スロック・チャムカーの人と地図

──フランス国立海外公文書センター所蔵文書INDO-RSC-00271の分析──

抄録

The reason why little is known about the social and economical situation of rural Cambodia during the French colonial period is due to a lack of study under the false premise that rural Cambodia was a “pre-literate” society leaving it with no written historical record. In reality, however, the Centre des Archives d’Outre-Mer (CAOM, France) and the National Archives of Cambodia have respectable collections of documents written in the Khmer language as petitions, demands and reports from provincial Cambodia. While this documentation is fragmentary, disconnected and focused on single incidents, it remains very valuable for the vivid images of village life it portrays.

This article analyses one Khmer document, entitled “Affaires religieuses,” in the possession of CAOM， which contains two requests for permission to build new Buddhist pagodas in Ruessei Srok village, Srey Santhor Province, lists of Thnang Day signatures of the villagers and maps of the sites for the new pagodas. This document gives us important information about the inhabitants, land and landscape of Ruessei Srok, one of the villages called Srok Chamkar along the bank of the Mekong River, during the 1910s. Srok Chamkar means the country of non-paddy fields reclaimed on the banks of major rivers, and lies in contrast to inland Srok Srae, the country of paddy.

The lists of Thnang Day signatures, containing the names of inhabitants who had agreed to construct the pagodas, are arranged into four groups: 1) high officials, 2) Achars (religious leaders), 3) village minor officials and notables, except Me Khum (village chief) and 4) commoners. The actual leaders of the construction project were the Achars, who then requested the high officials to intermediate between the village and the higher authorities in Phnom Penh through personal connections. Among the commoners, Chinese names are intermingled with Khmer, suggesting that the communities supporting each of pagodas were also ethnically mixed. The names of women were segregated in the lists of signatures, but the names of husbands and wives appear together as land proprietors in the written requests.

An analysis of the maps attached to the documents enable us to discover that several belts running parallel to the Mekong River represent the land of Srok Chamkar. This way of representing fields on maps is indicative of local practical knowledge accommodating to the features of chamkar parcels, which are limited in width, but variable in length depending on the annual water level of the River. Furthermore, the existence of the text and maps shows that Cambodian rural society was by no means “pre-literate”. A more detailed analysis of the rural documents of Cambodia should lead us to a better understanding of the historical antecedents of colonial Cambodia.