Why Did They Kill? Cambodia in the Shadow of Genocide. Alexander Laban Hinton. California Series in Public Anthropology. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. xxii + 360 pp.

Reviewed by: Antonius C.G.M. Robben (Utrecht University)

Democratic Kampuchea has been called the most totalitarian state in world history. In April 1975, after defeating the Lon Nol regime in a civil war that took the lives of six hundred thousand people, the Khmer Rouge leaders embarked on a radical experiment in social engineering that was to bring a communist utopia for the impoverished peasant masses by creating an agricultural state based on rice production. By January 1979, when Vietnamese troops overthrew Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge, 1.7 million out of a population of eight million Cambodians had been starved to death or assassinated by communist cadres. Why did this genocide take place and what motivated the perpetrators to participate? Alexander Laban Hinton answers these central questions in a groundbreaking study which makes use of cultural models theory to integrate ideology, culture, group processes, and individual conduct and motivation into one analytic framework.

Cultural models theory provides a fine-tuned analysis of how individuals act in diverse ways among the multi-interpretable parameters of culture. How appropriate is this theoretical approach for explaining perpetrator motivation in a totalitarian state that ordered people to think and act only from the collective while banning personal desires, decisions, and goals as manifestations of antiproletarian individualism? In other words, a cultural models approach may easily explain the Kampuchean translation of shared into personal knowledge but might have difficulty accounting for idiosyncratic schemata and individual motivation. Alexander Hinton’s ethnography succeeds splendidly in addressing the former but could have followed through a bit further on the latter.

In an exemplary fashion, Hinton delineates the construction of the ideological scaffolding of the 1975-79 genocide. He demonstrates how a European political ideology was grafted onto Cambodian cultural models and then translated into horrifying deeds that resonated with local meanings. Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge was a revitalization movement that attracted popular support with its explanation of Cambodia’s chaotic times in terms of a class struggle which would inevitably end in a just and egalitarian society. The Leninist-Maoist conviction that this historical process could be hastened with the use of violence was taken to extremes by the Khmer Rouge: cities were forcefully vacated, Buddhism abolished, village life dismantled, and nuclear families separated. This high-modernist agenda for a new society required the speedy elimination of counterrevolutionary forces. Cambodians were divided into "old people" (exploited peasants, the illiterate) and "new people" (city dwellers, landlords, the educated, former Lon Nol officials). This partition of Cambodian society manufactured a fundamental social difference which formed part of, what Hinton calls, a genocidal priming. Genocidal priming is a process typical of all genocides but what made the Cambodian genocide particularly lethal was its activation by disproportionate revenge. Cambodian revenge is not characterized by the eye for an eye but by the head for an eye principle: an offended person must overtrump his offender with excessive violence, e.g. by killing his foe and his entire family. The combination of disproportionate revenge, class struggle, and adversary historical events (U.S. bombings, corrupt Lon Nol regime, rural poverty) propelled the genocide. Kampuchea’s leaders were obsessed with conspiracies and encouraged continuous purges to cleanse the totalitarian state of class enemies, internal enemies, spies, "ugly microbes," and their families.

Purges have been standard practice in other communist regimes but reached staggering proportions in Cambodia because of a particular cultural understanding of patronage. Cambodian patronage is suffused with suspicion. Patrons and clients suspect each other of trying to improve their lot by joining more promising partners. Pol Pot and his collaborators sought to annihilate all competing patronage networks and monopolize all ties in every domain of Kampuchean society. Confessions extracted through torture proved that the party’s suspicion was right, and would set off another round of purges.

How did Pol Pot and his associates mobilize their cadres to carry out the genocide? Hinton shows how perpetrators were imbued with Marxist-Leninist and Khmer Rouge ideology, convinced of their own revolutionary consciousness, filled with hatred against all enemies and the desire to eliminate them, and motivated by the anxiety that they themselves might be accused of being traitors, as in fact happened frequently. These henchmen made reality fit paranoid imagination by dehumanizing alleged enemies, extracting confessions, and rounding up ‘strings of traitors.’ They were not acting out of due obedience, sadism or as brainwashed automatons but had a choice in when and how to kill. They were impelled by cultural notions of loyalty, honor, shame, face, revenge, self-image, and social position to demonstrate their self-worth and worth for Ângkar, the omnipotent Khmer Rouge organization, by assassinating helpless victims. In a truly brilliant concluding ethnographic analysis, Hinton demonstrates how genocidal priming and perpetrator motivation met in a horrifying incident of exocannibalistic liver-eating.

Hinton’s multilevel analysis of the Cambodian genocide is a showcase for cultural models theory and a demonstration of superior scholarship. Having said this, I nevertheless find two lacunae in his study. First, I lack a discussion of resistance. I understand that Ângkar’s panopticon made everyone suspicious and execution a real likelihood but was resistance completely absent? Resistance can take many subtle forms, as shown in the work of Tvetan Todorov on Nazi concentration camps and Soviet labor camps, so I wonder about similar acts in Cambodia. A discussion of resistance would take away the impression that Khmer Rouge cadres were only in control of the timing of the killings but never their outcome. Second, Hinton could have made his theoretical approach even more convincing if he would have analyzed alternative cultural scenarios and conflicting cultural models during (pre-)Kampuchean times. Fair enough, he does briefly refer to the existence of a nonviolent Buddhist mode but a full-blown elaboration would have helped to uncover people’s soul-searching when poised at a crossroads in life when they had to choose between a Buddhist path of loving kindness and a cultural scenario of disproportionate revenge. This criticism does not detract from the book’s tremendous importance to anthropology, genocide studies, and cultural models theory but would have enriched the study even further.