Introducing "Deathpower"

B u d d h iss m ’ s r i t u a l i m a g i natio on i n c ambodia a

Introduction

When I moved to Cambodia in 2003 to study contemporary Buddhist funeral rituals, my wife, Leah, moved with me. She was then in the second trimester of her rst pregnancy, so perhaps there was no way for me to not see fertility and new life in the human management of death. After all, we had just sold everything we owned except for a few clothes and a large box of books, bringing these with us for a planned stay of three years. We had left one form of life for a new one. While I was attempting to understand what this would mean for my academic project, both of us were also expecting a brand-new form of life to take us over, as we became three from two. Two years later we became four, while in the same time, we also lost family and friends to old age, sickness, and accident, con rming a link between the constancy of new life and the universal process of death that is no less profound for being obvious. Anthropologists have long connected these two on the basis of their conjunction in funeral ritual, but it doesn’t take an anthropologist to make the connection.

2 Introduction

In 2003, Cambodia was already in the full swing of globalization. Ten years of Vietnamese-sponsored government (1979–1989) followed the devastation of Democratic Kampuchea (1975–1979). The con ict continued through the eighties and nineties, with remnants of the Khmer Rouge in pockets of the country. This meant that massacres remained a part of daily life, and danger from land mines increased during this period, though the terror was certainly less for most than under the Khmer Rouge. After the fall of the Soviet bloc, a UN-led transition to a free market, formally democratic state resulted in elections in 1993 and a new constitution founded on the basis of “Nation, Religion, and King.”

The garment industry was booming in 2003, and in 2014 was the largest export industry and the second largest industry in the country as a whole, after agriculture. The creation of a large group of urban wage workers as a signi cant part of Cambodian social life was under way.

At rst, my family settled into a house on the southern edge of Phnom Penh, closer to the factories than to the riverside.

Death often seems to double life. Once there was an animate personality in a body; after death there is only a corpse. Death implies a subtraction and suggests that there was something more that must have gone somewhere. We are notoriously resistant to the idea that anything as important as a person might end. In this sense, we may imagine that death somehow multiplies life. The ability to master this paradoxically productive power, to manage that which death produces, and to put all the parts back into their proper places is at the heart of what I call deathpower. At death, Buddhist monks care for the dead and create new forms of social value. This pastoral care is backed by their ability to conquer and domesticate spirits that resist their appropriate moral stations.

When I introduced myself in Cambodia as a student interested in funerals and the “things of death,” I was frequently told this mildly transgressive proverb: The treasures of man are women, wine, money, and villas; the treasures of gods include incense and candles, while the treasures of the Buddha are nirvana and the grave.

Introduction 3 There was genuine laughter in response, and nervousness about its content: associating Buddhism so straightforwardly with death and the grave seemed disrespectful. No one else recited it in the presence of respected authorities like Buddhist monks; I did. They would laugh gently and change the subject, or else insist that in spite of the humor, the proverb was correct. When the proverb was told to me by laypeople, it was clearly a joke. When monks interpreted the proverb for me, however, it became a code with a correct interpretation of each element.

They explained that the poem identi ed treasures, or things of value (sampatti, a.w. sambat) for di erent types of beings: humanity—explicitly gendered male—values things of temporary and pleasurable use, including women, while the gods value sacri ces of incense and candles; the Buddha’s treasure—nirvana—rests in the same category as death.

The interpretation speaks to what di erent beings consider valuable, and was my introduction to discussions of value and its transformations in Cambodia. The last line of the poem identi es the treasures of the Buddha with death and nirvana (a.w. nirv a, nibb na, nippean). Buddhist doctrine certainly holds up nirvana as the highest goal of ascetic practice, though it is famously di cult to explain (Collins 1998). To associate nirvana with death alludes to Buddhism’s central concern with mortality, as well as the apparent but doctrinally denied equivalence between the two states. Attaining nirvana may be understood as the conquest of death; given the apophatic nature of the concept, however, nirvana can never be fully distinguished from the mortality over which Buddhism asserts conquest. Death is simultaneously a value, and the conquest of that value.

