*Ongoing Project
Acronym: TRANSCAMUS
This Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship is funded by the European Commission’s Horizon
2020 program and carried out at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Institute for Social
Anthropology (ISA)
Abstract: Since the 1993 re-installment of the monarchy after the devastating rule of the
Khmer Rouge and the subsequent Vietnamese occupation, foreign NGOs have been
mushrooming in Cambodia. Several among these are charities that are based in Malaysia
and the Arabian Gulf, and which have become the core of Muslim transnational networks
that intersect in the country. These charities invested vast resources in order to reconstruct
the Cambodian Muslim religious infrastructure and leadership, that had been almost
completely wiped out during the Khmer Rouge. At the same time, they spread their own
religious ideas and discourses among the country’s Muslim minorities. This research will
inquire into how transnational Muslim networks and charities based in the Middle East and
Malaysia have transformed the religious identity, leadership and infrastructure of
Cambodia’s Muslim minorities. I will look into the evolution of the Gulf and Malaysian
charities in the country, the patterns of the existing competition between them, and how
the transnational flows and the transformation of the Islamic field altered the structure of
gender relations among Cambodian Muslims. The chief method of data collection will be
ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Cambodia, Malaysia and Kuwait.
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 838474
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