PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — Just over
two years ago, at the Anful Garments Factory in Kompong Speu Province, a young
worker named Chanthul and 250 of her colleagues collapsed in a collective spell
of fainting. They had to be hospitalized; the production line shut down.
Two days later, the factory was back
up, and the mass faintings struck again. A worker started barking commands in a
language that sounded like Chinese and, claiming to speak in the name of an
ancestral spirit, demanded offerings of raw chicken. None were forthcoming, and
more workers fell down. Peace, and production, resumed only after factory
owners staged an elaborate ceremony, offering up copious amounts of food,
cigarettes and Coca-Cola to the spirit.
This episode, however bizarre, was
not singular. In the past few years, Cambodia has experienced a slew of mass
faintings among garment workers: One after the other, hundreds of women have
fallen to the floor of their factories in a dizzy spell called duol sonlap in
the Khmer language. The swooning has been attributed, variously, to heat, anemia,
overwork, underventilation, chemical fumes and food poisoning. But according to
one group of medical anthropologists and psychologists who have studied the
phenomenon, two-thirds of these episodes are associated with accounts of
possession by local guardian spirits, known as neak ta.
The mass faintings have paralyzed
production, to the consternation of the government, factory owners and
international clothing retailers. The United States opened its market to
Cambodian exports in the 1990s, and the garment industry in Cambodia has since
become a $5 billion-a-year business. According to the country’s Garment
Manufacturers Association, there are now over 600 garment factories, most owned
by Taiwanese, Korean, Chinese, Hong Kong and Singaporean companies. Many were
hastily erected on the dusty outskirts of Phnom Penh and in a few other
free-trade zones — on land where people believe neak ta have lived for
generations.
Although Theravada Buddhism has
been the official religion of Cambodia since the 13th century, it never
supplanted the existing pantheon of ancestral spirits, local gods and
Brahamanic deities. Perhaps the most important of these is the neak ta, a
spirit strongly associated with a specific natural feature — a rock, a tree, a
patch of soil. These spirits represent a village-based morality and are
inseparable from the land. This connection is so strong that in past times even
some kings were seen to be merely renting the land from neak ta.
Like those kings of old, Cambodia’s
deeply superstitious prime minister, Hun Sen, in power for almost three
decades, calls on land and water spirits to curse his enemies. Most Cambodians
today, while Buddhist, ply spirits with tea and buns at small altars.
These days, when neak ta appear on
the factory floor — inducing mass faintings among workers and shouting commands
at managers — they are helping the cause of Cambodia’s largely young, female
and rural factory workforce by registering a kind of bodily objection to the
harsh daily regimen of industrial capitalism: few days off; a hard bed in a
wooden barracks; meager meals of rice and a mystery curry, hastily scarfed down
between shifts. These voices from beyond are speaking up for collective
bargaining in the here and now, expressing grievances much like the workers’
own: a feeling that they are being exploited by forces beyond their control,
that the terms of factory labor somehow violate an older, fairer moral economy.
Early last year, I met a
31-year-old woman called Sreyneang, a worker at Canadia Industrial Park, west
of Phnom Penh. She had recently caused dozens of her co-workers to collapse
after speaking in the voice of a neak ta. While entranced, she had also
assaulted the president of the factory’s government-aligned union, pounding him
with her fists and pelting him with insults.
We chatted on the dirt floor of the
tiny wooden house where she lived; there was nowhere else to sit. She said she
had been feeling ill on the day of the fainting, and that the factory nurse had
refused to let her go home. She did not remember most of what had happened
next, but a spirit healer later explained that a neak ta had entered her,
infuriated that a banyan tree on the factory site which had been his home for
centuries was chopped down, with neither ritual propitiation nor apology,
during the construction of the building.
A few months after that event,
something similar happened at a sporting-goods factory near the capital that
was said to have been haunted ever since it opened in August 2012. Female
workers asked their supervisor, a man named Ah Kung, if they could hold a
ceremony and offer a chicken to a neak ta angered at being displaced from the
site. He refused. Two days later, the spirit entered the body of a young female
worker, Sreymom, and claiming, in her voice, to have been “looked down upon,”
began shouting in a mixture of Khmer and short, quick syllables her colleagues
took to be Chinese. Several dozen other workers lost consciousness and had to
be treated at a local clinic.
“When she was possessed, she just
pointed around everywhere,” one eyewitness explained afterward. “She said, ‘I
want to meet Ah Kung.’ She said, ‘I want to meet him because I lived here a
very long time and he never respected me and this is my land.”’ When Ah Kung
arrived, the bystander said, “He came out and knelt down in front of her and
offered whatever the neak ta asked.”
What the spirit was asking for was
respect. He demanded that an altar be built and that ritual offerings be made
to him there four times a month. He demanded that the owner roast a pig for him
and throw a Khmer New Year party for the workers. The owner complied. The
faintings stopped.
