Aug. 4 (Wed.), 18:00-20:00
Baitong Restaurant, 7 st 360, near Beung Keng Kang market
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 sl 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
