Michael Falser

From a colonial reinvention to postcolonial heritage and a global commodity: performing and re-enacting Angkor Wat and the Royal Khmer Ballet

It is a commonplace that cultural heritage is not only a highly contested concept of modern times, full of nationalistic undertones, cultural stereotypes and essentialist topoi such as past grandeur and enduring cultural purity. Cultural heritage has also become the easiest and most profitable prey for today’s global tourism industry. These observations apply with particularly dramatic consequences to young emerging, postcolonial nation states with a rich repertoire of built (tangible) and performed (intangible) culture – especially if elements of this repertoire are branded ‘UNESCO World Heritage’ without considering their contested formation histories. Few other iconic heritage sites are more instructive in showcasing these observations than the temple site of Angkor, by charting the transcultural trajectories of Cambodia’s heritage construction through the processes of French colonial reinvention, postcolonial/nationalist essentialisation, and global commodification. This paper focuses on the ‘Royal Khmer Ballet’ as cultural performance and heritage re-enactment in combination with the twelfth-century temple of Angkor Wat as architectural stage. References to similar ‘heritagisation’ processes in the (post)colonial Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) will help to anchor this transcultural enquiry.

From Colonial Map to Visitor’s Parcours: Tourist Guides and the Spatiotemporal Making of the Archaeological Park of Angkor

This paper discusses the spatiotemporal formation process of the Archaeological Park of Angkor near Siem Reap in current day Cambodia. Within the time frame of the French rule in Indochina, it focuses on the first travel guidebooks created between 1900 and 1950, the most important of which were written by the first Conservators General of Angkor, Jean Commaille, Henri Marchal, and Maurice Glaize. This paper argues that these guidebooks were a powerful control tool used by the colonial authorities to realize a gradual and finally almost all-encompassing figuration of the spatiotemporal facets of the park for tourism purposes. Accompanying the administrative and legal delimitation of the park and within a traceable development from undefined conventions (1900–1909) and early attempts of vulgarization (1909–1913), to mechanization (1920s–1930s) and finally standardization (1940s–1950s), these guidebooks developed graphic maps, walking diagrams, circuits, itineraries, and a time-dependent parcours for the park and inside the temples to regulate the visitors’ object selection, body movement, time management, and visual orientation. Together with the structural conservation work affected in situ by the scientific staff, these guidebooks contributed considerably to the progressive decontextualization of the Angkorian temples from a living site of local social practice and (trans)regional Buddhist pilgrimage to a stylized heritage reserve of dead colonial archaeology—a conflict that became even more visible with the effects of globalized mass tourism after the inscription of the Archaeological Park of Angkor to the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1992.

The Bamiyan Buddhas, performative iconoclasm and the ‘image’ of heritage

Analsysis of the tragic circumstances of the explosion of the Bamiyan Buddha is 2001, including a critique of cultural heritage politics and media

Epilogue: Clearing the Path towards Civilization – 150 Years of “Saving Angkor”

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 through the different pathways of cultural heritage constructions that developed around the famous temple of Angkor Wat between 1860 and 2010. The temple’s central causeway will be used as a motif and metaphor for the “civilizing path” taken by the mission to “Save Angkor,” which has been declared by varying cultural brokers and political regimes in and between Asia and Europe through the past 150 years.

Cultural Heritage as Civilizing Mission: Methodological Considerations

The self-legitimation of political regimes in modern history was and often still is attempted through a twofold strategy: (a) a normative assessment of the ruled country’s past and present, and (b) the enactment of a concrete committed action programme to guide the nation towards a better future. The interest in this dynamic of a normative (intro-)vision on the one hand, and—as a practical consequence—of an applied, action-oriented mission on the other, forms the basis of this volume’s thematic inquiry. Although this critical assessment of the past and present may encompass a wide variety of aspects (social, financial, moral, intellectual, etc.), our focus here is on the specific field of materialized culture, and in particular on the complex of architectural manifestations that crystallizes over time through a multiform process into a (supposedly) “representative,” (i.e. trans-generational and collective) cultural canon of the nation known as cultural heritage.

Representing Heritage without Territory—The Khmer Rouge at the UNESCO in Paris during the 1980s and their Political Strategy for Angkor

In the modern history of Cambodia, the temples of Angkor were constantly (ab)used for identity constructions by the actual ruling powers. In this game, the years between 1979 and 1989 represent a unique case study: While the Cambodian territory itself was occupied by the Vietnamese Heng Samrin-regime, the resistance movements around the Khmer Rouge were driven out of the country but recognized by the United Nations as the legal Khmer government under the name of Democratic Kampuchea. As a clever political strategy and in coalition with the former King Norodom Sihanouk, its political leaders around Khieu Samphan and Ieng Sary appropriated the Western discourse on national cultural heritage: with its Permanent UNESCO-Delegation in Paris, the “safeguarding of Angkor” was promoted as an inseparable part of the diplomatic struggle towards national independence. This paper tries to analyse the ways and means of the “Angkor-as-heritage discourse” of the Khmer Rouge/Democratic Kampuchea in the 1980s, including the reactions of UNESCO and the international community.

‘Archaeologizing’ Heritage and Transcultural Entanglements: An Introduction

The appropriation of the past by actors in the present is subject to multiple dynamics. These span a field of forces composed of nation states, transnational organisations, and local communities, each concerned with preserving the remains of the past in order to emblematize identities, to protect and project a nation’s patrimony, or alternatively to construct a notion of world heritage. There are many facets to the study of heritage in modern societies; the concept is part of a transcultural order that has emerged in the last two centuries. A child of the European Enlightenment, it circulated under the aegis of colonialism across the globe where it was harnessed to the civilizing programme of the colonial state and at the same time appropriated by the agenda of nation building to wrest locality from the global constellation of empire. In the contemporary world, heritage has become increasingly enmeshed with modern media, tourism, and the spectacle, which in turn has led to the creation of a veritable ‘heritage industry.’ Today’s global heritage industry does not flatten cultural difference; rather, it exploits the particularity of the local and re-packages the exotic as a commodity for the world bazaar in ways that are reminiscent of the Orientalist fabrications in the world exhibitions of the nineteenth century. Yet the globalization of ethnicity ought not to detract from the observation that the varied national and local articulations of identity and its tangible anchors make heritage a contested issue and often a site of tension and violent conflict.

Alpine Landscapes of Defence: On Modern-Vernacular Avalanche Protection Systems in the Swiss Alps

This paper conceptualises modern, locally developed avalanche protection systems in the Swiss Alps as “alpine landscapes of defence,” which marked the decisive turning point when the alpine nations of Europe switched from early-modern reactive to modern Alpine proactive/preventive risk management against natural hazards. Using the sophisticated system of dry rubble wall constructions above the small mountain village of Goppenstein along the Bern-Lotschberg-Simplon railway line (built in the mid-1930s as a reaction to a deadly powder snow avalanche in 1908), this paper discusses, first, the hybrid technological history of these avalanche protection systems, which combined the tacit knowledge of local mountain-dwellers, the know-how of railway engineers, and the developing scientific research on Alpine natural hazards; second, aspects of a cultural sociology of risk are pondered by acknowledging avalanche protection areas as useful entities for the analysis of the high-modern cultural history of Switzerland in particular, and of the modern narrative of a gradual cultivation of nature from tentative appropriation to final human mastery in general. Lastly, the unique cultural and historical value of local avalanche protection systems in dry rubble wall construction is discussed, considering the aspects of climate change, biodiversity, and the preservation of historic cultural landscapes.