I've been in Cambodia for a few years now but have spent very little time in neighboring countries. Sometimes I wonder how many of the psychological "cultural differences" to my home country I've come to recognize about life here are generalizable to other Asian or Southeast Asian settings and how many are Cambodia-specific; maybe attributable to the traumatic legacy of witnessing so much violence, enduring so many broken relationships, and then losing the country's best minds during the Khmer Rouge.
Examples:
- the tendency for families to shower their children with gifts (to the extent their budget allows) yet maintain an emotionally distant relationship with them
- very little impulse-control, especially when alcohol is involved
- a morbid fascination with bloody accidents, publishing explicit photos and widely sharing such images on social media
- "having a beer" means drink until you're smashed and then be excused from anything you do or say in the aftermath
- zero trust...in the government, in general society, for one's neighbor, even spouses constantly police each other
- little incentive or intrinsic pride in "doing your best;" or "doing what's right" instead to be able to "do as little as you can get away with"
- reflexively deflecting responsibility when something goes wrong, even when it's most obviously your fault
- defining morality based on general consensus vs. having an objective code of honor ("If I don't take advantage of this business loophole, someone else will, so may as well be me who benefits from it.")
- no expectation of fairness; from a supervisor's point of view: coming up with a short-term fix by granting the "squeaky wheel" the grease it's demanding but then stopping short of devising a long-term plan to make sure all of the wheels have adequate grease. From a parent's point of view: Accepting without question that bigger kids will dominate smaller kids and that's alright because eventually there'll be even smaller kids the victims can get their revenge on.
- finding humor in the (sometimes extreme) misfortune of others
- seeing violence as an acceptable means of persuasion. (E.g., a child comes crying up to an adult saying "My friend hit me" then calming the child by grabbing the offending friend, restraining him and encouraging the first child to hit him back without ever addressing the situation that caused the skirmish).
I'd be curious to hear if there's anyone who's spent a comparable amount of time in say, Thailand or Vietnam, and can offer regional comparisons.
Southeast Asian culture? Or Khmer Rouge legacy?
Hardly unique to Cambodia, maybe some, but in general it is all about the differences between West vs. East phylosophical values - difference in perspectives:seidier wrote:I've been in Cambodia for a few years now but have spent very little time in neighboring countries. Sometimes I wonder how many of the psychological "cultural differences" to my home country I've come to recognize about life here are generalizable to other Asian or Southeast Asian settings and how many are Cambodia-specific; maybe attributable to the traumatic legacy of witnessing so much violence, enduring so many broken relationships, and then losing the country's best minds during the Khmer Rouge.
Examples:
- the tendency for families to shower their children with gifts (to the extent their budget allows) yet maintain an emotionally distant relationship with them
- very little impulse-control, especially when alcohol is involved
- a morbid fascination with bloody accidents, publishing explicit photos and widely sharing such images on social media
- "having a beer" means drink until you're smashed and then be excused from anything you do or say in the aftermath
- zero trust...in the government, in general society, for one's neighbor, even spouses constantly police each other
- little incentive or intrinsic pride in "doing your best;" or "doing what's right" instead to be able to "do as little as you can get away with"
- reflexively deflecting responsibility when something goes wrong, even when it's most obviously your fault
- defining morality based on general consensus vs. having an objective code of honor ("If I don't take advantage of this business loophole, someone else will, so may as well be me who benefits from it.")
- no expectation of fairness; from a supervisor's point of view: coming up with a short-term fix by granting the "squeaky wheel" the grease it's demanding but then stopping short of devising a long-term plan to make sure all of the wheels have adequate grease. From a parent's point of view: Accepting without question that bigger kids will dominate smaller kids and that's alright because eventually there'll be even smaller kids the victims can get their revenge on.
- finding humor in the (sometimes extreme) misfortune of others
- seeing violence as an acceptable means of persuasion. (E.g., a child comes crying up to an adult saying "My friend hit me" then calming the child by grabbing the offending friend, restraining him and encouraging the first child to hit him back without ever addressing the situation that caused the skirmish).
I'd be curious to hear if there's anyone who's spent a comparable amount of time in say, Thailand or Vietnam, and can offer regional comparisons.
