In my own study of the annual rites constituting pchum ben, a fifteen-day period of ritually caring for the dead (usually one's own recently deceased kin), I found that the popularity of this Cambodian Buddhist rite had soared dramatically following the severe tragedies that beleaguered Khmer society during the 1970–90 period of civil war, the coming to power of the Khmer Rouge, and the ensuing occupation of the Vietnamese.Footnote ¹ I was quite surprised, then, to find Erik Davis claiming, in the introductory essay of his new book Deathpower, that Buddhist funeral rites had remained fundamentally unchanged during the past fifty years or so of Khmer social history. Why this is so leads Davis into a careful consideration of Khmer ritual imagination and becomes one of the primary burdens of his ensuing discussions forming the heart of his book. The cue for his answer is rooted in his identification of the profusely present agricultural imagery prevalent within the performance of the many funeral rites that he frequently observed in great detail. Indeed, the deep-seated imagery of fertility and its associated meanings of abundance, resilience, nurturing vitality, and regenerative power provides keys to what Davis means by “deathpower”: how rituals concerned with this basic end-of-life rite of passage are aimed at binding, enslaving, and thereby redirecting otherwise chaotic or wild spiritual powers in a constructive fashion that facilitates favorable rebirths for the dead and thereby beneficial consequences for the living. As Davis asserts, “Buddhist domination of the legitimate ritualization of the dead—its deathpower—establishes and moralizes particular notions about fertility, social legitimacy, and morality, drawing on everyday notions and concepts from Cambodian agricultural life” (p. 6). This is a book, then, that articulates a rich and nuanced understanding of Khmer religious culture in relation to fundamental and traditional means of economic production. It is peppered by a number of theoretical asides and laced with helpful anecdotal illustrations.

The first two chapters are contextual, situating the ethnographic discussions within the confines of Buddhist temples (rural and urban) and describing in the abstract the unfolding and various processes constitutive of funeral rites, including the core symbolism involved with the “binding” of spirits. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 are the heart of the book, closely examining the logic of binding spirits in a manner similar to how agricultural processes are controlled; how ritually consecrated threads are used to bind corpses and urns that render potentially malevolent powers as protective; and how the gift of pamsukula, simultaneously understood as a monastic shroud and chant, are regarded as the ritual means by which death and its fear are conquered. Chapter 6 consists of a creative (and I think controversial) interpretation of the pchum ben rites in which a “logic of reciprocity enables rural people to characterize the urban wage workers, who return to the villagers during this celebration, as parasites out of a widespread resentment of the cities’ relationship to rural villages” (p. 22). In chapter 7, Davis provides a fascinating comparative study of witchcraft and the ritual work of Buddhist monks, contrasting the two mainly along the lines of secretive and public, or how witches function primarily in terms of a reversal of monastic logic. Finally, the eighth chapter is, in my opinion, perhaps the most informed discussion yet written about what “Brahmanism,” as a “non-Buddhist category,” has come to mean functionally in Khmer religious culture. In the process, Davis obviates the need to see Khmer religion in a purely and oversimplified syncretic fashion.

The fieldwork for this book was conducted primarily from 2003 to 2006 while the author was a graduate student in the history of religions at the University of Chicago, so not only has its publication in 2016 been long awaited, but also it is a work that is thoroughly digested, and it is unusually well considered theoretically for a scholar's “first book.” Because of its focus (death) and theoretical sophistication (there are many “outtakes,” some concerned with the performance theory proposed by Cornelius Castoriadis), Deathpower is a challenging but important read, especially for scholars of Theravada Buddhism and the interdisciplinary field of Southeast Asian studies. Yet it is probably beyond what most undergraduates (with the exception of honors students) can handle, even upper-level students in advanced seminars. So my enthusiastic recommendation of this provocative book is aimed at graduate students and practicing scholars in Buddhist studies, anthropology, and history of religions.