Cambodia: Weakness in Family Structure and Relationship 

(Comments: This article is one of the most important social analyses of the many major weakness of the Cambodian society, the family structure and relationship. This weakness in family structure and relationship dated back to the Angkorian time. Yet, it still persists until today, without much change. The worst is the fact that most Cambodians do not realize that this major social flaw exists amidst them. This suppression of identity of most Cambodians by the monarchy led to the lack of pool of potential leaders from which a country can its future leaders. Cambodians continue to depend only on the monarchy to solve all the problems in Cambodia, despite the fact that the royal family of Cambodia has only disdain for the Cambodian people than most other autocratic regimes in the world. Without changing this flaw, Cambodians cannot get out of the big mess it is now in created by internal and external foes. Naranhkiri Tith Ph.D. Washington DC July 24, 2007)

In the late 1980s, the nuclear family, consisting of a husband and a wife and their unmarried children, probably continued to be the most important kin group within Khmer society. The family is the major unit of both production and consumption. Within this unit are the strongest emotional ties, the assurance of aid in the event of trouble, economic cooperation in labor, sharing of produce and income, and contribution as a unit to ceremonial obligations. A larger grouping, the personal kindred that includes a nuclear family with the children, grandchildren, grandparents, uncles, aunts, first cousins, nephews, and nieces, may be included in the household. Family organization is weak, and ties between related families beyond the kindred are loosely defined at best. There is no tradition of family names, although the French tried to legislate their use in the early twentieth century. Most Khmer genealogies extend back only two or three generations, which contrasts with the veneration of ancestors by the Vietnamese and by the Chinese. Noble families and royal families, some of which can trace their descent for several generations, are exceptions.

The individual Khmer is surrounded by a small inner circle of family and friends who constitute his or her closest associates, those he would approach first for help. In rural communities, neighbors--who are often also kin--may be important, too, and much of housebuilding and other heavy labor intensive tasks are performed by groups of neighbors. Beyond this close circle are more distant relatives and casual friends. In rural Cambodia, the strongest ties a Khmer may develop--besides those to the nuclear family and to close friends--are those to other members of the local community. A strong feeling of pride--for the village, for the district, and province--usually characterizes Cambodian community life. There is much sharing of religious life through the local Buddhist temple, and there are many cross-cutting kin relations within the community. Formerly, the Buddhist priesthood, the national armed forces, and, to a lesser extent, the civil service all served to connect the Khmer to the wider national community. The priesthood served only males, however, while membership in some components of the armed forces and in the civil service was open to women as well.

Two fictive relationships in Cambodia transcend kinship boundaries and serve to strengthen interpersonal and interfamily ties. A Khmer may establish a fictive child-parent or sibling relationship called thoa (roughly translating as adoptive parent or sibling). The person desiring to establish the thoa relationship will ask the other person for permission to enter into the relationship. The thoa relationship may become as close as the participants desire. The second fictive relationship is that of kloeu (close male friend). This is similar, in many ways, to becoming a blood brother. A person from one place may ask a go-between in another place to help him establish a kloeu relationship with someone in that place. Once the participants agree, a ceremony is held that includes ritual drinking of water into which small amounts of the participants' blood have been mixed and bullets and knives have been dipped; prayers are also recited by an achar (or ceremonial leader) before witnesses. The kloeu relationship is much stronger than the thoa. One kloeu will use the same kinship terms when addressing his kloeu's parents and siblings as he would when addressing his own. The two friends can call upon each other for any kind of help at any time. The kloeu relationship apparently is limited to some rural parts of Cambodia and to Khmer-speaking areas in Thailand. As of the late 1980s, it may have become obsolete. The female equivalent of kloeu is mreak.

Legally, the husband is the head of the Khmer family, but the wife has considerable authority, especially in family economics. The husband is responsible for providing shelter and food for his family; the wife is generally in charge of the family budget, and she serves as the major ethical and religious model for the children, especially the daughters. In rural areas, the male is mainly responsible for such activities as plowing and harrowing the rice paddies, threshing rice, collecting sugar palm juice, caring for cattle, carpentry, and buying and selling cows and chickens. Women are mainly responsible for pulling and transplanting rice seedlings, harvesting and winnowing rice, tending gardens, making sugar, weaving, and caring for the household money. Both males and females may work at preparing the rice paddies for planting, tending the paddies, and buying and selling land.

