The symposium starts

A main reason why I went to Cambodia is to attend the World History symposium on Southeast Asian history.

A symposium is a scholarly conference in which researchers present their findings to groups of their peers. The true benefits come outside of the panels when people get to meet other people who are pursuing like interests. Plenty of interesting people abound. Even though most of them teach in colleges and major universities, I enjoy putting myself in the midst of conversations and meeting these interesting people.

I attended my last WHA symposium in Istanbul, Turkey last October.

You can follow my Istanbul blog here.

About seventy scholars came for the symposium. Most are Americans, but a substantial number came from Europe and Asia.

We met as a large group only a few times. Before our first session I took this picture of one of the simple classrooms at the university that was hosting us. Many of the people in the image I got to know fairly well.

United States' secret war

Towards the end of the Vietnam War, Richard Nixon expanded the war into Cambodia.  The secret war started with a massive bombing campaign followed by tens of thousands of troops. It was an illegal war because the US did not get Congressional approval like it did later for the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan.

The purpose of the early blanket bombing campaign was to stop the supply routes of the Vietcong enemy. More tons of bombs fell in Cambodia and Vietnam during this period than all of the bombs used by the US in World War II against Germany and Japan.  Militarily it was a failure.

Before I left for Cambodia, a friend said that I would be very impressed by the beauty of the country. When I asked when he had traveled there, he said that he was deployed in Cambodia during the 1970s. He said that soldiers traveled deep into the country and could visit pretty much anywhere in Cambodia.

More about landmines

One of the stops that we made was at the Cambodian landmine museum.

The museum was founded by a former child soldier of the Khmer Rouge. He was considered his unit's best sharpshooter at the age of ten. He switched sides and developed a remarkable ability to defuse landmines with simple tools.

More on the founder of the landmine museum.

The images below show just a small number of the mines and unexploded shells that he has defused.

Sanskrit

The language of Cambodia is Khmer, which is a distant relative of Sanskrit. Sanskrit comes from India and was widely used by the ancient Khmer empire. Cambodia derives much of its culture, religion, and language from India because of the Indian Ocean trade system.

This image was the only piece of writing that I saw in any of the temples. It is written in the Sanskrit language.

The Center for Khmer Studies

Our group of historians visited a Buddhist pagoda and research center in downtown Siem Reap. It was lovely--an oasis in the middle of a bustling city.

In the library was a wall painting of the setting around the Buddha when he meditated under the Bo tree and received enlightenment.

Notice the bullet holes in the wall. Those occurred most likely during the 1970s. During that time the Khmer Rouge evacuated the city and eliminated the population of Buddhist monks.

Household shrines

Religions in general and Buddhism in Cambodia in particular tend to be syncretic. In other words, they absorb influences from other cultures and tradition.

In Cambodia people erect gold-colored spirit houses for holding the spirits that have been displaced through the construction of the buildings. Small houses have small spirit houses, and large buildings have huge spirit houses.

Frequent offerings are made at these personal shrines. A historian that I spoke with suggested that this practice has its origins in the spiritualism that predates Buddhism in the region.

This spirit house was in front of the university where we held our symposium.

Active temples

At one of the temples that I visited a stupa stood in the center of the complex. A stupa is a Buddhist reliquary that often contains a small piece of the remains of the Buddha.

An incredibly small, fragile woman was in continual prayer next to the stupa. She would provide blessings to people who wanted one, such as this woman from our group. The pious Cambodian woman was also collecting money to support the neighboring monastery.

Much like the cathedrals of Europe, these temple complexes are places of worship today.  Most, however, have not seen much religious use in the past several centuries.