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Book Reviews

Book Review: Home SOS: Gender, Violence, and Survival in Crisis Ordinary Cambodia.

This is an important book with theoretical interventions and insights that take us
beyond the confines of both Cambodia and Gender as analytic categories, even while
remaining solidly grounded in each. Expanding the terms under which we conceive
gender-based violence, Brickell puts forward a novel approach to social analysis that I
will call a ‘home-based’ analysis. Through the lens of the home, which she argues is
‘intimately connected, rather than sealed off’ from the impacts of political processes
(p. 8), this book connects the seemingly disparate episodes of forced eviction and
domestic violence.

Finding the Future: A review of ‘Love and Dread in Cambodia: Weddings Births, and Ritual Harm under the Khmer Rouge’ by, Peg LeVine

This is an important book that challenges what Michael Vickery refers to as the standard total view (stv) of life under the Khmer Rouge and rethinks the practice of ‘forced marriage’ during that era. LeVine’s treatment centers on the family and the ways that marriage and
especially childbirth for many were not the coerced and humiliating experiences recounted in much of the literature, but were opportunities to connect the disordered present to the continuity of past traditions and to extend imaginative reality into the future.

A Review of Historical Imagination, Diasporic Identity and Islamicity Among the Cham Muslims of Cambodia, by Alberto Pérez Pereiro

This dissertation is an ethnographic study of contemporary Cham Muslims in Cambodia. In it,
the author lays out a number of intertwining and complicated questions that he subjects to the
insights of long-term community engagement and the power of ethnography. Pereiro addresses
the intertwined conceptions of religious proscriptions and cultural performances that give rise to
Muslim identities in light of historical consciousness and coexistence within a Buddhist state. He
also attends to the relationship between the Cham, the Khmer, and the Cambodian state, as well
as their situation within the broader Muslim community.