By Cal State Long Beach welcomed back alumnus James Tyner on Thursday to discuss his geographical studies about the Cambodian Genocide.
Tyner, who is now a professor at Kent State University in northeast Ohio, delivered a lecture titled “Mapping Phnom Penh During the Cambodian Genocide” in the Beach Auditorium.
During the event, hosted by CSULB’s geography and anthropology departments, Tyner discussed his research on the city of Phnom Penh, Cambodia, as well as the concept of “urbicide,” an organized destruction of cities.
Approximately 1.7 million people lost their lives during the Cambodian Genocide, which lasted from 1975 to 1979, according to the Cambodian Genocide Program at Yale University.
According to Tyner, most literary experts believed Phnom Penh was a ghost town from 1975 to 1979. He said, however, that he found out through his research that Phnom Penh actually had an extensive, functional and spatial economy.
Tyner said that during the genocide, the Communist Party of Kampuchea and its followers, the Khmer Rouge, controlled Phnom Penh. Nevertheless, the city’s economy was far from communist.
“They were not a socialist state but a capitalist state,” he said. “They would produce for exchange, then have a surplus through rationing.”
Through a grant from the National Science Foundation, Tyner said he was able to conduct his research on the mapping of Phnom Penh and track down important locations that stimulated the city’s economy, such as hospitals and factories.
“Most of the history there is undocumented,” said Tyner, who has traveled to multiple Asian countries, including the Philippines, Thailand and China for his research efforts. “The only way to find out what happened is to interview the people that experienced it.”
Deborah Thien, a geography professor, said she was glad to see Tyner visit.
“He’s an accomplished professor who has written 13 books and is an [alumnus] of [CSULB],” she said.
The most notable of Tyner’s 13 books is “War, Violence, and Population: Making the Body Count,” which received the Association of American Geographer’s Meridian Book Award for Outstanding Scholarly Contribution to Geography. The book focuses on how population is regulated through mass violence.
Thien said that Tyner’s research is noteworthy and should be of interest to all.
“The whole event says a whole lot about the people [of Phnom Penh],” she said.
Tyner said he hopes that his lecture and research shed new light on an unseen subject.
“I want people to see the day-to-day activities in this city,” Tyner said. “This is an opportunity to change the understanding of the [Cambodian] Genocide itself.”
