History, Buddhism, and New Religious Movements in Cambodia (review)

John Marston and Elizabeth Guthrie have assembled a fascinating collection of essays on Cambodian religion, nationalism, and identity. While the volume's title is somewhat ungraceful, the essays taken together constitute a virtual treasure trove of information on Khmer Buddhism in all its many facets. Cambodian religion has been vastly understudied in modern times, even considering the important contributions of Bizot, de Bernon, Forest, and Ang in French. In the last year we have been presented with three new books in the field in English: Ian Harris' work on the history of Cambodian Buddhism, Stephen Asma's account of a personal journey through lived Theravada Buddhism, and this collection by Marston and Guthrie. While the first is a valuable new synthetic contribution and the second a fun ride, as an anthropologist I find the Marston/Guthrie volume exciting in its scope.

The first section of the book focuses on re-reading Khmer religious history, with pieces by Ashley Thompson, Anne Hanson, and Penny Edwards. Thompson's work here and in other venues on the middle period of Khmer history serves to destroy the myth that the period after the fall of Angkor was only a "dark age" with no cultural or religious activity worthy of study. Here she analyses the messianic cult of the Buddha Maitreya by exploring how he appears — by his absence — in middle period iconography. In her conclusion she deftly links the image forward to Norodom Sihanouk as the embodiment of Maitreya in modern times. Anne Hanson explores crucial changes in religious thought in the 19th century, banishing the "Cambodians are unchanged since the times of Angkor" theme that dominates too much of the general writing on Cambodia. She argues that the "self-conscious imagining of a 'Khmer' identity associated with a distinctive language, ethos, culture, and nation, and particularly with a distinctive way of being Buddhist, was a product of the cultural politics of the nineteenth century" (p. 41). Hanson's chapter, and the next piece by Edwards explore these 19th and early 20th century shifts: French colonial influence, the introduction of the Thommayut sect from Thailand, the beginnings of print media, the establishment of the Buddhist Institute and the rise of the French-educated scholar monks Chuon Nath and Huot Tat and their "new Mohanikay" or "Dhammakay" order. An understanding of these important shifts is crucial for comprehension of what follows historically and sets up the discussion of contemporary ethnographic examples that follow in this book.

The next section focuses on images of the "leper king" and the idea of the king as a body standing metonymically for the geo-body of the kingdom. The first piece by Thompson analyses the issue in theoretical terms, playing on this dual conception of "body" to discuss the idea of king as healer. The second piece by Hang Chan Sophea is an ethnographic description of contemporary practice in relation to several images of the leper king and his parallel female image Yay Deb in Siem Reap and Phnom Penh.

The third section of the book is on the ethnography of contemporary Cambodian religion. Guthrie discusses contemporary Tun Ji or "nuns," including descriptions of their lives at one temple in central Phnom Penh, Wat Mangalavan. Guthrie's argument, that the marginalization of Tun Ji and their "ordination" is a recent phenomenon influenced in part by Western ideas about women and religious asceticism, seems to me somewhat strained. The idea of ancient female power that gets lost in modern times is a well-worn trope. While there is inscriptional evidence for educated and pious elite women, it seems to me insufficient to argue that it is only in recent times that the Tun Ji were limited to the householder or non-ordained role. Nonetheless, the contribution raises important issues regarding contemporary women's religious practices.

Didier Bertrand's contribution on medium possession is important to understanding crucial concepts at the heart of Cambodian Buddhism today. These include parami (baramey, Sanskrit/Pali...