Organizer: Penny Edwards, Monash University
Chair: Lindsay French, Rhode Island School of Design
The power of Angkor as a site of memory and the seat of the Khmer Empire was progressively developed through ritual, art and literature from the 9th to 13th centuries. The fall of Angkor to Siam in the 15th century saw the transfer of Angkorean statuary by Siamese Kings to the north, and Khmer royalty to their new capitals in the south. Throughout succeeding centuries, Angkor remained the spiritual mainspring of both political power and cultural production in the shrinking Khmer Empire.
Colonial historiography telescoped this cultural continuum into a trifocal narrative of Angkorean glory, post-Angkorean decay, and French redemption. While French officials fragmented and exported Angkor for European consumption, colonial propaganda and conservation programmes remade Angkor as a totem of French beneficence. By the 1940s, these reconstructed ruins had become the lodestar of Cambodge’s burgeoning nationalist movement. Since Independence in 1954, successive regimes have framed their claims to legitimacy in the imagery of Angkor. Yet war and predation have defaced and displaced the actual art of Angkor, particularly since the 1980s, so that the temples themselves now tell a different story of power and influence.
Through a multidisciplinary scrutiny of ritual, sculpture, text and iconography, this panel confronts European projections of Angkor with Khmer conceptions of the ancient capital, and considers the influence of colonial fantasy on Cambodia’s present. As it explores diverse narratives and practices, the panel dismantles some enduring assumptions about the temples, and tracks the shifting center of Angkor’s power across centuries, continents and cultures.
Text and Temple: The Memorialisation of Angkor Vat
Ashley Thompson, Université de Paris VIII
From the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, Khmer Queens, Kings, and other pilgrims engraved more than forty "vows of truth" on the stone pillars and walls of Angkor Vat. All but one of these texts were composed in Khmer. This reappropriation of the temple in writing—and in Khmer writing—can also be read in the early seventeenth-century text Lpoek Nagar Vatt (The Edification of Angkor Vat). This narrative description of the legendary foundation of the temple, its architecture and decor, is arguably the earliest extant original full-scale literary work in Khmer. After the abandonment of the capital at Angkor, Angkor Vat was thus textualized, while simultaneously giving birth to the Khmer text.
The association between construction and composition was not an innovation of post-Angkorean times. In ancient as in modern Khmer, a range of verbs are employed interchangeably to "compose" a text or to "construct" a temple. Temple walls, pillars and doorjambs have been supporting inscriptions for as long as they have been supporting lintels and vaults. However, in the ancient period, poetic composition in stone remained the reserve of Sanskrit, while Khmer served primarily administrative purposes. Around the end of the thirteenth century, the decline of monumental stone construction was accompanied by the decline of composition in Sanskrit. A complex relationship between Pali and Khmer developed, with Angkor Vat serving literally and figuratively as the matrix of literary composition.
This paper will examine a variety of texts to explore this phenomenon even as it continues to affect contemporary Khmer expression.
Constructing Angkor in Cambodge
Penny Edwards, Monash University
Hun Sen, Pol Pot, Sihanouk, and Lon Nol have all sought moral authority and political legitimacy in the iconography of Angkor. In a bid to unravel this nationalist trope, this paper taps French and Khmer texts and archives to map the conflation of temple, race and nation in the Protectorate of Cambodge (1863–1954).
Modeled by Suryavarman II on a celestial city, Angkor lived on in Khmer lore and legend as the architecture of angels and a locus of divinity long after its abandonment in the 15th century. As they transported Europe’s 19th-century passion for heritage and history to Cambodge, and transplanted Metropolitan preoccupations with inventing and identifying "national" monuments to colonial soil, French administrators and archaeologists inscribed the ancient ruins with new meaning.
In ceremonies and circulars, exhibitions and museums, newsprint and novels, Angkor’s tricorn towers came to symbolize both a golden past and a glorious future. The centuries between the defeat of Angkor and the dawn of French rule were dismissed as a place "sans histoire" (without history). School curricula and colonial propaganda transmitted these readings to Cambodge’s educated elite. Driven by imperial rivalry, ideological imperatives, and romantic fascination, colonial administrators and scholars in France and Indochina launched a campaign to rehabilitate the temples.
As it explores the intellectual paradigms, archaeological endeavours and political projects which shaped Angkor’s trajectory from religious site to national monument in Cambodge, this paper excavates the nexus between colonial perceptions of Angkor and contemporary nationalist constructions of the temple-city.
The Fascination for Angkor: Reimag(in)ing and Reordering the Cambodian Aesthetic and Political World
Panivong Norindr, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
"Why fascination?" asks the French philosopher Maurice Blanchot in his attempt to locate the "origin" of a work of art and the "space" occupied by literature in our imaginary. The same question could be posed for Angkor. Why does it continue, to this day, to fascinate us? One of the aims of this paper is to examine Angkor, not simply as a monument to man’s creativity, a repository of cultural values, or an object of pure aesthetic enjoyment, but also as the site of intense aesthetic re-imaging and political appropriation.
Angkor exerts such a fascination on the imaginary of the French that it becomes a privileged "lieu de memoire" (locus of memory) for writers such as Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Pierre Loti, André Malraux, and Michel Butor; naturalists such as Henri Mouhot; artists and architects such as Auguste Rodin and Lucien Fournereau, and film operators and directors such as Leon Busy, Jacques Kebadian, and Didier Fassio. One could even go so far as to say that Angkor constitutes the cornerstone of all official and artistic representations of Indochine. This paper examines the "force" of this passion for Angkor, drawing upon a large literary, iconographic, and filmic archive to better assess the aesthetic and ideological stakes in the French colonial and postcolonial gaze.
Stolen Statues
Lindsay French, Rhode Island School of Art and Design
There is no more potent symbol of Cambodian history and culture, and no more important national icon for Cambodians, than Angkor Vat. As a monument to past greatness and an inspiration for an uncertain future, Angkor has enormous emotional significance for the Cambodian people. It also has great collective economic importance as the country’s foremost international tourist attraction.
But the value of the Angkor temples extends well beyond Cambodia’s borders. They have been major sites for the production of knowledge, prestige, and academic careers in the context of both colonial and post-colonial relations between Cambodians and the French, and neo-colonial relationships of post-civil war reconstruction and development. Since the United Nations’ return to Cambodia in 1992, the temples have been claimed by international organizations (UNESCO, the World Monuments Funds) as artistic and cultural treasures of world-wide import; indeed, Angkor sculptures are a treasured part of prestigious museum collections around the world, and increasingly of private collections as well. Because of this, they also represent a quick and dependable source of income in a country where nobody’s income is secure, as the recent explosion of theft and smuggling of temple carvings out of Cambodia demonstrates.
Several very different economies of value converge on the Angkor temples, and interact in ways that shed light on the international art market as well as Cambodia’s current political incarnation. This paper focuses on the interaction between these different economies of value in the context of the newly created, economically chaotic and politically tenuous Cambodian state.