Open AccessS-21 as a Liminal Power Regime: Violently Othering Khmer Bodies into Vietnamese Minds
Author(s) -
Daniel Bultmann
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
genocide studies and prevention
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 1911-9933
pISSN - 1911-0359
DOI - 10.5038/1911-9933.14.3.1768
Subject(s) - liminality , power (physics) , sociology , vietnamese , genocide , ideology , prison , rite , rite of passage , transformative learning , criminology , gender studies , history , aesthetics , law , politics , political science , anthropology , art , philosophy , linguistics , pedagogy , physics , quantum mechanics
The article analyzes the structure, scripts, and procedural logics behind the violent practices in S-21, the central prison of the Khmer Rouge, as a liminal power regime. The institution’s violent practices and operations served to reveal a “Vietnameseness” and/or otherness within the victims and to prove not only their guilt regarding a singular crime but also a long history of treason and collaboration with the Vietnamese, as well as a moral shortcoming that put them outside their own imagined Khmer moral universe and made them part of a larger scheme. The initial and—for the ideology of the revolution—problematic sameness of the victims needed to be reshaped into a profound otherness in terms of thinking, lifestyle, and biography. The process of interning, torturing, and turning subjects into enemies in S-21 (and beyond) resembled a transformative ritual, a violent and enforced rite of passage into a new symbolic status.