Unravelling rituals, examining biases: a Christian’s inquiry into the Cambodian Buddhist custom of Pchumben

This thesis addresses an issue of cross-cultural understanding, focusing on the Cambodian ancestral practice of Pchumben as its central case. To mitigate preconceptions and prejudices and uncover local interpretive frameworks, this research develops a unique practice of embodied reflexivity (ER), drawing on the Buddhist discipline of anupassanā and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of embodied perception. ER reflexively examines sensory and affective experiences and traces them into their embodied past, disclosing topologies of embedded narratives and their contextual constructions. This East-meets-West method enables comprehension at deep phenomenological structures, fostering more nuanced and empathic understandings of other religious cultures.

In this phenomenological ethnography, semantic and gestural resemblances were deconstructed, offering multivalent interpretations of Cambodian perspectives on worship, food offerings to deceased loved ones and hungry ghosts, and reciprocal relationships between the living and the dead. This study also highlights ritual’s epistemic roles in forming worldviews, shaping moral sensibilities, and constructing identities, via aesthetic pathways beyond conscious rationality. Additionally, this analysis articulates a non-dualistic conception of sasna (‘religion’), distinct from the Western Christian construct. For Cambodians, sasna is founded on tradition, an integrated socio-cosmological imaginaire, ethnic-national identity, and moral practice. Faith is a communal rather than personal affair, manifested in affective virtues rather than doctrinal beliefs. The thesis contributes to discourses in the anthropology of ritual and religion, Theravada studies, and Christian mission.