After Angkor:
Ashley Thompson unravels memory, mourning, and moving on in Cambodia -- from ancient times to today

Ashley Thompson's first glimpse of the ravages of time and war were in Thailand in the late '80s, in a refugee camp for Cambodians fleeing the Vietnamese occupation of their country. Many of the refugees still carried the burdens of living through the Khmer Rouge regime a decade earlier.

"It was a terrible situation," she says. "There were 200,000 people confined to a couple of acres, surrounded by barbed wire. The no man's land between them and Cambodia was covered in land mines."

Thompson, now a professor in South and Southeast Asian Studies at UC Berkeley, recalls that a group of American psychiatrists came to interview refugees. The general consensus was that the Cambodians weren't dealing with the past, that their culture didn't allow them to express their grief or sadness.

In the decades since the Khmer Rouge period, dozens of articles have echoed similar sentiments.

"I've never heard anything more false," Thompson says. "I understand how these conclusions are reached. But the ways in which people live with that are quite profound, though not necessarily recognizable to an outside eye."

In a book project she's now undertaking, Thompson hopes to re-examine some of the ways in which outsiders have understood and written about the people of Cambodia and their history. She also aims to draw out Cambodians' own methods of understanding history, both recent and distant.

Angkor Wat has long reigned as a potent symbol of Cambodia, past and present

Cambodia's legendary landmark -- Angkor Wat -- is both the apex and the symbol of the country's most significant historical period. Between 800 and 1431 A.D, a civilization flourished throughout Southeast Asia, centered in what is now Cambodia. Magnificent temples were constructed throughout the region. It was a time of empire, of great temple construction, of scholarly romanticism.

Indeed, Western scholars long argued that culture simply disappeared after the Angkorian civilization fell. Summing up a common argument among colonial-era thinkers on Cambodia, Thompson says, "There was this beautiful fabulous empire and these people have absolutely forgotten it. We have to restore their memory to them. And so we are the saviors in many ways."

"There's this entire period of history after Angkor which is dismissed," Thompson says. For these Western scholars, it's as if nothing existed between the time the empire fell and the early 20th century.

Ironically enough, Western scholars were following a line of argument that Cambodians themselves had pioneered centuries earlier. A 16th century king had "re-discovered" the Angkorian empire, and writings during that time pre-figured such colonial-era discussions of loss and recovery.

For Thompson, framing this distant history in terms of loss and remembrance provides an interesting entry into the legacy of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia today.

1.7 million people died in the Khmer Rouge genocide

In recent years, both the international community and some parties in Cambodia have clamored for an international tribunal to put the ghosts of the Cambodian genocide to rest. The Cambodian government and the United Nations reached an agreement in March on how a tribunal would be formed to try former Khmer Rouge leaders.

Arguments in favor of such trials have generally relied on the idea that murderers are still living freely in the country, and that the country hasn't been able to heal.

For Thompson, the issue comes down to understanding how different people resolve their own histories -- terrible or otherwise. The West may come to terms with horrors like the Holocaust through its legal system, but many Cambodians have a different approach to dealing with a past in which 1.7 million people were murdered.

"In any old temple, very frequently you'll find a little shrine that has rusty shackles or a couple bones -- which is a memorial to the people who died in that area under the Khmer Rouge, very explicitly so," she says.

Beyond that, a Western-style legal tribunal may not have the same meaning elsewhere in the world.

"What does it mean when you're working with that legal system and its Judeo-Christian background, in a Buddhist context? It can mean all kinds of good and necessary things. But it's not going function the same as in post-World War II Germany."

The Khmer Rouge copiously documented the details of its torture and death centers

The Khmer Rouge diligently documented many of the people it tortured and killed. Photographs, confessions, and mounds of skulls and bones are the artifacts of this terrible history, on display in museums like the Tuol Sleng prison near Phnom Penh.

A Western approach would see such documentation as a valuable tool in the effort to make genocide a "Never Again" article of the past. Some Cambodians have argued that such records should be burned and their ashes put to rest in a national funerary monument.

"In Cambodia, what you do when people are dead, is you burn all the remains," Thompson explains.

"There's a lot of soul searching on the side of the West, which is necessary," she says. "Certainly, people are doing that. But it's not as if we have a guaranteed solution for keeping it from happening again, or having people work through it."

The international tribunal is a synthesis of the external and the indigenous in Cambodia. For Thompson, the indigenous and exogenous cannot be entirely separated -- and perhaps they shouldn't be. For her, such cultural crossroads provide fertile ground for academic exploration.

Exploring current issues in Cambodia provides Thompson with the means to revisit why she first became interested in that country in the first place. While writing her dissertation in Paris, Thompson worked with the French author Helene Cixous, whose play "The Terrible but Unfinished Story of Norodum Sihanouk, King of Cambodia" inspired the Berkeley scholar to study Cambodia.

In its day, the play represented one method of staging contemporary history, of reacting and responding to events around the world, Thompson says.

"She wrote a play about Cambodia that Cambodians have never seen," she says. "It has never been translated into Khmer."

Thompson plans to resolve both of those issues, by working towards having the the play translated and staged in Cambodia -- staging history, literally.

"It's a practical outcome of all these silly academic reflections," she says. "We'll see." -- Todd Dayton