This is a compelling book about a Cambodian man known as Duch, his crimes, trial, and the social and cultural contexts in which these events took place. Born in 1942 in provincial Cambodia, Duch joined the revolution in Cambodia in 1967, when he became a member of the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK). The eventual rule of the CPK in Cambodia, from April 1975 to January 1979, during which time Cambodia was renamed Democratic Kampuchea, is better known as the Khmer Rouge regime. Duch was Deputy Chairman and then Chairman of the largest and bloodiest security center of the regime, a place called S-21. He was arrested in 2007 and faced trial in 2009 at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), the internationalized tribunal also known as the Khmer Rouge Tribunal.
The stand out strength of Hinton's book is the obvious fascination the author has with the relationship between Duch and his own trial. Hinton also traces the relationships between other key actors in this “ethnodrama,” and between these actors and this important, current, sociolegal process. This book is especially insightful around the role and views of key victim-survivors who participated in Duch's trial, who faced him in court to testify to their own and others' extreme mistreatment.
Hinton's relationships with these victim-survivors, his sociolinguistic Khmer fluency and his knowledge of Cambodian history, politics, and culture, all feed a highly original account. Hinton provides a thoughtful foil to much of the existing literature on the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia. Man or Monster is also an important contribution to knowledge about the crime site of S-21, now the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, extending the ground-breaking study by historian David Chandler of Duch's “total institution” (Reference ChandlerChandler 2000).
This is a book that has many conceptual cakes and eats them too. An early discussion of “thick framing,” from the first description of a present-day graffitied photograph of Duch—reproduced on the book's cover—develops into a longer meditation on articulation and redaction. This is an important extension of anthropological, sociolegal and political theories of violence, ideology, and power, and their intersections with international criminal law. As Hinton writes: “even as […] reductive articulations are asserted, they are unsettled by the complexities they redact” (290). During Khmer Rouge rule, there could be no unsettling of, no complexities to, the “effacing conviction” Duch showed and owed the senior leaders. I wasn't as immediately convinced of the salience of another key concept, that of “dehiscence” (a bursting or eruption of a sutured wound), especially as something that might occur from behind a frame; a frame, to me, remains obdurately technological, not embodied.
On the (animal) body, however, Hinton's consistent return to the Cambodian proverb: “If you break open the crab you'll show the shit” (a case of dehiscence from a smashed exoskeleton) was instantly illuminating, and probably the main motif I will take away from the book. In one late re-reading of this proverb Hinton writes: “If you break the shell of articulation, you see what has been pushed out of sight” (295), but what is most chilling in the earlier use of this proverb (by Duch himself, during his trial) was the sense of “showing,” not just “seeing”; you'll see, but you'll also be responsible for showing (others), the shit. This is what everyone was simultaneously knowing, fearing and avoiding at all costs, even those costs most extreme, under the Khmer Rouge. The only violence that could not be done, then, under the Khmer Rouge, was violence to this compact, the compact of the whole (crab's body), the compact between the “yes-men” like Duch and his senior leaders. By his and their self-conviction—the CPK was never wrong—there was no shit, there was only the smooth carapace of a pure and impregnable revolution.
Hinton shows how, despite apparently inconsistent pleadings and reactions, a consistent pattern of denial of agency and responsibility characterized Duch on trial. Interested in the paradoxes of the legal process of the ECCC, and in moments during the trial that undercut the binary of victim and perpetrator, Hinton suggests Duch's statements “mirrored an S-21 confession [under torture], [they were] a mixture of truth and falsehood calibrated to meet the demands of the moment” (188). He also notes how the trial came to represent both participating victims and the defendant Duch as being “in a liminal state, contaminated by violation, relegated to a static space of defilement and degradation, plagued by dangerous and threatening emotions, and waiting for help in regaining their humanity” (190).
The book is intriguingly structured. Made up of two main parts (“Confession” and “Reconstruction”, with six and four chapters, respectively), there are also additional entrance, bridging and exit “chapters.” For those interested to push the boundaries of generic academic writing, here is “ethnodramatic” writing, poetry and literary “collage” coexisting with detailed critical history and astute legal reporting. The way the book plays with temporality is also to be highly commended. While I knew the legal “outcome” of the trial, I still found the dramaturgical arc of the book suspenseful and ultimately satisfying. These creative experimentations furthered my understanding of the legal process as lived experience, although the same amount of “show” could have been done with a fair bit less “tell” (written explanations of the creative components). Hinton also writes that including these different forms of writing was an attempt “to render a more polyphonic account” and “to foreground some of what is edited out of ‘authoritative’ academic and journalistic accounts” (290). At Duke University Press, however, it's possible that the creative-critical is the new authoritative (see, e.g., Reference GhodseeGhodsee 2017).
The eye in Hinton's critical storm is the notion of humanity. Many rhetorical appeals to “we” assumes an audience of true believers, a coherent community in which the author (white, male, academic, non-Cambodian), and the reader, belong. Even as Hinton remains ambivalent about the questions he puts to this “we”—and fair enough too—of the addressed “we” he seems certain enough.
The “man or monster” binary of the title of the book is repeatedly acknowledged as a simplification, itself redactive, and is attentively problematized. My discomfort with the book's title is that “man or monster?,” and the word “torturer,” reasserts the very representations of Cambodia that Hinton is at pains to critique. In Cambodia's biggest academic bookstore, English-language book covers are littered with images of mass, anonymous, uncremated human remains, or other shocking and garish photographs, colors and titles. While Hinton's book only edges this sensationalist field, it's hard not to see an insensitive marketing ploy, and an indictment, dare I say it, on us.
