The Anthropology Of Genocide - WNLibrary

276 genocide’s wake
the same commune, they were placed in work teams segregated by age and gender
such that husbands and wives saw one another only at night, and parents and
offspring could meet only occasionally. 9 Household commensality was replaced
by communal dining halls (which allowed the state to control food distribution down
to the grass roots level). Children were encouraged to spy upon and turn against
their “reactionary” elders. Marriages, formerly decided upon by individuals and
parents, were now arranged between strangers or had to be approved by Khmer
Rouge cadres. Expressions of love for family members—such as weeping over the
death of a spouse or child—were denigrated, scorned, and even punished. One
woman managed to remain impassively silent when her husband was summoned
to a work project—that is, almost certain execution—but she could not contain herself
when her newborn infant died shortly thereafter. In response to her uncontrollable
wails, the KR cadre responded disdainfully: “You’re crying over that little
thing? We lost all those people in our struggle, and you don’t see us crying.”
After the Khmer Rouge were ousted and tight controls over the population were
lifted, people moved about the country searching for family and kin from whom
they had been separated, and many returned to their home communities. Svay was
transformed once more, reorganized as an ordinary village again, as many of its
original inhabitants returned from other regions to which they had been relocated
during DK. “It was then,” one villager said, “that we found out who was alive and
who was dead.” Families reconstituted themselves with whatever members survived.
As in prerevolutionary times, present-day Svay households are either nuclear or extended
families. Some of the latter are three-generational stem families (a couple
or widow[er] with a married child plus the latter’s spouse and children), such as
was common in the past. Other extended family households, however, have more
varied composition, as people followed the prerevolutionary practice of sheltering
needy kin, and some took in relatives left orphaned or widowed after DK. (One
household, for example, has a wife and husband, the wife’s widowed sister and a
widowed aunt, plus the couple’s married daughter and her husband and children.)
Ties with kinfolk in the village and nearby communities were also reactivated, with
mutual aid of various kinds that include labor exchange for rice cultivation, financial
help in times of need, assistance for one another’s life cycle and other rituals,
and a sense of mutual concern and moral obligation for one another’s welfare (see
also Uimonen 1996:45). 10
Contemporary patterns of reciprocal aid and cooperation among kinsmen—
and also among close friends—are perceived by villagers as revivals of customary
(that is, prerevolutionary) patterns of behavior. In discussing aspects of present-day
life (such as cooperative labor during rice cultivation), villagers often say that a
certain practice occurs “as in times before” (douc pi daoem). In fact changes have occurred,
but the villagers’ reference to earlier times seems to invoke a belief or hope
that life has returned to what they knew in a peaceful prewar Cambodia. 11
On the issue of mutual assistance in the context of this particular village, it is
important to recall that most of Svay’s present population are former residents who