S-21 as a Liminal Power Regime
Violently Othering Khmer Bodies into Vietnamese Minds
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12966918 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Daniel Bultmann (0000-0001-5465-2010, University of Siegen, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2020 |
| Volume | 14 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 11-26 |
| Publication date | 2020-12-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Genocide Studies and Prevention (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1911-0359 • E-ISSN: 1911-9933 |
| Publisher | International Association of Genocide Scholars (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.5038/1911-9933.14.3.1768 |
| OpenAlex | W3114892646 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 10 |
The article analyzes the structure, scripts, and procedural logics behind the violent practices in S-21, the central prison of the Khmer Rouge, as a liminal power regime. The institution’s violent practices and operations served to reveal a “Vietnameseness” and/or otherness within the victims and to prove not only their guilt regarding a singular crime but also a long history of treason and collaboration with the Vietnamese, as well as a moral shortcoming that put them outside their own imagined Khmer moral universe and made them part of a larger scheme. The initial and—for the ideology of the revolution—problematic sameness of the victims needed to be reshaped into a profound otherness in terms of thinking, lifestyle, and biography. The process of interning, torturing, and turning subjects into enemies in S-21 (and beyond) resembled a transformative ritual, a violent and enforced rite of passage into a new symbolic status
Aesthetics · Art · Criminology · Genocide · Ideology · Liminality · Linguistics · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Prison · Rite · Rite of passage · Sociology · Transformative learning · Vietnamese · Anthropology · Cambodian History and Society · Gender Studies · History · Law · Philosophy · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies
The Forest of Symbols
Caring for the Dead Ritually in Cambodia
Dead Certainty
Man or Monster? The Trial of a Khmer Rouge Torturer
Converts, not ideologues? The Khmer Rouge practice of thought reform in Cambodia, 1975–1978
They Will Rot the Society, Rot the Party, and Rot the Army
The Killing Compartments. The Mentality of Mass Murder
The Cambodian Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocidal Crimes
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0.02 |
| Citation span | 1984 - 1984 (1) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |