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Buddhist monks in 2011 visiting the house of the former Khmer Rouge Ta Mok who was responsible for the mass murder of the Cambodian population, and who decorated the inner walls of his house with painted depictions of the Angkor Wat and Preah Vihear temples. Along Veng, the last stronghold and headquarter of the Khmer Rouge until the late 1990s, was declared a major tourist spot by Cambodia's prime-minister Hun Sen, himself an old Khmer Rouge, in 2001 (Michael Falser 2011)
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This epilogue to the edited volume intends to highlight the astonishing continuity of “civilizing projects,” from colonial through to post-colonial and globalized eras, in the same object of built cultural heritage in Cambodia. Using a historic photograph as our point of departure, this epilogue will take the reader on a transcultural journey throu...
Citations
... Conventional Cambodian approaches to conservation and archaeological heritage management are top-down from the colonial to post-colonial periods. France's 'mission civilisatrice' focused on monument restoration and preservation and re-invented Khmer art in an Angkorian style as means to preserve Cambodia's identity and to restore Cambodia to its glorious past (Edwards 2007;Abbe 2015, 131;Falser 2015b). The Conservation d'Angkor, the École des Arts Cambodgiens, the National Museum in Phnom Penh (NMC), and Wat Po Veal in Battambang were founded by the protectorate and Cambodian governments (Dauge 1997, 169;Clémentin-Ojha and Manguin 2007, 223-224;Abbe 2015). ...
... Additionally, the secularization of the Angkor Archaeological Park, the outdoor exhibit of the lost civilization and its picturesque ruins, has continued to affect the relationship between communities and conservators (e.g. Miura 2001Miura , 2002Miura , 2005Miura , 2011aLuco 2005Luco , 2013Warrack 2013;Falser 2015aFalser , 2015b. The foregoing begs the question of how Cambodians see institutional research and conservation in the context of non-institutional looting. ...
... In fact, a similar process occurred during the 16th century associated with the reestablishment at Angkor as the political centre and the restoration of Angkor Wat by post-Angkorian monarchs (Thompson 2004, 205). Undoubtedly, this association has been favourable for Cambodia's international politics in that these disciplines bolster Cambodia's territorial claims against neighbouring countries, and legitimize successive governments from the French Protectorate, Khmer Rouge, and the post-Khmer Rouge Vietnamese-backed government, to the current government (Wagener 2011;Luco 2013;Locard 2015;Falser 2015b;Heng and Phon 2017;Stark and Heng 2017). ...
French colonizers introduced archaeology to Cambodia with the emphasis on the restoration of Angkor monuments. The Cambodian public’s perception of archaeology as a field of the exotic, populated exclusively with international researchers, is fuelled by misconceptions of the discipline. Public awareness is hindered by the lack of heritage education outreach and human resources, and the excessive focus on Angkor. In this paper we argue that the recent increase in the visibility of archaeology through its expansion beyond the Angkor region, public outreach efforts, the rise of social media, and dedicated community engagement has helped de-exoticize Cambodian archaeology and make it meaningful to communities beyond other archaeologists, looters, or hired labourers for international research. Community members participating in archaeological research can serve as valuable mediators who convey the objectives of archaeological research and its raisons d'être to their communities as part of the process.
... US bombing and a 1969 coup ousted Norodom Sihanouk to establish Lon Nol's Democratic Kampuchea fractured the country. French EFEO staff departed Cambodia in 1972, along with their Conservation d'Angkor staff; Cambodian Pich Keo became the first Cambodian archaeologist to assume responsibility for Conservation d 'Angkor in 1972(Falser 2015. By 1973, US bomber planes had dropped at least 470,000 tons of bombs on southeastern and eastern Cambodia under Lyndon Johnson and then Richard Nixon. ...
This chapter reviews the history of post-conflict archaeological training and heritage management in Cambodia. It traces post-1993 developments in the country, and discusses best practices in post-conflict capacity-building in the realm of heritage and cultural preservation.
Fifty years after the ratification of the World Heritage Convention, we have come to learn that there is a huge discrepancy between the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO) ideals of protecting heritage sites with outstanding universal values and unmatched realities in situ. I attempt to elucidate what World Heritage ideals of heritage protection are held in iconic sites in Southeast Asia. The studied sites are ancient monumental heritage sites of national importance – namely, Borobudur of Indonesia, Sukhothai and Ayutthaya of Thailand, and Angkor of Cambodia. The authorities in these countries have converted heritage sites into parks for visitors and for capitalization, which has placed authenticity and integrity at stake as well as converting the sites for contestation between the authorities and local communities. In order to solve the dilemma of the World Heritage ideals and their unwanted realities, I explore possible effective approaches for UNESCO and its partners to take into consideration.
With the growing popularity of heritage tourism throughout the world in recent years, international agencies have guided their member states to develop different forms of tourism, including cultural tourism, sustainable tourism, and local participation in heritage conservation and tourism development. This paper first reviews the concepts of cultural tourism, heritage, sustainable development, and sustainable tourism, upon which international guidance has been based and practiced. It then explores the interpretations and applications of international guidance by the Cambodian national authorities in the Angkor World Heritage site, and compares these to the responses and applications by local NGOs and social enterprises. Angkor World Heritage site demonstrates a highly controversial national interpretation and application of international guidance, which is complemented, but only somewhat, by the initiatives of local NGOs and social entrepreneurs.
UNESCO World Heritage regions are historically constructed categories that do not easily map onto global geographies, yet they still continue to have important political and ethical implications in the international arena. Since their inception, regional categories have been at the heart of debates over global representation and equity in the World Heritage Committee. We include the recent controversy over uneven regional representation in elections to the Committee and the measures adopted to remedy this for the future. Specifically, the “Europe and North America” regional group has historically been the most dominant region and, as we demonstrate, continues to be so despite measures such as the Global Strategy. In the last decade, however, the “Asia and the Pacific” regional group has exhibited a growing presence in many aspects of World Heritage. We go on to examine overall trends from annual sessions of the World Heritage Committee from its start in 1977 to 2014 in terms of site inscription on the World Heritage List, membership on the Committee and size of national delegations in order to look in greater detail at the rising profile of Asia. This leads to a discussion of the different forms and understandings of regionalism, whether for Europe or Asia, and how some Asian delegations see their increased role and visibility in World Heritage.
