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“The Pretas are coming” 3

humans. During this ‘dark fortnight’ of the waning moon, the pretas search for gifts of
food that their living relatives and descendants are supposed to leave them at Buddhist
temples. They are supposed to search in at least seven temples during this period; if
they find food, they will give their blessings. If, on the other hand, they find nothing
and return to hell as hungry as when they left, they may choose to curse their
descendants, so that they will share in the ghost’s hunger and desperation. If they
cannot eat together, the ghosts will ensure that they at least starve together. Pretas are
manifestations of deep need, and obligate giving. Pchum Ben is the one holiday a year in
which gifts may be given to the pretas.

During the Fall festival of Pchum Ben, people from the cities crowd buses, cars,
and small motorcycles to travel along the muddy dirt roads back to the villages of their
birth. Almost no one in Cambodia has lived off the farm for more than a generation,
and nearly all can identify an agricultural village somewhere in the countryside as
‘theirs.’ In 2005, I was crammed into a minibus with fifteen others, mostly elderly
women and men, traveling from the city to the countryside for the festival. Villagers
lined the roads to watch the buses and cars rush by, and often shouted comments like
these: “The pretas are coming! The pretas are coming! This bus is full of really old pretas!
Hey youngster, make sure that those old ghosts don’t grab you!” And then the villagers
laughed at us without smiling.
At first I laughed too, but quickly realized that none of my fellow pilgrims found
it funny. Instead, their faces fell. Some were angry, but most seemed hurt and dejected.
A friend of mine with whom I was traveling kept saying, “They’re so angry at us. They
really want us to go back home.” If the riders in my minibus didn’t laugh, the folks
standing on the side of the road—skinny shirtless men, older women in faded sarongs,
young naked children with taut bellies and reddish hair—more than made up for our
lack of delight.
When country folk greet their city relatives—who spend all but the most
important religious festivals of the year far away from their birth country—as pretas,
what are they doing? Why is this joke funny to rural Cambodians, and why in the
world would they want to denigrate and humiliate the very people who are bringing
the food, money, and gifts that make their village festivals so enjoyable? I believe the
answer lies in the economic relationships between these two groups, and the differing
!"#e &retas are co-in01 2

3a4s in 3#ic# social e6c#an0e is i-a0ined8 9e need first to understand t#e s4-bols
t#at are bein0 deplo4ed> and t#eir conte6t8
? intend to s#o3 t#at t#e @e4 to understandin0 t#is jo@e lies in understandin0 t#e
social i-a0ination of a functionin0 0ift econo-4 e-bedded in t#e festival of !c#um Ben8
"#is 0eneral econo-4 is suffused 3it# fluctuatin0 po3erCbased relations#ipsD &roper
0ivin0 is represented as t#e return of a previousl4 received 0ift> and e-p#asiEes ongoing
reciprocit48 "#e receiver can be #u-iliated unless ac@no3led0ed as t#e source of a prior
0ift> or if s#e or #e is incapable of reciprocatin08 ?n -odern Fa-bodia t#e cit4 is often
seen to refuse t#e obli0ation to reciprocate or ac@no3led0e t#e source of its 3ealt#8 ?n
suc# a situation> t#e deni0ration of 0ifts or 0ivers can #elp control t#e status t#at
e-er0es fro- 0ifts 0iven 3it#out reciprocation8 ? 3ill s#o3 t#at t#is #olds true bot# in
unritualiEed social interactions> suc# as t#e jo@e> and in t#e reli0ious i-a0ination of
!c#um Ben and pretas> and t#at t#e t3o infor- and s#ape eac# ot#er8

