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

Abstract

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.

Keywords:

• re-enactment
• performance
• Angkor
• Royal Khmer Ballet
• architecture
• cultural heritage

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Erratum

Notes

This article was originally published with errors. This version has been corrected. Please see Erratum (http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13527258.2013.815495)

1. This and all following English translations from French sources are by the author of this paper.

2. The author would like to thank Vann Molyvann and his wife Trudy for this information provided during an interview in Phnom Penh, in March 2010.

3. ‘The monuments themselves give only us only a little precious information on the dance. Not that the female figures are rare on the Angkorian temples, but it does not make sense to see in them only dancers. As protective deities, praying and following the almighty and mysterious god who lives in the cella, they are here to surround him, to serve him and to adore him, forever perpetuated in stone. At Angkor Wat, the god-serving enchantresses are multiplied ad infinitum, however they do everything but dance [italics MF]. On the bas-reliefs we can only find at most two or three dancing poses’ (Groslier 1969, 91).