A child was wailing his heart out at an orphanage in Cambodia after his father, a soldier, left him for a better upbringing as he had to work and the child's mother was dead. It was with this scene Kathie Carpenter's Life in a Cambodian Orphanage makes headway into a journey of childhood outside the traditional family structure. At first glance, a number of assumptions are inevitable: orphans are children with dead parents, or perpetually sad and hopeless; orphanages are emblematic of trauma; Global South orphanages are places for whites and Global North residents to come and exploit children through volunteer activities. The list goes on but the answers given by government and several organisations' reports remain speculative unless a thorough fieldwork comprising the voices of those living and working in the orphanages is heard. Carpenter's work achieves that by focusing on an orphanage organisation in Cambodia, Children's Opportunity Center (COC), where she captured daily lives within the organisation in the early 2000s. Over eight chapters, including an introduction and a conclusion, Carpenter takes a trickle-down approach to chart out an ethnographic study of childhood in a Cambodian orphanage. After carefully laying out the broader overview of her work, the author enters into a detailed discussion about the field and herself (as an outsider from the Global North). Here, she talked about herself as an ‘orphanage tourist’, someone who was visiting the orphanage like it was a tourist destination and an important cultural element of the Cambodian society. She acknowledges her own initial inhibitions and reflects on the way she stepped out of them as she immersed herself into the COC. As an English-speaking adult from the Global North, such expositions become important as they show what role the ethnographer plays in laying the foundations of their fieldwork, especially in the case of children from the Global South. Carpenter takes her reader through the sociopolitical history of Cambodia to show where and how the orphanage culture grew and why children were left there. In doing so, she looks at different meanings of being an orphan that had existed in Cambodia across time. The flowchart at the end of chapter two underlines all the major political events through which the meaning of out-of-family care has changed in Cambodia. Besides giving a history of the COC, she also highlights important concepts that have emerged in the scholarly and political discourse of childhood orphanages in Cambodia—voluntourism, orphanage tourism and the rising debate of the anti-orphanage tourism in 21st century. Carpenter draws us into the life of the children and adults in COC by capturing the rhythms of daily life. In a largely jargon-free language, she describes what it is to be in the orphanage and how it establishes a routine. Additionally, it provides a window into how the organisation is rooted in the histories and ground realities of Cambodia. It shows aspects of power, and agency among children and adults through their routines, interactions, hygiene, discipline, conflict, dance and music. In enriching her ethnography with authentic voices, the latter chapters get repetitive. It is in the concluding chapter that Carpenter argues how the anti-orphanage debate is reliant more on subjective views rather than an objective assessment of what an orphanage does for the children. Through day-to-day activities, orphanages like the COC are able to instil in the children ‘a sense of agency’, ‘value of education’ beyond its economic output and generation of new skills through volunteers that made it ‘a real home, for many of the children for many years’. However, Carpenter's analysis glosses over issues of class and gender, despite the fact that COC children came largely from working-class backgrounds with both boys and girls cohabiting the space. Reflections on class and gender would have enriched the work further. What makes Carpenter's book truly remarkable is her lucid and accessible writing that weaves ethnographic data with theories. Carpenter's text is a much-needed reminder to keep your senses open when you enter a field, both to capture an orphaned child wailing and their disappearance. Rahul Singh is a PhD candidate in Sociology at Presidency University, Kolkata as a Junior Research Fellow.
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Jun 4, 2024
Bastien Rueff + 3
