Symbiosis of Microcredit and Private Moneylending in Cambodia

Microcredit's potential for poverty reduction is a highly contested issue. In Cambodia, the dramatically increasing commercial microcredit coexists with widespread private moneylending. These two practices are rooted in different economic world views: neoliberalism on the one hand, and the traditional Khmer economic sociality permeated by patronage on the other. The ethnography shows that far from competing with each other, microcredit and private lending have adapted to form a symbiotic relationship, and much private lending is financed through microcredit. While microcredit is often beneficial to people living well above the poverty line, the widespread access to credit, through microloans as well as private lending, is threatening the livelihoods of the economically most vulnerable and precipitating their social, economic and spatial exclusion from their local communities. In contrast to the social and economic exclusion caused by land grabbing and forced evictions, which has received a fair amount of public attention, exclusion as a consequence of indebtedness has, for sociocultural reasons, remained much less visible.     

Songs of Our Spirits: Possession and Historical Imagination among the Cham in Cambodia

The currently flourishing spirit possession cult among a group of Cham in Cambodia has multiple cultural meanings. On the most explicit level, the ceremonies aim at healing a suffering person whose condition medical treatment has proved insufficient to cure. But since the state of health or illness is intimately connected to the state of the person's primary social relations, both the 'patient' and his or her close kin are all symbolically purified from evil in the course of the ritual proceedings. The mediums are possessed by spirits of members of the royal court of the historical Champa kingdom. Through the representations of the semi-mythical past of Champa, more specifically its royalty and court culture, the possession cult also tells us that healing is a question of bringing present-day Cham into concordance with their ethnic origins, and a question of symbolically reunifying ethnicity and lost national autonomy. It is suggested that the historical imagination displayed in the ceremonies addresses not only the ancient military defeats of the Cham by the Vietnamese, but also the people's more recent sufferings under the Khmer Rouge, and that the cult provides an arena for coming to terms with both ancient and recent experiences of victimisation as well as complicity, suffering as well as guilt, and for expressing ethnic consciousness and pride.