None of these re ections was foremost in my mind as we settled into our rst home in Cambodia. I leapt into my project as I conceived of it at the time: a study of the changes in Buddhist funeral ritual since the Khmer Rouge period. It took very little time to discover a problem: while ritual diversity throughout Cambodia had clearly diminished overall, current funeral practices were not signi cantly di erent from the practices that had been hegemonic prior to the civil wars. I was able to con rm this not only through many interviews with people involved in funerals both before and after but also through close examination of François Bizot’s

4 Introduction

work on pre-war Cambodian Buddhism, which, in spite of his consistent focus on heterodox initiatory practices and their possible relationship to a defunct sangha in Sri Lanka, contains close descriptions of “normal” funerals as well (Bizot 1976, 1981, 1994). In fact, in spite of my desire to focus precisely on the di erences, novelty, and change that had occurred as a result of Cambodia’s recent and violent history, I found that funeral rituals were profoundly unchanged, and almost exclusively relied on rural traditions. The only signi cant di erence was the increased hegemony of the already dominant funeral practices, a result of the suppression of traditional ritual diversity by the Khmer Rouge (Kobayashi 2005). While other practices were taking on new meanings—especially the communal festival of Bhju Pi a (a.w. Pchum Ben)—the funeral ritual itself had been largely una ected by the successive waves of change introduced by the various regimes of the last half century. What happened? Why were funerals so resistant to change and transformation, while other rituals were a ected in the ways I’d hypothesized (LeVine 2010)? Reproducing rituals without change is itself a strategic act; that this strategy is especially evident in funerals raises the question of their social value (Bell 1992).

The value and persistence of agricultural imagery signi es that much of the force and avor of such imaginations rely on daily embodied experience, such as that which occupies over 80 percent of Cambodia’s population: the techniques and practices of xed- eld, rain-fed rice agriculture. But this explains the persistence of particular images and practices, not the special persistence of funeral rituals over others.

My answer to the question of funeral rituals’ resilience is that they are a central act in the re-creation of the sociohistorical world in which Cambodians imagine moral possibility (Castoriadis 1975, 170–220). Funeral rituals perform, and through performance institute, key values in the Cambodian imagination that map geography and human beings, along with the techniques that mediate them for good and ill. Funerals are not the only rituals that engage these cosmological imaginations, but the moralization of the techniques that manipulate the dead in funerals and other death-focused ritual events is at the core of the morality of lived Buddhism.

What I call deathpower is the social power to care for, and in so doing, manipulate, the dead. By “manipulate” I mean to transform the dead in

Introduction 5 either secular memory or ontological status. Deathpower implies pastoral care for the dead and transforms their social meaning through that care. In Cambodia, Buddhist monks assist in the processes of both proper re ection among the living and achieving improved rebirth for the deceased, and bind spirits into sites of ongoing value—such as relics, a spiritually defended sanctuary, or an urn of cremated remains that descendants continue to interact with for years.

Deathpower is not a private property of a priestly elite, however, and multiple actors frequently compete for access. Monks may argue for preeminence on the grounds of moral legitimacy, while magicians argue on the basis of practical assistance or technical expertise. The technical and moral dimensions of deathpower may be separated in analysis. The rituals I examine in this book associate morality with hierarchy. To live in the Cambodian sociohistorical world, oriented to life, is to be part of a hierarchy. To refuse hierarchy, in turn, reveals one as demonic, savage, immoral, and oriented toward nonexistence. In contrast to both, the Buddha and the sangha—the community of monks—are those who confront death and the “lonely wastes” without fear, falling into a subordinate hierarchical status, or immorality. For kings and Buddhist monks alike, moral and political sovereignty are rooted in a fearless and practical engagement with death (Stone 2005).

Against these moralized hierarchies range forms of deathpower portrayed as secretive and individualistic, including the forms of black magic examined in chapter 8. Buddhist control of spirits is technical and moral; non-Buddhist control of spirits is also technical, but deemed either amoral or immoral. The Buddhist dominance is emphasized in the funeral, where the shades of pastoral care are presented in greatest relief.

I use the term “deathpower” to demonstrate the ways this care for the dead contrasts with Foucault’s in uential notion of biopower (Foucault 1978, 140). Foucault explicitly contrasted the power over life, biopower, with the power over death as emblematic of two di erent and opposed forms of sovereignty (Foucault 1997, 247–248; Agamben 1995; Mbembe 2003; Foucault 1997). Premodern sovereignty was the ability to “Make die or let live,” whereas for Foucault, modern forms of sovereignty and individual subjectivity were related through an inversion of this power.

