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:

Eve M. Zucker is a sociocultural anthropologist whose research explores moral, ritual, and digital forms of social memory and recovery following mass violence, with a focus on Cambodia and the Holocaust. She is the author of Forest of Struggle: Moralities of Remembrance in Upland Cambodia (University of Hawai'i Press, 2013) and co-editor of Political Violence in Southeast Asia Since 1945 (Routledge, 2021), Coexistence in the Aftermath of Mass Violence (University of Michigan Press, 2020), and Memory and Mass Violence in the Digital Age (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). Her recent work addresses AI's influence on mass atrocity memorialization, including articles in Discover Artificial Intelligence and AI and Society, and a forthcoming chapter on digital denialism of the Khmer Rouge. She co-founded Yale’s Digital Memorialization of Mass Atrocities initiative and the international Digital Archive of Mass Atrocities research group. She is affiliated with Yale University and Cornell University’s Southeast Asia Program, and serves as President of the Center for Khmer Studies, on the steering committee of Yale’s Genocide Studies Program, and on the executive committee of the New York Southeast Asia Network. She holds a PhD in Anthropology from the London School of Economics.

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