Sketching an Institutional History of Academic Knowledge Production in Cambodia (1863–2009) — Part 2

This paper focuses on the institutional mode of academic knowledge production in Cambodia since the beginning of the colonial period. It addresses the importance of French official orientalism represented by the Ecole Française d'Extrême-Orient and its role in constructing a reified narrative of the nation state of Cambodia centred on the Angkorian "golden age" while orientating intellectual "modernization" through the renovation of Buddhism. This top-down approach was pursued by the successive post-independence regimes — to the exclusion of the Khmer Rouge who systematically destroyed Cambodia's intellectual and cultural life. In contradiction with state initiatives, a few researchers — mostly French and Cambodians — chose to orientate their research toward ethnographically relevant subjects, taking Cambodian society as principal agent of cultural and historical meaning. This trend, referred to as "Khmer Studies", found its programmatic autonomy among exiled Cambodian intellectuals in the 1980s, paving the way for grass-root initiatives developed in Cambodia in the wake of its re-opening in the 1990s.