Explore the vast range of titles available.

One of the outstanding questions of Southeast Asian history is the nature and timing of major cultural and political shifts in the territory that was to become Cambodia, starting in the 13th century. What explains the shift in religious doctrine, different language uses (Pāli over Sanskrit, Khmer as a literary language), the radical transformation in architecture and sculptural production? How was the spread of Theravāda Buddhism related to regional political reconfigurations? What exactly was it we rather blindly label ‘Theravāda Buddhism’? Do the esoteric Buddhist traditions the region still harbours relate to this transitional period? What of the exoteric at this time? And how is 'Theravāda Buddhism' entangled with the identity shifts that over the next four hundred years gave rise to the Buddhist state now called Cambodia? Editor Ashley Thompson has brought together the foremost scholars of premodern Cambodian art and archaeology to reflect on the relevant material evidence to probe these questions - and to push them further in exploring larger issues of Buddhist history, regional exchange networks and ethno-political identities across mainland Southeast Asia. The book will be a crucial reference for historians of Southeast Asia, and its insights into religious change will make it important reading for scholars of broader Buddhist Studies. Fully illustrated in colour, the book will appeal to those with a serious interest in the Buddhism and Buddhist art of mainland Southeast Asia.

Post-independence national historical writings have often been seen as a product of nationalist advocacy and modern nation-state formation. Moving beyond this perspective, this article considers how political leaders took a direct role in promoting different kinds and forms of collective historical thoughts to strengthen their leadership. Specifically, the article explores an active engagement of independent Cambodia's leaders such as Prince Sihanouk, Lon Nol, and Pol Pot, who independently saw national historical understanding as one's own monopolized source of power. It also discusses how different historical accounts in the country were shaped by, and kept up with, other important factors such as Cold War confrontations and regional and global historiographical trends, including “Modernist” and “Marxist” approaches. Discussing these factors helps us understand more critically national historical accounts, which were closely intertwined with specific socioreligious and political circumstances such as political rule and legitimacy, widespread public anxieties, and geopolitical tensions. It also sheds light on the substantial impact of state-imposed historical interpretations on society. As informed by the Cambodian case, this impact can be seen in the implementation of state projects stirred by certain kinds of historical understanding which consequently transformed the living conditions of thousands of people.

This article contrasts the ways in which the memories of the Khmer Rouge genocide have been constructed at different levels and at different periods since the 1980s. Various actors have been involved in this construction, such as the ruling Cambodian People's Party, the Khmer Rouge Court sponsored by the United Nations since 2007, and Cambodian villagers. This has led to numerous misunderstandings and discrepancies regarding the trial of the former Khmer Rouge leaders. The current research is based on ethnographic fieldwork undertaken in a village in the province of Pursat. It shows how the villagers have taken care of the human remains from the state-sponsored memorials and of the mass graves (that is to say, of the unknown bodies). The article shows how the Khmer popular religious system is instrumental in forging a memory of the dead of the Pol Pot regime and in healing social suffering.

The temple of Angkor Wat in Cambodia is one of the most famous monuments in the world and is noted for its spectacular bas-relief friezes depicting ceremonial and religious scenes. Recent work reported here has identified an entirely new series of images consisting of paintings of boats, animals, deities and buildings. Difficult to see with the naked eye, these can be enhanced by digital photography and decorrelation stretch analysis, a technique recently used with great success in rock art studies. The paintings found at Angkor Wat seem to belong to a specific phase of the temple's history in the sixteenth century AD when it was converted from a Vishnavaite Hindu use to Theravada Buddhist.

The study explores the cultural and religious meaning behind episodes of mass fainting sweeping through garment factories in Cambodia. An ethnographic study was conducted at 20 garment factories in Kandal, Preah Sihanouk, Kampong Cham, Kampong Speu, Takeo, and Kampong Chhnang provinces. Informants were 50 women who fainted or possessed and their families, factory and clinic staff, and monks. Informants described their views on the causes of the mass fainting. Based on the informants' views, the seeds were sown when factories were built on former Khmer Rouge killing fields, when local guardian spirits were disrespected and when the factories were not inaugurated with the proper rituals. We found that an inauspicious death, a conflict leading to violation of a vow, or culturally inappropriate interventions by management explained what triggered the episodes. The results show that people believe that mass faintings occur in parallel with tensions between the workers and the foreign owners of the factories and tensions between the human and spiritual owners of the land. The study has implications for the development of culturally responsive public health interventions in mass group phenomena.