Ownership of property among the rural Khmer was vested in the nuclear family. Descent and inheritance is bilateral. Legal children might inherit equally from their parents. The division of property was theoretically equal among siblings, but in practice the oldest child might inherit more. Each of the spouses might bring inherited land into the family, and the family might acquire joint land during the married life of the couple. Each spouse was free to dispose of his or her land as he or she chose. A will was usually oral, although a written one was preferred.

Private ownership of land was abolished by the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s. Such ownership is also not recognized by the PRK government, which for example, refused to support former owners when they returned and found others living on and working their land. Some peasants were able to remain on their own land during the Khmer Rouge era, however, and generally they were allowed to continue to work the land as if it were their own property. In 1987 the future of private ownership of land remained in doubt. According to Cambodia scholar Michael Vickery, the PRK government planned to collectivize in three stages. The first stage involved allotting land to families at the beginning of the season and allowing the cultivators to keep the harvest. The second stage involved allotting land to each family according to the number of members. The families in the interfamily units known as solidarity groups (krom samaki) were to work to prepare the fields, but subsequently each family was responsible for the upkeep of its own parcel of land. At this stage, each family could dispose of its own produce. In the final stage, all labor was to be performed in common, and at the end of the season any remuneration was distributed according to a work point system. Livestock at this stage would still belong to the family. By 1984 the first stage groups accounted for 35 percent of the rural population, but the third level accounted for only 10 percent of the farms (see Agriculture , ch. 3).

Source: US Congress Library; Country Studies, 1990

_________________________________________________________________________

• An Uncertain Legacy: The Khmer Paradox

 But there is no evidence of any healthy philosophy developing outside the cult of the king-god, after whose disappearance there was in any case nothing capable of regenerating the nation. In such a closed society nothing was left to pin one's faith on - except Buddhism, a religion of total renunciation.

For this reason Khmer culture was not only doomed to perish sooner or later, but was incapable of spreading. It is obvious that it was the germ of the civilizations of Siam and Laos, and had a profound influence on the Chams. But the sole reason for this was that these countries were more or less under Khmer domination, deriving from a related racial stock and living under similar conditions. Khmer civilization was valid in the environment and specific circumstances from which it emerged, but it could not be reproduced in other times and places. Cambodia must consequently be classed with those cultures which, splendid though they may be, have never, like Egypt, Japan and the Empire of the Incas, transcended their geographical and ethnical frontiers. There have, as we know, been centers of civilization, perhaps of less brilliant achievement, which have nevertheless proved models of inspiration to other lands: such for example as Greece, Israel, Iran, Rome, China and India -'countries greater than themselves', as René Grousset liked to call them.

It is perhaps worth while attempting to discover the reason why some civilizations are like beautiful but barren trees, while others are laden with blossom and fruit. The former, in our opinion, is doomed because they are incapable of evolving a philosophy of man and his destiny. In this field ancient Cambodia was satisfied with what India gave her, and even so was content to remain second best. In spite of the extraordinary development of the State in Cambodia, she appears never to have formulated any theory of power or public welfare such as was bequeathed to all Europe by Rome and to the Far East by China. In Cambodia there was no society, nothing but an undefined juxtaposition of elementary and undifferentiated cells. There were no classes, none of those intermediate and unstable structures which alone provide any possibility of evolution. There was nothing but a vast anonymous proletariat, with a head which may have been wonderful but was, after all, severed from the body. It was a polypous society , a hive incapable of self-reproduction other than by swarming, doomed inexorably to die, as soon as queen, is destroyed.

