Buddhism and emotional support for elderly people.
This paper discusses the important religious role of elderly people in traditional Khmer society and traces the construction of new lives by refugees to Western countries in the past decade, showing the important place of monasteries as a focus for the old. The data derive from field work in Cambodia in 1965-66 and from several shorter periods of fieldwork in the mid-1980s among Cambodian refugees in France, Thailand, Australia, Germany and the United States.