"We don't forget the old rice pot when we get the new one": discourses on ideals and practices of women in contemporary Cambodia.

Abstract

Drawing on microlevel research with men and women of differing ages living in rural and urban Siem Reap (home to the global heritage and tourist site of Angkor), this article focuses on the key discourses and practices that men and women draw on to (de)stabilize putatively traditional ideals of Cambodian womanhood and to (re)situate them in the contemporary period. Mapping the complex ways that people represent, make sense of, and respond to prerevolutionary cultural norms of female behavior in a very different era (with particular, though not exclusive, attention paid to mobility and education), the article demonstrates how deeper ideological changes concerning women’s relationship to Khmer tradition will have to accompany the surface reordering of Cambodian gender relations if equality between women and men is to be achieved. Until then, the ideal woman in contemporary Cambodian society is ultimately one who can creatively negotiate and balance the multiple demands placed on her by society, family, and self.