Great initial gifts, long-maintained prosperity, and certainly a wonderful achievement. Yet nothing of all this survives but a vague memory. Such, no doubt, is the fate of all greatness divorced from love. Nor must it be forgotten that the record of the Khmers survives only because our own humanism, faithful to its proper task, has been at pains to exhume it and bring to life almost in spite of itself. Moreover, it is only a portion of that interest for us, today. The history of the Khmers has its place, like any other human fact, in the field of general knowledge. The evolution of Khmer society is a fruitful theme for the consideration of the sociologist. Yet neither is of primary importance, because both lie outside the main streams of universal history, and neither has left any offspring. The underlying glory and unique legacy of ancient Cambodia are to be found in the wonderful monuments which stand sentinel in Angkor.

A legacy from the past: Khmer art:

It would be easy to point to a more masterly architecture, a more remarkable Sculpture, a more logical decoration. Among the other works of art produced in Asia itself there are many more meaningful and more sympathetic. The art of Angkor, like its culture, was not a source of universal inspiration. In saying this we may be doing an injustice to the fine productions of medieval Cambodia or Siam, of which we know so little but which have sometimes proved worthy successors to the Angkor traditions. But it must be admitted that we cannot speak of a Khmer aesthetic, or cannot at any rate say that it was one of those discoveries which become a permanent part of human experience.

It may be agreed that the art of Angkor was instinctive, lacking in restraint and too often prosaic, and that it left no heirs. Nevertheless Angkor remains a unique ensemble, equally fascinating to the newcomer and to the scholar who has spent years in its study. I am inclined to believe that its secret is to be found in that word 'ensemble'. Taken in detail Khmer art is always a little disappointing. But its size is unsurpassable, the harmony of these enormous structures, the feeling of what may be called urbanism. The temple-mountain symbolizes a whole universe, and owes its grandeur to the very loftiness of its aim. Standing as it does in the centre of the city it makes its effect by its wonderful perspectives of light and shade. From the mind that conceived it, it derives its diagrammatic effect and its symbolic power. The faith that raised its stones has imprinted on them the touching beauty of the human face. And because it was constructed out of space and time, it still dominates the one and has defied the other, lifting its temples in a perpetual gesture against the sky.

The regal majesty and calm repose of Angkor Wat; the troubled message of the Bayon with its hundred faces.... Fully to express them we need something more than words, something better than pictures: we need to add the dawn breaking over the forest, the sun's ray suddenly piercing the clouds - and the silence....

Rare breezes and shifting lights; a heavy coolness; indefinable scents; immobility rather than death, and repose rather than sadness. All these make up the beauty of the stones of Angkor and the memory of the men who wrought them.

{Bernard-Philippe Groslier Angkor: Art and Civilization translated by Eric Ernshaw Smith, 1966, (From: Khmer: The Lost Empire of Cambodia, by Thierry Zaphir, Harry N Abrams, New York, 1998)}
_______________________________________________________________________

• Traditional village and family organization in Cambodia

Village and family organization, especially if compared to China and Vietnam, or India, were extremely weak. Khmer villages were not cohesive units, as in Vietnam, dealing collectively with officials; and beyond the nuclear household, families easily disintegrated. Family names did not exist, records of previous generations were not kept, ancestors were not the object of a religious cult. Corporate discipline over the individual by extended families or by village organizations was weak, and once a person had fulfilled his obligations to the state – as a tax or corvée – there was little constraint in his activities. It is thus likely that a paradoxical situation of great anarchic individual freedom prevailed in a society in which there was no formal freedom at all.

The relations among royalty, officials, and peasantry, which did not begin to change under the colonial impact until 1884, were organized in forms of dependency. Everyone below the king had a fixed dependent status which served to determine his obligations to the next higher level and also provided protection. The provinces of the realm were given in appanage to the highest officials of the capital whose agents in the provinces collected the taxes and organized the corvée which were the raison d’être for the system. Each peasant in theory, and in the central agricultural provinces in reality was dependent client of an official whose identity he knew.

Besides such dependence at all levels of society within the country, the Cambodian ruling class had for centuries been dependent on foreign over-lords and protectors, usually Siam and Vietnam, but at one point in the 1560s Europeans, and French protection against Vietnam was sought in the 19^th century even before the French were ready to impose it.

