Cambodia. Mixed medicines: Health and culture in French colonial Cambodia. By Sokhieng Au. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Pp. ix + 263. Tables, Plates, Notes, Glossary, Bibliography, Index. - Cambodians and their doctors: A medical anthropology of colonial and postcolonial Cambodia. By Jan Ovesen and Ing-Britt Trankell. Copenhagen: Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) Press, 2010. Pp. xv + 301. Glossary, Maps, Tables, Plates, Notes, Bibliography, Appendix, Index.

Cambodia Mixed medicines: Health and culture in French colonial Cambodia By SOKHIENC AU Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Pp. ix+ 263. Tables, Plates, Notes, Glossary, Bibliography, Index. Cambodians and their doctors: A medical anthropology of colonial and postcolonial Cambodia By JAN OVESEN and ING-BRITT TRANKELL Copenhagen: Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) Press, 2010. Pp. xv + 301. Glossary, Maps, Tables, Plates, Notes, Bibliography, Appendix, Index. These two contributions to the study of medicine in modern Cambodia agree that there was a lack of practical and explicit interaction between indigenous and foreign (modern, French) medicine in twentieth-century Cambodia. They disagree, however, over the reasons. In Cambodians and their doctors, Ovesen and Trankell argue that 'French-promoted healthcare' in colonial Cambodia failed because physicians and policymakers lacked ethnographic knowledge about indigenous medical traditions (p. 43). They likewise attribute deficiencies in postcolonial efforts to build a modern system of public health to the lack of understanding and accommodation of fundamental elements of indigenous medicine. According to Ovesen and Trankell, medical ethnography can provide a solution to these historical failures. Like Cambodians and their doctors, Au's Mixed medicines is also predicated on ethnographic evidence; but rather than offering a solution to the failed interactions of modern and traditional forms of medicine in colonial Cambodia, it revels in the failure. For Au, a comprehensive historical ethnography of Cambodian medicine does not resolve the lack of practical and explicit engagement with French colonial medicine: it explains it. Cambodians and their doctors is an empirical work. The authors abstain from engaging with literature in the fields of medical and historical anthropology (and likewise comparative historical analysis) in favour of ethnographic detail (p. x). They present their ethnography in a revisionist posture. Contra scholars who emphasise the role of colonial bureaucratic practices in fostering and reifying ethnic and class antagonisms in Indochina, the authors argue that the latter were a real feature of precolonial life, arising from 'repeated experiences of differences in mentality, sociality, and habitus' (p. 41). Chapter 4 suggests that documentary biases in the historiography of the Democratic Kampuchea period (1975-79) have resulted in a gross overstatement of the lack of modern medicine under the Khmer Rouge. But the real argumentative foil of the book is 'peasant resistance theory', specifically the argument that Cambodians refused French medicine as a means of resistance to colonial power. Au's earlier work ('Indigenous politics, public health and the Cambodian colonial state', Southeast Asia Research, 14, 1 [2006]: 33-86) is a favourite target of Ovesen and Trankell in this respect (pp. 43, 71-3). The value of Cambodians, which is based on intermittent periods of fieldwork dating back to 1995, lies in its detailed social ethnography of indigenous medical practice in the second half of the twentieth century. Chapter 5, for example, contains a comprehensive taxonomy of 'healers, spirit mediums and magic monks' along with the nature of their calling and practice (pp. 133-5), while copious field notes introduce individual practitioners. Chapter 6 offers a similar account of the social role and status of Khmer indigenous midwives (pp. 186-201). Ovesen and Trankell make the case that French colonial policymakers--and likewise academics--misunderstood the prominent place of ritualistic and psychological aspects of healing (p. 166), and the 'spiritual' as opposed to merely 'technical' work of midwives (p. 199). In the way of cultural ethnography, however, Cambodians fails to move beyond generality and abstraction. The authors construct an image of Cambodian medicine as a monolith, which is depicted in stark contrast to modern biomedicine. …