The aim of this paper is to examine how a society such as Cambodia’s, which has undergone massive trauma, might heal and, in particular, whether traditional healers can help With the healing. The paper draws upon a participant observation of more than 1,100 healers carried out over 12 years in order to reveal how various forms of traditional healing instill illness and suffering With meaning and how the Khmer Rouge manipulated and reconstructed local explanatory models of illness to reflect their fundamentalist ideology. It describes the fate of traditional healers under Pol Pot and examines the cultural meanings assigned to mental illness, sexually transmitted diseases (including AIDS) and malaria by both traditional healers and Khmer Rouge cadres. As Pol Pot showed, the dismantling of systems that provide social justice is most effectively done by those Who know the culture. This paper asks whether the retooling of social justice might also be most effectively handled by the traditional harbingers of cultural meaning, namely, the healers. The challenge posed by the ‘outbreak of peace’ matches the one that accompanied war. In Cambodia, it encompasses alarming new incarnations of trauma as AIDS sweeps the country, parents traffic daughters, children Shoot parents, lovers hurl acid and youths descend into Ecstasy. ‬