![]() ![]() In 1878 the Mission archéologique de Indochina was founded which in 1901 became the Ecole Franchise d’Extrême-Orient (DEFEO). ![]() Thus, from the mid-19th century onwards, the tradition of scholarship on Cambodian history and culture is both shaped and dominated by the French. At the same time, French administrators began to put in place Cambodian institutions to protect Cambodia from disappearing. It was French scholars who at the turn of the century, threw themselves into the task of translating the inscriptions and re-creating the history of the Angkorean Empire. Although Cambodian Buddhists made pilgrimages to Angkor, the seat of the ancient empire, no one in the country knew the names of Angkorean kings or could decipher Angkorean inscriptions. When France extended her protectorate to cover Cambodia in 1863, there were less than one million people who owed allegiance to the Cambodian king (Chandler 1991). Some suggest that through their scholarship, the French created the entire notion of “Cambodia”: they gave to the Khmer the seductive idea that their ancestors had been the most powerful and gifted people in mainland Southeast Asia, and that the years following the fall of the Angkorean Empire were ones of regrettable and frustrating decline (Chandler 1991). An intimate relationship existed and still exists between the presentation of Khmer culture and history and French colonial scholarship. Its members speak Khmer, a Mon-Khmer language. ![]() Khmer is the main ethnic group of Cambodia. And all reflect particular periods or phases in Cambodia’s troubled history. All reveal aspects of Khmer culture and society in the way they represent themselves. 1), the Battambang Provincial Museum, the Wat (Temple or Monastery) Po Veal Museum, and the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. I will focus here on four of these museums, old and new: the National Museum of Cambodia (Fig. ![]() I spent much of this time working in and visiting museums and thinking about their role in presenting Cambodian history. I had visited the country at least five times during the previous seven years, but this was my first lengthy stay. During the 1980s, some of the old museums reopened and, in Phnom Penh, new museums appeared.įrom September 1993 to June 1994, I lived and worked in Phnom Penh, employed as a visiting professor at the Université des Beaux Arts (University of Fine Arts). From 1975 to 1979 all of these were closed because of the rule of the radical, Maoist-inspired Khmer Rouge. By the 1960s, it had not only five major museums, but several small provincial ones as well. Changes in what we choose to display-and how we choose to display it-reflect changes in how we perceive ourselves and others.Ĭambodia is a country with a rich heritage of fine arts and monumental architecture. These contrast sharply with the interactive scientific galleries created during the 1970s and the lively ethnographic galleries of the 1980s. Its galleries include those I remember from my childhood-dark rooms with illuminated panoramas filled with stuffed animals and birds placed in artificially created environments. A stroll through the Museum of Natural History in New York City aptly illustrates this point. Museums are more than repositories for the relics of the past they are also mirrors of a people and society at a particular time and place. ![]()
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