The Khmer Lands of Vietnam

Even though an existing trope through the seven chapters of this work is that very narrative that explains the eventual dispossession of Khmer land, Taylor additionally concludes that the substantial continuation of Khmer cultural practices, vocabulary, toponyms and other cultural markers up through the present is another form of previously less considered cultural resilience. Although Taylor does make use of much material through the middle of the twentieth century, he does not dwell too heavily upon mid-century, post-colonial, Khmer Krom ethonationalism. Rather, he is more concerned with highlighting the main aspects of the landscape, the central Khmer Krom provinces, towns, settlement centers and landmarks – particular wat, Khmer Theravadhin Buddhist temples – that are demonstrates of a remainder of Khmer control over the landscape.

There are some interesting methodological absences that appear to arise as a direct result of Taylor’s heavy reliance upon oral history and ethnographic material, combined with French and Vietnamese sources. For example, Taylor does not appear to use any information from the National Archives of Cambodia or the National Archives of Vietnam II in his analysis, although he does make sure to include narratives that highlight the extreme diversity of the region, through bringing in the delta overseas Chinese, Austronesian Cham and Malays as additional players. However, there are only very rarely individuals of these groups mentioned, as with the Vietnamese as well. As a direct consequence the material in the book is strictly viewed through an ethno-historical lens. Historians may find a critique in these methods in that they tend to ‘upstream’ contemporary ethnographic material into the past, reshaping it in a way that is not necessarily historically accurate. However, Taylor’s careful work avoids this critique through a critical focus on the ‘social memory’ of the Khmer Krom community, in that he is more or less only concerned with exactly this: how the past is constructed, and less so how it actually was. There may, however, also be a very real reason that Taylor adapts this emphasis on ‘social memory’ rather than ‘historical reality,’ since it adds an emphasis on cultural study that gains access in Vietnam, a socialist state that celebrates research on ‘cultural diversity,’ while simultaneously creating some serious extra layers of paper work for local populations and foreign researchers, not to mention the infamous occurrence of local ‘watchers’ or provincial police and plain clothes police recruits that tend to question informants of all researchers, before – and especially after – research is conducted.

Ethnic minority status in Vietnam comes with its fair share of stereotypes: lack of modernization, backwardness, superstition, cultural poverty, economic poverty, illiteracy, rebelliousness and overall lack of ability to understand the ‘Marxist miracle work’ of the state. This is not, per se, the fault of the government as a whole, or individuals, or institutions. Rather, the stereotypes are deep, ingrained and apparently nearly impossible to uproot, even being internalized by individuals of the Khmer Krom community themselves, as Taylor demonstrates. However, the attention to narratives that connect the natural landscape of mangrove forests, low hills, flood plains and saltwater delta land to the Jataka stories of the biography of the Buddha, the Reamkerti – the Khmer version of the Ramayana – and the Mahabharat, Taylor’s ethnography places a special emphasis on the historical perceptions of individual monastics, local headmen, amateur historians and simply popular narratives that are a welcome complication to the normatively flat narrative of Khmer defeat through Vietnamese conquest and cultural hegemony.

Perhaps the most important theoretical shift for Taylor’s work, by terms of contributions to the ethnography of Vietnam and the Khmer people, is the author’s choice to construct each individual chapter around a particular form of landscape. In previous works, Taylor has focused upon popular livelihoods, popular religion and micro-ethnographies (that is, ethnographies of a very concentrated area). However, his choice to collect the ethnographies here and place an emphasis on coastal waters, fresh waters, flooded mountains, ocean-side mountains and ‘uplands’ (i.e. hills), shows a turn toward environmental concerns. All told the piece reads like a rather extensive popular collection of contemporary landscape origin myths that explain the appropriateness of any irredentist sentiments that Khmer Krom populations might have in relations to the southern region of Vietnam. Hence, this work represents one of the most extensive, impressive ethnographies that any non-Vietnamese or Khmer researcher has been able to complete of the region since the work of French colonial orientalist scholar Etienne Aymonier in 1900. Thus, The Khmer Lands of Vietnam is a work that will be an important read for students, teachers and researchers of Environmental History, Anthropology, History of Southeast Asia, Buddhist Studies and Vietnam.  

William B Noseworthy, University of Wisconsin-Madison (noseworthy@wisc.edu)