2007 and her BA cum laude in English Literature from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities in 1996. Work first learned about Cambodian ways of being in the world at a small Buddhist temple in Southern Minnesota. She originally went to the monks to learn meditation and mindfulness techniques. While there, she witnessed the transformation of Buddhist space as the small Cambodian community finished construction of a kutī (monk’s dwelling) on their newly purchased ten acres of land. Her subsequent studies in Anthropology progressed and deepened her relationships with the Minnesota community of Cambodian Buddhists. The strings that bind these relationships extend into her anthropological inquiries at the edge of the forest in rural Cambodia. Work has traveled to Cambodia seven times since 2005, establishing a Community College service learning program and doing field research that informed her MA thesis and her PhD dissertation. Her work in Cambodia continues with forthcoming publications on the issues of land tenure, deforestation, and climate mitigation strategies. v This dissertation is dedicated to the memory of my father vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I owe thanks beyond the capacity of this segment for all it took to bring the following pages to fruition. The largest thanks goes 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 members of my dissertation committee, Magnus Fiskesjö, Andrew Willford, Andrew Mertha, and Anne Hansen. Without their efforts and insights this work would be but a shadow of its current brilliance. I also thank the members of my reading groups who spent countless hours reading and commenting on various versions of the manuscript, especially Gökçe Günel, Melissa Rosario, David Rojas, Saiba Varna, and Chika Watanabe. In addition to my dissertation committee, my work has been influenced by other scholars in classrooms and workshops and I would like to mention the most notable of them: Prof. Anne Blackburn, Prof. Dominick LaCapra, Dr. Paul Nadasdy, and Prof. Anna Tsing. For the maps I thank my friend Isaiah Parker for his patient instruction in the fine art of cartography. I received generous funding from the National Science Foundation, the Center for Khmer Studies, the US Department of State Foreign Language Area Studies program, Cornell’s Southeast Asian Program, and the Department of Anthropology at Cornell University. I also received funding and unending emotional support from the Mary Tambornino and Ron Usem foundation for offspring maintenance and can never thank them enough for helping this study to fruition. 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. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract ……………………………………………………………………… iii Biography ………………………………………………………….………... v Dedication …………………………………………………………………… vi Acknowledgements ………………………………………………………….. vii Contents ……………………………………………………………………… viii List of figures ………………………………………………………….…….. ix Preface ………………………………………………………………….……. x Introduction ………………………………………………………………… 1 Chapter 1 Shaping the Space: Movement and Structure………………...………. 15 Chapter 2 A Roadology: Intentional acts of movement and transformation….…. 54 Chapter 3 `Anak Tā: Articulating the boundaries………………………………. 98 Chapter 4 The Cham: History, memory, and practice…………………………… 141 Chapter 5 Merit in Motion: Temple building and other powerful acts………….. 186 Conclusion …………………………………………………………………… 242 Figures………………………………………………………………………… 253 Bibliography………………………………………………………………….. 272 viii ix LIST OF FIGURES Map 1- Cambodia Map Map 2- Sambok Dung Map 3- Sambok Dung (neighborhoods) Map 4- Sambok Dung (homestead detail) Photo 1a- Home by Railroad Photo 1b- Entrance to Cham Neighborhood Photo 3a- `Anak tā hut Photo 3b- Offering to Lok Tā Bẏng Kaṃṇáp Photo 3c- Inside Lok Tā Bẏng Kaṃṇáp hut Photo 3d- Fancy hut for mcâs dẏk mcâs ṭī Photo 3e- Tā Gum Yāy Dā and Lok Tā Bẏng Kaṃṇáp Map 5- Champa Kingdom Map 6- `Anak Tā of Sambok Dung Photo 4a- Cham Dress Photo 4b- Cham Dress Photo 4c- Cham Dress Figure 1- The Buddhist Temple Complex Photo 5a- Name of donor painted on temple pillar x PREFACE Why in this place? Sambok Dung is a place of becoming.1 The forest is becoming village, the houses of worship are becoming concrete, and strangers are becoming neighbors. It was this becoming that made it stand out for me as the right site for my dissertation research. My original intent was to study the reconstruction of religion amid the construction of community in this socially heterogeneous environment against the backdrop of Khmer Rouge (KR) displacements and civil war. When I got to the village, my first two encounters were with the village spirit and with local stories of the dangers of woodcutting since the plantations moved into the neighborhood. I continued to study religion and spirit traditions, which have caused me to rethink the categories of both ‘animism’ and ‘religion’, but the concerns of villagers caused me to expand my field of inquiry. This expansion brought the power of Buddhism and the spirits into direct conversation with the power of global development and the even stronger power of the physical environment at the edge of the forest. The becoming was also an undoing and the dance of creation and destruction was always visible. Sambok Dung came into being as a result of a social land concession (SLC) that brought villagers from all over the country to cut rice fields from the forest. The advent of the SLC is part of Cambodia’s becoming. Thirty years of war that started in 1970 with the ouster of Sihnaouk finally ended with the death of Pol Pot and the absorption of KR factions into government ministry and military positions in 1999. 1 This is a fictional name for the village. xi Since that time, Cambodia has entered the global marketplace and become a player in the high-stakes game of resource extraction and global agrarian transformation that is currently sweeping over the remaining forests of Southeast Asia. The primary vehicle for this transformation is the economic land concession (ELC), without which the SLC would have never been issued. My story is not about the final enclosure of land in Cambodia and the sudden wealth it engenders, but this sets the stage for the story that emerged from my eighteen cumulative month of research in Sambok Dung between 2010 and 2012. My story is within this enclosure. I want to take a moment here, at the outset, to explain the land deals, the plantations, and forest exploitation that hum in the background of my dissertation. The 315,000 hectare economic land concession (ELC) that straddles Kompong Chhnang and Pursat Provinces is part of the largest and most controversial Cambodian concession. Awarded to the Pheapimex Fuchan Cambodia Co ltd in 2000, the concession is Cambodian owned, but the plantation operations of the Pheapimex group are externally based in China, Korea, and Taiwan.2 Sambok Dung sits in the 2 For more on this particular concession and the intricacies of economic expansion through concessions in Cambodia, see A.