Historical studies about Cambodia have paid little attention to regional factors, and historians have been hardly able to give much perspective about the history of particular regions within the country. Therefore, this paper looks at Kampot as it was during the French colonial period in order to understand the foundations of present-day Kampot. Presently, Kampot is the name of a province and its capital city, which face the Gulf of Thailand. During the colonial period, it was an administrative center for the circonscription résidentielle that extended over the coastal region. The principal sources for this paper are the “Rapports périodiques, économiques et politiques de la résidence de Kampot,” from 1885 to 1929, collected in the Centre des Archives d'Outre-Mer in Aix-en-Provence, France.
 Drawing from the results of our examination, we can recognize two stages in the history of Kampot. These are (1) the Kampot of King Ang-Duong, and (2) modern Kampot, which was constructed by French colonialism. King Ang-Duong's Kampot was the primary sea outlet for his landlocked kingdom. After colonization by the French, King Ang-Duong's Kampot became extinct, and the coastal region became isolated from other parts of Cambodia. The principal reason for this was the opening of Saigon Port and the exploitation of the Mekong River route. French Kampot became a regional administrative center and a colonial resort, which continues to the present. The appearance of the colonial city was succeeded to the provincial capital city after independence. Kampot's status as a resort, which had been interrupted during the civil war period, began to be revived in the middle 1990s.
 Throughout the periods of its history, the coastal region had been located on the border between inland Cambodia and the international maritime world. The delimitation of the Kingdom of Cambodia under French colonialism made Kampot into a state border district. The international openness of Kampot sometimes disturbed regional security. From the French point of view, the Chinese element had the potential to cause insecurity and, therefore, was strictly watched. The border served as a zone of refuge for thieves and pirates, and menaced the stability of the French administration. This situation continued until quite recently. Until the mid-1990s, the Khmer Rouge dominated the zone where thieves had once raged during the colonial period.

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Under the reign of King Ang Duong in the middle of nineteenth century,Cambodia was under the influence of Siamese culture. Although Cambodia was colonized by France in 1863, the royal troupe of the dance still performed Siamese repertoires.
 It was not until the cession of the Angkor monuments from Siam in 1907 that Angkor began to play a central role in French colonial discourse. George Groslier's works inter alia were instrumental in historicizing the court dance as a “tradition” handed down from the Angkorean era. Groslier appealed to the colonial authorities for the protection of this “tradition” which had allegedly been on the “decline” owing to the influence of French culture. In the latter half of the 1920s the Résident Supérieur au Cambodge temporarily succeeded in transferring the royal troupe to Groslier's control.
 In the 1930s members of the royal family set out to reconstruct the troupe, and the Minister of Palace named Thiounn wrote a book in which he described the court dance as Angkorean “tradition.” His book can be considered to be an attempt to appropriate colonial discourse and to construct a new narrative for the Khmers.
 After independence in 1953 French colonial discourse on Angkor was incorporated into Cambodian nationalism. While new repertoires such as Apsara Dance, modeled on the relief of the monuments, were created, the Buddhist Institute in Phnom Penh reprinted Thiounn's book. Though the civil war was prolonged for 20 years and the Pol Pot regime rejected Cambodian culture with the exception of the Angkor monuments, French colonial discourse is still alive in Cambodia today. The dance has not ceased to be presented as “tradition” through the media.

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The “feminization of poverty” is apparent in regard to female-headed households, and Cambodia is not an exception. Due to the civil war and the aftermath of the Pol Pot regime, the population of women has exceeded that of men, and the ratio of female-headed households still remains relatively high. This paper is a case study of one rice-farming village in Takaev Province in the southern plain region of Cambodia. It will describe the present state of female-headed households and discuss how these women try to survive by selecting and utilizing various social and human resources within the milieu of their kinship and marriage system. Despite the fact that the household unit as means of livelihood was dismantled during the Pol Pot regime, family ties were not destroyed and households were reconstructed soon after the regime collapsed. Although the regime created many households with a deficiency of members, the kinship structure basically remains the same as before the 1970s. The nature of men's migratory marriage sometimes brings about the easy desertion of wives, but the predominance of a matrilocal residential pattern provides female networks in the wives' home villages. Nevertheless, the matrilocal preference does not always solve the problem of the “feminization of poverty.”

