Landscape, Memory, and Post-Violence in Cambodia.

• Author: Rodell, Paul A.
• Position: ASIA - Book review

Tyner, James A. Landscape, Memory, and Post-Violence in Cambodia. London, Rowman & Littlefield, 2017.

Geographer James A. Tyner first traveled to Cambodia in 2001. This book, plus three others and thirteen articles, resulted from this visit and subsequent research trips. Tyner considers which sites of Khmer Rouge (KR) atrocities are remembered, how they are remembered, and to what purpose are they remembered. The book also reflects on the question of which sites of mass killings have been forgotten or ignored and why and how these other sites should be remembered. He also contemplates why the Cambodian government should take a different approach to remembrance. Tyner's comparative evaluation of oppositional forms of remembrance culminates in an ambitious and cogent study.

Tyner begins with a quick description of the Koh Sla dam, an altogether unremarkable earthen structure that was not discovered until twenty-eight years after the fall of the KR, even though approximately 9,000 men, women, and children were worked to death at this site and their bodies were entombed in the mud dam. Hundreds...