#angkar

Nadia Murad and Murad Ismael appear in On Her Shoulders by Alexandria Bombach.

This year’s Human Rights Watch Film Festival will showcase 15 timely and provocative documentary and narrative works, screening June 14 to 21, 2018 in New York City. (more…)

Downsizing in old age can be painful. You have to make choices about keeping or discarding precious items. These things have clung to you, following you through a succession of moves to new places, finding their way into different boxes or onto other shelves. Each time you have touched them, you’ve asked yourself, “Why do you hang on to these? You don’t need them anymore.”

Sitting on my shelf was…

Downsizing: Letting Go of Cambodia

Downsizing in old age can be painful. You have to make choices about keeping or discarding precious items. These things have clung to you, following you through a succession of moves to new places, finding their way into different boxes or onto other shelves. Each time you have touched them, you’ve asked yourself, “Why do you hang on to these? You don’t need them anymore.”

Sitting on my shelf was…

You may be wondering why I chose the name “Pineapple Panopticon” for my Tumblr account. What the heck do pineapples have to do with privacy, surveillance or panopticons really?? Well it started when I was trying to select one of the background images for my Tumblr account. I saw the pineapple background. I like pineapples; they are delicious and cool looking. After much browsing and not thrilled with my other choices I decided to choose the pineapple background for fun and then randomly Googled “pineapple panopticon” to see if I could find something funny to tie this all together. Low and behold, I found nothing comical but an academic journal article titled “The Theory and Practice of Utopia in a Total Institution: The Pineapple Panopticon” by Stewart Clegg, Miguel Pina e Cunha, and Arménio Rego instead. It is about the panoptic regime of the Communist Party of Kampuchea in Cambodia. OMG!! What are the odds??

  The Khmer Rouge were the followers of the Communist Party of Kampuchea in Cambodia and was led by Pol Pot and others between 1975 to 1979. The Khmer Rouge transformed their utopian vision into practice, with the political movement known as Ângkar as its main instrument. Ângkar’s panoptic presence was visible in many ways including black-uniformed soldiers, extermination camps, a new social order, the extermination of Buddhist monks, and the closing of temples, schools and markets. It was said that Ângkar had ‘the eyes of the pineapple’ in that “it was reified and made transcendent, described as a supernatural, enlightened being, as ever vigilant, as the perfect model of a metaphorical panopticon” (Clegg, et al, 2012, p. 1748). The many eyes were constantly looking for infiltration by enemies and no one could escape its scrutiny. People lived in fear of being accused of anti-revolutionary behaviour and people spied on each other so that everyone was constantly under surveillance. The Ângkar was omnipresent and everyone was under its panoptic gaze in that people were constantly watching themselves and watching others. Clegg and the others argue that this dual sense of being watched while watching others creates the conditions for surrendering one’s identity since one is constantly being put under scrutiny and surveillance and must always be acting (p. 1744).

  This ties in with the Foucauldian notion of the panopticon that we have been discussing throughout this course, which of course be borrowed from Jeremy Bentham’s original concept of the panopticon. Foucault uses the original concept developed by Jeremy Bentham as a metaphor for modern disciplinary societies and their desire to observe and normalise. He argues that since prisoners (or persons outside of a penal institution) do not know when they are being watched, they are forced to be on good behaviour permanently to avoid punishment. Due to the paranoia the Ângkar caused, the people of Cambodia and of the communist party were living in fear and thus modified their behaviour as if they were being constantly monitored.

  It was a total fluke that I happened to stumble upon this article that is relevant to this class and I am glad I was able to use the pineapple theme and assign it meaning. Also think about surveillance and panopticism the next time you eat tropical fruit. The eyes of the pineapple are watching you!!!!

"Now if only I had a mate…"

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