HSEPP Conference

Saturday, March 14th, 2015 (at 4:00 pm)

At Royal University of Fine Arts, Phnom Penh

Dear HSEPP Members,

Human Sciences Encounters in Phnom Penh and Center for Khmer Studies are co-sponsoring the

conference on the Saturday, 14th

March 2015 at the the Royal University of Fine Arts (behind the

National Museum of Cambodia), addressing themes of 3 mains topic below. Please also notice

that the conference will start at 4:00 pm.

The conference will be held in English and entrance is free.

We look forward to receiving you on Saturday, March 14th, 2015 at 4 pm!

Topic I: “Communist Language Ideology: Performing

Communist Language under the Khmer Rouge”

by Cheryl Yin.

Abstract: Traditionally, Cambodian culture is hierarchical. One must respect one’s social superiors and one

expects respect and deference from social inferiors. This hierarchy is reflected in the Khmer

language through its elaborate honorific register. When the Khmer Rouge came into power in

1975, this culture of hierarchy and social difference was in direct conflict with communist

ideology of egalitarianism. In order to flatten the hierarchy and promote a classless society, the

Khmer Rouge sought to change Cambodian culture and the Khmer language. My talk will

explore the Khmer Rouge’s language policies in relation to literature regarding: - nationalism and nation-building (How does language play a role in newly formed

nation-states?) - language standardization (why did the Khmer Rouge feel the need to change and

standardize the Khmer language?) - performance and performative language (could Cambodians be described as

“performing” or “feigning” communist language in order to survive?) Because of the time limit, I will focus on the performative aspect. Did Cambodians have

backstage (private) and front stage personas (public)?Did they put up a front in the presence of

the Khmer Rouge, but take off their mask when in private? I argue that the performative aspect

of language is what helped Cambodians feign compliance. They can use communist speech

without believing in the actual words they were regurgitating. Speech has now become a tool for

them to survive and to obtain resources (food, shelter, etc.).

Cheryl Yin’s Biography: Cheryl Yin is a PhD candidate and fourth year graduate student in Linguistic Anthropology at

the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor where she also received her Master’s degree in

Linguistic Anthropology in 2014. She received two Bachelor’s degree in 2007 from Pitzer

College in Claremont, California, in Anthropology and Linguistics. Cheryl is currently

conducting research for her PhD dissertation on compulsory linguistic egalitarianism in

Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge regime (1975-1979) and the impact those radical changes

may have had on the everyday use of language, specifically honorifics, after the fall of the

regime in 1979.

Topic 2: “MahaGhosananda: Performing Dhamma for World

Peace”

By Linda Chhath

Abstract: In the aftermath of the Khmer Rouge MahaGhosananda was among the few highly trained

Khmer monks to survive, having been outside of Cambodia since 1953 in pursuit of various

Buddhist educational training. Beginning in the late 1980s he presented a Buddhist model for

conduct, behavior, and thinking, in a manner to resolve immediate problems through his social

work to reconcile the unstable and splintered reality of a post-Khmer Rouge Cambodia both

locally and internationally. Reading his actions and words, this presentation will tease out the

meaning behind MahaGhosananda’s self-presentation and articulate what I argue was his aim of

teaching the ethics of social engagement for a Khmer audience who had “survived” but were

continuing to suffer from deep social, mental and bodily scars.

Linda Chhath’s Biography: Linda Chhath is a PhD candidate in the Department of Languages and Cultures of Asia at the

University of Wisconsin, Madison. She holds a MA in Southeast Asian Studies from the

University of Wisconsin, Madison and a BA in History and Anthropology from the University of

California, Santa Cruz. She is in Cambodia conducting dissertation research on Buddhist ethical

expressions and national and cosmopolitan social movements within the context of post-colonial

nation building and “Third-World” perspective, Cold War anxieties.

Topic 3: “Feminist Re-readings and Affective Archives:

Regarding Two Registers of Historical Trauma”

By Lina Chhun

Abstract: In clinical models of trauma, silence and its various manifestations are read as pathology, as

barriers to healing and recovery. Psychosomatic symptoms and experiences especially, are

diagnosed as disorder—as physical falsehoods malingering women tell about their bodies.

Narratives of violence and trauma are pushed into narrow categories of experience, a result of the

demand for the construction of “empowered identities” founded upon the breaking of such

pathologically-marked silences. These clinical as well as liberal discourses—especially in the

U.S.—have largely come to define the experiences of not just individual, inter-personal violence,

but also historical and collective experiences of violence. The following paper proposes a feminist intervention into this framing of violence, silence, and

pathology. Building upon and speaking back to previous narrative work I have done with family

members, I use feminist frameworks to re-read the affective archives of the psychosomatic and

hauntings in the afterlife of the Cambodian genocide. Using Jacqui Alexander’s notion of

palimpsestic time and VeenaDas’ approach to voice and the everyday, this paper tentatively

engages the potentialities of such re-readings for expanded discussions of healing after historical

violence.

Lina Chhun’s Biography: Lina Chhun is a PhD candidate and fourth year graduate student in the Department of Gender

Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Lina currently holds an MA in

Gender Studies with a concentration in Asian American Studies from UCLA, an MS in Social

Psychology from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a BAS in Psychology and

Women’s Studies from the University of California, Davis. Her research focuses on questions of

memory, mediation, narrative, and the production of history in the afterlife of violence, with an

attunement to registers/registerings of historical trauma relating to the Cambodian genocide of

1975-1979. --

HSEPP - Human Sciences Encounters in Phnom Penh - email: hs.encounters@gmail.com French web site: www.rencontres-shs-cambodge.ird.fr/ English web site: http://www.shs-encounters-cambodia.ird.fr/ Networks : http://rupp.academia.edu/HUMANSCIENCESENCOUNTERSINPHNOMPENHCAMBODIAHSECambodia http://www.facebook.com/Humansciencesencountersinphnomphenh

Coordinating team: Youk Sopheak with Pascale Hancart Petitet, Gabriel Fauveaud, Colleen McGinn, Léo Mariani & Clémence

Schantz .