- Your current position:
- Research >
- D: Historicities & Heritage >
- D12 Heritage as a Transcultural Concept >
- Contributions to Conferences and Workshops >
- IIAS Leiden, 2-3 July 2010
Print this Page. Send this Page.
International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS), Leiden University, Netherlands (2-3 July, 2010)
Asian Countries as Exhibited at World Expositions: Revisited in a Global Historical Perspective
- National Colonial Exhibition, Marseille 1906: The Khmer Royal Ballet in the front of the reconstitution of the Angkorian 'Bayon'-temple, in the presence of the Cambodian King, French high officials and the gazing crowd (Petit Journal 1906, title page)
Presentation
"From a French exhibit back to the real thing: Re-enacting the Khmer temple of Angkor Vat in a transcultural perspective"
Long before the 12th c. Cambodian temple of Angkor Vat became an archaeological object of French-colonial archaeology, it started its European career in partial imitations at the World Exhibitions in Paris 1878, 1889, 1900 and in the Colonial Exhibitions in Marseille in 1906 and 1922. Its massive inner enclosure was finally rebuilt in 1:1-scale iron-plaster model at the Colonial Exhibition in Paris 1931 before it disappeared again after the Paris Expo in 1937. The orientalistic imagination of this largest religious stone monument in the world was always accompanied with life performances of the famous Apsara dancers of the royal Khmer court. However, this performative unity of architectural and human re-enactment had an enormous influence after 1953 on the national identity-construction of independent Cambodia and on the real site of Angkor Vat itself. In a process of self-stereotyping, the European display modes of this temple were re-imported, partly modified and became almost a political ritual for foreign state visits from Charles de Gaulle, Jossip Tito to Jacqueline Kennedy until today’s mass tourism industry and popular culture. This paper is a work-in-progress-presentation that aims to discuss these forms of re-enacting heritage in a transcultural perspective.
The programme of the workshop can be found here.
The poster of the workshop can be downloaded here.
