Tourists, Pilgrims, and Mourners: Americans at Cambodian Sites of Collective Memory

• In Event: Rationalizing Tourism: Neoliberalism, Neocolonialism, and Self-Care Culture

Abstract

How does a society mourn past atrocity in the midst of a polycrisis while carving out joy in daily life? And how do outsiders to that society mourn and celebrate with them? Or can they? 2025 will mark 40 years since the Khmer Rouge took power in Cambodia. In the summer of 2024, I visited Cambodia on a trip with a group of American professors under the auspices of the U.S. State Department. In a two-day stretch, we visited both the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Phnom Penh and The Killing Fields, both sites of the murder of millions of Cambodians by the Khmer Rouge regime. What struck me about our presence there was the absolute disconnect between our cultural knowledge of the horrible history that surrounded us at these sites. To view another culture’s sites and ceremonies of memory is to take up a shared commemorative practice. Ideally, this can be done. But when does it break down? Why does it feel different for an American to visit Cambodia than Dachau or Auschwitz?

Tourism is a means by which collective memory gets stored, and we were constantly confronted with the question of whether we were tourists, researchers, or mourners. When Americans commemorate the events surrounding the Vietnam War, Vietnam is usually the only site considered. Cambodia is an overlooked Southeast Asian country on many levels, and its sites of memory are often overlooked as well. If Americans do go to Cambodia, by and large they go to Angkor Wat. Angkor Wat is a pilgrimage site for many seeking an "authentic" spiritual experience, and Cambodia is also marketed to Americans as a site of dark tourism where one can even shoot at animals with 70s-era munitions. In this paper, I examine the impact of American empire on the tourism industry—its marketing, its guided tours, and the commemorative events surrounding the genocide—in Cambodia and ask if solidarity or glints of liberation are possible for the tourist under the neoliberal regime of American empire.

Author

• Joseph L. V. Donica, City University of New York