The 1890s Cambodian kru and spirit-medium traditions

Record summary

Late nineteenth-century Cambodian sources and colonial observations describe kru ritual specialists, guardian-spirit cults and episodes interpreted as possession or spirit-mediated healing. These materials can be compared with Southeast Asian mediumship, illness narratives and socially recognized altered states. The evidence is dispersed across French administrative writing, missionary reports and Khmer religious contexts, and “possession” may be an outsider’s translation of several local categories. A researcher should identify a specific village, ritual, practitioner or document before making event-level claims.