Pchum Ben
"#e #istor4 of !c#um Ben in Fa-bodia is unclear8 ?ts le0endar4 ori0ins are
assi0ned to t#e ?ndian @in0 Gi-bisara> 3#o rei0ned durin0 t#e ti-e of t#e Gudd#a and
3as @illed b4 #is o3n sonH its practice appears to be uniIue to Fa-bodia8J So-e
Fa-bodians assert t#at nineteent# centur4 @in0 Ln0 Muon0 reestablis#ed t#e festival
b4 reducin0 t#e period of t#e festival fro- t#e entire t#ree -ont#s of t#e rain4 season to
its current len0t# of onl4 fifteen da4s8 Ln0 Muon0Ns successor> Oin0 Porodo-> si0ned
t#e treat4 of t#e protectorate 3it# t#e Qrenc#> placin0 Fa-bodia under Qrenc#
supervision8 Rnder t#e Qrenc#> Fa-bodian -one4 ca-e to #ave its -odern 3ordD loy>
na-ed after t#e 4ouis d67r coins of t#e ancien regime82 Sver since t#e ti-e of Oin0
Porodo-> state institutions #ave steadil4 increased t#eir institutin0 and or0aniEin0
po3er at t#e villa0e level8 "#is #as resulted in everCe6pandin0 Ti-a0ined co--unitiesN
of reciprocit4 un-atc#ed b4 t#e e6pansion of actual reciprocit4 bet3een count4 and
cit48 "#e classic econo-ic proble- of Tto3n and countr4N is per#aps Fa-bodiaNs -ost
persistent -odern dile--a8

J
Si-ilar 0#ostCfestivals occur t#rou0#out F#ina 3it# i-portant differences8 See Step#en Q8 "eiser> T#e
g#ost festi:al in medie:al C#ina U&rinceton> VWXXY8
2
?n contrast> -odern Fa-bodian currenc4 is ter-ed riel> after t#e -iniscule fis# are cau0#t and
processed into Fa-bodiaNs -ost i-port source of protein> pra#ok8
“The Pretas are coming” 5

Pretas embark on epic journeys during the festival period, from hell to the
villages of their relatives. But they are not the only ones going on pilgrimages. It is
expected that all good Cambodians will return to the villages of their birth for Pchum
Ben, or at least for the final day, known as Pchum, or the day of gathering. Since Pchum
should be celebrated in one’s home village, the holiday involves massive evacuations of
cities to agricultural birth villages (srok kamnaert). Although the vast majority of
Cambodia’s monetized wealth is concentrated in the cities, over eighty percent of the
population remains in the countryside. Families from the city make great efforts to give
to the limits of their ability when they journey back to the villages. They don’t come
empty-handed: they bring food, treats, bread, and rice. If they are indeed wealthy, they
will often arrange in advance to donate sums of money or expensive ritual implements
for the temple ceremonies, and will hire a tent for a catered meal for themselves and a
few of their country relatives on the temple grounds, after the ceremony. In return, they
occupy the major roles in communally performed rituals, sit in the best places, receive
more attention from the high ranking monks, and eat delicious meals in catered tents,
around which children and hungry adults wait for leftovers.
These human pilgrimages back and forth between city and village are
undertaken in a spirit of generosity, in order to serve one’s poor dead relatives and
one’s home village, but the economic and social distinctions between the city and the
village are also points of contention. The generous gifts to the countryside’s dead from
the city are highly symbolic. They return the countryside’s wealth without
acknowledging it.
Pchum Ben means ‘the gathering of the rice balls,’ and occurs during the waning
moon. The first fourteen days are technically referred to as the days of dak ben or kan
ben, placing or carrying of the rice balls. Traditionally many villages would share only a
few temples, and the village chiefs consult with the temple committees to arrange for
‘turns,’ or ven, during which each village makes an appearance at the temple during
different days of the festival. The last day, Pchum, is the day when everyone attends a
their primary temple—chosen by individual families, usually on the basis of a history of
ordination or cremation—at the same time.
These practices of segmentary and shifting solidarity place us within the realm of
the gift economy. In Marcel Mauss’s classic exposition, societies organized by the gift
“The Pretas are coming” 6

