Refusal

A lot of contemporary anthropologists are populists, as in pro-marginalized people groups, and a lot of us have taken to writing about resistance and hegemony (oppressive dominating forms of power). A while ago I read an interesting essay by an anthropologist named Sherri Ortner, which was about ethnographic refusal to recognize and acknowledge that which doesn't fit with our platform. She accused a lot of the resistance writers as ignoring the members of a population or group who don't resist, who collaborate with the dominators for power or profit etc. She accused us of being starry-eyed romantics, basically--of overstating our case by refusing to write about the bits that don't fit.

I've been thinking of her last night and today because I have been on a brief and sweeping review of Cambodian history, particularly the Khmer Rouge era, when about 2 million Cambodians died--and hundreds of thousands more had died in the war in the years preceding the KR victory. I saw something I didn't like in one historian's account, so I sort of ignored it in my mind, and then I saw it in two more articles today, and realized that I'd been engaging in exactly the kind of refusal she was talking about.

Here's the gist of it--a number of sources argue that 'forest people,' highlanders, made up some of the early Khmer Rouge forces. Pol Pot and Ieng Sary, two of the Maoist intellectuals who were the architects of the Khmer Rouge, lived in the northeast from 1967 to 1970, with some of the highland peoples. And they liked them a lot and actually employed hilltribe guys as their bodyguards until late 1977, when the northeast minority groups were also purged for not being 'pure Khmer.'

It was something I really didn't want to hear--it made me realize that I have this framework in my head that argues lowlanders oppress highlanders and always have done and that realizing that some highlanders were actually complicit in Pol Pot's agenda complicates this picture.

It's funny how hard it is to stay objective. The other thing that mightily upset me in my reading was finding out that Phnom Pros, the hill temple just outside of Kompong Cham, the pretty town where I spent my first year in Cambodia, was a major execution centre--they estimate 10,000 Cambodians were slain there and buried in mass graves all around the base of the hill.

How could my Khmer companions bear to go there? None of them mentioned this to me. We took the girls from the shelter there at Khmer New Year and everyone danced in circles with the crowds of local folk and threw white powder and water at each other. I suppose it's a testimony to how life goes on, regardless of the horror of the past, but it also makes me sad. I don't think I could have danced if I had known I was dancing over unhallowed bones. So much of Cambodia lies just below the surface like that, badly buried, rising from time to time like ghosts and unsettling us all.