Sounding the dead in Cambodia: cultivating ethics, generating wellbeing, and living with history through music and sound
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Abstract
This dissertation rethinks the ethics of history and trauma in post-genocide Cambodia by examining how Cambodians use a broad repertoire of sounded practices to form relations of mutual care with ancestors, dead teachers, deities, and other predecessors. At its root, the dissertation is the study of an ethical-religious-aesthetic system by which Cambodians recall predecessors’ legacies, care for the dead, and engage ancestors and deities as supportive co-presences. Traditional and popular musics, Buddhist chants and incantations, whispers, and the non-acoustic practice of “speaking in the heart” (niyāy knung citt) are among the primary sounded practices that Cambodians use to engage the dead. Parts One and Two detail those sounded practices and their social implications. I discuss how previous approaches have misinterpreted the nature and capacities of Cambodian music and other ritualized sounds through historicist, colonialist, and secular epistemologies, which cast those sounds as “culture” or “performance” and ignore their capacities as modes of ethics and exchange with the dead. Instead, by rethinking those sounded practices as Cambodian-Buddhist ethics and exchange, I examine how Cambodians fulfill an obligation to care for the ancestors who have supported themselves. I suggest fulfilling that obligation generates personal wellbeing and provides a new model for what living with history can sound like and feel like. Taken together, in Parts One and Two, I detail the non-linear temporalities, types of personhood, ethics, exchange with the dead, and the intergenerational mode of living with history that Cambodians bring into being through music and sound.
Part Three zooms further out to discuss how sounded relations with the dead have consequences for national and international politics, which leads to larger critiques of the Cambodian government’s politicization of Khmer Rouge remembrance and international humanitarian efforts that attempt to help Cambodians heal from trauma. Since at least the mid-1990s, a plurality of international activists, scholars, volunteers, and development workers have concluded that Cambodians perpetuate a silence about the Khmer Rouge era that furthers their traumatization. Most observers suggest that Cambodians need to provide public testimony about that violent past in order to heal. This dissertation contests those conclusions, following work in anthropology and trauma studies that problematizes the universalization of the Western psychotherapeutic notion of biomedical trauma and its treatments. I suggest that those calls for a testimonial voice presuppose historicist modes of remembrance and knowledge production that naturalize liberal Western models of personhood, citizenship, justice, wellness, and political agency. To move away from those models, I argue that Cambodian sounded and ritual practices generate what I term “modes of being historical” and “ways of living with history” that are intimate, familial, intergenerational, engage national pasts, and can be a mode of political action. Those “modes of being historical” include but are not limited to telling stories of others’ struggles and deaths. I illustrate how Cambodians have long used a multitude of sounded practices to engage the past, grapple with life’s difficulties, and care for themselves and their ancestors.
This dissertation posits that sound studies and ethnomusicology can further the emerging scholarly shifts toward the culturally specific ways people cope with difficult pasts. I propose a new approach to post-violence ethics and history by arguing for the decolonizing possibilities of emphasizing the modes of being historical, ethical relations of mutual care, and ontological entanglements with the dead that Cambodians generate through music and sound.