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Trying to understand how once rational, compassionate individuals could slaughter one-fifth of the Cambodian population is tantamount to comprehending the incomprehensible. Crushing class conflict, political unrest, and economic stagnation help to tell the story of the overall society. Telling the story of those who actually worked in Cambodian extermination centers, however, is another matter—this is a place where structural explanations have very limited applicability.
Explaining why a person would kill is how Alex Hinton, an anthropologist by training, begins to explain the death of 1.5 million Cambodians at the hands of the Khmer Rouge between 1975 and 1979. Hinton argues that a thorough analysis of a particular genocide is incomplete without understanding the cultural context in which the perpetrators and victims operate. It is a person’s body of localized, cultural knowledge—which, in this case, largely derived from Buddhism—that shapes his or her response to an oppressive, dictatorial regime. Consequently, this ethnography seeks to understand the Cambodian genocide by navigating between the larger political processes
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and socioeconomic conditions of the nation and the localized, culturally driven understandings of the average Cambodian. In reconciling these two perspectives, Hinton makes a valuable contribution to the growing body of work examining how a genocidal regime successfully emerges and finds supporters in an otherwise largely peaceful population.
The first part of Hinton’s book is concerned with understanding how this particular genocide developed. He first focuses his analysis on Cambodian and Buddhist notions of disproportionate revenge. When shamed, an individual seeks not only to exact revenge but also to eradicate an entire lineage, rooting out the cause of his humiliation. The strong protection—as well as direction and, at times, tyranny—of Cambodian patronage networks helps Hinton understand why the Khmer Rouge worked to extinguish the population of property-owning elite that threatened the ruling Maoist philosophy. Hinton’s cultural analysis, supported by years living in Cambodia and extensive interviewing, is quite strong in this first section, and lends credibility to his later assertions.
The author is clearly more captivated, however, by what motivates seemingly innocent individuals to slaughter friends, neighbors, and even family members. He therefore concentrates the second part of his analysis on perpetrator motivation. Here, his extensive interviews (which avoid judging the perpetrators, unlike many other bodies of work devoted to genocides) help the reader understand how his complex cultural models resonate at the local level. Examining the Cambodian killing centers and the Khmer Rouge cadres who interrogated and killed within their walls, Hinton wants to know not only why people killed, but why they killed with such vicious abandon. Although the links seem at times tenuous, Hinton weaves together the fear and anxiety present in Buddhist and existentialist thought to explain how performing extensive execution processes, designed to do more than simply kill, served as a demonstration of loyalty, and therefore helped secure the safety of perpetrators.
The book relies on nightmarish examples to document the cultural meaning Hinton uncovers in atrocious acts. In the closing pages of the ethnography, Hinton details the gruesome disembowelment of a prisoner and the eating of his liver by the Khmer Rouge cadres. Killing demonstrated one’s ability to “cut off his heart,” or sacrifice weak emotion to prove loyalty and adherence to the party line. The brutality with which the cadres treated the prisoner illustrates the construction and demonization of the opponent social group that facilitated the genocide.
Truth commissions have long been lauded for helping societies rebuild after atrocities; the healing process is often uniquely tied to survivors being able to share their stories, uncensored, in a public forum. A privately undertaken individual study certainly cannot achieve what a nationwide truth commission can, but the importance of Hinton’s record should not be underestimated. Telling the tales of those who survived, and those who did not, is an awesome responsibility that has great power to heal. By combining these stories
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with previously unavailable documents about the genocide, Hinton’s book provides a personalized, detailed understanding of life under the Khmer Rouge.
Though Hinton presents a compelling set of narratives, his conclusions are not entirely novel. The findings of Stanley Milgrim’s obedience experiments, for example, have been applied to acts of genocide numerous times before, as the author does here. The author is careful, however, to seek explanations for genocide beyond the help that Milgram and his obedience experiments offer. As Hinton notes, Milgram himself was taciturn about extending his findings to situations of such vast wrongdoing. Hinton contends that perpetrator motivation largely stems from the movement’s creation of a diseased, threatening “other”; from the leadership’s ability to funnel social, political, and economic unrest toward their own ends; and from the mounting insecurities and fear induced by the most authoritarian of regimes. None of these are entirely new ideas, and it is when Hinton tries to draw sweeping (and familiar) conclusions that the study starts to falter.
Thus the real power of the book lies in the study of Cambodian social structure, embrace of Buddhism, and familial norms. By grounding his study in the everyday details of Cambodian society, Hinton’s ethnography helps us understand the Khmer Rouge genocide from the perspective of those who wielded the knives and guns. Though the horror of genocide can never be excused, it can be understood in more nuanced ways; Hinton makes a very important contribution to developing a holistic understanding of the roots of the genocide in Cambodia.
—Stacy Humes-Schulz
HLSHRJ@law.harvard.edu
This file was last modified: Wednesday, 03-Aug-2005 10:56:00 EDT