If there is a space for ordinary people in the history of Cambodia, that space has been on the ground, beneath kings and monuments, in the distant background of glory and tragedy. Ordinary people remain placeless, nameless, voiceless, and invisible. But they existed. This thesis aims to redress such élitist historiography by introducing a different historical narrative that is fragmentary and episodic narratives of ordinary people. It explores the role of flesh-and-blood individuals, and the worlds they lived in and imagined, in Cambodia in the nineteenth-century, a period of radical change that remains comparatively unexamined, especially prior to the establishment of the French Protectorate in 1863.

The thesis excavates archival sources, including testimonial narratives and local literature, and pieces together such shards and fragments into vivid narratives of ordinary people who lived at the fringes of society yet traversed vast stretches of Cambodian territory. It is a quilt of the life-stories of individuals –of Khmer, Siamese, Vietnamese, and Chinese descent– who traveled, dreamed, adventured and agitated in order to make their lives better in the here-and-now felt and material world. In that sense, it is a quotidian history. But it is also a history of imagination and belief, and of how the visions of, and quests for, other worlds sustained the everyday practices and decisions of the extraordinary, common folk whose journeys are at the core of this thesis.

The thesis analyzes practices that deviated from élite Buddhist norms and were dismissed as immoral, superstitious, and irrational by authorities. Such practices have been similarly marginalized and neglected in histories of Cambodia. The thesis argues that these practices were more than a survival strategy. They offered a means to a better life rooted in the here-and-now.

The thesis also examines axes of connection between commoner and élites realms, and reveals significant worlds of difference between the commoners and the ruling élites in their motivations for supporting movements that challenged the status quo. One such movement was the rebellions led by Prince Votha in 1876-1890. The thesis offers a new lens on this rebellion, bringing to light the motivations of his supporters. It considers the temporary nature of historical events such as the Votha rebellion, against the permanent and continuous nature of story telling. In examining their testimonies and the multiple journeys they made, the thesis also challenges the primacy of the patron-client model in Southeast Asian studies. It shows that commoners exercised agency and mobility, and highlights the various factors that determined support for a patron, and that led commoners to switch allegiance from one patron to another, or to move from one village or town or kingdom, to another. The thesis further analyzes testimonies for rhetorical resistance to the imposition of French colonial rule. It also examines the tensions between narratives of the future (prophecy) and the past (as both legend, and history) in Khmer oral and written texts. Finally, it examines how rebels and their memories kept alive different ways of seeing and possibilities for being outside of the authority of the state.

In the 9th century CE, a vast polity centered on the region of Angkor was taking shape in what is today Cambodia and Northeast Thailand. At this time the polity's inhabitants, the Khmers, began to see themselves as members of a community of territorial integrity and shared ethnic identity. This sense of belonging, enshrined in the polity's name, Kambujadesa (i.e., Cambodia) or "the land of the descendants of Kambu," represents one of the most remarkable local cultural innovations in Southeast Asian history. However, the history and implications of early Cambodian identity have thus far been largely overlooked.

In this study I use the evidence from the Old Khmer and Sanskrit inscriptions to argue that Angkorian Cambodia (9th-15th centuries CE) was at its conceptual core an ethnic polity or a "nation"--an analytic category signifying, in Steven Grosby's words, an extensive "territorial community of nativity." The inscriptions of Cambodia's provincial elite suggest that the polity's autonomy and its people's common descent were widely disseminated ideals, celebrated in polity-wide myths and perpetuated in representations of the polity's foreign antagonists. I contend that this culture of territorial nativity contradicts the prevailing cosmological model of pre-modern politics in Southeast Asian studies, which assumes that polities before the 19th century were characterized by exaggerated royal claims to universal power and the absence of felt communities beyond extended family and religion. At the same time I seek to problematize standard historical accounts of the nation which fail to observe the affinity between territoriality and fictive kinship in select political cultures before the era of ideological nationalism.

This dissertation examines a significant subset of the premodern miniature Buddhist reliquaries—stūpika—found in Java, Indonesia to contribute granularity to our understanding 9th-11th century Javanese life. Methodologically, this project explores the productivity of leveraging an ecocritical lens to gain clarity around obscured histories. This approach, in our case, adds significant texture to our understanding of sites of manufacturing, cultural priorities and social power relations during a time of significant local change and across the flows of Monsoon Asia. Specifically, by examining stūpika from a variety of angles—as objects of space, of text, of iconography, of metal molds and of clay— this project allows stūpika to sketch their own ecology of meaning. This dissertation reads that stūpikaic space as a landscaped representation of the materialities impacting their creation. In doing so, this dissertation paints a picture of Java in which sites of metal and clay production were highly specialized but collaborative centers of tinkering. Further, this project highlights local, contemporary perspectives on Buddhism, architecture, iconography and gender roles. Together, stūpika reflect for our view all the complexities of this process of change at the hands of the many.