There was thus no serious conception of self-reliance at any level of Cambodian society, and in a crisis everyone looked to a powerful savior from above or outside rather than seeking a local solution.

(Michael Vickery; Cambodia; 1975-1982, South End Press, Singapore, 1984)

____________________________________________________

By David Chandler

(Phnom Penh Post, (December 24, 1999 – January 6, 2000)

As far as Cambodia is concerned, the century just ending can be fruitfully described in several ways. An unpromising approach would be to cut the century more or less in half, with fifty-four years labelled "the colonial era" and the rest "Cambodia since independence."

A better approach would be to see Cambodia gradually emerging into a wider, largely indifferent world, buffeted by a succession of foreign influences, starting with France, continuing through a period of haphazard but brutal American interference followed by stretches of Chinese and Vietnamese Marxism-Leninism before "ending" in 1999 with an ex-Communist government facing the amorphous challenges of globalization.

A third way of treating Cambodia's history is to examine the conduct of its political leaders, including the French, and to evaluate their efforts both to control the country and to achieve some sort of "reading" of Cambodge/Cambodia/Kampuchea that would legitimate them and also endow the country with a unique or at least a suitable identity. Given Cambodia's permeable borders and its demographic weakness vis a vis Thailand and Vietnam, the battle for uniqueness seems to have been lost some time ago and the price paid by many Cambodians, to say nothing of their political leaders, has been high. On the other hand, every twentieth century Cambodian ruler, including the French and continuing to Hun Sen, has tried to establish a form of government sharply different from the preceding one, putting a personal mark on his portion of the century. In several cases, an incoming regime has sharpened the contrast by condemning the leaders of the previous government to death.

A final approach to Cambodia's history in the 1900s, unpalatable to an historian, is to suggest that as Cambodia emerges into Southeast Asia and as Southeast Asia enters the world, Cambodia is losing the capacity to generate its own history. What had been in some sense an island or a village is being submerged in a global ocean, affected by global changes in climate, population, culture and economics over which no one in Cambodia has any control. Seen from this perspective, as from the third, "Cambodian" history as it has been constructed and written about in the past may be coming to an end, as "Cambodia" loses parts of its former meaning.

Hun Sen is Cambodia's first ruler who seems indifferent to history, in the sense that he makes no connection between his government and Cambodia's past, or between his style of rule and the style of previous rulers. It is hard to imagine Sihanouk, Lon Nol, or even Pol Pot telling an audience as Hun Sen did in 1998, that it was time to "dig a hole and bury the past" even when we consider that "the past" is for thousands of Cambodians an unbearable burden.

Although overshadowed in many peoples' minds by more recent events, the colonial era in Cambodia filled up the first half of the century and laid the groundwork, in many ways for the regimes that followed.

The historian Alain Forest has described colonialism in Cambodia as "painless" (sans heurts), and it seems fair to say that the relationships forged between French colonial administrators and the Cambodian elite were indeed benign and painless, for the elite.

Cambodia's rural poor benefited less, but with improvements in communications, markets, and veterinary medicine, for example, they were better off at the end of the colonial era than they had been at the beginning. More importantly, between the 1880s and the 1940s Cambodia was at peace. During the colonial era, its population quadrupled.

The shortcomings of French colonialism in Cambodia fade in comparison to what has afflicted the country since 1970. Nonetheless, the French left many rough patches in Cambodian institutional life. These can be traced in part to the fact that the French never intended to leave. Unlike the British and the Americans but like the Dutch and Portuguese, the French saw little point in educating Cambodians for very long or en masse. They saw no point in preparing them for a world any wider than French Indo-China. They also failed to establish a strong legal system or an independent judiciary. Laws and judges, after all, might be used to question colonial rule. Cambodians were not allowed to participate in what Paul Mus has called the monologue of colonialism. Under the French, Cambodia was a quaint backwater, a sideshow to the main events taking place in the components of Vietnam. Cambodians, like the Lao, were the "younger brothers" of the Vietnamese, not only in terms of French investment and attention, but also for the Indo-China Communist Party when it was founded in 1930.