This comparative study examines the complex, changing configurations of the relationships between the state and mediumship cults, under different regimes and histories in three Southeast Asian states and China. Spirit mediums are endowed with charismatic authority, owing to their access to the supernatural sphere, which stands in implicit tension with the authority of the state. This tension underlies state–mediumship relationships in Southeast Asia, but leads to diverse dynamics, according to the place of religion in each state. In the atheist, communist/post-communist states (China and Vietnam) mediumship is primarily approached as a political issue; in Buddhist Thailand as a religious issue, and in multicultural Malaysia, where Islam is the official religion, as a legal issue. Tensions prevail particularly in the communist/post-communist states, where there has been a resurgence of mediumship cults, even as these are officially proscribed as ‘superstitions’. In Thailand tensions have been ameliorated by a gradual amalgamation of the cults and popular Buddhism, while in Malaysia tensions are prevented by controls over religious practices. Further research on the relatively neglected issue of the relationship between the state and mediumship cults in the emergent regions of the world is suggested.

This study looks at the crucial features of Cambodian and Burmese monumental architecture at the peak of the two empires. By necessity, the overwhelming majority of sites are religious, as residential structures of almost any type, with the exception of some monastic buildings, were made of perishable materials and do not survive.

The Khmer Rouge's impact on Cambodia's ancient heritage has been understudied. There are, at present, no major resources that explicitly present a centralized compilation of data or information regarding the relationship between the communist regime and the temples of Angkor nor the various damaging effects that a decade of internecine upheavals have had on the monuments. This absence of primary material is surprising considering the extensive archaeological and conservational work that has taken place in Cambodia, and not to mention the international fascination with Angkor. This article aims to take the first steps in redressing this palpable gap in the literature-it is a brief inquiry into the cause and effect of damage, desecration, and destruction committed to the major Angkorian monuments and the treatment of Cambodia's ancient, tangible heritage by successive political regimes. It also attempts to deal with the inadequate nature of existing documentation that has hindered any analysis of the issues at hand. I restrict my attention to the Buddhist complexes in Cambodia with a focus on four phases of violence: \"Operation Menu\" or the American bombardment of 1969-70; the Cambodian Civil War, 1970-75; Democratic Kampuchea's occupancy of power, 1975-79; and the Vietnamese invasion of 1978-79. In regard to what exactly happened to these monumental complexes at the hands of the Khmer Rouge, I have covered structural damage from conventional weaponry; the use, and, in most cases, misuse, of the temples by various political factions (including strategic, practical and quotidian, and propagandistic use); and the effect of conservation interruption and looting. In light of the recent destruction of cultural heritage in the ongoing conflicts in Syria and Iraq and the recent conflict in Mali, these issues remain perpetually relevant in world affairs.

This article begins with a historical overview, in which I offer a brief introduction to the Buddhist and Christian communities in Cambodia and call attention to critical moments of interaction between them, beginning with the entry of Christianity into the primarily Theravada nation of Cambodia in 1923, and continuing until the mass repatriation of refugee from Thailand back to Cambodia in the early 1990s. Transitioning into a more focused analysis thereafter, I highlight one particular case study, featuring the interface between the evangelical Christian and Missionary Alliance (CMA) denomination and their neighbors from the Theravada Buddhist community: religious leaders, politicians, and even colleagues in Christian ministry. The case study highlights the period between the arrival of the earliest CMA presence in Cambodia in the 1920s to the onset of the Cambodian Civil War(s) in 1970. As the case study will illustrate, although the relationship between the Buddhist and Christian communities in Cambodia has been characterized at times by animosity and at others by cooperation, it is certain that throughout Christianity’s existence in Cambodia, it has been shaped by Buddhist contributions. The relationship between Buddhism and evangelical Christianity in Cambodia has been an ambivalent one that started out rather tense but has also been marked by key moments of cooperation that have shaped the development of Khmer evangelicalism in significant ways. Buddhists’ contributions to the formation of Khmer evangelicalism include providing resources for church services in the early decades of the CMA’s presence in Cambodia, impacting essential theological interpretations through consultancy in the process of translating the Khmer Bible, and allowing space for the preservation of the practice of Sabbath-keeping.

This essay draws on Kenneth George's ethnographic study of the Indonesian painter Abdul Djalil Pirous and his art, as well as Pirous's own characterizations of his paintings as \"spiritual notes,\" to theorize and examine how paintings serve as ethical media. The essay offers a provisional definition of and methodology for \"visual ethics\" and considers how pictures and language (such as scriptural texts) can function quite differently as sites for ethical reflection. The particular painting analyzed here is a large temple mural of the death of the Buddha (mahāparinibbāna) located at Wat Unnalom, a prominent Buddhist monastery in Phnom Penh, painted in the 1980s by Cambodian artist Sum Pon. After discussing the lifeworld of Pon's Mahāparinibbāna and varied Khmer Buddhist interpretations of the painting, I suggest that the painting's rendering of \"moral vision\" helps us understand Buddhist ways of seeing more generally. I conclude by returning to George's question about how our understanding of ethics would change if we took pictures as the \"fulcrum of moral relationships,\" arguing that pictures can embody certain kinds of tensions or paradoxes that are difficult to explain and grasp discursively, such as paradoxes that arise from the inevitability and yet inexplicability of death as well as the tensions between Buddhist aims of cultivating \"boundless\" love and the particularities of our own individual experiences of love.