Cornell University Doctoral Candidate, Courtney Work, under the supervision of Dr. Magnus Fiskesj, will conduct research on spiritual practices in the context of post-war rural village reconstruction in Cambodia. This research is driven by recent empirical and theoretical work on religion and ritual, which highlights particular local processes that are in constant interplay with both larger historical narratives and sociopolitical conditions. Local spirit practices, for example, are not static remnants from the past, but are actively involved in the political, economic, and historic worlds of practitioners. Work's research will investigate the integrative and potentially divisive work of spiritual practice as a small rural village incorporates modernity and rebuilds community life after the traumas of war and genocide.
Research will be conducted in a rural Cambodian village, newly resettled by displaced families in the year 2000. Through sustained ethnographic engagement consisting of participant observation, formal and in-formal interviews with Buddhist monks, nuns and villagers, geographic mapping of spiritual landscapes, and documentation of embodied ritual practices the following research questions will be examined: What aspects of spiritual practice are revived and deployed in a rapidly modernizing rural Cambodia, and how does this practice bring expression to continued political repression and the ongoing traumas of war-torn, poverty stricken villagers? How do religious practices and understandings affect the democratic process in Cambodia today? Do engagements with spirits, ghosts, and Buddhist practice open possibilities for healing and reconstruction? Can they also create opportunities for division and violence?
This research is important because it will examine post-traumatic practices and the use of spiritual activities to mediate lived experience. It will revisit and expand upon the social science thery of modernity and spirituality, and will be of interest to scholars of trauma, reconstruction, and processes of societal healing. Such understandings can inform policies of reconciliation in post-conflict societies and improve our understandings of processes related to social healing following massive traumas, particularly those inflicted by violence and warfare. Funding this research also supports the education of a social scientist.
My dissertation research was conducted in 2010-11 in a remote village of western Cambodia. NSF funding enabled the study of religious practice in this newly established village, where Cambodians from many different provinces came to cut new rice fields from the forest. Two large land concessions, one social and one economic, issued in the year 2000, began the process that transformed a cluster of soldier’s huts at the railroad tracks into a village with a 5-room school house, a Cham (Khmer Islam) mosque, and a Buddhist temple. This process also called forest spirits to become village guardians, and it turned the deep forests of the nearby mountains into sites for intensive timber extraction and cassava plantations. In this new village, the boundaries created by religious, governmental, and economic practices are quite visible. There are three distinct neighborhoods along three different roads; one Cham , one Buddhist, and one with soldiers and wood dealers. My research reveals, however, how this spatial delineation belies the intricate relationships that emerge across the social and natural environments and the ways that the boundaries of each self-segregated group disperse into realms of shared experience and congeal around groups of affiliation and identification. The people are disparate, but not divided. The results of this research provide insight into how shared experiences bridge the divisions created through social structure and will contribute to the literature on post-traumatic recovery and social reconciliation. In this village, people share the memory of war and societal upheaval, a shared memory that is normalized into daily conversation: It’s like we were back with Pol Pot, all sharing a pot of rice with only three grains, this was said by attendees at a wedding party who arrived after the food ran out. This shared experience of scarcity softens the boundary between those who suffered brutality at the hands of the Khmer Rouge and those who supported the KR agenda and lived in moderate, hard-working communities: everyone was hungry. Everyone also remembers the wild pigs and the forest trails from the time when their village was nothing but forest. They now share the new experience of economic intensification. In 2009 large companies arrived and claimed their concession to the surrounding forests. These land seizures disrupted a long established local system of rosewood extraction and offered a close-to-home form of migrant labor for local residents. In this village, Buddhist and Cham, soldier and farmer, were all affected by Pol Pot, by their adventures as pioneers, and are now drawn together by their shared experiences with the companies currently altering the physical, economic, and social landscape across Cambodia. My research also offers an intimate look at the process of religious revitalization from two vantage points. The first and most prominent is in Buddhist practice. In and near the village, the forest spirits transform into village guardians and enter into social relationships with the new resident humans, a village temple rises one building at a time thanks to two powerful urban monks. Nearby, politically connected elites rebuild neglected temples, seeking magical Buddhist practices still alive in the remote regions. These meritorious rural temple restorations also silence complaints from monks about the impacts economic intensification. The other revitalization is the network of Malaysian Muslims who are reaching out to many Southeast Asian Muslim communities and who sponsored the village mosque. They are not involved in economic penetration, but, offer financial assistance and advocate a reformed and rationalized Islamic practice that shuns the worship of ancestors and the more esoteric practices common to the Cham and other Southeast Asian Muslims. These networks of Buddhist and Muslim elites who sponsor religious projects are not at all new; their economic capacities are new and reflect their reach and influence. Their disparate spiritual foci, esoteric and rationalized respectively, reflect something else to unpack through writing. My research will contribute to a growing body of literature on the nature of religion in contemporary society. So far, I have presented my findings to two groups of Cambodian university students in Phnom Penh, to scholars at an interdisciplinary conference on Cambodia hosted by the Center for Khmer Studies, at the American Anthropological Association annual meeting, and in two refereed graduate student panels at US universities. I am currently working on two Khmer language publications and have two articles under consideration in peer reviewed journals. The writing of my PhD dissertation for the Department of Anthropology at Cornell University is well underway and I expect completion by the spring of 2013. Funding from the National Science Foundation enabled me to gather invaluable data that captures a particular moment in history, the details of which will make strong interventions into current scholarship on contemporary religion, on development and environmental issues, and on post-traumatic recovery in developing nations.
