Hinton, Alexander L. Man or Monster?

Hinton opens his book with a thick description of the Tuol Sleng Museum in an essayistic style. Housed in a former school, later Duch’s S-21 prison, the Tuol Sleng Museum functions not only as a powerful lieu de mémoire, it also provides the People’s Republic of Kampuchea’s (PRK) official narrative of the atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge, presenting Tuol Sleng as “Cambodia’s Auschwitz” (14). Hinton pays special attention to the museum’s framing of the story and the various layers of representation in the exhibit. He is attentive to how the museum presents its story, in what context, and the ‘thick’ and ‘thin’ frames present throughout – ranging from literal picture frames to the PRK’s imposition of certain official narratives. Hinton considers “how Duch was ‘graffitied’ by participants and observers at his trial” (31), and later also in the museum, where his picture has been graffitied over by various visitors, adding an interactive – although technically illegal – aspect to the museum. Hinton productively revisits Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil, claiming it is “not just a failure to think in exceptional circumstances but part of our everyday thinking” (31), stressing in particular how Duch’s case says “something about all of us, a link suggested by Duch’s photo and these acts of defacement” (9). Hinton, in this dialogue with Arendt, proposes a consideration of “the banality of everyday thought” (35), pointing to the tendency to simplify and categorise a complex world in terms of ‘us’ versus ‘them’, ‘man’ versus ‘monster’, and challenges the oversimplified ways people tend to think about perpetrators. The rest of the book narrates Duch’s trial through an “ethnodramatic structure” (36), which he describes as “an ethnography that includes elements of dramatic structure and uses language and narrative structure to raise questions and evoke ambiguities that are often glossed over in expository writing” (35). The experimental style results in a book that considers Duch’s case through various different forms of writing – literary, theatrical, theoretical, legal, poetical, scholarly, and historical. The book is a piece of art that is both exploratory for the inexperienced reader and thorough for the seasoned Khmer Rouge expert. Hinton ends with the epilogue “Man or Monster” referred to in the title, where he considers the reductive simplicity and the implications of this question further, and argues for “afacement” (recognising complexity) rather than “effacement” (blurring complexity; 295) when dealing with these issues.

Author of this entry: Eline Reinhoud

Hinton, Alexander L. Man or Monster? The Trial of a Khmer Rouge Torturer (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2016).