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Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Foreword: Some Introductory Remarks

May Ebihara

At the Edge of the Forest:
Narrative, Order, and Questions of Meaning in Khmer History and Society

Anne Ruth Hansen and Judy Ledgerwood

David Chandler: Selected Bibliography

Coming to Cambodia

David Chandler

Introduction to “Songs at the Edge of the Forest”

David Chandler

Songs at the Edge of the Forest:
Perceptions of Order in Three Cambodian Texts

David Chandler

PART I: GAPS IN THE WORLD

Gaps in the World:
Harm and Violence in Khmer Buddhist Narrative

Anne Ruth Hansen

Songs at the Edge of Democratic Kampuchea

Alexander Laban Hinton

PART II: ALTERNATIVE READINGS OF THE PAST

Performative Realities: Nobody’s Possession

Ashley Thompson

The King with Hansen’s Disease:
Tales of the Leper in Colonial Cambodia

Sokhieng Au

Between a Song and a Prei:
Tracking Cambodian History and Cosmology through the Forest

Penny Edwards

PART III: NEW SONGS

Constructing Narratives of Order:
Religious-Building Projects and Moral Chaos

John Marston

Ritual in 1990 Cambodian Political Theatre:
New Songs at the Edge of the Forest

Judy Ledgerwood

Imaginary Conversations with Mothers about Death

Erik W. Davis

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Contributors

Sokhieng Au currently holds a post-doctoral appointment in the Department of History at Northwestern University. Her research and training is in Southeast Asian history, colonial medicine, and the history of science, particularly focusing on the interface of European and Southeast Asian medical practices and epistemologies in colonial Southeast Asian societies. She is currently at work on the manuscript of her first book, based on her recent PhD thesis from University of California, Berkeley, entitled “Medicine and Modernity in Colonial Cambodia.”

David Chandler is Emeritus Professor of History at Monash University. He continues to write and edit books on Cambodian history and culture. His most recent volume, coedited with Alexandra Kent, forthcoming from Nordic Institute of Asian Studies Publications, is entitled People of Virtue: Reconfiguring Religion, Power, and Moral Order in Cambodia Today.

Erik W. Davis is Visiting Instructor in the Department of Religious Studies at Macalester College and a doctoral candidate in Religion at the University of Chicago. Davis, whose broad interests and training are in Buddhism, Asian religions, and theory in the study of religion, has focused his recent research on funerals, ritual, and the connection between agriculture and religious imagination. He is currently finishing his dissertation at the University of Chicago, entitled “Treasures of the Buddha: Imagining Death and Life in Contemporary Cambodia.” He conducted his fieldwork in Cambodia, where he lived between 2003 and 2006.

May Ebihara (1934–2005) was Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Lehman College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her PhD dissertation, “Svay, a Khmer Village in Cambodia,” based on fieldwork in rural Cambodia, has become a classic ethnographic work in the field. After returning to “Svay” following the DK period, she revisited key themes in essays such as “A Cambodian Village under the Khmer Rouge, 1975–1979,” in Genocide and Democracy in Cambodia, ed. Ben Kiernan (New Haven, CT: Yale University, 1993).

Penny Edwards is Assistant Professor in the Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She is a historian by training, and her research centers on nationalisms, ethnicity, gender identity, and the Chinese diaspora in colonized and postcolonial Southeast Asia, particularly colonial Cambodia and Burma. Her new book, Cambodge: The Cultivation of a Nation, 1860–1945, was published in 2007 by University of Hawai’i Press. She is also the author of “The Tyranny of Proximity: Power and Mobility in Colonial Cambodia, 1863–1954,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 37,3 (2006); and “Grounds for Protest: Placing Shwedagon Pagoda in Colonial and Postcolonial History,” Postcolonial Studies 9,2 (2006).

Anne Ruth Hansen is Associate Professor of History and Director of the Comparative Study of Religion Program at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. Her work focuses on the history and development of Theravada Buddhism in Southeast Asia and on Buddhist ethics. Her recent book, How to Behave: Buddhism and Modernity in Colonial Cambodia, 1860–1930, was published in 2007 by University of Hawai’i Press.

Alexander Laban Hinton is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Rutgers University, Newark, NJ. His work has focused on genocide, political violence, truth and reconciliation, memory, and trauma, particularly in Cambodia, but comparatively, across nations, as well. He is currently at work on a sequel to his book Why Did They Kill? Cambodia in the Shadow of Genocide (University of California Press, 2005), exploring the themes of genocide, modernity, and revitalization in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. He is also coediting a volume on the aftermaths of genocide entitled Genocide, Truth, Memory, and Representation: Anthropological Perspectives.

Judy Ledgerwood is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Southeast Asian Studies and Chair of the Anthropology Department at Northern Illinois University, DeKalb. Her work has examined gender, migration, and diasporic communities; and politics, human rights, and, more recently, religion in contemporary Cambodia. In Cambodia, she has run a conservation program at the National Library, the National Museum, and the Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocide and taught at the Royal University of Fine Arts in Phnom Penh. She also worked as an Information Officer for the United Nations. Ledgerwood is editor of numerous volumes and articles, including (with Kheang Un) Cambodia Emerges from the Past: Eight Essays (DeKalb, IL: Southeast Asia Publications, Center for Southeast Asian Studies, 2002).

John Marston is Professor and Researcher at the Centro de Estudios de Asia y Africa at Colegio de Mexico in Mexico City. His research interests in Southeast Asia and Latin America include social change, religious movements, media, and Theravada Buddhism; he is also interested in post-socialist societies, the political economy of language, the anthropology of the United Nations, migration, and transnational communities. He has worked extensively in Cambodia, both as a researcher and formerly as an UNTAC Information Officer. His recent publications include the edited volume (with Elizabeth Guthrie), History, Buddhism, and New Religious Movements in Cambodia (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004), and a forthcoming essay, “The Cambodian Hospital for Monks,” in Buddhism, Power, and Political Order, ed. Ian Harris (London, New York, NY: Routledge, forthcoming).

Ashley Thompson is a Lecturer in the History of Art and Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds. Widely published in a variety of disciplines and cross-disciplines, Thompson’s recent work includes entries in the exhibition catalogue for Angkor—Cambodia’s Glories (2006), “Paul Mus vu de l’Ouest: À propos des cultes indiens et indigènes en Asie du Sud-est,” in L’espace d’un regard: Paul Mus et l’Asie (1902–1969), ed. David Chandler and Christopher Goscha (2006); “Buddhism in Modern Cambodia: Rupture and Continuity,” in Buddhism in World Cultures, ed. Stephen C. Berkwitz (2006); and her translation of a Khmer ritual poem in Calling the Souls: A Cambodian Ritual Text/Le Rappel des âmes: Texte rituel khmer (2005). Thompson also serves as editor of Udaya: Journal of Khmer Studies.

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