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Nationalist Transformations: Music, Ritual, and the Work of Memory in Cambodia and Thailand

Sat, March 18, 8:30 to 10:30am, Sheraton Centre Toronto Hotel, Floor: 4th Floor, Forest Hill

Abstract

Drawing on fieldwork conducted in Cambodia and Thailand since 2004, this paper explores tensions that arise when individuals and institutions impose nation-state ideologies on music and ritual that predate the nation-state concept and transcend official state boundaries. In numerous contexts, musicians and dancers in Cambodia and Thailand perform offerings and blessings that honor their teachers and consecrate ritual spaces and actors. Due to broad influence from India and centuries of conflict and borrowing, these rituals and aspects of their accompanying music have proliferated throughout Cambodia and Thailand. Today, individuals and institutions in both nations claim that these rituals effect a continuity that reflects each country’s unique national identity. Seeking to understand how these rituals and their music have attained such significance in two different countries, I describe the conflicting ways in which these countries’ historical narratives have been told. In particular, I outline how France’s colonial legacy in Cambodia has led the land, borders, temples, rituals, and the performing arts to be considered as nationalist possessions, while they did not hold such significance in earlier eras. Using Paul Ricoeur’s work on “Memory and Forgetting,” I argue that these rituals fulfill a “duty to remember” that, in Cambodia’s case, counteracts a colonialist narrative of decline. However, these rituals’ work of remembering ignores an equally essential task, what Ricoeur calls “the duty to forget.” This prioritizing of memory over forgetting, enacted through music and ritual, may in fact inculcate the political thought that contributes to the continuing animosity and violence between Cambodia and Thailand.

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