Cambodia. Forest of struggle: Moralities of remembrance in upland Cambodia. By Eve Monique Zucker. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2013. Pp. 233. Appendix, Notes, Bibliography, Index.

Abstract

Forest of struggle: Moralities of remembrance in upland Cambodia By EVE MONIQUE ZUCKER Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2013. Pp. 233. Appendix, Notes, Bibliography, Index. doi: 10.1017/S0022463414000150 Forest of struggle considers the impact of the Khmer Rouge revolution on a remote village at the edge of the Cardamom Mountains in Kompong Speu Province, southwestern Cambodia. Eve Zucker is broadly concerned with the question that animates most anthropologists who have worked with Cambodians in the years since 1979: 'how communities negotiate the memories associated with difficult pasts and come together again to rebuild their lives' (pp. 7-8). She explores this question through the explanatory themes of morality and memory (both individual and social) as they relate to trust, distrust, and the re-establishment of broken trust in a village context. Zucker's primary research is ethnographic: she conducted a ground-up study of local interactions, based on an extended stay in the pseudonymous village of O'Thmaa, that looks at the most basic forms of sociality: kinship, food, commensality, and life cycle and other ritual practices. Through her fieldwork, Zucker was able to observe how relatedness was established and maintained (or not) at the village level, and to consider how villagers negotiated their difficult memories of the past in the present: how they talked (and didn't talk) about the past, how they behaved in relation to each other, and how they incorporated these memories into their actions as they moved into the future. However, this is an unusual ethnography. Importantly, it represents the first extended study of a Khmer Rouge 'base area'; and the first to consider the impact of the revolution on people who were recruited by the Khmer Rouge early on in their struggle and who were drawn into periodic contact with them in the civil war that followed their overthrow in 1979. The subjects of Zucker's study experienced multiple dislocations between 1970 and 2000 as their home territory was occupied by competing forces. War ended much later for these Cambodians than for people in most of the rest of the country, and the impact on them was enormous. The experience of 'base people' in this 'forest of struggle' is a story we have not heard before. As Zucker points out in her introduction, many of the 'new people' from towns and cities who moved to France, Australia, or the United States as refugees after 1979 have written personal memoirs about their experiences of the Khmer Rouge revolution. This is not true of the 'base people' who occupy this marginal area: most who survived DK (Democratic Kampuchea) were illiterate, and many of the younger generation remain illiterate. Thus she is presenting new information, about individual and social processes under particular and carefully reconstructed historical circumstances. Their early association with the Khmer Rouge did not in any way protect the villagers of O'Thmaa. Zucker's book begins with a chilling tour of the old village of O'Thmaa that an elder from the village conducted toward the end of her fieldwork, pointing out old household sites and enumerating the former residents who had been killed or died of illness under the Khmer Rouge. Of the less than one-third who survived DK, nobody remained in this original village. …