Organizer: Council on Southeast Asia Studies, Yale University

Type/Location: In Person / New Haven, CT

Description:

A monument that Khmer Rouge leader Ta Mok commissioned in the mid-1990s to honor the soldiers who defended Anlong Veng, the movement’s final stronghold, has undergone a remarkable metamorphosis. Carved into a boulder, the monument featured three male soldiers and one female soldier carrying spikes, the deadly weapons that women transported to the frontlines. Following the Khmer Rouge's final collapse in 1999, government soldiers vandalized the monument, beheading the male statues and damaging the female figure’s face. But rather than remaining a defaced relic, the monument was transformed. By 2017, the female soldier had become Yeay Mao, “Black Grandmother,” a powerful guardian spirit known for defending Cambodia against historical Siamese invasions and protecting contemporary travelers.

Building on earlier research at this site, this talk explores how this transformation reveals the spirit world as a potent force in Cambodia’s post-conflict reordering. The monument-turned-shrine operates as a chronotope, an intersection of multiple times and spaces, containing the Khmer Rouge past, the violence of defacement, and the mythico-historical realm of Cambodia's spiritual cosmos. While international justice mechanisms, neoliberal markets, and state narratives visibly reshape the landscape, the spiritual realm operates as an often-invisible force capable of absorbing contradictions and reunifying fractured territories. As the current border statue dispute with Thailand demonstrates, spiritual claims to territory remain potent forces in contemporary Southeast Asian politics.

About the Speaker:

Christina Firpo is professor of Southeast Asian history at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo. She is the author of The Uprooted: Race, Imperialism, and Childhood in Indochina 1890-1980 (University of Hawaii Press, 2016); Black Market Business: Selling Sex in Northern Vietnam 1920-1940 (Cornell University Press, 2020); and Beauty and the Nation: Women, Culture, and the National Image in Interwar Vietnam (Columbia University Press, 2025). 

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