*Anne Y. Guillou*
will talk about:
*Healing in the clamor of history. Doctors, healers and patients in Cambodia
*
* *
In this talk, I will present a research on the Cambodian medicine(s) which
has been published as a book (in French) in 2009 (‘’*Cambodia**: Healing in
the clamor of history. Physicians and society*’’).
The first questions arose when I came in Cambodia in 1990 as a PHd student
in medical anthropology. I then began my field research by staying in
Cambodian hospitals all around the country and in the refugees’s camps.
There I observed the many misunderstandings between the Cambodian medical
staff and the humanitarian Western (and Japanese) one, regarding the
standards of the medical work, both in its technical and ethical aspects.
This resarch aims at understanding how a Western knowledge and practice such
as biomedicine has been integrated and given a new meaning in a non western
social context such as the Cambodian society.
The first part deals with the doctors’ status and identity that the
Cambodian society have forged through the different regimes and the
successive State ideologies of public health, since the French protectorate.
The second part describes the daily life in hospitals as I have observed it,
focusing on interactions and conflicts between Westerners and Cambodians,
and doctor-patients relationship (including an analysis of the Cambodian
medical ethics vs the Western one).
The third part entitled “healers and patients” analyses the global healing
market by portraying healers such as monks, kru khmaer (particularly the
successful “neo-traditionnal” ones), and mediums. Instead of focusing on
patients’ therapeutic recourse as it is done in most studies, I focus on
interrelations between healers themselves (including doctors) by showing how
the different categories of healers partially share the same social and
symbolic universes.
*Anne Yvonne Guillou* holds a PHd in anthropology from EHESS (Paris, 2001),
and a BA in Khmer studies from INALCO (Paris 1988). She is a tenured
researcher of the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS),
currently working for the Center of Southeast Asian studies (CASE), Paris.
She has been doing research on Cambodian people since 1986, firstly in
France among refugees and then in Cambodia since 1990. Her current research
interest is in social suffering and post-genocide social recovering ; Khmer
popular religious system ; Body, sickness, healing practices, medicines and
practionners ; and Health and migrations.
*Some of her publications can be found on line*:
*http://case.cnrs.fr/spip/case/Guillou-Anne-Yvonne*
Emiko Stock, Pascale Hancart Petitet, Gabriel FauveaudCoordinating team:
