ABSTRACT
To study the resilience of a people victimized by abject terrorism and genocide illuminates the power of culture. By “culture,” I denote a traditional way of life, a rubric of familiar phenomena that include indigenous ritual, ideology, belief systems, and the spatial and temporal rhythms to which these systems move and integrate. Yet, also revealed in such a study is the power of cultural change—change fueled by a growing market economy, tourism, and affordable mass media and communication technology. At the crossroads of such dynamism lies present-day Cambodia, a postmodern nation utilizing centuries-old fishing and rice harvesting techniques alongside popular consumption of MTV and the Internet. Cambodia is likewise, and infamously, a nation recovering from years of war, political instability, and acute social suffering. A chief operative of such was the Red Khmer or “Khmer Rouge,” a radical polity that methodically purged over two million Cambodian citizens between 1975 and 1979, including 90 percent of the country’s popular singers and musicians.
