State ‘Care’ or Mere Oversight? Evaluating the Effectiveness of Top-Down Support for Pilgrims during the Angkorian Period.

Summary

This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Care and Power" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The ethically loaded conception of ‘care’ has been approached in myriad fields as a form of ‘duty’, the product of interdependency or close personal relationships, or even as a moral disposition to the needs of others. Introducing this concept into the field of archaeology, we can break ‘care’ down into its tripartite structure of 1.) the caregiver; 2.) the receiver of care; and 3.) the physical signatures of this dynamic. As archaeologists deal with the material record, this third aspect is pertinent, particularly when assessing care within a state-supported pilgrimage. Under the reign of Jayavarman VII (ca. 1122-1218 C.E.), inscriptions indicating the construction of 102 hospitals and 121 fire shrines across the Angkorian state have been interpreted as serving a top-down function. These charitable structures allowed the king to offer care to alleviate his kingdom's suffering while channeling merit back to himself. During this period of increasing pilgrimage activity, it is necessary to challenge the uniformity of distribution and form of pilgrim infrastructure to better grasp the efficacy vs. performativity of state-imposed care. This paper will employ a framework of care within the context of pilgrimage infrastructure under the Angkorian period to assess and challenge traditional notions of state-imposed care.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• The Archaeology of Care and Power

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 51142