No abstract

During negotiations over the proposed UN Genocide Convention, a delegate from China suggested that the distribution of drugs be included as a method of genocide. He said that under Japanese occupation during World War II, the Japanese had "imposed mass consumption of drugs in order to disintegrate the minds of the Chinese population … and make them forget their national aspirations and their craving for national freedom," Lemkin writes in his account of the negotiations. 1 A Polish delegate concurred, adding that the Nazis had insisted on paying their non-German workers in alcohol in order to undermine Polish society. Lemkin himself raised the issue of psychological damage done to those in concentration camps by the Nazis and decided to focus on the "area of damage rather than the means of action." 2 This led to the inclusion in the Genocide Convention of the intent to cause "serious bodily or mental harm" to members of a group. Thus, although the convention does not make explicit reference to intoxicants, they served as inspiration for one of its main clauses. Moreover, in Lemkin's writings on genocide, intoxicants certainly emerge as a subject of concern, and as a method of genocidal conquest. This may seem puzzling to many modern readers, raised with a conception of genocide as state-organized mass killing. But the man who coined the term "genocide" actually developed a conception of genocide that differs significantly from the UN Convention itself, and from the popular understanding that has been influenced by the convention. Notes related to his thinking on the subject are included in his unfinished work housed at the New York Public Library and the American Jewish Historical Society, where the author conducted research in relevant archives. In his writings, Lemkin privileged the natural right of groups to exist, believing that certain forms of human collectivities-national, racial, religious and ethnic-were especially valuable because they made unique contributions to broader human civilization. 3 He paid particular attention to the importance of nations as "families of mind," or "aspects of consciousness that took on a social reality … between individuals." 4 Drawing on the work of Frazer and Malinowski regarding cultural functionalism, he saw culture as the undergirding force that enabled nations to survive and provide for the basic needs of the individuals of which they were composed. Actions that undermined the cohesiveness of a group's culture challenged the existence of the group itself-and by extension, of its members, which relied on the bonds of culture to fulfill both their basic and derived needs. As a result, genocide could take place without recourse to physical violence. Lemkin considered a broad range of acts genocidal, such as destroying cultural symbols, removing children from their group of origin and, as will be examined in this paper, the widespread distribution of intoxicants. For groups such as the Native Americans and Tasmanians, Lemkin believed that the introduction of new substances...

Although religious worship was banned during the Khmer Rouge regime (1975–79), spiritual practices are once again flourishing in Cambodia. These include both the practices of the majority Buddhist population and a small but visible Cham Muslim minority. While popular Buddhism in Cambodia today incorporates the legacies of Hinduism and animism in the country, the majority of Cham Muslims have adopted a more orthodox version of Islam due to the influence of global proselytization. This article argues that these dominant strains of religious practice divergently train conscious attention in habitual patterns, cultivating different orientations of intentionality among Khmer Buddhist and Cham Muslim Khmer Rouge survivors. The patterns of attention encouraged by current religious practices shape the narrative organization of memory as survivors engage in an NGO‐sponsored form of psychotherapeutic “testimonial therapy.” As my ethnographic findings demonstrate, these divergent narrative constructions and their public performance reinforce different relational experiences of selfhood and engagement with supernatural others among Cambodian Buddhists and Muslims, with significant implications for perceived social belonging in contemporary society.

Although the Khmer Rouge regime was responsible for the deaths of roughly 2.2 million Cambodians—and the persecution and abuse of millions more—only a handful of survivors have been able to testify at the tribunal established to prosecute former leaders of the regime. Partly to address this gap, an NGO affiliated with the tribunal has been offering ‘Testimonial Therapy’ for the past decade as a form of reparation for survivors with symptoms of psychological distress. For 16 months, I followed survivors undergoing this therapy, during which they developed a testimonial narrative of their life story in collaboration with a local mental health worker. In this Position Piece, I consider Myers’ conception of ‘moral agency’ (2015) in relation to this process of personal narrative creation, and the critical importance of audience engagement. I then reflect on my own positionality as both ethnographer and active listener, tracing how this affective posture has been formed not only through fieldwork, but also through engagement with family narratives of loss in the context of war-torn Ukraine.

This chapter describes how in Cambodia, the communist Khmer Rouge regime, which was responsible for widespread death and destruction, also banned all prerevolutionary wedding traditions. The state organization (Angkar) took over the spouse-matching process. Given the importance of marriage in Cambodian society for personal and family networks, the authors find that the Khmer Rouge regime’s attempt to alter wedding traditions profoundly affected the country’s social fabric. Despite the unorthodox marriage practices during the Khmer Rouge, many of these couples stayed together after the regime’s collapse. Drawing upon 16 months of ethnographic fieldwork among survivors of forced marriage and their families, the authors examine how these socially and spiritually problematic unions affected the children born as a result of the arrangements. Within these complicated family environments, children of forced marriages often feel pressure to both manage their parents’ emotions and to help compensate for what their parents lost during decades of violence and turmoil.