Anatomy of a Crisis: Education, Development, and the State in Cambodia, 1953-1998

1 The Traditional Setting: State, Society, and Education before Independence

The Traditional Setting State, Society, and Education before Independence 9 Just how people came to inhabit the land that now forms Cambodia remains something of a mystery. As in many other Southeast Asian countries , mythical legends about the creation of Cambodia provide tales rich in detail and adventure yet scant in terms of historical fact. One story revolves around a Brahman prince who marries a dragon-princess. The descendants of this couple, according to the legend, are the first inhabitants of Khmer lands, Kambuja. Like many such legends of emergence , Cambodia’s tale of Kaundinya has a number of variations, all established on similar themes.1 Although useless in terms of a historical narrative, the tale represents an illuminating thematic introduction to Cambodian culture and the Cambodian state. What is important about the tale of Kaundinya is its Indian influence. The name Kambuja is Sanskrit, while the story’s central protagonist, Prince Kaundinya, was a Brahman. Like much of the prehistory of Southeast Asia, and particularly Cambodia, the concept of Indianization , while rarely disputed, remains clouded. Scholars continue to grapple with questions about whether Indianization was a product of Indian or local initiatives, whether it was an imposed or invited phenomenon, and whether it began because of economic, political, or cultural concerns . Despite the many questions, there is general agreement that the Indianization of Southeast Asia was a two-way interaction that profoundly affected the nature of social relations in the region.2 The social system that emerged throughout the Indianized Khmer polity was one of reciprocal relationships and dependencies. A caste system, such as that in India, did not gain momentum in Cambodia. A complex social hierarchy was, however, evident. The hierarchy can be thought of in terms of a pyramid, with its labyrinth of internal entrances and corridors representing a complex web of relationships between people and institutions. It is this web that served to link the local worlds of Cambodian villagers with the Khmer king. The social system was not static, changing many times between the initial Khmer-Indian interactions and the arrival of the French in the mid-nineteenth century. Despite these changes, the underlying basis of the hierarchy endured.3 The hierarchical social system was certainly evident in the precolonial Khmer villages of the sixteenth century. The villages were generally centered on a local wat (temple or pagoda). On the surface, they appeared “loosely structured,” with family and monkhood constituting the only durable groups. Beyond these groups, cohesion was maintained through a network of relationships between patrons and clients. People living in a village could be identified as either neak mean (a person who has), or neak kro (a person who does not have), depending on their status relative to each other. Weaker members of the village (neak kro) sought protection from those of greater strength (neak mean), such as local monks, bandits, or minor “government” officials. These neak mean were then considered neak kro in relation to officials from nearby centers who exercised greater power. Village life was a fragile, and often savage, existence. Reliant on the vagaries of the weather, on minimal protection or support from the state, and with no roads or means of long-distance communication, people were largely dependent on each other. In order to survive, alliances were formed and, as a result, the system of hierarchy endured.4 Cambodia’s social hierarchy was not unique. In many ways, it was typical of hierarchical social systems evident in other Asiatic kingdoms —Thailand, Burma, the Indonesian archipelago, and the Malay peninsula being obvious examples. At the apex of Cambodia’s hierarchical pyramid was the king, considered to be the protector of society. While self-preservation, motivated by a continued procession of rivals and would-be challengers, was often the primary consideration for Cambodia’s precolonial sovereigns, the institution of kingship was revered by the peasantry, whose ideas about the monarch, according to David Chandler, were “grounded in mythology rather than experience .”5 A legacy of the idealized conception of the monarch inherited from the Angkorean period, which bestowed on Cambodia the notion of a God-King, was the widespread belief among the peasantry that it 10 The Traditional Setting was the king who had determined the fertility of the soil and therefore the survival or otherwise of their crops. The village and the king were connected physically by the administrative cadre known as oknya. Like...