| Over one and one-half million of Cambodia's eight million inhabitants died from overwork, disease, starvation, and outright execution during Democratic Kampuchea (DK), the period of Khmer Rouge rule (April 1975 to January 1979). While other scholars have explored the historical, political, and socioeconomic roots of such genocides, few have analyzed how perpetrators come to be motivated to kill. Synthesizing practice theory and cultural models research into what I call a "psychopraxis approach," this study explains the origins of genocide in a more comprehensive manner by taking into account both the macro and the microlevel.;In particular, I use this theoretical approach to explore how Khmer Rouge ideology, in combination with historical developments (e.g., the Vietnam war, the overthrow of Prince Sihanouk, economic destabilization) and sociocultural transformations (e.g., banning Buddhism, undermining familial and village attachments, distinguishing between "old" and "new people"), created an environment in which genocide was possible. DK ideology, which glorified violence against its "enemies," was successful in motivating people to kill precisely because it manipulated preexisting cultural models that were emotionally salient to many cadre and soldiers.;Thus, after the historical and theoretical introductions, the first ethnographic chapter describe how the massive purges which took place during DK were strongly informed by a "cultural model of mandala politics" that is rooted in Cambodian notions of power, patronage, and paranoia. Chapter Five shows how Khmer Rouge ideology played upon traditional cultural models of face and honor to motivate perpetrators to kill because of status concerns. In Chapter Six, I illustrate how the Khmer Rouge created an extremely authoritarian society in which genocidal orders were more readily followed because of preexisting cultural models of obedience. The last ethnographic chapter points out how the DK regime used a cultural model of disproportionate revenge to incite its minions to seek vengeance upon their "class enemies." I conclude by briefly summarizing my argument about the Cambodian genocide and situating it in relation to other studies of DK, debates about the Holocaust, and the anthropology of political violence. |