impose three positive obligations: to give, to receive, and to return.5 Mauss’ primary
examples were of societies in which gift economies were most explicit in rituals
articulating the relationship between two social groups, such as clans. During Pchum
Ben, the first fourteen days can be seen to represent a segmentary solidarity of the ‘clan’
type—larger than the household, but smaller than the largest solidarity group. Within
each clan smaller, less formalized forms of giving may also be found. In Cambodia, this
is found in the household, and its extension via familial networks: the radical idiom of
reciprocity is imagined as kinship, ‘kin of the same flesh.’ (sach nhiet).
In the Cambodian imagination, this finds its expression in the dependence of the
living on the blessings from the dead—ancestral satisfaction and gifts are the explicit
prerequisite for the agricultural fertility on which wealth is based, even for over eighty
percent of modern-day Khmers. But Pchum Ben here has a difficulty. The ancestral
spirits with which it deals are not satisfied ancestors, but pretas – hungry ghosts. In the
Buddhist texts, the gift of merit to a preta is made at feasts through the intervention of a
Buddhist monk: the monk receives a gift of food; merit is made as a result of that gift,
and the monk assigns that merit to the spirit. The spirit is in turn immediately
transformed into a heavenly or worldly spirit, capable of giving the blessings of fertility
to their living descendants.6
While this bond of reciprocity through relationship is both practically and
symbolically strong, there are a number of ambiguities in the formulation, which result
in a particular vision of general reciprocity. Cambodians normally express a certain
agnosticism regarding their relatives’ status after death—they often have no reason to
suppose that deceased relatives have been reborn as pretas, but give in case they have
been. Here we see the image of a generalized reciprocity. Food and merit must be given
to relatives. Pchum Ben obligates giving to relatives, even if they are dead, and even if
we cannot know if they really are in need. This is another expression of Lewis Hyde’s

5
Marcel Mauss, The gift: the form and reason for exchange in archaic societies (New York & London, 1990
[1950]). It may be helpful to the reader to note that my reading of Mauss is deeply influenced by his
reception via Bataille and Clastres. See Georges Bataille, The accursed share, Robert Hurley trans., 3 vols.,
vol. 1 (New York, 1989), Georges Bataille, The accursed share, 3 vols., vol. 2-3 (New York, 1993), Georges
Bataille, "The notion of expenditure," in Visions of excess. Selected writings, ed. Georges Bataille (Minnesota,
1985), Pierre Clastres, Society against the state (New York, 1987 [1974]).
6
There is an excellent review of this process in David Gordon White, "Dakkhina and Agnicayana: an
extended application of Paul Mus's typology," History of Religions 26 (1986).
“The Pretas are coming” 7

formulation: “The gift must always move”: Regardless of need, gifts must be given,
received, and returned.7
This generalized reciprocity is expressed in other ways. In addition to feeding
and making merit on behalf of specific, and often named, deceased relatives,
participants are expected to offer something for all of their deceased relatives, “up to
the seventh generation.” Since relatives of the seventh generation are almost by
definition complete strangers, this formula is in fact a way of expressing kinship with
potentially anyone and everyone.
During Pchum Ben there are two different forms of giving which entail different
imaginary configurations of exchange. First is the daytime ceremony of chanting
pansukul, a mortuary chant for the dead. In this offering, gifts of food are given to
Buddhist monks. Names of specific dead relatives are usually attached to these
offerings, and the monk will chant pansukul for the dead, transforming the gift into
merit that will help the deceased achieve a better rebirth in the future. The ceremony is
solemn, and the monks’ participation is required—without the monk, the merit will not
be received by the pretas. This ceremony is usually performed in family groups.
The second type of giving is the bawh bay ben ceremony. This is a night-time
ceremony, usually beginning around three-thirty or four in the morning. In stark
contrast to the pansukul, the tenor of the bawh bay ben ceremony is festive, even gleeful.
All participants gather at one time, usually at the eastern door of the main sanctuary,
and parade around the sanctuary three times, throwing balls of rice and splashing
water into the ground and mud surrounding the vihear. Monks have little to no role in
this ceremony, and the names of the dead are not necessarily specified.
We can summarize the major differences between the two practices in the
following ways: The pansukul performances emphasize the position of the monk as
intermediary, and gifts given to the monks are transformed into merit given to the
spirits. Pansukul is respectful of the pretas, treating them largely in their ancestral aspect.
Pansukul is the celebration of a general reciprocity in which relationships are conceived
of through kinship, and in practice, specific, hierarchically-imagined relationships. Gifts
given in such relationships compel return, and are celebrated in confidence of the
mutual respect involved in the relations.