The descendants of the builders of Angkor, in other words, were not allowed to consider becoming free from the suffocating embraces of France and Vietnam. In this context, the Khmer Rouge catchwords "independence" and "self mastery", and the lengths that the Khmer Rouge went to achieve them, make melancholy sense.

The most enduring French contribution to Cambodia was probably in the construction of early Cambodian history and in the restoration and maintenance of temples in the Angkor complex and else where.

The French, of course, did not "discover" Angkor. Henri Mouhot was led to the ruins in 1860 by a Cambodian guide. He found a Buddhist monastery and over a hundred monks inside the moats of Angkor Wat. What the French accomplished by publicizing Angkor, on the other hand, played up to the feverish need for exotic places that affected nineteenth century France. In the process of saying how grand and mysterious the ruins were, they bequeathed to the Cambodians a powerful but ambiguous legacy.

Independence from France came by accident for a few months in 1945, when the Japanese imprisoned French civil servants throughout Indo-China. When France returned in force in 1946, Vietnam was already independent under Ho Chi Minh, but Cambodia's young king, Norodom Sihanouk (b.1922), with no forces at his disposal, welcomed the French and for several years showed little interest in Cambodia's "struggle" for independence, dominated in Phnom Penh by the anti-royalist Democrats and in the countryside by the Vietnamese-controlled Communist insurrectionists. In 1952, Sihanouk launched a crusade for independence and, when it was granted at the end of 1953, declared himself its "father".

The 47 years that followed have had, to put it mildly, their ups and downs. It is tempting, looking back through the smoke of the 1990s, 1980s and 1970s to see the so-called Sihanouk era, which ran from 1955 to 1970, as a golden egg. It seemed that way at the time to many fortunate young foreigners like myself, but even in the 1960s there were aspects of Sihanouk's rule, as well as aspects of American policy and the strategies followed by Thailand and by opposing factions in Vietnam that foreshadowed some of the horrors that came later. It was fashionable for foreigners in the 1960s either to treat Sihanouk as comical, slightly crazy and irrelevant (the prevailing American view) or as the very best that (poor old) Cambodia could do (a view peddled by the French).

Sihanouk himself was more complex. While allowing himself to be compared to Angkorean kings, the Prince had few illusions, thought the worst of almost everyone, and was a contradictory mixture, like most of us, of compulsions, affections, phobias, strengths and faults. Intolerant of dissent, contemptuous of his advisors and enormously vain, his affection for Cambodia's "little people" was unfeigned and set him apart from any Cambodian ruler before or since. He worked extremely hard. His diplomatic skills allowed Cambodia to avoid the war longer than seemed possible at the time, but when the bets were off in 1970 the Prince readily allowed foreign forces to combine with local ones to tear his beloved country apart.

Despite his eagerness to be considered up to date, Sihanouk struggled throughout his time in power to keep Cambodia from being affected by anything outside its borders. He wanted Cambodia to be an "island of peace" (koh santhipheap), so as to maintain it as a Utopia (which had been an island) at a time when Cold War and the twentieth century were penetrating every nook and cranny of the world. As in the 1830s and 1840s, when the country had been a battlefield between Thailand and Vietnam, Cambodia could offer no defenses of its own once the Cold War, and the twentieth century, arrived in force.

The patterns of globalization that I have suggested might be bringing Cambodia's autonomous history to a close began to be felt in the 1960s, and became even more evident in Cambodia's civil war in 1970-1975. Without the Americans aiding Lon Nol and the Vietnamese helping the Khmer Rouge, the fighting would never have killed so many people or done so much harm to the country. Without Sihanouk's blessing, the resistance would have struggled for legitimacy. The "Nixon doctrine in its purest form", combined with misconstrued Marxism-Leninism and Sihanouk's appetites for flattery and revenge, came close to making Cambodia disappear.

Ironically, Democratic Kampuchea, billed by the Khmer Rouge as launching Cambodia into a beautiful, uncharted future, was in fact a vainglorious attempt to return the country to its Utopian, island status, cutting it off from foreign influences and infections while seeking "independence-mastery" in a way that favored the Cambodian "race" (whatever that was) at the expense of the Vietnamese.

