"Lawyers spend a great deal of their time shoveling smoke." - Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr

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"Major reforms came with the implementation of an International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank three-year structural adjustment program. Within this program, the garment industry was identified as one of the key vehicles for development. While this industry has received significant attention from developmental economists since then, their accounts have presented a largely de-humanized, positivist picture. Crucially, they fail to interpret the “interplay between the world market and cultural identity, between local and global processes, between consumption and cultural strategies” (Friedman 1994: lO3). The chapter by Annuska Derks here fills that void by focusing on one young woman named Srey, who leaves her village in the province to work in a Phnom Penh factory. Srey is presented as an example of women across the country who have to negotiate many conflicting positions and new life spaces. Part lured, part seduced by the modern life in the capital city, they attempt to simultaneously uphold the model of a dutiflul daughter in their rural communities. Too easily portrayed by the media as victims of the global market, exploited and underpaid, Derks argues that this is indeed an oversimplification, for these women have their own aspirations towards modernity of which they have already been given a taste back in their villages through other returning factory workers and television programs...

Moving from the performance of culture and identity in Cambodia to focus more specifically on transnational and gendered subjectivities, let us now return to the opening quote by Sam-Ang Sam, a Cambodian American ethnomusicologist who has resettled in Cambodia after spending many years studying and teaching in me us. In many ways, the question posed— “what do we want?”—triggers memories of the 1960s and 1970s when civil rights marches and anti-war demonstrations in the West were caught on camera and widely televised: “What do we want? Peace. When do we want it? Now,” and so on. In another way, one cannot help but recall one of Freud’s seminal questions: “What do women want?” That these references are taken from a Western context is by no means an innocent gesture. One look at the present Cambodian constitution drafted in 1993 reveals that some of its language is borrowed from the West, and there is no doubt that many Cambodians returning from abroad have helped shape its language. While retaining the characteristic Cambodian grandiloquence, the constitution is strongly flavored by modern Western democratic ideals...

She goes on to look at contemporary “graffiti” written elsewhere in Cambodia contesting the perception that Cambodian culture is largely oral. Far from being mere acts of vandalism, these graffiti are reflections of Cambodian cultural practices connected with religious beliefs and the spiritual realms, and in significant ways they are indicators of the trends of different periods in Cambodian history."


--- Introduction: Cambodia and the Politics of Tradition, Identity and Change in Ollier, L. and Winter, T. eds, Expressions of Cambodia: the Politics of Tradition, Identity and Change.


Okay. New excuse to vandalise...