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Abstract
Cambodia is strewn with places of national, local or, most frequently, village importance, considered as potent places, that is to say, places that are said to have agency and a positive or negative power of interaction with human beings. This paper emphasises the constituent principles of potency using case studies based on ethnographic research conducted between 2007 and 2015 in Pursat province, western Cambodia. Beginning with the analysis of the sanctuary of a powerful land guardian spirit called Khleang Muang, the author progressively guides the reader to all the potent places that form a network which spatially tells the legend of the sixteenth-century Khmer King Ang Chan who passed by Pursat, coming from Angkor and settled in Lovek (south of Tonle Sap Lake). Violent death and sacrifices, rituals, spiritual energy called paramī, old buildings, monasteries, precious tableware kept in the soil, trees, stones, termite mounds … all those constituents of the potency of the places are analysed. The author’s discussion of the core of potency (pāramī and paramī) enables her to show how Buddhism and land guardian spirit cults are entangled in a single still hierarchical religious system. Finally, the author analyses how potent places in Cambodia embody a process of localisation of the nation-level institution of monarchy.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Phuong Sakona, Minister of Culture and Fine Arts of Cambodia, whose comments during a seminar in Phnom Penh enabled me to make a more accurate analysis of pāramī. This work has continually benefited from discussions with Ang Choulean. I also wish to thank Bénédicte Brac de la Perrière and the two anonymous reviewers for their useful comments on earlier versions of this article. Justin McDaniel and Erick White kindly made me aware of recent scholarship on pāramī in Thailand.
Notes
1 I use the transliteration system of Lewitz (Citation1969) except when the words are commonly written otherwise.
2 In Angkorean statuary, the linga, a phallic symbol representing Shiva, is embedded in a base symbolising Shiva’s consort in the form of a yoni, a female sexual organ.
3 Nissăy (Pali: nissāya) implies a mutually dependent, thus intertwined, destiny with another person or place.
4 In her inventory of literature on spirits in Cambodia, Work (Citation2017) provides an overview of anak tā beyond the issue of territoriality. She explores their central role in the Cambodian social landscape in relation to other spirits and Buddhism, political power, the dead and the memory of past events, and recent social movements pertaining to land eviction and working conditions in Cambodian factories.
5 On the analysis of anak tā as a dead person blocked in the rebirth cycle, see Forest (Citation1992).
6 The type of individual who can convert moral capital into social and/or political capital is referred to in the Khmer language as anak mān pūṇy (person [who] has [Buddhist] merits).
7 For the purpose of clarity, I will use the spelling paramī in this specific meaning. This is the usual way people refer to potency of place in my research area. However, some of them pronounce it according to the spelling pāramī and others acknowledge both pronunciations. Bizot (Citation1994, 116) has already mentioned this difference. Spelled paramī and pronounced accordingly, the word, he writes, means ‘force’, ‘potency’, ‘sacred energy’ emanating from a ritual artefact in its broadest meaning, particularly from the gods assisting Buddhism. Bertrand (Citation2000) finds the same difference in his study of the spirits called paramī.
8 Complementary research in the western province of Battambang (western Cambodia) around the legendary character of Grandfather Iron Stick and in the south-eastern province of Prey Veng around the land guardian spirit Me Sa at Ba Phnom come to similar conclusions.
9 Originating from another province, he was appointed to the Pursat Province Culture department right after the Pol Pot regime in 1980. A complex character, he felt progressively closer to Khleang Muang until he replaced de facto the former local ritual servant. He then launched an ambitious building program that aimed at attracting visitors of higher social background, likely to make more substantial donations, beyond the village circle.
10 The prime minister has never been there, according to rumour, since he has fostered since the early 2000s the idea that he is the reincarnation of Kan (Norén-Nilsson Citation2013), King Ang Chan’s enemy, and thus also Khleang Muang’s.
11 Since the end of the Pol Pot regime, Khleang Muang’s cult has progressively become the subject of an undercover dispute concerning the financial and ritual management of the shrine. The protagonists are the Culture department, in the person of its director (now retired but still active) and people from the surrounding villages.
12 The statue also closely resembles that of Chao Anou, the last King of Vientiane, whose statue faces the Mekong in this city. Thanks to both Marc Mouscadet and Christian Taillard for information on this subject.
13 If we consider Khleang Muang as a guardian spirit, anak tā sometimes have a double of the opposite sex, which is accorded varying degrees of importance. I have observed this fact in the villages where I have worked. Ang (Citation1986, 202) also mentions it.
14 The former commander in chief of the royal army Ke Kim Yan (until 2009), and Nhek Bun Chhay, the (royalist) second in command of the armed forces until the 1997 coup, are reputed to be fervent devotees of Khleang Muang. I have myself observed a meeting held by Nhek Bun Chhay at Khleang Muang’s shrine. The spirit is said to have saved Nhek Bun Chhay’s life when he fled in 1997 by making him invisible.
