Gangster Style, Foreigner Style: Young People, Consumerism and Intergenerational Tension in a Cambodian Province
Kate Senior, Janet Helmer, Andrew Vodic

Abstract
A fixation on local gangsters was prominent in young people’s discussions about youth issues in the Battambang region of Cambodia. In depth exploration of this issue revealed that gangsters became a metaphor for the tensions between tradition and modernity in young people’s lives. The gangster was simultaneously feared and admired by most of the young people in this study, feared because they had disengaged with education and traditional values, but admired because they embraced all that was modern. This paper presents the results of a series of workshops on qualitative research with students at the University of Battambang and forty nine semistructured interviews that resulted from these workshops.

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