November 7, 2009
Sra Alley
Hearing stories or reading in the police blotter about tragedies in Cambodia, particularly out in the countryside, I sometimes can't help but feel as if I'm contemplating a William Hogarth print. Most stories in the blotter seem to go along the lines of "Person X is drinking with friends, Person Y interrupts the dirinking somehow, so X attacks Y with an axe." There are variations, of course: sometimes it's a son burning down his mother's house for haranguing him, other times it's a group of "anarchistic ruffians" attacking their schoolmates with samurai swords. But it usually involves alcohol, and lots of it. (The Khmer have a saying that sums up their attitude towards imbibing: "Drink, Drink to get drunk. If not to get drunk, why drink?")
But not all drunken attacks make the newspaper. Oftentimes they stay within the home, as the wife and children suffer silently. I asked my students to discuss why some men hit their wives when they are drunk, and after questioning the ambiguity of the posessive plural (how many wives does each man have?), they offered some interesting explanations, but the most cutting was, "because if they hit somebody else, they'd get in trouble." That's one of the less enchanting aspects of 'traditional culture.'
Posted by flynn at 10:12 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack