Au-delà des ethnonymes. À propos de quelques exonymes et endonymes chez les musulmans du Cambodge

Abstract

Scholarship on Muslims of Indochinese Peninsula—from the colonial period to nowadays—has often gone hand in glove with Cham research. Perceived as a unified and reduced unit, the small community of Cambodian Muslims is today more than ever described as one. Yet, research conducted on Chams and/or Muslims in Cambodia attests of a broad confusion of terms. The result comes at odds with the social reality of Chams or Cambodian Muslims, in fact as dynamic as it is unseizable. Through a study of some exonyms and endonyms replaced in their original contexts, the article introduces Cham social complexity and diversity in terms of discursive processes. An alternative to references generally designated as “ethnie”, religion, and nation, those pages question the validity of those categories central to the anthropology “objects” definition.

Keywords

• ethnonym
• ethnie
• exonym
• identity
• Chams
• Muslims in Cambodia