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also acknowledge the indispensable support of my Cambodian
translators and research assistants as well as my Israeli research
assistants. I would also like to thank those who have dialogued
with me over the years as I grappled with endless questions:
Avihu Shoshana, Lea David, Don Handelman, Davith Bolin,
Robert Hayden, Milica Bakic-Hayden, Tony Robben, Steve
Heder, Anne Guillou, Fabienne Luco, Rachel Hughes, Eve
Zucker, Erik Davis, Heonik Kwon, and Giora Kidron. I would
also like to thank Mark Aldenderfer and the anonymous
reviewers for their thoughtful comments and Linda Forman
for her editorial assistance, all of which greatly enriched this
paper. Finally, I most heartfully thank my Khmer interlocutors
for their insights, trust, and hospitality.
Comments
Mark Goodale
Laboratory of Cultural and Social Anthropology, Faculty of Social
and Political Sciences, University of Lausanne, Géopolis 5514, 1015
Lausanne, Switzerland (mark.goodale@unil.ch). 22 II 19
Carol Kidron’s longitudinal and critical ethnography of com-
munal genocide commemoration in Cambodia reveals the
troubling outer limits of human rights and humanitarian ver-
nacularization, cultural and conceptual border regions where
cosmopolitan liberalism loses its way, is menaced on all sides,
and ultimately succumbs to its own inherent weaknesses. That
her case study involves the bones of the dead, the material
remains of those “frozen in cosmologically dangerous . . .
limbo,”only reinforces its significance for an anthropology
struggling to make sense of a world in which the discipline’s
prevailing ethical commitments to the politics of identity have
themselves failed to produce the kind of “productive dyna-
mism”that seemed so possible when “friction”was a measure
of creative possibility rather than a sign of what Kidron de-
scribes as “Euro-Western discursive and economic power.”
There are two ways to read her intervention, and they are
not mutually exclusive. First, her article can be understood in a
narrow way: “culturally incompetent”public genocide com-
memoration in Cambodia becomes a culture industry, a “bone
business”in which money is to be made—directly or indirectly—
by playing along with a foreign and imposed model of atrocity
reckoning. In the same way in which humanitarian aid econ-
omies likewise create complicated networks of exchange, the
same is true with the economy of genocide suffering in Cam-
bodia. In this more restrained reading, the consequences of
what Kidron calls the “dark semiotics”of collective memory
making are limited to—or embodied by—particular artifacts
produced by this culture industry: hybrid stupas; must-see
stops on a Euro-Western atrocity remembrance tour; and piles
of commodified human remains, dug up and jumbled together
without any effort toward religious or cultural authenticity.
Yet beyond what she calls these “perfect failures”of geno-
cide commemoration in Cambodia, Kidron’s article can be
viewed through a wider lens. Here, her study reveals some-
thing much more elusive and unsettling: the way in which the
culture industry of genocide suffering tells us something about
the perfect failure of global human rights promotion itself,
which depends fundamentally on both the possibility of and
ethical value in universal normative commensuration. What
Kidron’s research demonstrates, however, is that normative
commensuration is less a social fact than a politicized—and
often commodified—aspiration. If commensuration in this
sense is impossible in the case of culturally appropriate rela-
tions between the living and the dead, where else might these
incommensurabilities be found along the boulevard of liberal-
ism’s broken dreams? Even more (or worse, depending on
one’s perspective), apprehending these incommensurabilities
but refusing to live with them, anthropologists who have bet
their careers on the promise of commensuration can do no
more than, as Kidron describes it, construct various theoretical
Potemkin villages, simulacra in which village-level entrepre-
neurs work the expected angles while the foundations of “en-
gaged universality”remain as solid as ever.
Anne Yvonne Guillou
French National Center for Scientific Research, 3 rue Michel Ange,
75016 Paris, France; and Laboratoire Ethnologie et de Sociologie
Comparative, Paris, and Maison de l’Archéologie et de l’Ethnologie,
21 allée de l’Université, 92023 Nanterre, France (anne.guillou@cnrs
.fr). 2 IV 19
Carol Kidron offers an analysis of what I would present, in less
elegant and more provocative terms than hers, as the recent
development (in less than 10 years) of commodification of the
genocide memory on the humanitarian market in Cambodia.
This process reflects the alienation of the local forms of ex-
pression (and nonexpression) of suffering and social devices of
resilience by dominant neocolonial memory-engineering enter-
prises. Although the small community of long-term Khmer-
speaking field researchers in Cambodia is aware of the “mem-
ory business”and expresses discomfort about it in private
circles, few have had the courage to break the taboo—prevailing
possibly particularly in Europe, where the issue of the memory
of genocide is a sensitive topic and prompts polarized thoughts—
surrounding the thriving memory activities funded by Western
countries in Cambodia. They indeed seem at first glance useful
and praiseworthy efforts. Carol Kidron provides a theorized
understanding (among other possible theoretical frameworks)
of the failure of the encounter between local forms of memo-
rialization of the recent painful past and the globalized ideology
and practices of the right and duty to remember. She proves
once again to be one of the most groundbreaking authors of
memory studies and scholarship of postgenocide Cambodia.
I will limit my discussion to two points. First, the “perfect
failure”of the encounter is better understandable in the light of
326 Current Anthropology Volume 61, Number 3, June 2020