- very little impulse-control, especially when alcohol is involved
any national has little impulse control when it comes to drinks
- a morbid fascination with bloody accidents, publishing explicit photos and widely sharing such images on social media
humans always wanted entertainment and the bloodier the better. In many countries there is a lot of censorship on things like that and not so many stooopid accidents.
- "having a beer" means drink until you're smashed and then be excused from anything you do or say in the aftermath -
hardly Cambodia-only thing. Have seen it in Thailand and heaps of Western countries.
- zero trust...in the government, in general society, for one's neighbor, even spouses constantly police each other -
again not-Cambodia only. Countries with authoritarian regimes and bad track-record of providing social infrastructure all have little trust of their people.
- little incentive or intrinsic pride in "doing your best;" or "doing what's right" instead to be able to "do as little as you can get away with" -
poor education, government that promotes status quo within patrimonial structure that supports bureaucratic nature of the state affairs is to blame for that. You could say that in part it was caused by KR that destroyed quite a bit. But I'd say it is all about current government.
- reflexively deflecting responsibility when something goes wrong, even when it's most obviously your fault -
Asian cultures are collectivist and support non-confrontation and balance maintenance more than individual achievements that sometimes come with taking risk and responsibility and thus dis-balancing the relationship. Non-confrontation
- defining morality based on general consensus vs. having an objective code of honor ("If I don't take advantage of this business loophole, someone else will, so may as well be me who benefits from it.") - don't get that
- no expectation of fairness; from a supervisor's point of view: coming up with a short-term fix by granting the "squeaky wheel" the grease it's demanding but then stopping short of devising a long-term plan to make sure all of the wheels have adequate grease. From a parent's point of view: Accepting without question that bigger kids will dominate smaller kids and that's alright because eventually there'll be even smaller kids the victims can get their revenge on
Asian cultures that are based on Buddism, Taoism bla bla bla are status oriented, means elders, higher positions, whelthier, more influential are always right - unquestionably (see non-confrontation)
- finding humor in the (sometimes extreme) misfortune of others
simple people - simple humour. with more PCness comes less humour about basics like someone's misfortunes
- seeing violence as an acceptable means of persuasion. (E.g., a child comes crying up to an adult saying "My friend hit me" then calming the child by grabbing the offending friend, restraining him and encouraging the first child to hit him back without ever addressing the situation that caused the skirmish)
kids were smacked around for centuries in different times everywhere in the world. Children's rights and stuff is a new development in the Western world. The rest is due to poor education, they still smack kids in public schools.
My 100 riel in a very simplified way so flaming is unnecessary - I generalized, otherwise there are books on this stuff without so much generalization.
"Asian cultures are collectivist"
The Khmer probably among the least collectivist on the continent. To greatly generalize... to a greater extent than other SE Asian cultures It's much more a culture of families than of villages. While you might get villagers together to lynch a sorcerer, getting families to cooperate on things like irrigation projects has historically proved more difficult.
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The Khmer probably among the least collectivist on the continent. To greatly generalize... to a greater extent than other SE Asian cultures It's much more a culture of families than of villages. While you might get villagers together to lynch a sorcerer, getting families to cooperate on things like irrigation projects has historically proved more difficult.
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Don't blame me I voted for Sanders
That's true I was surprised to find that Khmer family structure was different to the Thai, when I was doing some work on health related issues here twenty odd years ago:jm wrote:"Asian cultures are collectivist"
The Khmer probably among the least collectivist on the continent. To greatly generalize... to a greater extent than other SE Asian cultures It's much more a culture of families than of villages. While you might get villagers together to lynch a sorcerer, getting families to cooperate on things like irrigation projects has historically proved more difficult.
