The Anthropology Of Genocide - WNLibrary

190 annihilating difference
Cambodia’s communist movement the “Khmer Rouge” in the 1960s. “Khmer Rouge” is
commonly used both as a plural and a singular term.
3. Norodom Sihanouk had also recognized and manipulated the power of dance and
music, as had Prime Minister Lon Nol in the early 1970s. See Shapiro 1994.
4. Some revolutionary songs retained traditional melodies while discarding old lyrics.
See David Chandler’s note in Chandler, Kiernan, and Lim (1982:326). Ry Kea (personal
interview, 2000) has identified some songs she heard in Democratic Kampuchea as being of
Chinese origin. In a private Chinese school in Phnom Penh a decade earlier, she had learned
songs celebrating Mao Tse Tung’s greatness. In revolutionary Cambodia, she heard the same
songs—identical melodies with lyrics that were, according to her, direct translations from
the Chinese—with one difference. Instead of honoring Mao—“When the sun rises a lotus
appears with the face of Mao Tse Tung upon it, shining over the people....Wherever there
is Mao, there is freedom”—the songs revered Angkar. Henri Locard (1998) estimates that
10 percent of the Khmer Rouge revolutionary songs he has studied over the years employ
melodies originating in the People’s Republic of China.
5. Examples include Chandler 1991, 1999; Dith 1997; Him 2000; Hinton 1997; Kiernan
1993, 1996; Lafreniere 2000; May 1986; Ngor 1987; Oum 1997; Um 1998; Vann 1998.
6. See references to a “great leap” in the journal of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs
1997–98; and in Chandler, Kiernan, and Boua 1988.
7. The Khmer Rouge took control of the capital, Phnom Penh, on April 17, 1975.
8. Scholars’ estimates range from 750,000 (Vickery 1984), to 1.7 million (Kiernan 1996),
to 2 million (Heuveline 1998), out of a pre-1975 population of between 7 and 8 million.
9. For a cultural analysis of what he terms “genocidal practices,” see Hinton 1997.
10. Along with Sally Ann Ness, who studies dance of the Philippines and Indonesia, I
would like to “attempt to return bodily experience as a form of consciousness and understanding
to a central place within the discipline of ethnographic inquiry, recognizing that to deny
the interpretive potential of bodily/choreographic phenomena is to deprive ethnography
of understanding an activity that may be as central to the human experience of another culture
as it is marginal to that of mainstream U.S. society” (1992:239) [emphasis in original].
11. This is one of several hundred such handwritten notebooks in the collection of the
Documentation Center of Cambodia, in Phnom Penh.
12. The same article presents a chilling account of Shining Path’s attempt to incorporate
children into its “war machine” (del Pino H. 1998:174), an attempt in many ways reminiscent
of Khmer Rouge practice.
13. Ben Kiernan (personal communication 1998) has suggested that the concept of the
embodiment of the country in Angkar could be extended to encompass the embodiment of
Cambodia in the leader, Pol Pot, if we look at aspects of the use of the term Angkar by members
of the Khmer Rouge. “ ‘[T]he Organization’...has a home address, watches movies,
is sometimes ‘busy working,’ but can be asked favors if one dares” (Chandler, Kiernan, and
Boua 1988:232). See Shapiro 1994 for preliminary work on Khmer notions of carrying
“Cambodia” within themselves.
14. For more on Cambodian folk dance, both ceremonial and theatrical, including the
relationship of folk dance to Norodom Sihanouk’s vision of modern nationhood, see Phim
and Thompson 1999.
15. Such resonances with the role of spectacle in the Nazi propaganda machine are evident,
but the analogy can be taken only so far. See Manning’s examination of Nazi spec-