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Normative Poems (Chbap) and Pre-Colonial Cambodian Society

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 April 2011

David P. Chandler
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Extract

Using the chbap to analyze pre-cotonial Cambodian society is difficult because these gnomic, normative poems are only incidentally concerned with the ways in which that society was put together. Moreover, it is hard to determine how firmly they are anchored in the times when they were written: how useful is a seventeenth century chbap, after all, in helping us to understand eighteenth-century society? Another problem with using them is that they often provide an idealized picture, suggesting norms of behaviour rather than describing or analyzing the ways in which people behave. Because of this, the poems belong to more than one century at a time. Finally, like anything written down in a largely illiterate society, the chbap encapsulate and pass on the ideology of a minority élite. It can be argued that this ideology, in pre-colonial Cambodia at least, was rarely at odds with the ideology of the rural, illiterate poor; but this may be a circular argument, brought on by the widespread popularity, imposed by the elite over several centuries, of the chbap themselves.

Type
Symposium on Societal Organization in Mainland Southeast Asia Prior to the Eighteenth Century
Information
Journal of Southeast Asian Studies , Volume 15 , Issue 2 , September 1984 , pp. 271 - 279
Copyright
Copyright © The National University of Singapore 1984

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References

1 Valery, Paul, “Persian Letters” in History and Politics (London: Pantheon, 1963), pp. 215–26; quotation at 219Google Scholar.

2 The Cambodian texts of the poems discussed in this paper, as well as transliterations and French translations, will be found in successive volumes of the Bulletin de I'École Française d'Extrème Orient (hereafter BEFEO) beginning in 1975, edited by Jenner, Philip N. and Saveros Pou under the running title, “Les cpap ou ‘codes de conduite’ khmers”, as follows: “Cpap Kerti Kal” (hereafter C-l), BEFEO 62 (1975): 369–94Google Scholar;“Cpap prus” (hereafter C-2), BEFEO 63 (1976): 3131–50Google Scholar; “Cpap kun cau” (hereafter C-3), BEFEO 64 (1977): 167–215CrossRefGoogle Scholar;“Cpap Rajaneti” (hereafter C-4), BEFEO 65 (1978): 361–402Google Scholar;“Cpap Kram” (hereafter C-5), BEFEO 66 (1979): 129–60Google Scholar;“Cpap Trineti” (hereafter C-6), BEFEO 70 (1981): 135–93.Google Scholar For an overview of the genre, see Pou, S., “La literature didactique khmere: les cpap” Journal Asiatique 269 (1981): 453–66Google Scholar.

3 For a discussion of these issues, see Vickery, Michael, “The Composition and Transmission of the Ayudhya and Cambodian Chronicles”, in Perceptions of the Past in Southeast Asia, ed. Reid, Anthony and Man, David (Singapore: Heinemann, 1979), pp. 130–54Google Scholar.

4 Pou, “La literature didactique”, p. 459.

5 For a stimulating discussion of this problem, see Lardreau, Guy, “L'histoire com me nuit de Walpurgis”, Cahiers de I'Herne: Henry Corbin (Paris: Herne, 1981), pp. 110–21Google Scholar; especially at 120, n. 11. Lardreau contends that “people without history” are in fact those who “ignore the historian” (his emphasis); as a result, “the forms, and images under which [they] subsume themselves are not deployed in the format: the history of the time”.

6 C-2, p. 343. Citations throughout the notes are to the French translations, although my English versions have been checked against the Khmer.

7 On neak chea, or “healthy people”, see Janneau, C., “Le Cambodge d'autrefois”, Revue Indochinoise (1914): 617–30.Google Scholar Janneau's study first appeared in Saigon in 1870; it is a penetrating study of Cambodian society on the brink of colonial transformation. See also Pou and Jenner's comment on the term at C-l, p. 382, n. 7. There are some interesting parallels between the notion of neak chea and the Burmese concept of athi, discussed in Aung-Thwin, Michael, “Athi, Kyun-thaw, hpaya khun: Varieties of Commendation and Dependence in Pre-Colonial Burma”, in Slavery, Bondage and Dependency in Southeast Asia, ed. Reid, Anthony (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1983), pp. 64–90, especially at 67Google Scholar.

