This book has two foci: how Cambodians with a refugee
background manage their new life in Aotearoa/New
Zealand and how an identity as a Khmer-Kiwi
transnational community has developed.
Religious practice, organisation, and leadership
became the main driving forces for asserting Khmer
community identity in diaspora. Collective memory was
harnessed to deal with shared cultural bereavement,
and the quest for belonging lent momentum to the
community s development and management of its
identity. Khmer Theravada Buddhism was important in
terms of spiritual wellbeing, but also served as a
platform for various community developments which
contributed to the creation of new ethnoscapes and
identities within the New Zealand social context.
An important contribution of the thesis relates to
the issues of the positionality of the researcher, in
this case a Cambodian who came as a refugee
researching his own community. The advantages and
problems of being both an insider as a Cambodian and
community leader and an outsider as an educated
academic attempting to maintain objectivity, is
outlined in detail in the thesis.
background manage their new life in Aotearoa/New
Zealand and how an identity as a Khmer-Kiwi
transnational community has developed.
Religious practice, organisation, and leadership
became the main driving forces for asserting Khmer
community identity in diaspora. Collective memory was
harnessed to deal with shared cultural bereavement,
and the quest for belonging lent momentum to the
community s development and management of its
identity. Khmer Theravada Buddhism was important in
terms of spiritual wellbeing, but also served as a
platform for various community developments which
contributed to the creation of new ethnoscapes and
identities within the New Zealand social context.
An important contribution of the thesis relates to
the issues of the positionality of the researcher, in
this case a Cambodian who came as a refugee
researching his own community. The advantages and
problems of being both an insider as a Cambodian and
community leader and an outsider as an educated
academic attempting to maintain objectivity, is
outlined in detail in the thesis.