Human Sciences Encounters In Phnom Penh

Geography in popular music of the Cambodian Golden Age helped rural and urban Cambodians engage with the country's process of independence. Popular music of this era addressed provincial boundaries by affirming landscapes of Cambodia such as rivers, mountains, that brought Cambodians towards a geographical awareness of "Srok Khmer." See more

You are interested by Cambodia, its changes, the effects of the presence of international organizations, the interactions between a vast network of socio-culturally diverse actors, between heterogeneous ways of acting and thinking ? This book is for you ! From an anthropological study conducted on the role, meaning, effects, issues and contradictions of the participation of « expert patients » in the fight against AIDS, this book highlights the local interpretation of international norms and the challenges of health democracy in the context of Cambodia

When did Cambodia begin to see itself as a Khmer kingdom? When did it start to consistently portray Ayutthaya and Bangkok as Thai kingdoms? Did it see Vietnam as Vietnamese? In this presentation of ongoing research, the appearances of ethnonyms such as “Khmer,” “Thai,” “Yuan,” and “Cham” are analyzed in a selection of Khmer chronicle texts dating from the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth centuries. See more.

In Southern countries many women are still dying from illegal and harmful abortion practices. In some of these countries, access to the legal abortion pill is considered a progress towards women’s health and women’s rights. In Cambodia, one of these methods is commonly called the ‘Chinese pill’, a combination of mifepristone and misoprosol used for its contraceptive and abortifacient effects. This is one of the "non-registered" drugs by the Cambodian Ministry of Health. Chinese pills are sold in pharmacies but they can also be found in markets, often sold by street vendors, rural practitioners as well as DJs working in karaoke. See more Here you can download the prezi of the conference

A sociological theory of ‘reintegration’ is proposed for Khmer female victims of sex-trafficking and sexual violence and locally derived benchmarks for assessing reintegrative success. Employing Grounded Theory Methodology, 53 qualitative interviews were undertaken between August 2010 and May 2012. These explored the perspectives of formerly ‘reintegrated’ recipients of assistance and others they considered important to reintegration. See more

This research project has been conducted in Benin and Ghana since May 2014. It is about to start in Cambodia. The overall research objective is to study the global pharmaceutical drug market, especially regulation, production, distribution, consumption and uses of medicines. Artemisinin-based combination therapies are considered as a point of entry as they are pharmaceuticals used to treat a common and recurrent disease, generally perceived by the people in Benin and Ghana as relatively benign. Self-medication is common to cure what the people called malaria. In Cambodia, however, malaria is not a widespread problem, it concerned people who cross or live in tropical forest areas. The study in Cambodia is focused on pdassaï, a more widely spread disease which means « common cold » and/or « flu » in khmer. See more

Dr Benny Widyono comes from Indonesia and is currently a professor of Economics at the University of Connecticut in Stamford Ct USA. He worked 5 years in Cambodia: 1991-1993 at United Nation Transitional Government of Cambodia (UNTAC)’s governor of Siem Reap province and 1994-1997 at the United Nation Secretary General’s Political representative to the Royal government of Cambodia, 1994-1997. His book entitled Dancing in shadows: Sihanouk, the Khmer rouge and the United Nation in Cambodia has been translated into Khmer and Chinese.

When discussing Pol Pot as the embodiment of a regime or Pol Pot as a person, most people in Cambodia would start by describing the atrocity of a regime under which about 1.7 million people perished violently from 1975 to 1979. Yet Pol Pot and his followers claimed that what they did was first and foremost to protect the nation: their crimes partly disguised behind the banner of their deep nationalistic sentiment.  See more

 The purpose of this paper is to revisit my investigation related to birth control and maternal reduction program in Cambodia in exploring its production of social forms, identities and “boundaries of the human” See more

The study explores the concept of the ‘right to the city’ from a Social Geographer’s perspective. As the capital of Cambodia, Phnom Penh has experienced drastic physical and social changes since the end of the civil war in the late 1990s. At the same time, slums and informal settlements have been affected by economic development and pressure on prime real estate demand. See more

