Abstract
This chapter features the story of a Western journalist in Cambodia (“Ann”) who gets caught up, by chance, in the care of two local women. While reflecting on her story, we are led to consider different grounds of obligation to people in need, wherever they may be. Like the other memoir cases in this book, the story is slightly disguised, to protect the protagonist’s identity. Since Ann was an experienced journalist and a good writer, I follow her own narration pretty closely. Aside from the story itself, I am able to draw on her analysis of the ethical issues as she understood them (analysis was the second component of the assignment in my Ethics course) as well as correspondence between us during the drafting of the case and after Ann’s graduation from the Harvard Kennedy School. In addition, to inform my commentary, I have consulted studies of Cambodian society, especially by anthropologists and historians, to provide some context for the events described.
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Notes
For background, see David Chandler, A History of Cambodia, 4th edition (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2008);
Evan Gottesman, Cambodia After the Khmer Rouge: Inside the Politics of Nation Building (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003);
Ben Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power, and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975–1979, 3rd edition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008).
Jan Ovesen et al., When Every Household Is an Island: Social Organization and Power Structures in Rural Cambodia (Uppsala: Uppsala University, 1996), p. 31.
It is not clear whether Ann fully realized that her effort at promoting good journalism was a subversive activity. Journalists could not speak the truth. As simple an act as providing a factual account of an event could get one into serious trouble with the government, resulting in beatings or death. More than ten years later, USAID ran a program in Cambodia to train journalists in investigative reporting. The director commented: “It’s absolutely problematic. You write an investigative story here, and you’ll end up being charged and put in jail.” Joel Binkley, Cambodia’s Curse: The Modern History of a Troubled Land (New York: Public Affairs, 2011), p. 268.
Anne Cucchiara Besser and Kalman J. Kaplan, “The Good Samaritan: Jewish and American Legal Perspectives,” Journal of Law and Religion 10:1 (1993–1994), pp. 207–208.
See Avishai Margalit, The Ethics of Memory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002). Margalit retains the insider/outsider distinction in a different form. Most discussions by philosophers are about legal enforcement of the moral duty to rescue, not the moral duty itself.
See, for example, Jeremy Waldron, “On the Road: Good Samaritans and Compelling Duties,” Santa Clara Law Review v. 40 (2000), pp. 1053–1103.
Ann cites Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976).
A lucid presentation is offered by Peter Singer, The Expanding Circle: Ethics and Sociobiology (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1981).
See John Marston, ed., Anthropology and Community in Cambodia: Reflections on the Work of May Ebihara (Caulfield: Monash University Press, 2011), and Ovesen, et al.
Viviane Frings, “Cambodia After Decollectivization (1989–1992),” Journal of Contemporary Asia 24:1 (1994), p. 62.
For an account of family relationships and the gendered division of labor in the Cambodian countryside, see Susan Hagood Lee, “Rice Plus”: Widows and Economic Survival in Rural Cambodia (New York: Routledge, 2006), especially Chapter 2.
The more general point is that forms of intervention to address a social problem are more likely to fail if they do not take account of social norms and local understandings of how the world works. Pritchett and Woolcock give the example of responses to the AIDS pandemic in Africa, where intervening agencies too often neglect the huge social stigma of AIDS; the overwhelming power that men exert over sexual encounters; the role of particular occupational networks in creating disease vectors that facilitate rapid transmission; and the heavy toll on surviving household members and extended kinship systems. Lant Pritchett and Michael Woolcock, “Solutions When the Solution is the Problem: Arraying the Disarray in Development,” World Development 32:2 (2004), p. 206.
A recent study observes that, despite the general preference for traditional healers, Western pharmaceuticals are very popular and widely available. “Khmers show little hesitation in ingesting pills in quantities and combinations that would certainly not be advised” by Western doctors. “Taken in such a way, they objectively do perhaps as much harm as good … This phenomenon is common in many postcolonial nations.” Sokhieng Au, Mixed Medicines: Health and Culture in French Colonial Cambodia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), p. 187.
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© 2015 Kenneth Winston
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Winston, K. (2015). The Woman in the Corridor: Caring across Boundaries. In: Ethics in Public Life. Asia Today. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137492050_6
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