8 For a discussion of this idea in a Cambodian context, see Chandler, David P., “Songs at the Edge of the Forest: Perceptions of Order in Three Cambodian Texts”, in Moral Order and the Question of Change, ed. Woodside, Alexander and Wyatt, David K. (New Haven: Yale University Southeast Asian Studies Monograph No. 24, 1982), pp. 53–77.Google Scholar See also C-l, p. 384, n. 8.

9 The locus classicus for a discussion of this issue is Hanks, Lucien, “Merit and Power in the Thai Social Order”, American Anthropologist LXIV, No. 6 (12, 1962): 1247–61Google Scholar.

10 C-4, p. 387.

11 C-6, p. 169.

12 Ibid.

13 See Pou, S., tr., Ramakerti (Paris: EFEO, 1977)Google Scholar, and also Pou, S., Haksrea, Lan Sunnary and Kuoch, “Inventaires des oeuvres sur le Ramayana khmer”, Seksa Khmer 3-4 (12, 1981): 111–26Google Scholar.

14 C-4, p. 386.

15 See Sweeny, Amin, Authors and Audiences in Traditional Malay Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980) for an interesting discussion of this conceptGoogle Scholar.

16 C-6, p. 18.

17 See Jenner, Philip N. and Pou, Saveros, “A Lexicon of Khmer Morphology”, Mon-Khmer Studies IX-X (1980–1981): 265–66Google Scholar.

18 C-5, p. 154.

19 C-2, p. 343, n.3; C-3, p. 203, n.l; C-6, p. 174, n. 4 and p. 179, n.l.

20 C-4, p. 397.

21 C-4, p. 389.

22 Ibid.

23 C-4 p. 392.

24 C-4, p. 390.

25 C-l, p. 386. For an example of agricultural advice, see C-2, pp. 335-36.

26 It would be rewarding to study pre-colonial Cambodia in terms of its status as a partially literate society, in which recited, overheard, and memorized chbap played a far greater role than the individual perusal of written texts. The problem is addressed in a stimulating way by Isaac, Rhys, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790 (Chapel Hill, N. C., 1982), pp. 1211–31.Google Scholar For a generalized discussion see also Goody, Jack, ed., Literacy in Traditional Societies (Cambridge University Press, 1968), especially pp. 27-38 and 85–131Google Scholar.

27 See Hatley, Barbara, Ketoprak Theatre and the Wayang Tradition (Clayton, Australia: Monash University Centre of Southeast Asian Studies, Working Paper No. 19, 1980),Google Scholar and also Sweeney, Amin, Authors and Audiences, passimGoogle Scholar.

28 Buddhist time-reckoning is numbered forward from the death of Gautama Buddha (in 543 B.C.) until the year 5000, when the world is to come to an end. This concept echoes Indian ones, whereby we are inhabiting the last of several eras. It seems likely in fact that time-reckoning seen in terms of decline, rather than in terms of cycles, repetition, or forward movement, is more widespread than we might suppose. See Veyne, Paul, Les grecs ont-ils crus a leurs mythesl (Paris: Seunil, 1983), p. 146, n. 40CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29 For a general discussion of this era, see Chandler, David P., Cambodia Before the French: Politics in a Tributary Kingdom, 1794-1848 (Ann Arbor, 1974), andGoogle ScholarChandler, David P., A History of Cambodia (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1984), pp. 77–136Google Scholar.

30 C-6, pp. 175-76.

31 See Chandler, David P., “Seeing Red: Perceptions of Cambodian History in Democratic Kampuchea”, in Revolution and its Aftermath in Kampuchea: Eight Essays, ed. Chandler, David P. and Kiernan, Ben (New Haven, 1983), pp. 34–56.Google Scholar It can be argued that the excesses of the Pol Pot regime, rather than its ideology per se, frightened people into inactivity. In any case, the possibility of a socialist regime in Cambodia is now stronger than anyone (except members of the Communist Party) would have imagined twenty years ago. Whether or not events in Cambodia have transformed the way people think about each other, however, is less clear.