Development agencies which address climate change adaptation (CCA) are increasingly adopting human rights based approaches (HRBA) to guide their work. What, however, does that entail in practice? This qualitative case study examines whether and how development NGOs understand and apply HRBA. We specifically explore the themes of participation, transparency, accountability, and non-discrimination as it relates to CCA programming. We examine how NGOs in Cambodia are addressing and implementing right-based approaches to climate change, and what the experiences and implications are from these efforts.  See more

The second decade of the 21st century is characterized by a lively debate about the future of Cambodian graduates and higher education in Cambodia after the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) in 2015. In fact, the initial initiative of AEC 2015 is founded on a vision of a single market and production base for ASEAN member states, and the free flow of skilled labor across the region is one of the five core elements of the ASEAN integration. See more

This lecture is an exploration of Cambodian high society during the French colonial period. It focuses on Thiounn, the « Palace Minister » (1864-1946), a biography. A Study of a social milieu and a prosopography of the Khmer administrative elite at the time of the Treaty of the French Protectorate (1863) until Cambodia’s Independence (1953). See more

This lecture explores how forced evictions affect displaced women’s economic conditions. Forced evictions – “the involuntary removal of persons from their homes or land, directly or indirectly attributable to the State” (OHCHR, 1996, p. 2) – are a worldwide phenomenon, and one of the most common triggers of forced migration globally. They are widespread in Cambodia. Twenty-seven in-depth narrative interviews were conducted with a purposive sample of 22 displaced women to explore post-displacement adaptation. See more

This lecture presents part of a fieldwork research on traditional Khmer wedding music conducted in Phnom Penh and Takeo province 5 years ago to complete a Master degree at Rome University. Wedding is considered to be one of the most important ceremony for the Khmers and it is believed to be of mythical origin. It consists of a succession of rituals which symbolize different aspects of wedding such as eternal union, magical blessing, success, happiness and fertility. See more

In Thnaot Chum, a village of rice growers, located in the province of Kompong Cham, religious syncretism mixes theravada Buddhism and a system of beliefs in more "local" invisible beings. In that context, a certain theory of rebirth arises. Not only do the people of Thnaot Chum believe that the departed (khmoc) and their ancestors (cī ṭūn cī tā) have the power "to catch life" (cāp' jātī) - in other words, to be reborn - and moreover a child's family often agree in sometimes recognizing that the child "remembers his former life" (cāṃ jāti ; ṭị̥ṅ jāti ; ṭịṅ kaṃṇoet). Here I would like to study different cases of children in the village of Thnaot Chum whose identity has been troubled by the presence of the departed. What do his family do or say when they agree that a child "remembers his former life" On what criteria do they base such an affirmation? Why must a child "forget his former life" (bhlec jāti) ? How can we understand this scial questioning about the identity of a child?

I would say that the durian divides mankind into two categories", the anthropologist Jacques Dournes claimed, those who hate it and those who love it. For Dournes, cultural relativity is the key to the problem as taste and smell result from habituation. I attempt to show that this explanation is clearly insufficient. Drawing from historical and contemporary sources (from the 16th to the 21st century), I discuss what one could call the modernization process of the durian. Put differently, I focus on the naturalization of the fruit's smell and on the symmetrical culturalization of its taste. Concretely, this paper is the story of an encounter between Westerners and the durian. It recounts the trajectory from the fruit’s discovery by the first explorers of Southeast Asia, to the efforts that those who followed exerted to contextualize it within wider conceptions of living organisms on the one hand, and Asian otherness on the other hand

This conference gave an introduction to the field of research of Clemence Schantz in Cambodia between January and April 2013. It gave an insight on the methodology used and the main research questions were addressed. Through the term "ethnography", this research aimed to define whether the fetus had a place in Cambodia. The word "place" implies several questions: Is the fetus important in Cambodia? Is it thought about? Is it hidden? Is it verbalized? Is it ignored? If it is thought about, did the society organize a set of practices around it? Was it included by the State in the legislation? The presented research questions were structured around the relationship between the fetus and the state, the relationship between the fetus and the Buddhist religion and the place of the fetus in Cambodian society.