In the modern period, the state’s power is to “Make live or let die” (Foucault 1978, 138; Butler 1987). Achille Mbembe has extended Foucault’s

6 Introduction

critique of sovereignty via biopower by investigating, along with others like Agamben, how the traditional sovereign power of unleashing death is exercised in the current politics, which he calls “necropolitics” (Mbembe 2003; Agamben 1995).

In contrast, the concept of deathpower I develop here attempts to outline the modality of a power that Foucault would likely identify as connected to a premodern form of sovereignty and subjectivity. However, if placed within the context of his later work on the “care of the self,” the obligation to care for the dead, associated with a particular modality of authoritative control over the dead, is a useful point of comparison with Foucault’s interpretation of the Greek imperative to care for oneself (Foucault 1985, 1988). The fact that it exists in contemporary Cambodia, alongside factories and peasants, foreign-dominated NGOs, and the trappings of modern democratic politics, challenges either the exclusive “modernity” of the notion of biopower or the wholesale replacement of previous forms of power with nascent regimes. In many ways, deathpower represents a more traditional means of instituting moral possibilities than does biopower: a means reliant on the control over and care for the dead.

These moral possibilities, constructed on the basis of Buddhism’s ritual control over death, institute the repertoire of much of the Cambodian imagination, ranging from its ethnic others, personal moral discipline, the cultivation of rice, the existence and types of witchcraft, and the creative deployment of traditional metaphors, to the rapidly changing circumstances of Cambodia’s present. Buddhist domination of the legitimate ritualization of the dead—its deathpower—establishes and moralizes particular notions about fertility, social legitimacy, and morality, drawing on everyday notions and concepts from Cambodian agricultural life.

The connection between funerals and the reproduction of core social values is not new. Bloch and Parry, anthropologists who have devoted substantial portions of their careers to the investigation of funerary rituals, assert that a near-universal in such ritual symbolism is the reproduction of fertility: “In most cases what would seem to be revitalised in funerary practices is that resource which is culturally conceived to be most essential to the reproduction of the social order” (Bloch and Parry 1982, 7). If funerals center around the recuperation of fertility, de ned as that thing culturally conceived as most essential to the reproduction

Introduction 7 of the society, then an examination of Buddhist funerals in Cambodia should tell us something about those core values.

The cosmologies instituted in funerals are not only particular values but also dispositions toward those values, especially those key to the reproduction of social order. In Cambodia, the key to the material reproduction of society has been agriculture and the production of rice. The Cambodian imagination of rice is a key site through which to examine culturally conceived notions of value. The fertility on display as recoverable value in funerals is not, however, just rice, but also the social order and techniques through which rice is materially reproduced. Rice has been the resource most essential to the reproduction of the social order.

It forms the basis of everything properly considered a meal; its production organized historical Khmer village communities; and raising it is the occupation in which over 80 percent of Cambodians still primarily labor.

Core components of social value such as rice, the particular nature of Cambodian social hierarchies, and techniques of water management are enshrined in the social imagination at the heart of funerals, arguably the most important rituals in Buddhist practice. Cambodians have created an agricultural organization of this society in the imagination partly through imposing culturally instituted binaries such as eld and forest; the Cambodian situation also historically relied heavily on slavery, and today depends on patron-client relationships. Finally, rice’s potency is analogized to the potency of humans, so techniques for controlling one resemble the other.

In funeral ritual, monks can be thought of as farmers of the dead; as farmers produce rice through practices of binding water into elds, so too monks produce sites of deathpower. The modes of production and the ways these sites are exchanged lend a moral dimension to the variety of practices, classifying some as moral and others as immoral.

Most of these exchanges clearly associate hierarchical social relations with morality and oppose them to secretive, individualistic actions, which are seen as forms of black magic. Historically, Khmer society organized itself for the production of rice on the basis of the social value of hierarchal relationships, ranging from the practices of upland slave-gathering to today’s ubiquitous patron-client relationships.

