From left, Susan Needham, co-founder of CamCHAP and Professor & Chair Anthropology CSU Dominguez Hills, Julie Bartolotto, Executive Director Historical Society of Long Beach, and Karen Quintiliani, co-founder of CamCHAP and Associate Professor Anthropology CSULB, talk about the launch of a website that is launching May 16, 2011 ensuring the history of the Cambodian community in Long Beach is documented and preserved. (Steven Georges / Press-Telegram)
ARCHIVE: Academics, Historical Society join to create source that traces group's history.
By Greg Mellen,
Press-Telegram Staff Writer
Posted: 05/06/2011
LONG BEACH - "It's a story," says Cal State Long Beach professor Dr. Karen Quintiliani "that has kept me going for 20 years."
The tale is that of the Cambodian community in Long Beach, which began as an intellectual trickle of college students in the 1950s and became a refugee flood in the wake of Khmer Rouge genocide in the late 1970s.
From those fractured beginnings, the Cambodian community in Long Beach grew into the largest in the United States. It is a community that has become an important, and often misunderstood, part of the fabric of Long Beach.
For anthropologists and historians, the still-evolving Cambodian tale is a narrative that can be irresistible.
Quintiliani, an applied anthropologist, and Dr. Susan Needham, a linguistic anthropologist at Cal State Dominguez Hills, have studied, interacted with and been a part of that community since the late 1980s.
In late 2007, when the duo was in a sort of intellectual cooldown from publication of a pictorial history book "Cambodians in Long Beach," the two had an epiphany of sorts.
"We were saying, `What do we do now?" Quintiliani recalls. "`Should we call Julie?"'
That would be Julie Bartolotto, executive director of the Historical Society of Long Beach.
For years, the professors had been talking about collaborating with the Historical Society to archive the thousands of photos, newspaper clippings, books and documents they had gathered over the
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years.
That phone call turned into much more than the three might have expected. In 2008, the professors with the backing of their schools and the Historical Society created the Cambodian History and Archive Project (CamCHAP).
On May 16, at the annual meeting of the Historical Society of Long Beach, the project's archive and a new website www.camchap.org will be officially unveiled.
In collaborating with the Historical Society, Quintiliani said she and Needham had to do a very unnatural thing for anthropologists: Make all their data and information available.
Needham joked that the two were also frankly getting a little tired of lugging all their content back and forth.
In picking the Historical Society to house their research, Needham said the hope was that it would be more accessible to the community.
Central to the whole accessibility issue, however, is the website. Still in development, it contains a historical timeline that dates the Cambodian experience from early in the first millennium and continues to modern day.
The aim, according to HSLB literature is to "tell the story of how Cambodians in Long Beach came to be the largest community outside Southeast Asia, how they have recreated their cultural practices here, and the ways they have contributed to the economy, politics and redevelopment of the Anaheim corridor."
Quintiliani said she imagined a young Cambodian-American high school student seeking reliable information about his or her history and culture. She hopes the CamCHAP site and archives will become that.
Bartolotto adds that the archives will not only provide existing analyses of the Cambodian experience, but the raw data to allow people to make their own analyses and conclusions.
As extensive as the Cam
CHAP website already is, Quintiliani and Needham say it is only in its nascent stages and they envision it being organic and growing and developing into a place for "scholarly dialogue that may not have been available any other way."
"The sky is the limit as far as building (the website)," Quintiliani said.
greg.mellen@presstelegram.com, 562-499-1291
ARCHIVE: Academics, Historical Society join to create source that traces group's history.
By Greg Mellen,
Press-Telegram Staff Writer
Posted: 05/06/2011
LONG BEACH - "It's a story," says Cal State Long Beach professor Dr. Karen Quintiliani "that has kept me going for 20 years."
The tale is that of the Cambodian community in Long Beach, which began as an intellectual trickle of college students in the 1950s and became a refugee flood in the wake of Khmer Rouge genocide in the late 1970s.
From those fractured beginnings, the Cambodian community in Long Beach grew into the largest in the United States. It is a community that has become an important, and often misunderstood, part of the fabric of Long Beach.
For anthropologists and historians, the still-evolving Cambodian tale is a narrative that can be irresistible.
Quintiliani, an applied anthropologist, and Dr. Susan Needham, a linguistic anthropologist at Cal State Dominguez Hills, have studied, interacted with and been a part of that community since the late 1980s.
In late 2007, when the duo was in a sort of intellectual cooldown from publication of a pictorial history book "Cambodians in Long Beach," the two had an epiphany of sorts.
"We were saying, `What do we do now?" Quintiliani recalls. "`Should we call Julie?"'
That would be Julie Bartolotto, executive director of the Historical Society of Long Beach.
For years, the professors had been talking about collaborating with the Historical Society to archive the thousands of photos, newspaper clippings, books and documents they had gathered over the
Advertisement
years.
That phone call turned into much more than the three might have expected. In 2008, the professors with the backing of their schools and the Historical Society created the Cambodian History and Archive Project (CamCHAP).
On May 16, at the annual meeting of the Historical Society of Long Beach, the project's archive and a new website www.camchap.org will be officially unveiled.
In collaborating with the Historical Society, Quintiliani said she and Needham had to do a very unnatural thing for anthropologists: Make all their data and information available.
Needham joked that the two were also frankly getting a little tired of lugging all their content back and forth.
In picking the Historical Society to house their research, Needham said the hope was that it would be more accessible to the community.
Central to the whole accessibility issue, however, is the website. Still in development, it contains a historical timeline that dates the Cambodian experience from early in the first millennium and continues to modern day.
The aim, according to HSLB literature is to "tell the story of how Cambodians in Long Beach came to be the largest community outside Southeast Asia, how they have recreated their cultural practices here, and the ways they have contributed to the economy, politics and redevelopment of the Anaheim corridor."
Quintiliani said she imagined a young Cambodian-American high school student seeking reliable information about his or her history and culture. She hopes the CamCHAP site and archives will become that.
Bartolotto adds that the archives will not only provide existing analyses of the Cambodian experience, but the raw data to allow people to make their own analyses and conclusions.
As extensive as the Cam
CHAP website already is, Quintiliani and Needham say it is only in its nascent stages and they envision it being organic and growing and developing into a place for "scholarly dialogue that may not have been available any other way."
"The sky is the limit as far as building (the website)," Quintiliani said.
greg.mellen@presstelegram.com, 562-499-1291
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