Society, Economics, and Politics in Pre-Angkor Cambodia: The 7th-8th Centuries.

• Author: Brown, Robert L.
• Position: Book review

Society, Economics, and Politics in Pre-Angkor Cambodia: The 7th-8th Centuries. By MICHAEL VICKERY. Tokyo: CENTRE FOR EAST ASIAN CULTURAL STUDIES FOR UNESCO, 1998. Pp. vii +486.

Southeast Asia offers an especially interesting arena for studying the reception of images of deities. Sometime around the fifth century A.D. Indian-related images appear in Southeast Asia. While there are a few possibilities, no images of deities can be identified with certainty in Southeast Asia before these Indian-related images appear. Even those that could possibly be identified as gods, primarily the feathered men on the Dongson drums, are small and apparently were not used as a focus of worship and ritual.

The question (asked repeatedly) is to what extent are these Indian-related images "Indian" and to what extent indigenous. Michael Vickery's book takes the position that the Indian cultural features--languages, religions, and art--are but a facade that covers an indigenous local Cambodian cultural content, predating Indian influence. It is the classic metaphor of the wine bottle whose formal, visual structure is but an empty shell that can be filled with any brew, the nature of which is in reality the important part of the combination. This metaphor nicely breaks apart form from meaning, the relation-ship of which is one of the most debated topics in art historical and philosophical scholarship. The facade or bottle metaphor makes the formal qualities of art and architecture meaningless. My review argues, however, that the Indic-formal qualities of the Southeast Asian images do indeed give them an "Indian" meaning.

First, a few general words about Vickery's book. It is a study known to have been in the works for some time, aspects of which Vickery has published in previous articles, and thus it has long been anticipated. The book does not disappoint. It is vintage Vickery: an almost astoundingly detailed analysis of the evidence from the many Cambodian inscriptions, primarily from the seventh and eighth centuries that we call the pre-Angkor period, and of the extensive secondary literature. To a large extent it is a dialogue with two of the great interpreters of the evidence, the late Georges Coedes and Claude Jacques. Vickery takes a strictly materialist approach. His calling upon Marxism and "Asiatic modes of production" as models in his introduction may give many of us pause, but his aim is to provide an alternative to what he considers the scholarly over-reliance on the Sanskrit inscriptions and the art, both of which are strongly Indian in nature, by looking instead to the extensive Khmer-language portions of the inscriptions. The Khmer inscriptions, he feels, reveal the true and indigenous portion of the society, one that is not focused on religion and "Indianess" but on materialist issues of control of resources--people and land--and the building of secular power. The art and Sanskrit inscriptions are just facades or forms filled with the local drive for power, animated by quite practical indigenous concepts of the material world.

I will divide the following discussion into two parts. The first part focuses on the context, extent, and accuracy of the Indian-related images that argue against the notion that the Indian-related imagery is a mere facade. The second focuses on a specific image type, that of the goddess, as Vickery's work has produced new evidence regarding the early goddess images in Cambodia, evidence that he uses to argue his image-as-facade theory.

Perhaps I have made it sound as if Vickery has made a sustained argument regarding the nature of...