The Buddhist ritualization of death pulses near the heart of the Khmer imagination of the world; it generates and supports a view of

8 Introduction

the world as it is presumed to be and a moral potential that o ends against it. Buddhist monks replicate in funerals the techniques associated with Cambodian rice agriculture and the social organization based on it. Slavery is important to this story, and I argue that slavery has conditioned hierarchy and morality in Cambodia, as well as characteristic modes of social interaction.

I follow the majority of Cambodian Buddhists and assume that there is no problem with the interaction between Buddhist monks and spirits.

Instead, I focus on the presumed modes of interaction in ritual practice. The social organization of Khmer society—dependent on historical slavery transforming into contemporary hierarchical patron-client relationships, and based on culturally distinctive forms of bunded, paddy agriculture—con rms the ubiquity of the rebirth of fertility in rituals of death as social value. Finally, I argue that the funeral ritual is a privileged site through which to examine core institutions and values in Cambodian culture and society.

Those values associate rice agriculture and social hierarchy with morality and present the nonagricultural and non-Buddhist highlands as populated by wild and savage beings—animals, spirits, and people— who are subject to slavery in order to introduce them to the moral discipline of Buddhist civilization. These values are personal and moral as well as social and geographical: just as slaves must be captured from the wild places where they prefer to live and bound into hierarchical forms of labor in Khmer civilization, so too each individual human being is made up of multiple souls that tend to wildness and escape to the forests, mountains, and deep waters (Edwards 2006; Thompson 1996; Ang Choulean 2004). In every case of physical or spiritual ight, the ritual answer is to bind the wild spirit into place, converting its moral ambiguity— also the source of its power—into morally authorized and directed social work. In Buddhist funerals, the dominant physical act is the binding of the spirit of the deceased into place—into the corpse prior to cremation, and into the urn containing the dead person’s remains.

IMAGINED BUDDHISM This book attempts to represent a portion of the Cambodian religious imaginary through a study of rituals involved in the management of

Introduction 9 death and spirits. I am primarily interested in how Buddhist practices relate to everyday Cambodian understandings of the world. My method has been primarily anthropological and ethnographic, and focused more on lay religiosity than on that of monks. The majority of eldwork took place from 2003 to 2006. I began by working primarily with funerary lay-ritual specialists called c rya (a.w. achaar) before proceeding to an examination of connected rituals. I often solicited initial responses to a subject through questionnaires, then followed up with structured and unstructured interviews.

If I describe the subject of this book as a particular part of the Cambodian religious imaginary, I should stress that I too am necessarily caught within an imagination that is almost by de nition somewhat obscure to me. Aspects of it include the imaginary worlds of anthropology and religious studies, as well as of the Midwestern regions of America in which I was raised. This is partly to say that there is no reality experienced or ever even locatable prior to its encounter in the imagination, and that therefore this account, like all others, will necessarily be limited, incomplete, and informed but not fully determined by these imaginaries. Following the work of Cornelius Castoriadis on the social imagination, I deal with Cambodian Buddhist rituals as events that perform, and through performance institute, the central imaginary signi cations that compose the cosmology of the Cambodian world (Castoriadis 1975, 1997).

When I discuss the “imaginary,” I mean something rather precise: society as an institution within the imagination. A serious exploration of Castoriadis’ thought and how it informs my method and presentation at each point is impossible here; I emphasize instead the following components of his theory of society as an “imaginary institution” (Castoriadis 1997). For Castoriadis, the radical individual imagination is the representational ux preceding conscious sense-making (Castoriadis 1997, 281). Meaning is created out of this ux and instituted as the grounds of the social imaginary, so that many people share in the creation of norms, values, methods, practices, etc.: the sorts of meaningful signi cations that together constitute a society. To institute such norms, or imaginary signi cations, as Castoriadis calls them, is to create and reproduce society itself. Therefore, “imaginary” is not a slander against something unacceptably unreal, but the necessary ground of all human creativity and collective life.1

10 Introduction

Castoriadis’ thought is de antly ontological, in a way that associates him broadly with a group of thinkers sometimes called neorealists. His attitude is easily grasped by scholars of Buddhist thought, and an overlapping, though not identical sense of the import is made by the rst verse of the Dhammap da, one of the oldest poems of the Buddhist tradition: Manopubbangama dhamma manosettha manomaya Phenomena are preceded by mind, made by mind, with mind as their chief.