15 Thanks to Ang Choulean and Michel Antelme for linguistic clarification.
16 Olivier de Bernon and Michel Antelme’s hypotheses (personal communications).
17 There are several other Khleang Muang. Porée-Maspero (Citation1962, 10) reports that in Kampot province, Khleang Muang dwells in the Hill of the Door (bhnaṃ dvā). Thompson (Citation2008) has observed in the monastery of Vāṃṅ cās’ in Udong a ritual of calling Khleang Muang. According to the royal chronicles (Khin Citation1988, 72), a khleang moeung (sacred post) was established in Phnom Penh during the founding of the capital by Ponhea Yat.
18 Among the potent places associated with Khleang Muang’s shrine, the monastery of Bakan was also referred to as the ‘navel’ of the country by several of my interlocutors.
19 ‘Aura’ is one of the accepted meanings of the term pāramī.
20 Yamada (Citation2004) has observed a cult of Khleang Muang in Long Beach, California.
21 Certain trees are said to be potent trees. Some of them shelter land spirits and ‘absorb’ their potency. For example, Bodhi trees (Ficus religiosa L.), tamarind trees, samroṅ trees (Angiosperms, class Dicotyledons, family Sterculiaceae, trees of second growth forests) and sṇuol trees (Dalbergia nigrescens Kurz, trees of dense forests) are perceived as potent (Martin Citation1971, 76, 101). I have often heard stories of places that had lost their potency because their trees had been cut down.
22 Pol Pot and his cenotaph have become the objects of a cult in many ways similar to that of an anak tā. He is called ‘master of the water and the land’ in northern Cambodia (Guillou Citation2016). Locard (Citation1996, 34 cited in Work Citation2017) recorded that the Khmers Rouges claimed to be ‘the masters of the water and of the land’.
23 The director of the Pursat Province Culture department, although officially retired, is still in charge of the shrine. He is now elderly and his succession may give rise to a change in the evolution of the management of the shrine.
24 Khleang Muang has featured in tourist guides since the early 2000s, even though, to date (2016), he only attracts a handful of foreign tourists per year.
25 The ‘ancestor’ in the sense of the founding member of a family line or social group is not, in Cambodia, the subject of a cult outside that of family ancestors (jī dūn jī tā), especially parents and grandparents, who have their own altar in the house. Ancestrality in this case is therefore the sense of an earlier presence on the land.
26 The mass graves of victims executed by the Khmers Rouges are also particular places giving off a similar type of force. The promise of life, in this case, was broken off sharply (Guillou Citation2014).
27 Pursat had its own stec trāñ.
28 Guardians of cities or temples are spirits of persons who died violent deaths in Cambodia and beyond. The Thai royal chronicles mention human sacrifices taking place for the protection of cities such as Bangkok, Vientiane and Luang Prabang by a phi müang or land guardian spirit. Formoso (Citation1998, 14) tells the story of the land guardian spirit Cao Com, ‘Lord of the Summit’, similar to that of Khhleang Muang. He also died voluntarily by impalement—but on the tusks of an elephant.
29 Sāp means ‘bland’ or ‘devoid of power’.
30 Buddhist shrines consecrated by ritual boundary markers (sīmā) are usually found inside the enclosures of monasteries (vatt) and not in isolated positions like this one.
31 Brāḥ jī, brāḥ aṅg jī or bjī (main Buddhist statue in a monastery), vatt yāy jī (monastery for pious women respecting the ten precepts), lok tā jī, tā jī (Grandfather Chi) or pallăṅk brāḥ (royal place of residence).
32 ‘Market people’, especially from important markets like those in the provinces’ main towns, form a different social group from peasants.
33 The superior has brought up to date the legend of the monastery’s founding, when a banyan tree grew by magic during the reign of King Ang Chan. The King interpreted it as a sign of his future victory over the Siamese army as I will show below.
34 In Khmer the particle ‘brāḥ’ means both ‘royal’ and ‘sacred’.
35 See Guillou (Citation2013) concerning the idea of the earth ‘absorbing and giving back’ these buried treasures.
36 My interlocutors in PMB mentioned: glasses; flasks; plates, especially the pañacaraṅg carved type with five alternate colours used for the King’s meals; containers (phdil); and bowls (thās) used for the presentation of offerings.
37 After the Khmer Rouge regime, this man was gradually removed from his traditional responsibility by the province’s director of Culture, but for all the inhabitants of the area he remains the legitimate servant of Khleang Muang.
38 These trees from the virgin forest impart their potency to Buddhist statuary which is a bearer of paramī.
39 The royal post-Angkorean site of Santhor-Basan is 20 km north-west of Phnom Penh, on a former course of the Mekong.
40 Legends of travelling trees can also be found in Burma, according to Bénédicte Brac de la Perrière (personal communication, 2012).
41 Davis (Citation2016) focuses on the ‘domestication’ of the wild forces—particularly those related to death—by the monks and other buddhist ritual specialists while Guillou (Citation2017) analyses the role played by the delineation of two fields of practices labelled as ‘buddhist’ and ‘brahmanist’ in the reconfiguration of religious practices in post-communist Cambodia.
42 See also de Mersan (Citation2012) for a similar process in Arakan (Myanmar).