In effect, the Khmer Rouge tried to finesse the twentieth century and to remove Cambodia from Southeast Asia. They wanted to turn the clock back, not to "year zero" ( a phrase that they never used) but to a time before corruption, streaming in from elsewhere, had occurred. Lon Nol may have had the same kind of reversion in mind when he named his futile offenses against Vietnamese "unbelievers" (tmil) in 1970 and 1971 after a pre-Angkorean kingdom, known to Chinese as Chenla.

It would be wrong, however, to exaggerate the backward-looking aspects of the Khmer Rouge era, which might be better characterized as a collective leap into the dark. Although an image of Angkor appeared on the DK flag, as on every other one since independence, references to Cambodia's supposedly glorious past were rare, harsh, and without heroes. History was devalued because none of it, except the peasants' recently demonstrated liberation, was thought to be worth preserving.

Isolationism failed in late 1978 when Vietnamese armies overpowered DK. Over the next few years, Vietnam returned Cambodia to Indo-China and brought it into the confraternity of socialist nations-in the last decade that the phenomenon existed. Aside from these "openings", Cambodia was isolated from the rest of the world, and remained a plaything of larger powers. The Peoples' Republic of Kampuchea (PRK) struggled to introduce elements of socialism while restoring cultural and religious practices that had been destroyed by the Khmer Rouge. The country's isolation from Thailand, initiated under the French, continued while over half a million Cambodians sought refuge across the Thai-Cambodian border. In those camps not controlled by the Khmer Rouge, Cambodians came in contact with people from foreign countries, with western institutions, global culture and with the possibility of emigration. In the 1980s, "Cambodia" spread into southern California and into the suburbs of Sydney, Melbourne, and Paris name only a few of their destinations.

Approaching recent Cambodian history via the personalities of its leaders is not especially fruitful, except insofar as doing so sets the rulers in sharp contrast with each other, as each of them strove to do. To begin with, the French sought to introduce order into the chaotic administrative system that they found in Cambodia when they arrived. Sihanouk, replacing them, tried hard to personalize his rule and to inspire his "children", the Cambodian people. This flamboyance faded under the taciturn Lon Nol, while the "Wild West" character of Phnom Penh in the 1970s became, in turn, anathema to the smooth-featured, secretive Pol Pot. The Vietnamese, like the French, offered collective, depersonalized protection and guidance-the "monologue of colonialism" again-to a severely damaged country, while in the 1990s Hun Sen, like Sihanouk, has sought to impart a highly personal flavor to his time in power.

At no time, except perhaps under Sihanouk in the decade following independence, has a preceding regime been given credit for anything, or has continuity been favored over change. The inability that has plagued Cambodia's politics throughout its history diminishes slightly under authoritarian rule, and respect for human rights diminishes even more. There is no inherent stability in the Cambodian "system", which is always dependent on a given regime's style, on shifting patterns of patronage, and on the premises that winners take all and that political opponents, by definition, put their lives at risk.

Cambodia's entry into ASEAN in 1999 marked its belated departure from Indo-China and its entry into Southeast Asia from which it has been isolated by accident, warfare or design since the 1860s.

Changes in world alignments have also altered the character of Cambodia's foreign relations. As the century closes, several supposedly immutable "givens" no longer apply. Cambodian foreign policy no longer consists (or will no longer be allowed to consist) of playing its neighbors off against each other or of seeking a larger, more distant patron to protect it from invasion. The menace of invasion has faded, the neighbors are committed to globalization, and the larger patrons are no longer there. With the end of the Cold war, Cambodia no longer serves as anyone's sideshow or surrogate. Instead, as this often humiliating kind of history comes to an end, Cambodia reverts to the status it enjoyed on and off in times of peace following the decline of Angkor, identifiable once again as a small Buddhist kingdom with a glorious past and few resources other than those displayed on a daily basis by its resilient, courageous people.

(David Chandler teaches at Georgetown University. His most recent book is Voices from S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot's Secret Prison (University of California Press).

_______________________________________________________________