The Dead in the Land: Encounters with Bodies, Bones, and Ghosts in Northwestern Cambodia LISA J. ARENSEN This article explores one Cambodian village’ s engagement with the remains of the dead encountered during postwar resettlement. For Khmer Buddhists, the correct material transformation of the bodies of the dead is critical, but these processes were often dis- rupted in Cambodia’ s recent troubled past. This article describes the subsequent ramifi- cations of these interrupted processes for both the living and the dead in Reaksmei Songha village in northwestern Battambang. Various residents had encountered the bones of the war dead, and some described sightings of ghosts. Kinship played a vital role in villagers’ responses to unearthed bones. However, residents tended to downplay the impact of these remains and their ghostly counterparts, possibly because of their own affective identifica- tion with the plight of the dead. W HEN YEI MOON AND Ta Haim 1 decided to move to their current house plot, they filled a truck with earth from their farm, the site of a mass grave from the harsh years of Democratic Kampuchea. When the earth was poured out to build up the new foundation, an entire skeleton tumbled free along with it, unknowingly transported whole from the farm. “It was like this,” Yei said to me, tracing the outline of the skeleton upon a bamboo bed. “Head, legs, arms, all kept together,” she explained. The elderly couple had taken the bones and thrown them into the pond to “make them cool.” Yei explained that she thought coolness would help the bones be at ease. The spirit, she insisted, had “disappeared already”; this treatment was expressly for the bones. Such accounts were not uncommon in Reaksmei Songha, a village in Ratanak Mondul district in the province of Battambang. The village where I conducted my eth- nographic research in 2009 had been the site of a labor camp under Democratic Kampu- chea, and then abandoned during the war years. Located upon the frontlines of the war, the land around the village was heavily mined and slowly returned to secondary forest. Resettlement began after the 1996 surrender of Khmer Rouge forces in the area, at which point land was allotted to those willing to risk occupancy on possibly mined terrain. The first postwar settlers were primarily former soldiers and residents of nearby resettlement sites, a mixed population of internally displaced people and Lisa J. Arensen (larensen@fieldstudies.org) is Resident Lecturer in the Center for Mekong Studies at The School for Field Studies. 1 All research subjects’ names have been changed, but I have followed the customary Khmer prac- tice of using age-specific pronouns before names. “Yei” and “Ta” are Khmer pronouns used to refer to an elderly woman and an elderly man, respectively. The Journal of Asian Studies page 1 of 18, 2017. © The Association for Asian Studies, Inc., 2017 doi:10.1017/S0021911816001662 https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021911816001662 Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 110.74.222.184, on 02 Feb 2017 at 07:08:08, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at