The Khmer Lands of Vietnam: Environment, Cosmology and Sovereignty

Conclusion

252 The Khmer Lands of Vietnam 252 Conclusion The term Khmer Krom (Khmers of Kampuchea Krom) defines the predicament of a people whom the nations of Cambodia and Vietnam each claims as its own. Meaning Khmers of Lower Cambodia, this Khmer-language ethnonym expresses a Khmer nationalist perspective on a population and territory said to have been separated from Cambodia during the process of French decolonisation and wrongfully placed under Vietnamese administration. The Vietnamese official conception of these Khmers as a national minority recruits them into the multi-ethnic community of the Vietnamese nation while rejecting their historical ties to the Khmer kingdom. Although these contesting claims on the Khmers of Lower Cambodia/the Khmer minority of Vietnam are held with equal passion, each is coloured by deep ambivalence. Many Cambodians suspect that the Khmer Krom have been subject to Vietnamese assimilatory rule for so long that they are no longer fully Khmer. For their part, Vietnamese officials lament the recalcitrance of a minority group whom they label pejoratively as backward, insular and marginal, and whose continuing identification with Khmer nationalist mythology threatens the integrity of the Vietnamese nation. The predicament for the people this study identifies as Khmer Krom is to be considered the rightful subjects of two different nations, neither of which fully accepts them as its own. This study explores an alternative approach to the Khmer Krom that locates them in the environmental context of the lower Mekong. Khmer people’s adaptations to this unique and complex environmental setting and their engagement in its contested history embodies a way of being Khmer that challenges the stereotypes about Khmer identity generated in the nation-building projects of both Vietnam and Cambodia. Khmers have secured tenure in this region through a combination of flexible adaptations to diverse environments , technological innovations and participation in a variety of economic, social and religious exchanges. They have coped with the Conclusion 253 claims made by other groups in this region by strategically drawing upon local resources, self-help networks and understandings, while also selectively engaging with translocal institutions, projects and ideologies. By recasting Buddhist and folk cosmologies and improvising stories of great richness, they have imbued their diverse local ecologies, circumstances and histories with universal significance. Through such practices, the Khmer Krom have taken a leading role in the transformation of their region and in the redefinition of what it means to be Vietnamese and Khmer. I use the name Kampuchea Krom to refer to this region for it is in wide circulation among its Khmer residents. This Khmerlanguage term can be interpreted as expressing a sense of belonging to Cambodia and it is seen by Vietnamese government officials as a cover for actual irredentist aspirations. However, better than any other, the term summarises the sense that Khmers in this region have of both belonging to but standing apart from the vicissitudes of the modern Cambodian nation that emerged out of a long and complex history of imperialism in this region. Khmers in this region have been inspired by this project and they have taken part in it. At the same time they have been negatively impacted by its excesses and denigrated by the parochial nationalist conceit that takes Cambodia as the model for what it means to be Khmer. The term Kampuchea Krom, therefore, is an apt summation for the local Khmer experience of looking up to the modern idea of Cambodia, but also being pitied or looked down upon by those who take this country as the apotheosis of the Khmer historical tradition. The term Kampuchea Krom also focuses attention on the difficulties that local Khmers have in relating to the Vietnamese idea of this region as southern Vietnam. This is an idea of the region as a “new land” with a 300-year-old history that began when Saigon and surrounding territories were settled by Vietnamese migrants and incorporated under Vietnamese jurisdiction. Such an idea contradicts historical evidence that this region already was inhabited by Khmers and under the influence of the Khmer court. It is particularly unsettling for local Khmers to accept the fiction that their history began only when outsiders arrived in this region, a perspective which denies them a history of their own and sees them both as peripheral to and derivative of a 4,000-year-old Vietnamese national project that has its current centre in Hanoi. The term Kampuchea Krom is thus psychologically more acceptable to local Khmer people than [18.225.209.95] Project...