Cause Of Cultural Conflict In Cambodia

All the cultures created by man have the same basic components such as language, belief, tradition, religion and so on. However, those common things are not enough to make people from different culture exist harmoniously together. Conflict, rivalry and chaos between cultures happen in every corner of the world. There might be loads of different factors that cause this cultural hostility and below are some common principle ones.

First of all, it is about the racism discrimination, the belief that one race is better than other races. All the races have their own unique cultures, which mean people of different races have different belief, different languages, different thinking and so on. When they come to live in the multinational society, or

Cambodians expect the young ones to show their respect to their elders regardless of any situation, which reflects that Cambodian values older people the most. To be specific, young people must appropriately address and talk in a favorable manner to their seniors with all due respect. However, in this contemporary society, this practice is not strictly enforced. For instance, the word “Nham”, translated as eat, is not expected to say to older people while other words such as “Pisar” or “TorToulTean” must be used to show the politeness. Another conflict example is the greeting gesture. Cambodia has its ways of greeting people by combining their hands together in front of their nose then bow otherwise judgment will be passed to the family. However, nowadays these gestures only happened between juniors and seniors, which is contradicting to the past in which also occurred between juniors. Another possible root cause of cultural conflict is globalization. Globalization is the exchange of ideas, technology or other aspects of culture. To nationalist or conservative groups, this way of interaction is not strongly supported, as it will ruin the local culture or viewpoints. As an illustration, personal affection in public is very common around the world such as holding hands or kissing. On the other hand, in Cambodia, such act is strongly criticized because the group believes that it may ruin the local culture. Last but not least, another main cause of conflict among groups within the society is the different between religions. Since people in different groups have different religion and do the same things in different ways within the deprivation of cultural relativism, they tend to judge other’s religion as inferior to their own. As an illustration, in Khmer funeral the corpses are