Adaptation of Cambodians in New Zealand

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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.