The Anthropology Of Genocide - WNLibrary

terror in democratic kampuchea 183
They sang to the workers who had survived. Hundreds had died while laboring
on the project. This is one example of how “the official voice can so strikingly contradict
reality and by means of such contradiction create fear” (Taussig 1992:30).
After a twelve-hour day at a labor site, a work brigade might be marched, sometimes
several kilometers, to a political gathering and required to listen to speeches
and songs, and to watch the dances. Many were too exhausted—and too uninterested—to
watch. But, said a woman who was a little girl at the time, “We would
be punished if we didn’t pay attention. Many of us learned to sleep with our eyes
open” (personal interview, 1992).
In addition to being instruments of battle, dances, in their enactment, also modeled
ideal revolutionary behavior and attitudes. The efficacy of their kinesthetic
statements stemmed in part from the formulaic pattern harnessed as a means of
educating and militarizing the populace in body and social space, thereby attempting
to discipline both.
In dance, the cultural significance of “the training and deployment of bodies”
is far reaching and includes “what it can tell us about the range of allowable representations
of the body in motion and the policing of bodily form in a specific
time and place” (Koritz 1996:91). The body, as the “tangible frame of selfhood in
individual and collective experience” (Comaroff 1985:6), possesses both “materiality
and...forces” (Foucault 1979:26), which can be manipulated by power relations
that “invest [the body], mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to
perform ceremonies, to emit signs” (ibid.:25). But that very materiality and those
very forces, through the bodily discourse of dance, can also actuate a creation of
meanings independent of the intentions of the powers that be, as we shall see.
When the lyrics in dance songs referred to the glories of agricultural work, the
dancers carried, for example, hoes and shovels; when the words praised industrial
development, they wielded wrenches or other appropriate instruments. Lyrics aside,
performers modeled ideal revolutionaries through their militaristic demeanor with
backs held straight and faces devoid of emotion and, as was often the case, by carrying
a real gun slung over one shoulder. They also modeled this through a lack of
pronounced gender differentiation in gesture, although there were exceptions, and
in dress, though women sometimes performed in a sampot (a long, straight skirt).
Staged “folk dances” meant to represent peasant lives and activities had been
created by professional artists in Phnom Penh in the 1960s and 1970s, and they became
very popular across Cambodia. Opposition of the sexes, including flirtation,
is a central motif of many of these, a theme rarely invoked in the Democratic Kampuchea–era
creations. The comic elements of some of these theatrical folk dances
are also absent in revolutionary pieces. 14
Yet there was some variation in the revolutionary formula. A woman tells of being
brought to a field nightly for almost a week in 1976, along with all the other teenagers
in her area of Battambang province (personal interview, 2000). There she and the other
“new” youth stood and watched as the “base” children performed a song about the
work of a blacksmith. The boys who were performing remained in place, moving their