Life Deferred: Rethinking Funerary Care Through Cambodia’s Mortuary Arts and Hierarchies of Death

This essay focuses on two funerals in Siem Reap, Cambodia, that were delayed. I argue that the hierarchical authority pervading people’s lives persists after their deaths, and that mortuary practices of caring for the dead, including musical and sounded practices, are thought to augment, diminish, or defer the dead’s new lives. Music and sound articulate with understandings of temporality at multiple scales as Cambodian Buddhists engage in funerary ritual to produce status and prompt reincarnation, establishing ‘hierarchies of death’ in which some dead are valued over others. I show how politically contentious discourses of genocide remembrance intersect with funerals’ sounds, performances, and timing, plus gender politics and macro-political posturing, demonstrating that one’s status in life and circumstances of death determine who is ‘grievable’, in Judith Butler’s terms, and whose new lives are deferred indefinitely.