New Books In Southeast Asian Studies

In his recent monograph, Deathpower: Buddhism’s Ritual Imagination in Cambodia (Columbia University Press, 2015), Erik W. Davis explores funerary ritual in contemporary Cambodian Buddhism and the way in which Buddhist monks manage death such that its negative power is harnessed and used for the reproduction of morality and of a particular social reality. The book is organized around two themes, which serve as the warp over and under which Davis skillfully weaves the ethnographic detail resulting from his many years of fieldwork in Southeast Asia. The first of these two themes is binding. In the funeral itself binding is both symbolic, as when the funerary ritualists contain the potentially malevolent spirits exiting the corpse, and physical, as when the corpse is bound with consecrated string. Davis sees this image of binding extending far beyond the funeral rite, however, and discusses the way in which Khmer culture itself is founded in part upon the binding or controlling of water–necessary in rice agricul