During the summer of 2024, I traveled to Cambodia to conduct field research for my dissertation. I was there to study foreign aid, public finances, and how the Cambodian government negotiated loan terms. While studying these mass flows of international capital I came across money that was crossing borders in smaller amounts but was perhaps even more interesting.
In June of 2024, I made a trip from the capital city of Phnom Penh to Battambang Province, in the country’s more rural and agrarian northeast. I was there to look at rural infrastructure aid projects—roads, dykes, irrigation, etc.—and to get a sense of how much the countryside was benefiting from ‘development’ relative to the city. When I arrived in Battambang—via a new Japanese-built road—I was shocked at how the city had changed since I had last visited a decade ago. The city center featured a Mitsubishi dealership, a Thai grocery store chain, and, most shocking of all, a Starbucks coffee-globalization in action.
My initial amazement was compounded the next day when I left town to visit a nearby temple. This temple was famous (I was told) because it was built on top of a mountain that looked like a ship (I personally couldn’t see it) and because the temple had recently begun to carve an enormous bas-relief of a reclining Buddha into the side of the mountain (that one I could see- it was hard to miss).
The most startling feature for me about the temple, however, was not the mega-carving, but the painted images on the temple itself. The scenes were relatively typical of a Cambodian Buddhist temple, and like at many temples, featured the name of the donor who had paid for the painting. These names immediately caught my attention. There were names in English, French, Chinese, and donated murals featured bi- or even tri- lingual inscriptions.
During the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in 1979, many Cambodians fled the country, first into refugee camps in Thailand, and then abroad. Since it is close to the Thai border, many Battambang residents were among this wave of refugees, and so are disproportionately represented amongst the overseas Cambodian community today.
The furthest afield donations I saw came from the French department of Reunion in the Indian Ocean. I was told that donations were all handled digitally. There was a local Bank of Canada affiliate who handled international transfers, or, if you wanted something even more convenient, you could send money via Facebook (monks, I learned, were very active on Facebook).
At this temple in Battambang Province, we can thus see a perfect microcosm of globalization. Transnational migrants from all over the world are using new digital technologies to shrink the distance between themselves and where they came from (and, importantly, their migrant counterparts in other countries). Kaplinsky (2005), notes that the conventional wisdom on globalization is that “inequality and poverty are caused not so much by the workings of the global economy as by the failure to engage positively with globalization (p. 25).” While there are many problems with this conventional account, the collective action of the Battambang diaspora specifically, and the social uplift provided by remittances more generally, can perhaps provide us with one template for ‘positive global engagement’.
Identity-making—both vis-à-vis religious identity and place-based local identity—has become a global process, with input from around the world. While the Starbucks in town is one symbol of a globalized culture, these murals are an important reminder that a globalized culture does not mean a monoculture. As Conrad and Sachsenmaier (2007) argue “the reinvigorated search for cultural alternatives to Westernization programs has manifested itself in… the possibility of culturally specific forms of modernity (pp. 2-3).” Cambodian temple fundraising, with its seamless integration of the local and the global and traditional and modern technologies shows us one possible form of culturally specific modernity.
Works Cited:
Kaplinsky, R. (2005). Globalization, Poverty, and Inequality. Polity Press.
Conrad, S. and Sachsenmaier, D. (2007). Competing Visions of World Order: Global Moments and Movements, 1880s – 1930s. Palgrave McMillan.
