Book Review: Media Ruins

Media Ruins: Cambodian Postwar Media Reconstruction and the Geopolitics of Technology, by Margaret Jack (2023). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Margaret Jack’s Media Ruins is a historically grounded ethnography that sheds light on the media reconstruction efforts of a generation of cultural producers in postwar Cambodia. The text documents how various forms of media—both old and new, digital and analog—captivate the imagination of social and political life in the region. Jack employs historical and ethnographic methods to examine how the weight of history influences Cambodia’s contemporary political landscape through online resource sharing and the public consumption of radio and film. In doing so, the book explores the emotional relationship that these creators have with their work against the historical backdrop of political turmoil and growing information control in Cambodia.   

The book is divided into two sections. The first section (comprising Chapters 1-3) guides readers through the history of radio and film cultures from 1955 through the 1990s, skillfully demonstrating the crucial links between media infrastructures and formal politics. The next section (comprising Chapters 4-6) provides a varied account of media commemoration projects based predominantly on Jack’s ethnographic explorations of the arts and technology communities of Phnom Penh. What binds these sections together is what the author has conceptualized as infrastructural restitution: “the creative reconstruction of historical media artefacts and infrastructures, as a way to access positive affect about the national past and work toward political action” (2). Each chapter in the book provides an empirical basis to this conceptual framing. As a particular form of work, the practices of infrastructural restitution take on varied meanings in the context of postwar Cambodia. The book thus carefully highlights how creative reconstruction practices unravel the intricate overlapping of work, memory, and political action in post-conflict settings such as contemporary Cambodia.

In the Introduction, Jack shows how media and political power in Cambodia have historically been intertwined. Here, she makes two important theoretical observations. First, in describing the nature of restitution by media-makers in Cambodia as infrastructural, she situates her work within the broader scholarship on the anthropology of infrastructure, information and communication technology, and science and technology studies. Her argument emphasizes restitution as a specific kind of work, characterized by care, which is often overlooked by both the state and the general public. Second, within the tumultuous political arc of Cambodia as a nation-state, which has experienced regimes of authoritarianism and geopolitical struggles over the decades, the very act of reconstructing media represents practices of memory-making; Media Ruins, in this regard, demonstrates how past traumas are integral to shaping contemporary political life.

In Chapter 1, Jack emphasizes the value of utilizing an infrastructural lens to study historical media legacies, in how these shape contemporary political life in Cambodia. The investment of the United States Information Service (USIS) in film and radio between 1955 to 1963 signaled the struggle for control over these media infrastructures. Trends in media governance, such as foreign investment from organizations such as the USIS, provide the critical context for the reconstruction narratives explored in this chapter. Tracing collaboration between Norodom Sihanouk (the then-king and -head of state of Cambodia) and the United States—which culminated in a rupture of economic ties and Sihanouk’s increasing media manipulation through censorship and political film projects—marks a defining moment in Cambodia’s geopolitical history. Relying on a rich set of archival materials, Jack pays particular attention to the training of media specialists to address the conditions in which foreign influences and local political aspirations co-existed, only for ties to ultimately be severed. The preconditions that Cambodian artists had to navigate included not only foreign investment (from the likes of the United States and China) but also Sihanouk’s own brand of authoritarianism. While programs for radio and film often featured shifting agendas and perspectives, Cambodian media infrastructures were actively contested by various national and international actors, making the work of restitution and recovery deeply urgent.

In subsequent chapters, Jack depicts two different modalities of infrastructural restitution. In Chapter 2, Jack focuses on a group of interlocutors, who—during the communist People’s Republic of Kampuchea (PRK) period, from 1979 to 1991—occupied peculiar positions as state-media workers. Part of their responsibilities involved fixing radios, cinema equipment, and other media objects. By extension, this meant fixing history and, as a result, engaging in the affective labor of aspiring to return the country to a “normal” state—that is, to periods in Cambodian history that had been marked by less political violence. Jack does well to highlight how this labor of reconstruction amounted to an inward-looking and personal project for these workers, in addition to being a more typical example of nationalism-infused mass mediation.

