Kreung Ethnicity - United Nations in Cambodia

Chrolab Chreh
Villagers conduct this sacrifice to allow the guilty person to apologise and
recover the soul of the victim. This in turn allows for the victim’s health to
return. This sacrificing is conducted whenever there is physical violence that
results in any bleeding or broken bones. It is also performed when a villager’s
general health, or a specific wound cannot be cured, or if it is thought that
the patient has chreh. 21 In some cases, when parents have bitten or seriously
scolded their children and the child becomes skinny and sick, villagers believe
that the child is afflicted with chreh. In such cases they will perform this
sacrifice with the purpose of calling back the soul of the child, allowing the
individual to be cured.
If parents suspect that their children have chreh, they are responsible for
conducting the sacrifice. If this suspicion is relayed by a fortune-teller or a
Me Arak, then the Me Arak is the one who conducts the sacrifice.
In the case of physical violence, the perpetrator must pay a chicken and a jar of
wine to conduct this sacrifice. The perpetrator must put his finger to the wine,
whisper apologetic words and ask for the removal of the bad luck of illness
and injury from the victim. After this they get a piece of chicken flesh and sink
it in into the wine and give it to the victim to eat. The Kanong or Krak Shrok
is responsible for organising this ceremony.
Char Kamliat
This is a large sacrificing ceremony to reject bad luck from the village,
particularly for villagers who are affected or who face danger from guilty
parties. Guilty parties are those individuals who are considered to have broken
a customary rule by causing a pregnancy before holding a cultural ceremony
celebration (engagement ceremony). The affected people are those who
became injured or sick and the family of any person who died in the period
between when the woman conceived and the pregnancy is known about.
21
Chreh refers to a condition when ones soul is said to separate from the body temporarily, often during
times of fear or trauma. It is believed that the soul will then try to find its way back to the body.
Kreung Ethnicity: Documentation of Customary Rules
49