Manas is a tricky word to translate directly as “mind.” As the “sixth sense” of Indian philosophy of mind, it often seems to be something like the sense manifold itself, coordinating the representational ux generated by the contact between the other sense organs and their appropriate sense objects. But manas in Buddhist thought clearly also is a sui generis sense organ of its own, with its own appropriate sense objects. It is strikingly similar to what Castoriadis refers to as the individual radical imaginary—pure representational ux—to such an extent that I am encouraged to retranslate the above as: Phenomena are preceded by the imagination, made by the imagination, with the imagination as their chief.

Everything we do as human beings not determined by our genetics exists at the level of the imagination. As Marx put it, the di erence between the constructions of bees and the social order of the human construction of buildings is that the human architect rst imagines the work that he then builds (Marx 1990, 283–284). The sheer diversity of human organization is su cient evidence of our proli c imagination, along with our ability to create for ourselves things that are not shared by all others. People live their lives in reference to social imaginations, attempting merely to succeed within, to preserve and restore, to challenge and undermine, or even to create completely new forms (Rappaport 1999, 319–323).

Societies create themselves in imagination by instituting the social imaginary through practice, in what Castoriadis calls the “Socio-

Introduction 11 Historical Domain” (Castoriadis 1997). This could be a form of oldfashioned idealism, in which thought creates action and ideas themselves revolutionize reality. But Castoriadis focuses on the relationship between the social imagination and the socio-historical domain of actual practice, describing particular imaginations as gaining or losing autonomy in and over society through the process of alienation; if the particular imaginary signi cation becomes autonomous, the society becomes heteronomous in relation to it.

What practices could mediate the reproduction of the social imagination? The answer partly depends on the imagination in question. In his book on the “Pali Imaginaire,” Steven Collins focuses on the imaginary worlds created and reproduced through the Buddhist world. His examination is largely limited to the Pali texts, which have been subjected to historical practices of editing and puri cation at Buddhist Councils throughout the history of Buddhism (Collins 1998; Hallisey 1991). For the imagination of the Pali canon, then, the practices of establishing and closing the canon and the practices that reinforce its value and centrality for Buddhists are central to the reproduction of the Pali Imaginary (Collins 1990). A canon is “closed,” and a code—a type of logic that Castoriadis calls “ensemblistic-identitarian” or “ensidic logic”— similarly tries to “close” culture (Klooger 2014; Castoriadis 2008). But even a brief glimpse at any culture over time demonstrates clearly that it is impossible to prevent change and transformation. A subsequent question, therefore, is: When imaginary signi cations persist relatively unchanged over time, what accounts for their persistence? As I attempt to demonstrate throughout this book, the e ort to encode values—norms, practices, meanings, signi cations—in binary form associates stark moral choices with a whole range of socially determined practices. Moreover, as I argue especially in the rst half, many of the particular—and especially the embodied—aspects of Cambodian Buddhist funeral rituals draw on similar practices in other rituals, and on physical techniques from everyday Khmer peasant life.

Rituals have often been compared analogically to texts that can be interpreted. In such an approach, one might “read” a ritual. This approach has been e ectively challenged by performance studies of ritual, which point out that the structural-functionalist method results in an understanding of ritual as merely re ective of a society’s “structure.”

12 Introduction

Moreover, the functionalist approach assumes that symbols have clear or transparent meanings, equivalent to their “function.” In working with reformist and modernist Buddhist monks, I was frequently informed of the “correct” meaning of a particular symbol, number of incense sticks, etc. The existence of such an ensidic code cannot exhaust the potential of meaning, though its presence—and especially its use to shape morally distinct or binary choices—is signi cant.

In the experience of lived Buddhism, however, few have access to or the knowledge to engage with texts in the Pali language; even fewer interpret rituals as texts of symbols containing univalent codes of meaning. This is not a new situation, but the norm for most Buddhists through history, who have also not spent signi cant time meditating.

To understand the lived imagination of Cambodian Buddhists, we must look instead at the practices in which lay Buddhists engage most frequently (Hallisey 1995, 44–49). In this study, I focus on rituals, especially those involved with death or spirits, as privileged practices through which social meanings are embodied and performed, and thus reproduced as key imaginary institutions.