7
Lewis Hyde, The gift: imagination and the erotic life of property (New York, 1983).
“The Pretas are coming” 8

Bawh bay ben, on the other hand, emphasizes interaction with the spirits
unmediated by the monks. It alleviates the hunger which defines the preta, and can be
described as disrespectful of the spirits, in so far as the activities of bawh bay ben
emphasize their disgusting position, and throws their offerings into the mud and filth,
where the pretas will search for their sustenance. Bawh bay ben is then the enactment,
rather than the celebration, of a generalized reciprocity. It expresses in its mode the
resentment of the living for the greedy dead, who cannot be counted on to return the
gift of fertility to those who feed them now. A similar resentment of the living, who
cannot or will not reciprocate, can also be discerned.

note: one more set of pretas

It might be helpful to look at one other group of living human beings who are
explicitly called living pretas. These are beggars. Beggars often go to the city from the
countryside during festival seasons, when ritual attendees are feeling expansive and
more willing to ‘make a little merit’ by giving small amounts of food or currency to
these poor. Like the pretas in scripture, beggars hang around the thresholds and outer
gates of Buddhist temples, and their poverty comes from their lack of access to the
activities of farming, herding, trading, or power in the monetized economy. As a result,
they too must rely on those who have such access, and who, by entering the ritual space
created during Pchum Ben, are obliged to give to their ‘relatives,’ both those close to
them, and those of the seventh generation. Beggars may receive gifts, but little merit is
thought to accrue to the giver as a result. The gift confirms the distance in social status,
but does so without reference to any religious or cosmological justification such as the
concept of kamma or merit. From elderly women to street children, they crowd around
the walls of temples, and beg for charity from those entering.

Flows of wealth in modern Cambodia

Cambodia is a “Least Developed Country,” and although much has been made
of the fact that poverty is decreasing when taken nationally, inequality is also rising
faster than poverty is falling. These inequalities are seen most clearly in the relative
calorie intake levels in the city and the country, and in the flows of newly free labor
from the un-developing rural areas to the cities.8

8
Independent Evaluation Group, "Engaging with fragile states. An IEG review of World Bank Support to
Low-Income Countries Under Stress," (Washington, DC, 2006).
“The Pretas are coming” 9

Cambodia’s wealth leaves the countryside and forests for the city in timber, rice,
soybeans, corn, and young workers. As opportunities for subsistence agricultural work
disappear along with the forests, migration to the cities accelerates. The highest profile
workers are young women who enter into Cambodia’s most profitable sector, the
garment industry.
The material wealth of the city is possible only through its extraction from the
countryside. Cambodia possesses no heavy productive industry. There has been no
effort to create a domestic market for Cambodian produced goods, which means that
the garment factories function as an export-processing zone, the labor-added value of
Cambodian women enriches the managers and owners of the factories, who either live
in the cities or outside of Cambodia entirely. Wealth remains in the cities, for the most
part. What wealth returns to the countryside does so in small familial flows, as women
in the garment factories remit almost their entire salaries—often going hungry
themselves—to their families.
The cities of Cambodia are not a ‘rising tide lifting all boats,’ but a tidal wave of
wealth that drowns the countryside while engorging the cities with wealth, workers,
and beggars. All year long, wealth flows from the country to the city, along with young
women and men looking for better ways to support their families back home and
willing to make enormous sacrifices to do it. These flows of labor and wealth go
unritualized but not unnoticed. When the folks in the city return to the country for
festivals, the happiness of the reunion can often be complicated by a certain amount of
resentment. From the point of view of the countryside, it appears that the bonds of
mutual reciprocity have been undone, and that the cities exist only receive from the
countryside.
The families from the city, on the other hand, see their Pchum Ben gifts as a mark
of their generosity, which should be acknowledged and appreciated by those needy
relatives who receive them, whether those relatives are deceased pretas or poor country
relations. Their food and gifts do go a long way to help create a sense of solidarity,
familial love, and trust, which might otherwise be strained by the tyranny of distance,
the length of absence and the gulf in lifestyles. During the two weeks of Pchum Ben, the
direction of wealth is reversed, like the Tonle Sap river which reverses its flow twice a
year, drawing the waters of the Mekong into the giant inland lake that provides sixty
percent of Cambodia’s protein consumption.
“The Pretas are coming” 10

At the end of the appointed period, wealth and power flows away again.
Economically, this is reflected in the reverse pilgrimages of vans and land cruisers to the
city. Religiously, Cambodians say farewell to their deceased relatives, who now return
to the world from whence they came. But as the joke around which this paper is
organized suggests, the ritualization of the city’s gifts does not mean that villagers have
forgotten what makes that generosity possible, and they appear intent on making sure
that the ultimate sources of wealth are remembered by all.

