‘I have a licence’: imagined corruption among traditional healers in Cambodia

This contribution explores how Cambodian traditional healers (kruu) navigate ambiguous and unevenly enforced regulatory regimes through rumours about police corruption. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in 2019 and the analysis of two cases, I show how healers interpreted police visits not only as scrutiny of unlicensed herbal practice but also as morally charged encounters in a Theravada Buddhist polity, where authority is evaluated through idioms of merit, virtue, and karmic consequence. State recognition licenses ‘traditional medicine’ while casting wider magico-ritual healing as suspect. Because kruu practice does not neatly separate into these domains, practitioners remain vulnerable regardless of credentials. In response, kruu and their clients calibrate small tactics – offering food, invoking professional certificates or kin ties, and sometimes telling strategic half-truths – by comparing rumours with their own past experiences. I argue that rumours are not merely misinformation but interpretive tools that generate anticipatory fear and practical reasoning under discretionary enforcement. The contribution concludes that law and religion in Cambodia are co-constructed through these mundane interactions.