아세안

Eve Zucker’s book, Forest of Struggle is an important contribution to the literature on societies in the aftermath of extreme violence and specifically to the study of Cambodian society since the Khmer Rouge era. The book is ethnography, but not in the classical style of a snapshot in time of a single village; it tells the story of two villages, set on the margins of Khmer society, on the “edge of the forest.” It belongs in a category with such important books as Linda Green’s Fear as a Way of Life (about Guatemala) on the one hand, and Anna Tsing’s In the Realm of the Diamond Queen on the other—stories of violence, fear, and displacement, but told from a local grounding. Zucker describes other studies of “social memory” as arguing that violence continues to influence the present as people “reinterpret their memories in efforts to cope with the violence of their past” (p. 11); but she would expand this discussion to include issues of morality and the remaking of the moral and social order. The memories she focuses on are primarily collective and are shaped by local history, including the way that local stories are re-told, and how these stories are tied to features of the landscape.