University of Heidelberg

The concept of heritage (French: patrimoine) relates to material structures, institutional complexes and practices and at the same time carries a powerful emotional charge emanating from the idea of belonging and shared cultural meanings, especially in the context of a young nation. Its origins go back to the European Enlightenment of the 18th century, in the wake of which secularising and nation-building processes followed. The concept travelled as a form of colonial modernity to the non-European world, where it worked to create new identities for alien cultural objects and situated them in a distinct discursive frame that was equally constitutive of the modern disciplines of architectural history and conservation. Yet today this concept is increasingly being undermined through the workings of globality and digitality. The project deals with modern processes of cultural appropriation, exclusion and ascription that marked the transcultural relationships centred on the Angkor Vat complex. By questioning diffusionist master narratives that constituted their units of analysis in terms of a metropolitan Leitkultur and a recipient culture on the periphery, this study privileges a transcultural approach that investigates both entanglements and inner pluralities in each of the units. It draws attention to the ways in which local agencies engage with ‘universalising’ concepts and debates on their own terms. Such processes are seen to create a ‘third space’ in which the monument comes to be refracted through the prism of new visualities. A rethinking of the concept of heritage is called for, one that will release it from the bonds of the European Enlightenment. The workings of heritage between the global and the local also complicate its function as a cohesive expression of national identity – in the end we have to address the possibility of pluralising the meanings and workings of the concept. 

In order to a) analyse transfer, translation, exchange and – most important – hybrid innovation processes that are a product of cultural flows between Europe and Asia and b) to question their long established asymmetries, the very nature of cultural heritage provides an ideal field for the intended methodological approach. If culture in general can be differentiated into social, mental and material aspects, the concept of cultural heritage participates in all of these three levels: At the social level it encompasses all variations of (regional, national, global) identity constructions, institution building, social practices – and the vision of cultural heritage plays a strong role in it: the identification, selection, protection, presentation and administration of which is always regulated by institutionalized authorities and scholarship (e.g. museums, research institutes, governmental conservation agencies – German: amtliche Denkmalpflege). As a mental construct culture comprises values – and the quality label (national, colonial, universal) cultural heritage is a normative projection in the name of “authenticity” that itself dominates preservation and conservation norms, standards and real actions on site. Material culture comprises artefacts including architecture – and historic monuments are a selection of the built environment to be protected by practices and techniques of preservation/conservation.
The intended methodology simultaneously analyses these three levels of culture through the lens of the (translingual) concepts of cultural heritage, (transnational) institutions and (transcultural) practices of historic preservation between France and Cambodia in (post)colonial/globalized times – with reference to Angkor Vat.

Colonial, postcolonial and contemporary sources relating to Angkor Vat comprise of visual representations, written forms of discourse and material remains on site and abroad (France and worldwide). They overlap and influence each other and their evaluation calls for a dual and synchronous approach, deploying the methods of a) (art) history, and b) architecture/ conservation/ building archaeology. All these disciplines that define the formation and research of both the applicants as well as of the visiting partner of this project. Textual material on Angkor Vat comprises of travel and expedition literature, ideological writings, political and administrative documents and scientific works, dating from literary expressions and political media that articulated the French mission civilisatrice in Indochina, the first Cambodian-nationalistic journal Nagaravatta (lit. Angkor Vat), Marxist-communist pamphlets of the Khmer Rouge to art historical analyses and conservation reports of Western academia and expertise. Visual representations range from sketches, architectural drawings, and photographs to virtualized models. Material remains and objects include archaeological findings, sculptures, architectural fragments (left on site or “staged” in museums and entire (in ruins, overgrown, preserved or reconstructed) temples structures on site and their models off site – e.g. in different states of increasing perfection from small exhibition models up to 1:1-scale accessible exhibits like the hybrid Angkor Vat-structures produced for a dozen World and Colonial Exhibitions in Paris and Marseilles between 1855-1947.