Cultural innovation in the face of modernization: a study of emerging community-based care in rural Cambodia

Abstract

Based on anthropological fieldwork in Pursat province, Cambodia, this article explores the socio-cultural background to the recent expansion of a unique Buddhist ritual called sângkeahăh in Khmer. This ritual can be regarded as an emerging practice of community-based care in the face of the rapid modernization and development that has been unfolding in rural Cambodia since the 1990s. It is performed at the houses of ill persons in villages, and the donations collected through the ritual are given to their family; participants are motivated first by merit-making and second by the acute awareness of increasing medical treatment costs. In addition to moving care from the private to the public sphere, the ritual represents a cultural articulation of a traditional practice of care at the grassroots level of the society, a unique case of a bottom-up response to modernization that the local culture and values support. The ethnographic description and analysis of this article contribute to deepening our understanding of the nature of community in rural Cambodia, cultural transformation in rural South East Asia, and the relationship between religion and care.