Buddhism

This volume showcases some of the most current and exciting research being done on Cambodian religious ideas and practices by a new generation of scholars from a variety of disciplines. The different contributors examine in some manner the relationship between religion and the ideas and institutions that have given shape to Cambodia as a social and political body, or nation.

Angkor, the ancient seat of the god-kings of Cambodia, is the great treasury of Khmer artistic culture, whose evocative, enigmatic sculptures are known throughout the world. Marc Riboud, the French photographer, visited the site several times, first in the late 1960s and most recently in November 1990, capturing its monuments and inhabitants before and after the years of the Khmer Rouge and the Killing Fields.

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 pioneering study of the fate of Buddhism during the communist period in Cambodia puts a human face on a dark period in Cambodia's history. It is the first sustained analysis of the widely held assumption that the Khmer Rouge under Pol Pot had a centralized plan to liquidate the entire monastic order.

Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Cambodia, Erik W. Davis radically reorients approaches toward the nature of Southeast Asian Buddhism's interactions with local religious practice and, by extension, reorients our understanding of Buddhism itself.

Documents the remnants of the rich Buddhist cultural heritage of Cambodia after centuries of wars and destruction.

A groundbreaking survey of the Buddhist architecture of Southeast Asia, abundantly illustrated with new color photography and 3-D renderings.

This ambitious cross-disciplinary study of Buddhist modernism in colonial Cambodia breaks new ground in understanding the history and development of religion and colonialism in Southeast Asia. In How to Behave, Anne Hansen argues for the importance of Theravada Buddhist ethics for imagining and articulating what it means to be modern in early-twentieth-century Cambodia.

The study of Cambodian religion has long been hampered by a lack of easily accessible scholarship. This impressive new work by Ian Harris thus fills a major gap and offers English-language scholars a book-length, up-to-date treatment of the religious aspects of Cambodian culture.