CRAM, a Muslim tribe of Indo-China, rather dark skinned with Oceanic affinities (see AsIA), practising circumcision but with strong traces of Hinduism, phallic worship and animism surviving in their beliefs and customs. Thus they believe in a plurality of souls, eighteen of which are mortal, attached to each individual, and associate the departure of the soul at death with the flight of a bird. They bury their dead close to their best rice fields, and have a series of ceremonies depending on the operations of the agricultural year; the reaping of the rice crop must be initiated by a woman. In the family the matrilineal system is still followed. Children are given opprobrious names, probably to obviate the malice of the spirits. Speech is tabu when collecting the valuable "eagle wood" (aquilaria agallocha), and invulnerability is procured by anointing the body with human bile. The Cham are fond of regattas and boat races, and play chess using canoes instead of bishops. The language of the tribe is connected with Cambodian and with Oceanic tongues and, like the dolichocephaly of its speakers, and their customs, suggests an Indonesian basis for the tribe.
See Baudesson, Indo-China and its Primitive People (1919) ; Leuba, Les Chams et leur Art (1923).