About Staff

My fundamental research interest is to comprehend the reality of the socio-cultural dynamics in mainland Southeast Asia. In particular, Cambodian society’s rapid and dramatic transformation has continued to capture my research attention for the past 10 years. The civil war since 1970 and the totalitarian state rule of the Pol Pot regime brought about a series of tremendous changes in Cambodian society, and following the socialist policy of the 1980s and the substantiation of modern governance procedures of state-rule by the new government after 1993 have affected society in many different ways. Thus, my interest lies in how local lives preserve their original property. I explore this through research on the charac teristics of “sociabilité” that have been formed in previous periods in distinguishing ecological and social settings in each locality. I am also conducting a time-space analysis of Buddhist activities in rural Cambodia in order to comprehend socio-cultural dynamics in the area. These research interests have blossomed into a comparative study of the “state-local culture” relationship in Southeast Asia. This must be applied firstly in the fieldwork on the Khmer-speaking population in Northeast Thailand and Mekong-delta region of Vietnam.