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As a means of analyzing present and future socio-economic trends in Cambodian society, I will present my findings concerning the orientation patterns of a selected population with regard to education and occupation.
 I will analyze the social process which affects the development and differentiation of such orientations in light of socio-economic and ethnic variables. I chose Chinese Cambodians as the secondary ethnic group in this study for two reasons. First, amidst the pluralistic milieu of Cambodian society, the Chinese have developed a particularly distinct ethnic community, and second, they were historically the first to form a merchant class in Cambodia. The data deployed in this paper are derived from a consciousness survey which I conducted in Phnom Penh.
 I developed three types of questionnaires for this survey: one for senior high school students, one for their parents, and one for their teachers. From the results of these surveys, I aimed to derive propositions regarding the orientation of senior high school students, their parents, and their teachers toward the students' career development.
 It has become apparent that there is a gap between the occupations of the parents' generation and the desired occupations of senior high school students. Some occupations appear to begaining in popularity while others are losing ground. A typical occupation which is losing popularity is farming, while an example of an increasingly popular occupation is that of office work. Professional work is an occupational category which seems to be stable from one generation to the next.
 Differences in orientation due to gender and locale are also evident. The better off the parents, the better the learning environment for female students. The orientation patterns of male students are more independent of economic factors. Students in suburban districts are deprived of social and economic resources. These handicaps are countered somewhat in cases where parents have a high level of schooling (a cultural resource) and/or strongly support their children's education.

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This paper aims to contribute an understanding of the historical experience and current situation of Cambodian rural society by throwing light on changes and reconstruction of Buddhist practice in two temples in the central region of Cambodia. It is well known that the country suffered extraordinary societal upheaval during the rule of Democratic Kampuchea (1975–79). However, intensive field research of these changes has been scarce until now. Theravada Buddhism, which was declared the state religion since Cambodia's independence from French colonial rule, was one cultural aspect most harshly suppressed by the regime. All Buddhist monks were forced to return to secular life in 1976 and Buddhist activities came to complete cessation during this era. However, since the collapse of the Democratic Kampuchea regime in 1979, Buddhist practice started again spontaneously. This paper, based on long-term rural fieldwork, describes the specific situation of the demise and rebirth of Buddhist practice in the local community.
 At the same time, this paper also focuses its attention on the history and actual conditions of division within village Buddhism. In fact, two differing styles of Buddhist practice, which are indicated by local people through the words samay (new/modern) and boran (old/ancient), have been observed in the research area. The so-called samay practice, which has its origin in the reformist monks' movement that began in the center of national Sangha in the 1910s, was introducedto one of two temples studied in the 1940s. On the other hand, the other temple studied upheld traditional practices called boran until the 1960s, but accepted a part of samay practice inits reconstruction process in the 1990s for the first time. In other words, the confrontation between Buddhist samay and boran emerges in a more complex manner at present than in pre-war times. This paper analyses local people's varied attitudes toward the division of Buddhist practice, with careful consideration of the relationship between temples and their communities inlight of the recent socio-economic changes of the local people's lives.

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In the late 80s, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam embarked on bold economic liberalization policies. The ensuing market, price, credit, and land tenure reforms allowed very reactive small farmers to use new technologies and to improve their livelihoods thanks to a dramatic agricultural growth, especially in irrigated rice production. This was particularly the case in the Mekong Delta and this article analyzes the impact of the economic liberalization reforms on this crucial agricultural system. The process of rice intensification is explained in detail, and an analysis of the closely related dynamics of diversification into non-rice activities is also provided.
 The intensification of rice-based production systems with more fixed capital, working capital, and labor led to an increase in family incomes. But the evolutionary pathways of farming households reveal that, depending on their initial endowment in productive resources, the pace of capital accumulation has been unequal among farmers. Consequently, economic reforms are leading to an increased differentiation among farming households in terms of types of production system and income level.
 At a time of increasing use of chemical inputs and renewable natural resources, and as social inequalities lead to labor migration, several key technological, environmental, and socioeconomic issues regarding the sustainability of rice intensification and agricultural diversification processes are discussed.

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