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 ones 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 Rouges 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 Yins 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 Masters degree in
Linguistic Anthropology in 2014. She received two Bachelors 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 MahaGhosanandas 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 Chhaths 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 disorderas 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 discoursesespecially 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 Alexanders 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 Chhuns 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
Womens 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/HUMANSCIENCESENCOUNTERSINPHNOMPENHCAMBODIAHS
ECambodia
http://www.facebook.com/Humansciencesencountersinphnomphenh

Coordinating team:
Youk Sopheak with
Pascale Hancart Petitet, Gabriel Fauveaud, Colleen McGinn, Lo Mariani & Clmence
Schantz .