The Persistent Presence of Cambodian Spirits: Contemporary Knowledge Production in Cambodia

Abstract

I struggled to present this active multiplicity of spirit and the permeable boundaries it engenders and crosses. A chronological approach to the text-based production of knowledge about Cambodia’s spirits illuminates the iterative presence and absence of spirit power in the chronicles of the colonizer. Early French Indianologists pointed to the deviance of spirits from Buddhist texts and erased them from their studies of Cambodian religion and statecraft, attempting to purify lived practice to more closely match the texts they encountered (Cœdès 1957). Other colonial functionaries who found their absence misleading, put the spirits back in (Leclère, 1899; Aymonier 1900, 1920; Mus 1933). Later Cambodian monks and scholars attempted to hold the enlightened line of foreclosure and deviance-denying spirit presence in the Buddhist world, but also to reimagine religion and statecraft to reclaim a distinctly Cambodian view of the world (Hansen 2007). In the years after independence, some were swimming against the purifying tide of religion and state (Porée-Maspero 1962) and later still, French ethnography began thinking in and through the vibrant Cambodian social and religious landscapes (Bizot 1994; Condominas 1977). This caused a flood of later spirited engagements with religion, statecraft, and social life (Forest 2012; Baccot 1968) that continues to inform contemporary works (Davis 2008a; Thompson 2008; Edwards 2008a; Guillou 2012). This linear trajectory of knowledge production is important to understand, as it highlights the scholarly interplay between silencing and giving voice to the power embedded in the ancestors and the stones of the land.