Beyond the challenge to structural-functionalism’s reduction of meaning to code, Castoriadis critiques its well-known inability to account for novelty or agency, since it sees social practice as the enactment of social norms. Whence or how these norms emerged is rarely considered, or naturalized in a symbolic way, as in Freud’s murder of the father (Taylor 2003, 7–8). Instead of seeing embodied performances as merely the rei cation of norms, Castoriadis, most performance theorists, and myself view them as key moments in which to examine social agency and creativity (Castoriadis 1997, 2005).

For Castoriadis, society is full of meaningful signi cations, which are necessarily imaginary, and inconceivable without them. These meanings are created by society, but there is no code, no necessary relationship between a signi er and a signi ed. The individual imagination seizes the signi cations and interprets them in its own light, shaped but not ultimately determined by the broader social imaginary and its institution in everyday life.

The polyvalent possibilities of meaning are such that Castoriadis compares them to the intensity of magma owing from an active volcano (Rosengren 2014). Part of the reproduction of the existing

Introduction 13 social imaginary, and hence society itself, requires attempts to channel these magmatic associations into a network of signi cations. This institution of particular meanings is almost always heteronomous or a priori, and is therefore simultaneous with the attempt by most societies to foreclose possibilities of meaning outside of the society, and especially any attempt to put society itself into question (Castoriadis 1997).

This attempt to foreclose possibilities outside of the society itself is central to Castoriadis’ understanding of the social imaginary in general. Such foreclosure, discussed by anthropologists as “claustration” or “embo tement,” is identical with the heteronomous creation of society itself (Castoriadis 1997; Condominas 1990; Macdonald 1957; Scott 2009).

Such closures work very e ectively when they are instituted via a set of binary distinctions laden with moral and desirable or horri c associations, such as the Cambodian distinction between the “civilized farm eld” and the “wild and savage forest.” Judith Butler has gone to lengths to point out that no binary distinctions—such as, for instance, the binaries between man and woman (gender) or even between male and female (sex)—are naturally given; sex and gender are instead both assigned, usually at birth by a physician, and the binaries are reinforced and made unquestionable to most within the system (Butler 1988, 524, 530; 1990, xxviii; 1993). Cambodians challenge some binaristic and enclosed codes, and create and reinforce others.

A society may therefore possess an authoritative interpretive code for ritual symbolism or actions, but this merely re ects the interpretation itself, rather than investigating how that interpretation was created and reproduced (Castoriadis 1975, 167–220; 1997). Practices and signi cations become autonomous through their repeated institution in daily life, an insight that gives priority to the practices of the everyday and the lived experience of individuals and groups over rare or elite practices (Mauss 1973 [1934]). These are the “ruling ideas” of a society, often sacred and unquestionable, resembling Gramsci’s notion of hegemony. Indeed, a value that has become autonomous in society appears to have gained its own life and force in the social world. One might almost call this the creation of a form of agency, or as David Graeber writes, “Gods in the process of construction.”2 In summary, human groups create themselves as a society in the imagination. The imagination is populated with signi cations that may

14 Introduction

become autonomous from the groups that instituted them in the rst place: they begin to travel through time and space, and gain a power that is independent. They are not merely “references” to “referents” but complex, polyvalent, and resistant to simpli cation. Religious authorities frequently attempt to reduce the Cambodian imagination to an ensidic code—the binary distinction with all its overladen moral burdens is perhaps the most obvious form—but the magmatic force of human imagination will constantly escape these bounds and engage in creative appropriations and transformations. We are introduced to imaginary institutions of our societies in everyday practice and introduced to the most central institutions in ritual practices, which gain durability and consistency as a virtue of their sacredness, and through their ability to rely on the everyday inculcation of a society’s particular imaginary in its members.

