What's On

Date: Mon, Nov 1, 2010 at 7:02 PM
Subject: Next HSHH Meeting: November 11th - Eve Zucker "Coming Home: the odyssey of upland Khmer Villagers in the aftermath of the Khmer Rouge"
To: HSHH <hshhpp@gmail.com>

Dear HSHH friends,

 

Hope you will all fight the cold wind to join at our next Human Sciences Happy Hours meeting !

 

 

Thursday November 11 – 6pm – Baitong Restaurant

(7 st 360, near Beung Keng Kang market)

 

Contact:

Emiko Stock & Pascale Hancart-Petitet

012 521 093 – 092 399 273

hshhpp@gmail.com

 

 

Eve Zucker will talk about:

 

 

Coming Home: the odyssey of upland Khmer Villagers

in the aftermath of the Khmer Rouge

 

 

Between 1999 and 2002 the residents of the village "O'Thmaa" began returning to the land that was their home thirty years beforehand. The impacts of the Khmer Rouge regime, two civil wars and repeated forced evacuations made the return 'home' (in all its meanings) ambiguous and extraordinarily challenging. Many of the moral pillars of society were compromised or had vanished altogether, deep scars from the Khmer Rouge revolution and genocide remained fresh, and extreme poverty added additional hardships.  Despite these obstacles, however, changes started occurring within the village during my time there that could be seen as small steps toward returning to a sense of normalcy, security and belonging.

 

Based on participant-observation fieldwork from 2002-2003 and again in 2010, this paper examines some of the means by which moral mending has, and is, taking place. In the early part of the decade through the mediums of kinship, trust, commensality, sharing stories, and village rituals villagers found ways of softening the past and building a sense of community once again. This process occurred within the milieu of new forms of modernity and the impacts of international development agencies. Now, seven years later, significant changes have occurred including the advent of ECCC Khmer Rouge Tribunal and a rise in ecotourism to the area. What are the impacts of the processes on social healing and village identity? How might the tribunal in particular augment a sense of security and belonging? Using ethnographic evidence this paper explores these changes through the themes of moral order, memory, and social change.

 

Eve Zucker is currently a Visiting Scholar at UC San Diego's Department of Anthropology and a CAORC Senior Fellow at the Center for Khmer Studies in Cambodia where she is conducting research on the topics of morality, memory and social change. Dr. Zucker holds a Ph.D. in social anthropology from the London School of Economics and Political Science in the United Kingdom and an MA in cultural anthropology from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. In the past she had worked as a research intern for the Cambodia Genocide Program at YaleUniversity and she has also participated in various Cambodian higher education projects while in Cambodia. Since 1994 she lived and worked in Cambodia on four occasions for a total of 43 months, 13 of which were spent living in an upland Khmer village in southwestern Cambodia where she conducted her doctoral research concerning memory and the remaking of moral order in the aftermath of violence.

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Human Sciences Happy Hours in Phnom Penh

email: hshhpp@gmail.com
web: http://hshhpp.pbworks.com/

Coordinating team:
Emiko Stock, Pascale Hancart Petitet, Gabriel Fauveaud