Abstract
On December 19, 2002, crowds of what the press described as nearly 1 million people joined the procession that brought relics from a stupa in front of the Phnom Penh railway station to their new home, an imposing new stupa on the hill near Oudong that already had several precolonial burial stupas of the royal family.1 This reinstallation of the relics has so far not been much written about either by scholars of Cambodian religion or politics, but seems to me to represent a significant moment of ritual reinscription, contributing to the construction of cosmology and national narrative of a newly unified country in the aftermath of socialism, an attempt at configuring Buddhist power in the aftermath of the crises of the 1970s and 1980s.
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© 2013 John Whalen-Bridge and Pattana Kitiarsa
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Marston, J.A. (2013). Post-Pol Pot Cambodia and the Building of a New Stupa. In: Whalen-Bridge, J., Kitiarsa, P. (eds) Buddhism, Modernity, and the State in Asia. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137326171_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137326171_5
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