An Interdisciplinary Study on Gender Structure & Representation of Present-day Cambodia

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Our group was originally planning to explore the gender structure & representation of present-day Cambodia from each viewpoint of three different fields: cultural anthropology, linguistics, and literature, in order to approach Cambodian "values." Filling up the lack of field data since the 1970's due to the Cambodian civil war and its aftermath was also our purpose. After some trials, we found that the gender analysis on the Khmer (Cambodian) language from a social-linguistic viewpoint could not be productive enough, so we partly changed our plan. We decided to make an approach to the gender topics from the three different aspects: (1) gender structure in the actual social relationships (2) gender policy of the Cambodian government (3) gender in the cultural representation, especially, short stories in the popular media.Regarding (1), M. Takahashi conducted the fieldwork at a small-scale rice-farming village in Takeo Province. As the result of an intensive survey on family, household a … More nd kinship, Takahashi could make clear to some extent that there are considerable gender differences among household types, post-marital residential patterns, inheritance system of house, marriage process and the range of locality of marry-in & marry-out. Two essays based on these findings (1. the function of gender on household-managing strategy of female-headed households and 2. the cambodian naming system) are included in the final report.Regarding (2), H. Ueda analyzed some documents that reflect gender policy of the present Cambodian government. A part of one of the documents are translated by Ueda and included in the final report.Regarding (3), T. Okada analyzed many short stories that appear on the popular magazines published in Cambodia especially focusing on attributes of both male & female characters and love relationships. Okada found out that, instead of emphasizing "srey krop leak" (a woman who has every kind of virtue), "kromom" (literally, a virgin) has more significance today, but female ideal value is not attributed to the state of kromom, and to be successful in marriage is the ideal goal in the stories.In the final report, we could not include the integrated essay of these three analyses, but could, at least, broaden the discussion spheres on the "values" of the contemporary Cambodian society by gender approach. Less