Lost goddesses

TRUDY JACOBSEN

Lost goddesses: the denial of female power in Cambodian history

Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2008. 336 pp. ISBN: 978-87-7694-001-0, pb £17.99

Reviewed by Katherine Brickell, Royal Holloway, University of London

Lost goddesses makes a fascinating and highly original contribution to deepening our understanding of Cambodian history. Jacobsen brings to life the gendered history of the Southeast Asian country in a critical and sensitive manner through the book’s focus on the ways in which Cambodian women have wielded power in the past. Tracing the relationship between women and power over time, Jacobsen eloquently assesses which diametrically opposing images of women – as powerful or powerless – are most accurate. Jacobsen sets up a number of important questions in this regard: ‘Who or what is responsible for the denial of female power in Cambodian history? Have Cambodian women ever been powerful? If so, when did this begin to change, and by what agency?’ (p. 2).

Analyses of these key questions starts from the 3rd to the 9th centuries where Jacobsen questions what (if any) power women wielded (Chapter 2). To examine this and other periods, ethnography and a diversity of historical sources are drawn up as appropriate, from inter alia, stone inscriptions in Sanskrit and Old Khmer, chronicles kept at courts, legal instruments, didactic codes for correct behaviour, observations of travellers, preserved folktales, official records of the French Protectorate, newspapers, autobiographies and biographies.
Using these various sources, the book argues that ‘the “tradition” of female powerlessness is false, constructed out of bias and perpetuated by those who have dismissed the significance of women in Cambodia’s past and ignored evidence for their consequence in the present’ (p. 279). With this compelling conspiracy argument running consistently throughout the book, the unravelling of this mystery and the suspense this provides the reader makes it quite an ‘academic thriller’. As Jacobsen expands, the book reveals ‘the circumstances of their deceit and identify the perpetrators of the denial of female power in Cambodian history’ (p. 14).

An excellent example of such deceit can be seen in relation to Cbpab, normative poems that describe the correct way for society and its members to act. In the middle period (1431-1867 Chapter 4), many of these Cbpab representing the earliest extant of Cambodian literature reflecting Buddhist characteristics, perceived women as spiritually equal to men. Accompanied by a whole host of further evidence, Jacobsen therefore concludes that ‘the middle period was not the epoch in which power was denied to Cambodian women’ (p. 103).

However in the 19th century (Chapter 5), the Cbpab Srei - ‘Code of conduct for women’ – began ‘a tradition of misogynist literature’ (p. 109) as conservative male interests were privileged under the reign of Ang Duong. As a result, there was an overall decline in the status of women as the literature produced before the imposition of colonial rule was taken to represent ‘traditional’ gender roles and maintained as a form of resistance to French influence to ensure that Khmer culture would not be lost. Jacobsen thus casts the 1950s and 1960s as critical for understanding the relationship of women to power as these rules became absorbed uncritically into the Cambodian educational system. This deceit post-Khmer Rouge was then perpetrated once again as the constructs of ‘traditional’ Cambodia were re-sourced from conservative literature such as the Cbpab Srei as an example of the purity and unassailability of Cambodian culture (Chapter 10).

Such examples of deceit are also found in addition to examples of western constructs of power which fail to incorporate the supernatural world. This is important as Jacobsen argues, as in Cambodia, the significance of women in this sphere has never been diminished, ‘despite repeated assaults on the role of women in the tangible world’ (p. 289). These assaults are finally analysed in the context of Cambodian society today as Jacobsen scopes out some of the main tensions arising in the contemporary period, albeit in a slightly anecdotal manner.

Overall however, this is an exceptional book of considerable merit that will be of interest to a wide range of academics working in history, anthropology, gender studies, politics, religion and Southeast Asian studies. It is excellent value and would be a clear candidate to be published in Khmer so that the false constructs of earlier periods can be revealed. This is especially important, as Jacobsen herself (p. 4) comments: ‘most Cambodians have little idea of gender relations prior to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, believing that male pre-eminence has always been a facet of Cambodian society’. It is this erroneous belief which Lost goddesses so powerfully erodes.