Because of Buddhism’s social and historical dominance, outsiders and insiders alike often frame the question of religious diversity in mainland Southeast Asia as one of “Buddhism and its others.” Sometimes this is expressed as a problem of Buddhism and “spirit cults,” as if only local spirits and Buddhism constituted the regional mix (Tambiah 1970; Spiro 1970, 1996). Some have recently attempted to create or adopt more complex classi cation systems for these religions. A recent positive contribution can be found in Pattana Kitiarsa’s book, Mediums, Monks, and Amulets, where he follows the vefold classi cation system of a Thai spirit medium in rural Thailand named Wo Chinpradit: He splits the deities into ve groups: thep, phrom, chao, phi, and winyan phanechon. Thep (deity) and phrom (Brahma) refer primarily to Hindu gods and goddesses, while chao is used to indicated Chinese deities. Phi in this context are benevolent spirits (phi di) like ancestral and guardian spirits, while winyan phanechon are bad spirits (phi rai), such as those of people who died a violent or untimely death and were not given a proper funeral. (Kitiarsa 2012, 23)

This classi cation is a ne beginning, though there is some confusion already apparent: it doesn’t allow for all the actually existing

Introduction 15 possibilities and alludes to the possible, in nite proliferation of other spirit categories. Moreover, except among self-conscious spiritual professionals, I never encountered neat categorizations of the spirit world.

While almost everyone is aware that the spirits with which they interact have di erent groups of origin, they imagine that all the spirits exist on the same plane, or at least interact with humans on the same plane.

Thus, for example, ethnically Chinese spirits from Hainan can become local spirits who interact with Khmer and Chinese alike in Cambodia (Davis 2013). Instead of attempting to discover the correct classi catory scheme for religions in Southeast Asia, I suggest that we see each such scheme as a creative and argumentative attempt to institute a new imaginary signi cation.

There is little agreement among scholars or Cambodian practitioners about the correct scheme, though there are some broad trends.

Advocates of modern reformist Buddhism tend to represent the religious eld as composed of Buddhism and superstitious spirit cult remnants, an opinion perhaps surprisingly close to those of earlier scholars (McMahan 2008). Thus, forest spirits with Sanskrit names and healing spirits from China are lumped together, in a way that opposes them to Buddhism. My sense is that this is a function of the power and relative hegemony of modern reformist Buddhism in contemporary Cambodia. While some—especially, in my experience, lay spiritualists whose expertise is grounded in powers that modern reform Buddhism nds troubling or suspicious—accept complex and descriptive classi cations presented to them, most people today tend to re exively classify what Bourdieu calls the “religious eld” into a binaristic complex of Buddhism and its opposite. The words for the latter are multiple, but the term I encountered most frequently was brahma ya-s san , or “brahmanism.” I will use that term throughout the rest of the book to represent the way that most Cambodians talk about the “non-Buddhist” world (that formulation already betraying the binaristic distinction).

I hasten to add that this use of the word “brahmanism” owes almost nothing to the scholarly brahamanism of Indic and Indological studies: it is not restricted to the worship of “Hindu” divinities, has no practices of caste, and is, for the most part, not rooted in a priesthood.3 While the use of the term could imply origins exclusively in the Indic lexicon and imaginary, it does not refer to this in practice, but includes a vast

F

I

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c rya in Kampong Cham at a p ram -empowered Buddhist temple.

Introduction 17 range of spirits of diverse and often indeterminate origins. This binaristic, complementary, and competitive classi cation can be seen in the description of the two sources of p ram —a type of spiritual power—and how they interact in the world.

On a trip to a supernaturally endowed (p ram ) temple in Kampong Cham province, I encountered elderly lay teachers—called c rya—who told me some of the history of the structure, which began as a temple devoted to Hindu gods during the Angkor period and later became a Buddhist temple. Thus, this was an ancient site that had been transformed, dedicated rst to what they called “brahma ya-s san ” and then to what they called “buddha-s san .” The c rya described the opposition between these two “s san ” as total. I asked about Chinese religion, and the religion of minority groups speci cally. The former they dismissed without much explanation, saying that “Cambodia is Buddhist, regardless.” However, they explicitly included the religions of highland ethnic groups, whom they referred to derogatorily as bhnang (a.w. phnong), in the category of brahma ya-s san , which was common in the majority of my explicit conversations on this topic.

