In The Khmer Lands of Vietnam, Philip Taylor has crafted a careful account of the Kampuchea Krom, “Lower Cambodia” and the Khmer Krom, who live in what is now southern Vietnam. His deep familiarity with the Khmer, Vietnamese and French languages has allowed him to make use of scholarship in those languages and conduct extensive fieldwork.
Little scholarship has focused on Kampuchea Krom. Historiography of the region often treats the Khmer populations of Vietnam as a relict of the great Khmer empires. From a Khmer nationalist perspective, it is territory that the Vietnamese have taken over. From a Vietnamese nationalist perspective, they move into an underpopulated area as part of their nam tiến or “southern expansion”. Official Vietnamese discourse tends to portray the Khmer Krom as a primitive, undeveloped people who resist modernization. During the late 1950s, the government made efforts to draw them more securely into Vietnam, by closing down the Khmer-medium schools the French had established, giving the Khmer Krom citizenship, requiring children to study Vietnamese in state schools, and perform military service.
Taylor sees the Khmer Krom in their own right, rather than as an extension of Cambodians, or as some kind of Vietnamese ethnic minority. He argues that expressions of Kampuchea Krom culture and identity have shifted over space and time in relation to the ecological niche in which they live. They live in an area consisting of several ecological zones, each permitting certain livelihoods, and an area of ethnic diversity, with significant numbers of Chams, overseas Chinese and Kinh. In some places, they have lived in greater isolation, while in others, they have been in extensive long-term contact with outside communities and the rest of the world. Experiences of war and of the modernization schemes the Vietnamese state has imposed are also central to the experience of the Khmer Krom. These forces have done much to dispossess many and permanently alter, if not destroy, the ecological conditions on which they have depended for their livelihoods. Great numbers of the Khmer in some regions have given up trying to regain their lost lands, which outside groups have taken over.
Each chapter explores how the Khmer Krom have adapted to a geographic-ecological area. This areal focus throws into relief the variation in ecology and therefore livelihoods that the people the Khmer Krom have come into contact with, and their experiences of the outside world. The region around the mouth of the Mekong, for example, is one of the oldest and densest sites of settlement, long predating the Vietnamese, with over half of the Khmer temples in Vietnam. Both Khmers and Vietnamese see this region as an area of cultural conservation, although they attach different meanings to that: while the Khmers take pride in the high levels of language and cultural maintenance, seeing these as a resistance to state interventions, Vietnamese officialdom view the region as recalcitrant and backwards.
Other regions may not be as vibrant. The Khmer Krom themselves see the coastal river-dune complex Taylor describes in chapter 2 as an area of cultural disintegration because of the gambling, drinking and over-spending. Here there are few markers of Khmer community or culture. Khmer literacy is low and the study of Buddhism is weak. Yet the strong connections with the outside world and economy and the frequent inter-ethnic exchanges of the region belie a simple characterization of being insular or autarchic.
Taylor spends the rest of the book going through various configurations of place, ecology and contact. In the final chapter, he considers Saigon, a metropolis embodying modern Vietnam, and a site of extended contact. Young Khmer Krom go to “Prey Nokor” (the Khmer name for Saigon) to be educated or to work. Many young men can take advantage of the Vietnamese fetish for Khmer Theravāda Buddhism, which they see as ancient and pure. Khmer monks are in great demand in Vietnam, and can put their ritual knowledge to use to finance their educations.
Taylor's work is also of interest to anyone grappling with how to deal with the past of traumatized peoples. He has made extensive use of myth to understand Khmer Krom cosmology. In doing so, Taylor has drawn out much about the past, less in terms of historically verifiable events, but more of how people understand their own pasts and their relationship with the land and surrounding peoples. Having suffered the traumas of war and multiple dislocations, dispossession, and destruction of the natural environment, the Khmer Krom may find discussing history dangerous or even forbidden. Out of the stories of place which Taylor elicited emerge the themes of disintegration, disappearance and reappearance, which connect the Khmer Krom with a distance past or comment on current conditions. We hear of a royal Khmer barge that sank centuries ago, but whose power periodically resurfaces to claim into the waters disrespectful passers-by. The barge marks the ancient, pre-Vietnamese lineage of the Khmer in the region. From the land itself, the prestige of Khmer tradition periodically resurfaces in places like Saigon through the power of Khmer Theravāda Buddhism.
Taylor has been successful in tapping the richness of the physical, social, and historical landscapes of Kampuchea Krom in a way that will appeal to anthropologists, religious scholars, historians and South-East Asianists more broadly. He has written in intelligent, accessible prose and provided numerous photographs and drawings to illustrate local geography. My only regret is that he has not shown greater sensitivity to language and transliteration – I found the Khmer transliteration inconsistent. While at just over 300 pages the book may not be quite the ideal length for undergraduates to read in its entirety, it could nevertheless serve as a focus for courses on Vietnam or modern South-East Asia.
