This article examines controversies surrounding the implementation of the first colonial indigenous health service, the Assistance Médicale, in Cambodia. It characterizes individual and group behaviours in the immediate social conditions of colonial Cambodian society, as well as some of the paradoxes of the modernization narrative ascribed to the colonial science of this period. This discussion supports a more general aim of furthering the understanding of Khmer political behaviour in the colonial period. A history of medical controversies reveals the changing nature of indigenous response to the colonial state, and provides alternative models to existing tropes of Khmer socio-political behaviour.
AdasM. (1981), ‘From avoidance to confrontation: Peasant protest in precolonial and colonial Southeast Asia’, Comparative Studies of Society and History, Vol 23, No 2, pp 217–247.
2.
AdasM. (1992), ‘Comment on “From avoidance to confrontation”’, in DirksN. B., ed, Colonialism and Culture, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, MI, pp 127–134.
3.
AdasM. (1998), State, Market, and Peasant in Colonial South and Southeast Asia, Ashgate, Brookfield, VT.
4.
AymonierE. (1984/83), Notes sur les coutumes et croyances superstitieuses des cambodgiens, CEDORECK, Paris.
5.
BarnesD. S. (1995), The Making of a Social Disease: Tuberculosis in Nineteenth-Century France, University of California Press, Berkeley, CA.
6.
BenedictR. (1968), ‘The relativity of normality’, in FriedM. H., ed, Readings in Anthropology, Thomas Crowell Co, New York, pp 791–808.
7.
ChakrabartyD. (2000), ‘Subaltern studies and postcolonial historiography’, Nepantla: Views from the South, Vol 1, No 1, pp 1–32.
8.
ChandlerD. (1974), ‘Royally sponsored human sacrifice in nineteenth century Cambodia: The cult of the Nak Ta Me Sa (Mahisasuramardini) at Ba Phnom’, Journal of the Siam Society, Vol 62, No 2, pp 207–222.
9.
ChandlerD.(1982), ‘The assassination of Resident Bardez (1925): A premonition of revolt in colonial Cambodia’, Journal of the Siam Society, Vol 70, No 1, pp 35–49.
10.
ChandlerD. (1992), Brother Number One: A Political Biography of Pol Pot, Westview Press, Boulder, CO.
11.
ChouleanA. (1986), Les êtres surnaturels dans la religion populaire khmère, CEDORECK, Paris.
12.
EbiharaM. (1971), ‘Svay, a rice growing village: 1958–1960’, PhD thesis, Anthropology Department, Columbia University, New York.
13.
EdwardsP. (1999), ‘Cambodge: The cultivation of a nation’, PhD thesis, History Department, Monash University, Melbourne.
14.
ForestA. (1992), Le culte des genies protecteurs au Cambodge: Analysis et traduction d'un corpus de textes sur les neak ta, Harmattan, Paris.
15.
FurnivallJ. S. (1956), Colonial Policy and Practice: A Comparative Study of Burma and Netherlands India, New York University Press, New York.
16.
GeertzC. (1980), Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali, Princeton University Press, Princeton.
17.
GuénelA. (1995), ‘Lutte contre la variole en Indochine: Variolisation contre vaccination’, History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, Vol 17, pp 55–70.
18.
GuénelA. (1996), ‘La lutte antivariolique en Extrême-Orient: Ruptures et continuité’, in MoulinA. M., ed, L'Aventure de la Vaccination, Fayard, Paris, pp 82–94.
19.
HardyA. (1993), The Epidemic Streets: Infectious Disease and the Rise of Preventive Medicine, 1856–1900, Clarendon Press, Oxford.
20.
KerkvlietB. J. T.ScottJ., eds (1986), Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance in Southeast Asia, Frank Cass, Totowa, NJ.
21.
MakP. (1995), Histoire du Cambodge: De la fin du XVIe siêcle au debut du XVIIIe, Presses de l'Ecole française d'Extrême-Orient, Paris.
22.
MartelG. (1975), Lovea, village des environs d'Angkor: Aspects demographiques, economiques et sociologiques du monde rural cambodgien dans la province de Siem-Reap, Ecole Française d'Extrême Orient, Paris.
23.
MüllerG. (2002), ‘Visions of grandeur, tales of failure’, PhD thesis, History Department, University of Zurich, Switzerland.
24.
OsborneM. (1978), ‘Peasant politics in Cambodia: The 1916 affair’, Modern Asian Studies, Vol 12, No 2, pp 217–243.
25.
OvesenJ. (1996), When Every Household is an Island: Social Organization and Power Structures in Rural Cambodia, Department of Cultural Anthropology, Uppsala University, Sida, Uppsala, Sweden.
26.
PannetierA.VerneauR. (1921), ‘Contribution a l'étude des Cambodgiens’, L'Anthropologie, Vol 31, pp 279–317.
27.
PannetierD. A. (1983), Au coeur du pays khmer: Notes cambodgiennes, CEDORECK, Paris.
28.
PopkinS. L. (1979), The Rational Peasant: The Political Economy of Rural Society in Vietnam, University of California Press, Berkeley, CA.
29.
ReidA. (1988), Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce: 1450–1680, Volume One: The Lands Below the Winds, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT.
30.
ReidA. (2000), Charting the Shape of Early Modern Southeast Asia, Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore.
31.
RobequainC. (1944), The Economic Development of French Indo-China, Oxford University Press, New York.
32.
RudéG. (1964), The Crowd in History, 1730–1848, John Wiley & Sons, New York.
33.
ScottJ. C. (1976), The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT.
34.
ScottJ. C. (1985), Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT.
35.
ScottJ. C. (1990), Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT.
36.
ShiraishiT. (1990), An Age in Motion: Popular Radicalism in Java, 1912–1926, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY.
37.
SporesJ. C. (1988), Running Amok: An Historical Inquiry, Ohio University Center for International Studies, Athens, OH.
38.
TarlingN., ed (1992), The Cambridge History of Southeast Asia: Volume 2 part one: From c.1800 to the 1930s, Vol 2, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
39.
TarrowS. G. (1998), Power in Movement: Social Movements and Contentious Politics, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York.
40.
TauchC. (1994), Battambang During the Time of the Lord Governor, CEDORECK, Phnom Penh.
41.
ThompsonV. M. (1937), French Indo-China, Macmillan, New York.
42.
TillyC. (1986), The Contentious French, Belknap Press, Cambridge.
43.
TillyC. (1995), Popular Contention in Great Britain, 1758–1834, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.
44.
VickeryM. (1984), Cambodia, 1975–1982, South End Press, Boston, MA.
45.
WeberM. (1947), The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, The Free Press, New York.
46.
WhiteL. (1993), ‘Cars out of place: Vampires, technology, and labor in East and Central Africa’, Representations, Vol 43, pp 27–50.
47.
WilmottW. E. (1967), The Chinese in Cambodia, University of British Columbia Publications, Vancouver.
