Salvage: Cultural Resilience among the Jorai of Northeast Cambodia

Product Description
In Salvage, Krisna Uk draws on extensive research in a Cambodian village she calls Leu to provide a unique ethnography of the Jorai, an ethnic minority group that lives in Vietnam and in the most heavily bombed region of northeast Cambodia. The Jorai inhabit a remote region largely beyond the reach of the nation-state but have suffered the devastating effects of battles between and within states. Uk focuses on the experience of a Jorai community that experienced violent and protracted international and domestic conflicts―the Vietnam War and the Khmer Rouge regime. These conflicts had enduring effects on the community’s moral fabric, the villagers’ activities, and the physical and spiritual environments with which they engage daily.
Uk’s ethnography is an exploration of a resilient communal life that refuses to surrender its integrity to the blind, destructive forces of modern aerial warfare and that struggles to come to terms with the unintelligible violence unleashed by Cambodia’s revolutionary movement. It examines the destructive power and enduring harm that explosive remnants of war inflict on the human body and the social relations. But it also reveals how the local Jorai villagers turn these treacherous and fatal products of foreign technology into precious subsistence items as well as aesthetic and ritualistic objects that will take the souls of the dead on their journey to a better life. Uk demonstrates how the Jorai of Leu can, through their creative and traditional labor, revive the legend of the formidable Jorai warriors by transforming deadly modern weapons into their own war trophies.
Review
"I envied her smooth transitions through discussions of dense theory, reviews of related literature, and traditional anthropological fieldwork. Clearly written and well organized, the book is also a testament to the care that many people, in this case those at Cornell University Press, put into creating such a fine work." -- Kurt Borchard, University of Nebraska Kearney ―
Historical Geography


"Uk's book [is] a pioneering anthropological study of an ethnicity that has been at the fulcrum of major historical events for many decades. The author has set a high mark for those who will, we can only hope, enjoy further opportunities to undertake ethnographic research with the minority communities of Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam." ―
Pacific Affairs
Review
"In Salvage, Krisna Uk presents new research on how people in Cambodia cope with the aftermath of the horrific wars that have ravaged their country. She does so by probing in depth the creative engagement with these horrors of a rural community in minority ethnic areas heavily bombarded by the United States. Uk makes a very rich ethnographic contribution, with updated and contemporary information on cultures previously known mostly though older colonial-era ethnography, offering a substantial advance on everything that has come before. Her work also expands on such highly relevant aspects as the ideas about spirits of disease and misfortune, to show how people cope with trauma in ways rooted in their cultural traditions. This book will enrich the understanding of not only scholars and students but also officials in international aid agencies and others engaged in practical work in recovering war zones. Uk gives us the tools to help people in similar situations worldwide, to better focus on how people can rebuild by relying on their own existing heritage and knowledge, and on their own culturally configured ingenuity." -- Magnus Fiskesjo, Cornell University
About the Author
Krisna Uk is Executive Director of the Center for Khmer Studies in Cambodia.