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Buddhist Ritual and the Reordering of Social Relations in Cambodia

This paper examines the resilience of local Cambodian kinship and village communities in the aftermath of devastating violence. These communities are explored as cross-cutting sets of exchange relationships between local community residents, community members and their urban relatives, lay people and Buddhist monks, and the living and the dead – in the context of the annual phchum ben ceremony, or ‘festival of the dead’. The phchum ben ceremony is an act of ‘social resilience’ in the spirit of this special issue; the ritual is an act of mourning, a demonstrative activity expressing grief, and a process to restore the disrupted social relations between the living and the deceased ancestors, especially those who died during war and the reign of the Khmer Rouge in the state known formally as Democratic Kampuchea (1975–79). The ritual focuses on community cohesion, as most rituals do, and social networks are enacted, recreated and displayed; by participating, people declare their membership of various social groups. The paper emphasizes that, in the contemporary economic and social context, the ritual is also about enacting and proclaiming social hierarchy, highlighting the gap between wealthy and powerful (now often urban) family members and their poor and dependent rural cousins.