Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- List of Tables
- List of Contributors
- Foreword by Robert Jay Lifton
- Preface
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction: Inscribing Trauma in Culture, Brain, and Body
- SECTION I NEUROBIOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES ON TRAUMA
- SECTION II CLINICAL PERSPECTIVES ON TRAUMA
- SECTION III CULTURAL PERSPECTIVES ON TRAUMA
- 15 Trauma, Adaptation, and Resilience: A Cross-Cultural and Evolutionary Perspective
- 16 Bruno and the Holy Fool: Myth, Mimesis, and the Transmission of Traumatic Memories
- 17 Failures of Imagination: The Refugee's Predicament
- 18 Trauma, Culture, and Myth: Narratives of the Ethiopian Jewish Exodus
- 19 Posttraumatic Politics: Violence, Memory, and Biomedical Discourse in Bali
- 20 Terror and Trauma in the Cambodian Genocide
- 21 Trauma in Context: Integrating Biological, Clinical, and Cultural Perspectives
- Epilogue: Trauma and the Vicissitudes of Interdisciplinary Integration
- Glossary
- Index
- References
20 - Terror and Trauma in the Cambodian Genocide
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 July 2009
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- List of Tables
- List of Contributors
- Foreword by Robert Jay Lifton
- Preface
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction: Inscribing Trauma in Culture, Brain, and Body
- SECTION I NEUROBIOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES ON TRAUMA
- SECTION II CLINICAL PERSPECTIVES ON TRAUMA
- SECTION III CULTURAL PERSPECTIVES ON TRAUMA
- 15 Trauma, Adaptation, and Resilience: A Cross-Cultural and Evolutionary Perspective
- 16 Bruno and the Holy Fool: Myth, Mimesis, and the Transmission of Traumatic Memories
- 17 Failures of Imagination: The Refugee's Predicament
- 18 Trauma, Culture, and Myth: Narratives of the Ethiopian Jewish Exodus
- 19 Posttraumatic Politics: Violence, Memory, and Biomedical Discourse in Bali
- 20 Terror and Trauma in the Cambodian Genocide
- 21 Trauma in Context: Integrating Biological, Clinical, and Cultural Perspectives
- Epilogue: Trauma and the Vicissitudes of Interdisciplinary Integration
- Glossary
- Index
- References
Summary
I continue to think of revenge. But this thought of revenge, it doesn't know how to stop. And we should not have this thought or the matter will grow and keep going on and on for a long time. We should be a person who thinks and acts in accordance with dhamma. [A person who seeks revenge] only creates misery for our society. It is a germ in society. But I continue to think of revenge … The people who killed my brother, who put down his name to get into the truck, are all alive, living in my village. To this day, I still really want revenge. I keep observing them. But, I don't know what to do…. The government forbids it.
– Chlat, whose brother's family was executed by Khmer RougeThere were many ways to die during Democratic Kampuchea (DK), the genocidal period of Khmer Rouge rule in Cambodia (1975–1979). Some starved to death. Others died from malnutrition and illness. Many more were executed, often en masse, in a genocide that took the lives of more than 1.7 of Cambodia's 8 million inhabitants (Kiernan, 1996) – almost a quarter of the population. Such numbers are almost incomprehensible, yet they fail to take account of the toll such death and destruction took on the survivors, who suffered the loss of friends and loved ones; struggled on in a world of privation and relentless work; tried to survive for another day in a time in which fear, terror, and trauma were omnipresent; and, after DK, attempted to piece together their fractured lives in a society that had been turned upside down.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Understanding TraumaIntegrating Biological, Clinical, and Cultural Perspectives, pp. 433 - 450Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2007
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