If the reconstruction of media through the work of these creators lent itself to the reconstruction of history, Chapter 3 problematizes the ahistorical processes of reconstruction carried out during the transition to “a more democratic and neoliberal environment” (85). Focusing on the theme of violence, this chapter traces the story of Radio UNTAC (United Nations Transition Authority Cambodia)—a non-state media outlet that emerged after the downfall of the Khmer Rouge—and its rejection of the historical ties between politics and media in Cambodia. In many ways, the chapter demonstrates how Radio UNTAC depicts a lack of restitution, given its ahistorical character and the violence that comes to define processes of restitution through distribution and general foreign interference. Focused on UNTAC and its afterlives of media transition, Jack alludes to how processes of democratization affected ordinary citizens in an uneven manner. While this chapter does present a counterpoint to restitution, it stops short of conceptualizing the precise stakes of studying violence in the wake of politico-economic transitions of media infrastructures at large.

Media Ruins methodologically pivots to the ethnography of reconstruction work in the next section of the book. In Chapter 4, Jack focuses on the work of Roung Kon, a group of architects that has documented heritage cinemas “during the extraordinary time of the arts” (p. 111), which began in 1953 with the independence from France and lasted until 1970, when the ensuing civil war led to the rise of the Khmer Rouge. According to Jack, these spaces encapsulate media ruins, or technological environments that reflect a complex affective relationship among art spaces, memories, and political histories of violence. By conceptually expanding the notion of ruins beyond mere sites of past violence, Jack’s ethnography with members of Roung Kon illustrates how these spaces embody multiple temporalities and, in doing so, contribute to the work of future-building. Members of Roung Kon perform this labor in the context of rapid urban development and information control in Phnom Penh. The work of infrastructural restitution, therefore, acquires more subtle forms of political action through these acts of reconstruction.

In the penultimate chapter of the book, Jack cites another example of infrastructural restitution to probe the relationship between media and memory. Focusing on a group of young film collectors called Preah Sorya (translating to “Sun God”), this chapter illuminates the significance of preserving and showcasing the work of artists that had been lost during past periods of war. In utilizing the recurring theme of infrastructural restitution, Jack shows how reconstruction work becomes important for a generation of media makers to commemorate both peace and violence, despite the fact that they did not live through all these historical periods themselves. The numerous films that Preah Sorya screens are full of what Jack calls “disintegration noise”—the material distortion to media artefacts in the form of blurs and editorial inconsistencies. In foregrounding this disintegration noise, and therefore the material dimension of media objects, Jack’s ethnography reveals how moments in history are captured and commemorated through acts of restitution within media infrastructures, which themselves are also rapidly in transition.

In exploring the historical passage from analog to digital realms, the sixth and final chapter of the book examines new media creators and the role of online platforms within the global landscape of techno-capitalism in Cambodia and beyond. Cultural celebration becomes a key emotional component for Jack’s interlocutors who run Facebook pages and other online repositories. Projects of digital archiving that may have differing forms of restitution (such as the Bophana Center App-Learning on Khmer Rouge History and Amazing Cambodia) highlight newer ways in which Cambodia’s past, present, and future are recorded and archived in platforms that are accessible worldwide.

In sum, Jack’s book serves as a timely reminder of the often-invisible nature of reconstruction work undertaken by communities in the aftermath of violence. The emphasis on media, both analog and digital, as a site for exploring these questions effectively intertwines the concepts of time and materiality that are inscribed in these cultural artifacts. While the book remains focused on examining various facets of this conceptual trope, scholars of media studies and anthropologists of work and science and technology will no doubt find this text insightful.

Author Biography

Rohan Sengupta is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Anthropology at New York University. His research utilizes ethnographic, archival, and multimodal methods to study news production, disinformation, and digital politics in contemporary India.