In other times and places,
ethnographers have also noted seemingly magical manifestations when indigenous
populations first confront industrial capitalism. As the manufacture of linen
intensified in northern Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries, household
spirits began to appear in textile workshops in a more malevolent form. There
was the story about the demonic imp Rumpelstiltskin, for example, who helped a
young woman spin grotesque amounts of thread, but only in exchange for her
firstborn. Other fairy tales sublimated the distress caused by the
environmental and social costs of intensified flax production. The
anthropologist Michael Taussig has written about Colombian peasants who were
newly incorporated into wage labor on sugar cane plantations in the 1970s and
reportedly sold their souls to the devil to increase their productivity.
Aihwa Ong, another anthropologist,
documented an outbreak of spirit possession in the 1970s among Malaysian women
in Japanese-owned electronics factories. These workers often screamed
hysterically and attacked their supervisors under the influence of a native
spirit called a datuk. Ms. Ong interpreted these acts as a spiritual rebellion
against the drudgery of factory life and the rupturing of the women’s
longstanding social ties as they migrated from villages to newly established
free-trade zones.
She also concluded that the spirit
visitations did the women little good because they allowed the factory owners
to cast the women’s valid complaints about working conditions as mass hysteria.
In Cambodia, the opposite seems to
be true. Like Ms. Ong’s subjects, the vast majority of garment workers here are
female and young. Many are the first generation in their families to work
outside their native rice-farming communities. They often send a large portion
of their wages back home, and feel both lucky to be able to do this and
desperate. “The conditions are terrible — very, very bad,” Sreyneang told me as
she described working six days a week to eke out $120 a month, without being
allowed to take days off even when sick. “The factory has always been really
strict.”
Despite efforts to diversify, the
garment industry in Cambodia still makes up around 80 percent of the country’s
total exports. Because the economy is so vulnerable to instability in the
sector, the government has often reacted harshly, even violently, to garment
workers’ efforts to unionize or take any collective action to ask for higher
wages. During recent demonstrations, on Jan. 2 and 3, striking workers at
Canadia Industrial Park and another factory near Phnom Penh were set upon by
soldiers and military police; at least four were killed and dozens were injured.
Cambodian workers frequently
complain that they are forced to work overtime and threatened when they try to
join independent unions rather than one of the many government- or
factory-backed unions that have sprung up over the past decade. (For an estimated
garment workforce of at least 450,000, by the International Labor
Organization’s tally, there are now over 400 unions, according to Solidarity
Center, an international labor rights group.) Pro-government and pro-factory
unions occupy most of the seats allotted to labor on the national committee
that determines wage increases, and their dominance complicates collective
bargaining.
In September 2010, when the
national minimum wage was $61 per month, some 200,000 workers took to the
streets to ask for a raise. It was the largest-ever strike in the garment
sector, but after just three days it came to an anticlimactic halt due to
police violence and threats against union leaders. Hundreds of the striking
workers were illegally fired in retaliation. The minimum wage remained the
same.
Then the neak ta appeared. Mass
faintings in garment factories increased exponentially in early 2011, just a
few months after the mass strike fizzled. Production lines shut down after the
workers’ bodies shut down, and spirits bargained with management on the factory
floor.
Public sentiment started to shift.
During the 2010 strikes, few seemed preoccupied with workers’ rights. Even the
foreign media and the Asian Development Bank’s chief economist wondered aloud
whether the workers’ demands would hurt the industry. But when the mass
faintings began, concern for the workers grew: Were they earning enough to feed
themselves? Were they being exposed to dangerous chemicals?
Since then, basic pay for garment
workers has risen from $61 to $80 per month, and is set to rise again to $100
in February. Numerous conferences on occupational health and safety have been
convened. Individual factories, the consortium of garment producers and mass
retailers like H&M have commissioned studies of working conditions in
Cambodian factories. Garment workers have started to receive monthly bonuses
for health and transportation.
Not all improvements can be
attributed to spirit visitations: The country’s six independent unions have
been fighting hard for wage increases. And working conditions still leave a
great deal to be desired; labor rights advocates say that $160 a month is the
minimum workers need to adequately feed and house themselves. But insofar as
conditions have gotten better, it is partly because the factory-floor faintings
have reframed the debate. The government’s brutal repression of this month’s
strike has shown that it will still not tolerate large-scale collective
bargaining. But mass swooning is a rare form of group action that can hardly be
suppressed.
And now neak ta have been showing
up to defend other victims of development. The spirits have appeared at
demonstrations and sit-ins organized by the political opposition, which has
been contesting the results of elections held in July, which kept Hun Sen’s
governing party in power. At protests against urban dispossession in Phnom
Penh, traditional animist curses are often levied at state institutions. Salt
and chilies are hurled at courthouses, chickens are offered to spirits, mediums
summon local gods to mete out justice in land disputes.
Last year, in a slum in Phnom Penh,
a demonstration by residents who were being evicted by a wealthy landlord was
interrupted when a neak ta possessed an indigent woman who lived under a
staircase with her mentally ill husband, both suffering from H.I.V. The woman
assaulted a local official who was trying to shut down the protest, forcing him
to stand down. Previously, the landlord had cut down an old banyan tree
believed to be the neak ta’s home.
“I have been protecting this area
for a long time,” the woman shouted, “and I am very angry because the company
demolished my house. I am very, very angry.”
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