Buddhism and Brahmanism were also opposed in terms of their attitudes toward violence and in their exclusive nature. Ever since its rededication as a Buddhist temple, kings have refused to enter. If they did so, the c rya told me, the king would lose his p ram , his supernatural power. The supernaturally empowered boundaries of the temple, also called p ram , were rooted in Buddhism, and the p ram of the king was rooted in Brahmanism, for all that the king is also assumed to be a pious Buddhist. Like witches and ghosts, kings are not permitted to enter a space empowered by an opposing supernatural p ram . Similarly and somewhat provocatively, the c rya also claimed that the Khmer Rouge were terri ed of the temple’s power, and although they destroyed many other nearby, nonsupernaturally protected Buddhist temples, they left this empowered one alone. “Contemporary politicians, however, are just normal men, and can enter and leave the temple as they wish.” The c rya themselves thus set up a binary analysis of supernatural power and its moral and e cient characteristics: both brahmanical and Buddhist p ram are potentially e ective in this world and create e ective spaces around their local instantiation, in which power based in the

18 Introduction

other form of p ram is ine ective. The distinction between Brahmanism and Buddhism is also a potent way of classifying moral behavior. Brahmanism, associated with kings, combatants, ghosts, the forests, and relations of power, at its heart associates the everyday, mundane world with violence, as well as spirits of variously moral dispositions. Buddhism o ends against this particular constellation of meaning—this social imaginary—through its association of monks with peacemaking, and the insistence that Buddhist monks exist outside of the everyday world’s hierarchy and therefore must be o ered the highest respect within that same hierarchy, as an expression of morality.

RITUAL PERFORMANCES OF DEATH AND THE DEAD Anthropologists and others have long attributed a particularly compelling power to ritual performance. Repetition and the self-discipline of performance may be said to help determine social consciousness, a formulation neatly revisited and restated by Rappaport: “Ritual, in the very structure of which authority and acquiescence are implicit, was the primordial means by which men [sic], divested of genetically determined order, established the conventions by which they order themselves” (Rappaport 1979, 197).

Rituals of death are privileged locations for the observation of core social imaginations and values. Funerary rituals in particular have fascinated anthropologists since the beginning of the eld. Bachofen’s 1859 study of the presence of eggs and other symbols of rebirth in ancient Mediterranean funerals may be the earliest on this topic (Bloch and Parry 1982, 1). Maurice Bloch and Jonathan Parry are among the anthropologists who have studied funerals and funerary rituals most thoroughly. As I noted earlier, they emphasize that funeral rituals almost always attempt to reproduce a symbolic fertility (1982, 7). As I argue in the rst half of this book, the resource imagined to be most central to the reproduction of Cambodian culture is rice, and the social organization and techniques used to produce it (Ohnuki-Tierney 1993).

This imagination is so powerful that people are imagined as animated by the same sorts of spiritual energy and amenable to the same sorts of ritual manipulation.

Introduction 19 The study of ritual has moved from a focus on enactment to a focus on performance, with an accompanying shift from a view of culture as a rei ed set of norms manipulating human beings toward a focus on human agency and creativity in performance, albeit often constrained by the very system in which that agency is enabled. With the increased attention to ritual performance and its e ects has come an increased estimation of ritual’s social power (Butler 1997; Hollywood 2002; Mahmood 2006). Catherine Bell responds to Geertz’s already strong formulation of ritual as a component of the “Theater State” by emphasizing ritual performance as a fundamental component of power itself: Ritual does not disguise the exercise of power, nor does it refer, express, or symbolize anything outside of ritual itself. In other words, political rituals do not refer to politics, as Geertz has strained to express, they are politics. Ritual is the thing itself. It is power; it acts and it actuates. (Bell 1992, 195)

This performative approach to ritual accords extremely well with the theory of the imagination pro ered by Castoriadis, understanding the performance of ritual as the active creation and reproduction of core social values and norms.4 In this context, ritual does not re ect the imagination of the world but actively creates it, associating it with morality, pastoral care, and the social obligations of the living to the dead.

Certainly, most Cambodians would agree. Few see the Buddhist funeral rituals as merely commemorative. When asked what would happen if the funeral ritual was not performed or not done properly, nearly all respondents o ered possibilities such as bad future rebirths for the deceased, the production of malevolent ghosts, etc. For most Cambodians, like Bell, ritual is the exercise of power itself—at least, power as they imagine it.

BOOK ORGANIZATION In this book, I have alternated chapters that focus on its arguments and shorter ethnographic vignettes that exemplify and connect them.

Chapter 1, “Getting Sited in Cambodia,” is a straightforward introduction to the monastic setting of most Buddhist funerals and introduces the di erent types of gures who participate. Chapter 2, “The Funeral,”