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In contrast with the patriarchal system, family law suggests equality between wife and husband in case of divorce and between sons and daughters in inheritance rules (Lingat 1952). This family system has been described as
uxorilocal because traditionally married couples live at first with the brides’ parents (Hirschman et al. 1996), but also as neolocal to the extent that married couples are expected to establish independent households as soon as material conditions allow. Regardless of the exact label, the tendency is toward nuclear families rather than extended ones, as documented in the case of Thailand (Smith 1973). DIVERSITY AND CHANGE IN CAMBODIAN HOUSEHOLDS, 1998-2006 Floriane Demont and Patrick Heuveline
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articl ... 552374.pdf
Some interesting work by Jan Ovesen,Ing-Britt Trankell'Joakim Ojendal in this area:
Thion has suggested that although the ambodian systemic hierarchy is highly evident in political behaviour and linguistic usage, it may have been "much less operative than is usually believed" (1993:92). This may be ascribed to the "lack of intermediary social groups which could relate the nuclear family to the national community as a whole. A loosely structured village community, drawn together by the wat, was not a strongly binding tie among the
villagers" (ibid.). Thus, we have a situation in which, "once a person had fulfilled his obligations to the State through tax or corvee there was little constraint on his activities. It is thus likely that a paradoxical situation of great anarchic individual freedom prevailed in a society in which there was no formal freedom at all" (ibid.:98)
During the KR years:
The foundation of Khmer social life, the nuclear family, was also attacked. It was the ambition of the party, or the angkar (,organization') as it was customarily called, to position itself in the place of the family. This was sought accomplished, among other things, by the establishment of mobile working cadres and assigning family members to different cadres. .........
- what many survivors afterwards said they found most repulsive and demeaning were the obligatory communal meals. Not only was the food mostly of inferior quality - thin rice porridge instead of cooked rice and thus fit for animals rather than for human beings - but being forced to eat in the company of non-kin was the ultimate denial of the right to some human dignity. When Every Household is an Island Social Organization and Power Structures in Rural Cambodia Jan Ovesen,Ing-Britt Trankell'Joakim Ojendal Uppsala Research Reports in Cultural Anthropology, No. 15 1996
Incidentally Ovesen and Trankell have done quite a bit of interesting stuff, for example: Jan Ovesen and Ing-Britt Trankell, Cambodians and their Doctors: A Medical Anthropology of Colonial and Post-Colonial Cambodia, Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2010.
Agricultural Transformation and Socioeconomic Exclusion: A Study from Takeo Province
http://khmerstudies.org/wp-content/uplo ... isphpreq=1
I am talking collectivism vs. individualist cultures. Obviously Asian continent is not culturally homogeneous and different countries are on different spectrum of collectivism. However, Cambodia is much less individualist than collectivist imho.jm wrote:"Asian cultures are collectivist"
The Khmer probably among the least collectivist on the continent. To greatly generalize... to a greater extent than other SE Asian cultures It's much more a culture of families than of villages. While you might get villagers together to lynch a sorcerer, getting families to cooperate on things like irrigation projects has historically proved more difficult.
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So family structures here is a biggest proof of the collectivist culture where kids are fluidly transferred between relatives to either those who can afford them or those who need help with the households for example. Family is given priority by many Khmer women married to foreigners is another example. In work relationship it is all about the balance in the group and not about achieving some crazy organizational goals (that is secondary). "Face concept" is extending your own self onto how others perceive you. etc etc etcFeatures associated with collectivism include being concerned with the ingroup's fate and giving its goals priority over one's own; maintaining harmony, interdependence, and cooperation and avoiding open conflict within the ingroup; reciprocity among ingroup members, who are related in a network of interlocking responsibilities and obligations; self-definition in terms of one's ingroups; and distinguishing sharply between ingroups and outgroups. In contrast, features associated with individualism include having greater concern with personal than ingroup fate and giving personal goals priority over ingroup goals; feeling independent and emotionally detached from one's ingroups; accepting confrontations within ingroups; and defining the self dependently of one's ingroups (Ho & Chiu, 1994; Markus & Kitayama, 1991; Triandis, 1989a, 1989b; Triandis, McCusker, & Hui, 1990). These constructs potentially clarify and elaborate the "fuzzy" construct of culture, not only providing a more "concise, coherent, integrated, and empirically testable dimension of cultural variation" but also linking psychological phenomena to a cultural dimension (Kim, Triandis, K~itgiba~i, Choi, & Yoon, 1994, p. 2)
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