Since the civil war of the 1970s, Cambodia has suffered devastating upheavals that killed a million ' people and exiled hundreds of thousands. This book is the first to examine Cambodian culture after the ravages of the Pol Pot regime-and to bear witness to the transformation and persistence of tradition among contemporary Cambodians at home and abroad. Bringing together essays by Khmer and Western scholars in anthropology, linguistics, literature, and ethnomusicology, the volume documents the survival of a culture that many had believed lost. Individual chapters explore such topics as Buddhist belief and practice among refugees in the United States, distinctive features of modern Cambodian novels, the lessons taught by Khmer proverbs, some uses of metaphor by the Khmer Rouge regime, the state of traditional music, the recent revival of a form of traditional theater, the concept of pain in Khmer culture, changing conceptions of gender, and refugees' interpretation of American television. Together the essays map a contemporary Cambodian culture, which, for over two hundred thousand Khmers, is now firmly entwined in the social fabric of the urban West.

The first comprehensive anthropological description of the Khmer Buddhism practiced by Cambodian refugees in the United States over the past four decades. Cambodian Buddhism in the United States is the first comprehensive anthropological study of Khmer Buddhism as practiced by Khmer refugees in the United States. Based on research conducted at Khmer temples and sites throughout the country over a period of three and a half decades, Carol A. Mortland uses participant observation, open-ended interviews, life histories, and dialogues with Khmer monks and laypeople to explore the everyday practice of Khmer religion, including spirit beliefs and healing rituals. This ethnography is enriched and supplemented by the use of historical accounts, reports, memoirs, unpublished life histories, and family memorabilia painstakingly preserved by refugees. Mortland also traces the changes that Cambodians have made to religion as they struggle with the challenges of living in a new country, learning English, and supporting themselves. The beliefs and practices of Khmer Muslims and Khmer Christians in the United States are also reviewed.

In a searching assessment of Cambodian politics and society since the revolutionary victory in 1975, the author sets Pol Pot's experiments of 1975-1979 into their historical and theoretical contexts. A complex view of Democratic Kampuchea.

How do the people of a morally shattered culture and nation find ways to go on living? Cambodians confronted this challenge following the collective disasters of the American bombing, the civil war, and the Khmer Rouge genocide. The magnitude of violence and human loss, the execution of artists and intellectuals, the erasure of individual and institutional cultural memory all caused great damage to Cambodian arts, culture, and society. Author Boreth Ly explores the “traces” of this haunting past in order to understand how Cambodians at home and in the diasporas deal with trauma on such a vast scale. Ly maintains that the production of visual culture by contemporary Cambodian artists and writers—photographers, filmmakers, court dancers, and poets—embodies traces of trauma, scars leaving an indelible mark on the body and the psyche. Her book considers artists of different generations and family experiences: a Cambodian-American woman whose father sent her as a baby to the United States to be adopted; the Cambodian-French filmmaker, Rithy Panh, himself a survivor of the Khmer Rouge, whose film The Missing Picture was nominated for an Oscar in 2014; a young Cambodian artist born in 1988—part of the “post-memory” generation. The works discussed include a variety of materials and remnants from the historical past: the broken pieces of a shattered clay pot, the scarred landscape of bomb craters, the traditional symbolism of the checkered scarf called krama, as well as the absence of a visual archive. Boreth Ly’s poignant book explores obdurate traces that are fragmented and partial, like the acts of remembering and forgetting. Her interdisciplinary approach, combining art history, visual studies, psychoanalysis, cultural studies, religion, and philosophy, is particularly attuned to the diverse body of material discussed, including photographs, video installations, performance art, poetry, and mixed media. By analyzing these works through the lens of trauma, she shows how expressions of a national trauma can contribute to healing and the reclamation of national identity.

Drawing from 25 years of research and travel in Cambodia, the French anthropologist Marie Alexandrine Martin provides a new perspective on the Khmer Rouge's rise to power and the Vietnamese occupation of the country.

Long neglected by Western travellers, Phnom Penh became Cambodias permanent capital in 1866. It has been home to Iberian missionaries and French colonialists, with a stunning mix of traditional palaces, Buddhist temples and transplanted French architecture. In the 1960s Phnom Penh deserved its reputation as the most attractive city in Southeast Asia. But after 1970 all this was to change, and a terrible civil war was followed by the Khmer Rouges capture of the city in 1975. Since the defeat of Pol Pot in 1979, Phnom Penh has slowly recovered, once again attracting perceptive travellers.

Contemporary fiction. Large Print. A powerful and impressive debut from one of Australia's most exciting young writers for fans of Alice Munro, Nam Le, Lorrie Moore and Jennifer Egan. Beyond the killing fields and the temples of Angkor Wat is Cambodia: a country with a genocidal past and a wide, open smile. A frontier land where anything is possible at least for Western expatriates. In these loosely linked stories, Laura Jean McKay takes us deep into this complex country, exploring the uneasy spaces where local and foreign lives meet. Three backpackers board a train, ignoring the danger signs and find themselves used as bargaining chips in a terrible game. A jaded expat, tired of real girls, falls in love with an ancient statue. As they explore the sweltering streets of Phnom Penh, two Australian tourists come face to face with the cracks in their marriage. There are devastating re-imaginings of the country's troubled history, as well as tender, funny moments of tentative understanding. These are bold and haunting stories, deftly told.