Past Events

Hope to see you in number at our next Human Sciences Happy Hour ! 

Once a month -  6pm – Baitong Restaurant

(7 st 360/ Norodom Bd, Beung Keng Kang I)

Contact:

Emiko Stock & Pascale Hancart Petitet

012 521 093 – 092 399 273

hshhpp@gmail.com

On Thursday 28, April 2011

The Spirits of Cambodia: New Research into Current Practice

presented by, Courtney Work

            The villagers in the newly settled village of Damnak Klung in Kompong Chhnang Province articulate a number of relationships with spirits. Some of these are economic relationships, some confirm and support special talents – like healing or playing music, some influence interpersonal relationships and still others constitute relationships with physical space. These spirits are at once a part of Buddhist practice and are separate from it; as one woman told to the researcher, “the spirits are connected to Buddhism because we use the tools and the language of Buddhism to talk to the spirits, but they are different –they are older.”

Courtney Work's research project is to explore and document village life and religious practice in rural Cambodia in the early twenty-first century. In this presentation she will discuss the work of spirits in everyday rural life, highlighting the various social and physical connections mediated by spirit beliefs and practices. 

Courtney Work is a PhD Candidate, Anthropology at Cornell University.  She received my Master's Degree from Brandies University in Anthropology and Gender Studies. Her thesis examined violent masculine performance at Cambodian dance parties. Her current research project is village centered. She is asking questions about Buddhism and contemporary religious practice and also looking into the political and economic structures of village life in early twenty-first century Cambodia.

On Monday May 9, 2011

Transacted Kinship

Vietnamese Children Sold for Adoption in Cambodia

presented by Nicolas Lainez

 This presentation addresses the sale of Vietnamese children in Cambodia. My goal is to explore this issue embedded in stereotypes, and to move beyond the anti-trafficking discourse. To do so, I privilege the actor’s viewpoint (emic perspective), colonial literary and legal sources. Data for this paper was gathered in 2009-10 through fieldwork conducted in Châu Đốc (on the Vietnamese border) and among the Vietnamese communities in Phnom Penh (Cambodia). It is presented with a discussion of a number of methodological barriers encountered in the field.

Firstly, the discussion with a mother who sold her daughter explores the motivations, conditions and prices of Vietnamese children sold in the Cambodian market. These sales can be validated by a deed that includes the price and the name of both the seller and the buyer. Similar contracts found in reports and press clips from the colonial period prove that the same practice is carried out despite the temporal spacing: the “sale of a child for adoption” (bán làm con nuôi). It therefore demonstrates historical continuity in terms of human sale.

Secondly, I will describe how emic representations help to justify acts that are absolutely condemned by the State, but that are justified by some destitute social groups due to their particular context: a desperate mother who does not want her child, and decides to get rid of him to retrieve some money. The famous novel When the light is out by Ngô Tất Tố (1939) depicting the story of a destitute mother who eventually sells her daughter to pay off tax debts and to free her husband, illustrates how desperation can excuse immorality and social condemnation.

Finally, Vietnamese informants tend to suggest that girls are more expensive than boys because parents not only take into account the wellbeing of the child with his adoptive family, but also consider the return on investment. Indeed, destitute daughters can work in prostitution; therefore they can remit higher sums of money to their parents than boys. A calculation takes place thus suggesting that for poor families involved in child sale, raising a girl means investing into the future.

This talk summarizes a chapter from the forthcoming Alliance Anti-Trafic’ Research Report: Nicolas Lainez (June 2011), Transacted Children and Virginity: Ethnography of Ethnic Vietnamese in Phnom Penh, Ho Chi Minh City, Alliance Anti-Trafic Vietnam.

Nicolas Lainez was born in 1975 in Barcelona, Spain. He’s currently enrolled in a PhD program on social anthropology at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris). He is researcher for the NGO Alliance Anti-Trafic Vietnam (Ho Chi Minh City), and associated researcher at the Research Institute of Contemporary Southeast Asia (Bangkok). His research focuses on cross-border mobility, human transactions, informal credit, debt-bondage, commercial sex, social structures, and the social construction of trafficking from the colonial to the contemporary period. His 30-months’ ethnography is based in the Mekong Delta (Vietnam), Phnom Penh (Cambodia) and Singapore.

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