Creating kin and unmasking charity

The obligations of Pchum Ben are fairly clear: gifts of food and merit are to be
given to all seven generations of relatives, and such gifts must be accepted. In return,
the recipients must bless the givers. The wealth given by the city in the gifting rituals of
Pchum Ben are rooted in the un-ritualized flows of wealth and labor from the
countryside to the cities, where commerce, wage labor, and monetized exchange create
the wealth that is only partially returned in gifts. In Pchum Ben a gift economy
temporarily replaces the free-market economy that drives the inequities of modern-day
Cambodia.
This gift economy is imagined to encompass all one’s relatives, even those one
doesn’t know are relatives—the seven generations. Part of Pchum Ben’s communal labor
then, is the imagination of all participants as relatives, kin to whom mutual obligations
are owed, not out of formal obligations, but because they are kin. A large part of the
activity of creating this ritual solidarity is the creation and maintenance of kinship
relations through giving. This practice has often been called ‘fictive kinship.’
Fictive kinship is a form of imaginary solidarity. It may or may not lead to real
solidarity, but it is a means of expressing a moral and social relationship among people
that is understood to not be explicitly or formerly acknowledged. There are at least two
forms of imagined kinship during Pchum Ben. First, people imagine their dead relatives
coming to beg for food. Second, in our joke, rural Cambodian imagine their city-
dwelling relatives as these same hungry ghosts, coming to the countryside.
This joke relies on an explicit reversal of the ritual imagination: those who
receive in ritual context are the ones who should be, and are normally, metaphorized as
pretas. When city families visit their birth villages laden with gifts and offerings, they
should be seen as the givers, and the recipients, their country families, as the pretas. And
“The Pretas are coming” 11

indeed, for the most part, the resemblances are more than metaphorical: the Food and
Agricultural Organization of the United Nations routinely notes the disparity in food
consumption between the cities and the countryside, where malnutrition results in the
swollen bellies, thin stringy hair, and tattered clothing that describe the pretas of myth.
At least a part of our joke relies on the reversal of categories.
Imagining one’s city relatives as pretas implies that they are themselves instead
the recipients of generosity. Perhaps this refers to the wealth the cities receive all year
long from the countryside. There is in this joke an application of the religious
imagination to solve a problem that the ritual cannot. The ritual may redistribute some
wealth, and destroy more, but families from the city remain significantly wealthier than
their relatives in the country. Since violence is rarely an acceptable means of
redistributing wealth in Cambodian culture, the gifts given by wealthy relatives can at
the very least be denigrated. Indeed, it is the violent hunger and endless greed of
corrupt officials and businesspeople which earns them, in other situations, the
metaphorization of the preta.
Recipients in such a situation may choose not to celebrate the gift: instead
accepting with one hand what they deride with the other. 9 In an essay called “What
makes Indians laugh,” Pierre Clastres noted that jokes deriding socially powerful
people are funny precisely because of their derision, and the resolution of social
contradictions that such transgressions attempt to accomplish:
The contradiction between the imaginary world of the myth and the real
world of everyday life is resolved when one recognizes in the myths a
derisive intent: the [Indians] do in mythical life what is forbidden them in
real life….For the Indians, it is a matter of challenging, of demystifying in
their own eyes the fear and the respect [that they are supposed to
display].10
If Clastres’ subjects do in mythical life what is forbidden them in real life, rural
Khmers appear to be saying in real life what is forbidden them in ritual life: the
denigration of the charity of the city. They are insisting, instead on a number of things:
They are the real givers; They have already returned the gift; and that the status that is
conferred on the ritual givers during Pchum should be reversed. This amounts to an

9
Precisely this problem was dealt with in Richard Lee’s famous essay on the denigration of gifts. See
Richard Lee, "Eating Christmas in the Kalahari," Natural History 78 (1969).
10
Clastres, Society against the state. , p. 145.
“The Pretas are coming” 12

attempt to contain the effects of the ritual’s imagining of the social world by inverting
the roles.
And judging by the reaction of my fellow passengers on the bus, the message
was received.
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