University of Heidelberg

"Rebirthing" Angkor?

Heritage between Decadence, Decay, Revival

and the Mission to Civilize

2nd International Workshop about Heritage

8-10 May 2011
Heidelberg, Germany

Organized by Dr. Michael Falser, Cluster of Excellence "Asia and Europe in a Global Context" (Chair of Global Art History, Prof. Monica Juneja)

In Asia, the mission to civilize meant restoring and recovering from oblivion an ancient and unique architectural heritage, which now had to be saved from extinction. The general East-West formations of the mission to civilize will be the subject of the deliberations during the first part of the workshop, comprising case studies of inner-European formations, of British-India, the Dutch-Indies and French-Indochina.

The second section of  the workshop focused on the specific case of Cambodia whose recent history has unfolded through a quick and dramatic succession of political developments – the French Protectorate (1863-1953) followed by  independence (1954-1970), twenty years of civil war, Khmer Rouge genocide and Vietnamese occupation (1970-1989), and finally 'national rebirth' under the international mandate of the United Nations. Here the question of continuity was addressed: in what ways did colonial cultural ideology – the ostensibly contrasting political ideologies of different regimes notwithstanding – shape the practice of conserving heritage through policies that involved modification, total negation or re-invention. In this context the phenomenon of inner-Asian migration of ideologies have also been discussed: how did the Russian or the Maoist-Chinese Cultural Revolutions, along with anticolonial traditions from Europe, influence the Khmer Rouge’s policy of genocidal re-purification that also affectedcultural heritage?

The third section of the workshop dealt with the “Archaeological Park of Angkor”: this complex, constituted as a limited protection zone under French colonial power, was reinscribed in a modified form as this complex was declared a World Heritage site of the UNESCO in1993. The workshop discussed here evolving heritage formations as they were articulated through the tensions between the local administrative management of the ‘cultural reserve’ of Angkor, the strivings of the local population to ‘re-traditionalize’ the site, and prevailing religious (Buddhist and vernacular) practices which conceptualize transcience and rebirth from the perspective of very different traditions.

Reconfirmed participants (in alphabetical order)

Gabrielle Abbe (Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne)

Marieke Bloembergen (Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies)

Penny Edwards (Department of South & Southeast Asian Studies, University of Berkeley, California)

Martin Eickhoff (Netherlands Institute for War Documentation)

Michael Falser (Cluster of Excellence "Asia and Europe in a Global Context", Heidelberg University)

Claude Jacques (Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Paris)

Monica Juneja (Chair of Global Art History and Speaker of Research Area D "Historicities and Heritage", Cluster of Excellence "Asia and Europe in a Global Context", Heidelberg University)

Khun-Neay KHUON (Deputy Director General, APSARA Authority, Siem Reap, Cambodia)

Henri Locard (Royal University of Phnom Penh)

Pierre-Yves Manguin (Ecole Française d'Extrême-Orient (EFEO), Paris)

Stefan Maul (Assyrology, Heidelberg University)

Krishna Menon (Convenor, INTACH New Delhi Chapter, India)

Keiko Miura (School of Letters, Arts and Science; Waseda University, Tokyo)

Juliane Noth (Institute of East Asian Art History, Heidelberg University)

Winfried Speitkamp (Institute of Social Sciences, Kassel University)       

Werner Telesko (Institute of Art History, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna)

Ashley Thompson (School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies, University of Leeds)

Rudolf Wagner (Institute of Chinese Studies, Heidelberg University, Co-Director of the Cluster "Asia and Europe in a Global Context"