Khmer Potent Places: Pāramī and the Localisation of Buddhism and Monarchy in Cambodia

Cambodia is strewn with places of national, local or, most frequently, village importance, considered as potent places, that is to say, places that are said to have agency and a positive or negative power of interaction with human beings. This paper emphasises the constituent principles of potency using case studies based on ethnographic research conducted between 2007 and 2015 in Pursat province, western Cambodia. Beginning with the analysis of the sanctuary of a powerful land guardian spirit called Khleang Muang, the author progressively guides the reader to all the potent places that form a network which spatially tells the legend of the sixteenth-century Khmer King Ang Chan who passed by Pursat, coming from Angkor and settled in Lovek (south of Tonle Sap Lake). Violent death and sacrifices, rituals, spiritual energy called paramī, old buildings, monasteries, precious tableware kept in the soil, trees, stones, termite mounds?…?all those constituents of the potency of the places are analysed. The author’s discussion of the core of potency (pāramī and paramī) enables her to show how Buddhism and land guardian spirit cults are entangled in a single still hierarchical religious system. Finally, the author analyses how potent places in Cambodia embody a process of localisation of the nation-level institution of monarchy.     

重思有灵, 激活思想

文章试图重新思考民族志中有关泛灵论的材料,目的是要理解生命的意义。西方传统理论和受其影响的现代科学理论被确证存在着转换的逻辑：这些理论倾向于认为个体生命是从世界中抽离出来的,是一个有边界的实体。作者试图从＂生生不息＂＂生命存在的关系构造＂以及＂运动的首要地位＂等方面重新思考生命世界的意义,并指涉现代科学的研究。通过区分＂对世界感到惊奇＂与＂对世界感到震撼＂来反思现代科学的不足之处,并提出理解世界的新视角——栖居。     

‘It's Dangerous,but these are my People’: The Assimilation of a Catholic Priest among the Meto of Oecussi

Originally from Pennsylvania, Father Richard Daschbach has lived among the Atoni Pah Meto of West Timor since 1967. In this paper I consider Richard's ministry in the context of the literature on Austronesian cosmological systems, focusing on how his work, though defined by characteristically Meto notions of authority, spirituality and precedence, is also what Collier and Ong have described as a ‘global assemblage’. Tsing's concept of ‘friction’ is used as a way of understanding how both local and notionally universal forces within this encounter have been energised and transformed through their accidental and sometimes uneasy proximity.     

成都东山客家方言中关于生命的民俗语言现象诠释

关于生命的诞生、成长、存在和消失,成都东山客家方言有自己的言说方式。本文诠释了一些反映生命意识和信仰的重要民俗语言现象,重点指出东山客家人所信奉的童子、月亮、树木、秧根、寄生、龙等,是万物有灵观的产物和残存,同时还指出了客家繁复的丧葬习俗所反映的灵魂观。     

胎梦说:感生神话起源的心理假说

感生神话的起源与胎梦有关,二者具有形式上的相似性,而从胎梦向感生神话的转化大致有早期万物有灵论和后期政治神话两个阶段两种方式。