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5 Violent Lives Disengaging Angkor, 1907–1916 If stones have fallen from the building Sir has them reset in the original position. Sir Monsieur Commaille, from France, Takes cement and paints it on like paper as reinforcement. Wherever moss grows thick enough to block your view Sir has it swept out clean. Penned by the distinguished poet Oknya Suttantaprija In (1859–1924) in his verse Journey to Angkor Vat (Nirieh Nokor Vat), commemorating King Sisowath’s visit to Angkor in 1909, the above description of French conservation is serene and orderly.1 We see the newly appointed curator to Angkor, Jean Commaille, portrayed as poetry in motion, diligently restoring order, seemliness, and cleanliness. But the serenity of the above scene was undercut by ripples of violence, culminating in the curator’s brutal gang murder on his own journey to Angkor Thom in 1916. Three years after the establishment of the protectorate, the pioneer of conservation of France’s national monuments, Viollet-le-Duc, had written: “To restore a building is not to maintain it, to repair it, or remake it, but to reestablish it in a state of completeness that can never have existed at a given moment.”2 It was in the search for such an impossibly perfect pristine moment that French savants set about dismantling the dynamic site of worship Angkor had become, so that they might resurrect it as it existed in the European romantic imagination. With each act of sweeping and tidying, and each chapter of Angkor’s disengagement from the jungle, colonial curators were also, often unwittingly, disengaging the temples and associated statuary from indigenous belief systems. Besieged by unfettered jungle growth ranging from the powerful roots of massive banyan trees to rampant lianas, Angkor was the antithesis of the pastoral landscape celebrated in the literary and artistic tradition of la douce France (sweet France), with its regulated rivers, vineyards, and orchards. While colonial explorers were confronting Angkor’s chaotic mixture of ancient relic and jungle mayhem, the forests of Fontainebleau, like their counterparts in Germany, were being rearranged and organized into a romantic woodland hike.3 As one young delegate from the Quai d’Orsay described this disjuncture between European woodland and Angkorean wilderness, “Before these grand debris of the past, one is struck by admiration, but emotion is 126 : Chapter 5 lacking. . . . The remains of a ruined monastery in the heart of a German forest, or the scaly walls of a deserted chateau . . . move more deeply.”4 Bringing Angkor into the cultural landscape of greater France would require cultivating the spirit of la douce France at Angkor. From the early 1900s, archaeologist and administration joined forces to convert Angkor into parkland that would appeal to European tourists and coincide with French notions of monumental space. These notions of space and its configuration differed dramatically from indigenous visions. In Khmer cosmology, the forest was the preserve of yeak, demons; it was an unregulated space, but also a deeply spiritual place. Trees were shelters for and repositories of ancestral spirits, or neak-ta. The vast Angkor complex’s very engulfment in this haunted terrain largely protected it from the predators whose greed would dismember it on its “rescue” from forest undergrowth.5 Indigenous initiatives in small-scale clearing of the immediate surrounds of Angkor Vat and Angkor Thom (Bayon) dated to at least the 1870s, when monks around Angkor cleared away plant life, wild grasses, and “to honor the new governor of the province,” had felled some trees obstructing the views of Angkor Thom.6 Despite such actions, Delaporte noted in 1880, the French Protectorate faced a challenge in overcoming the “superstitious beliefs of the natives” and mobilizing indigenous labor on a larger scale to arrest the “invasions of exuberant vegetation.”7 In its very approach to space, the colonial project to deforest and demarcate Angkor would thus represent another strand in the temple’s secularization, through its disengagement from the surrounding landscape and its conversion into “Angkor Park.” The protectorate’s conservation agenda was dictated not only by a need to conquer the land through the production of aesthetically pleasing, bounded parklands and to compartmentalize time itself into periods of Angkorean glory, post-Angkorean decay, and colonial regeneration. It was also shaped by scholarly, museological, and strategic ambitions to partition what had, by the turn of the century, become referred to as “Cambodian religion” (sasana kmae) into Buddhism (associated with present practice) and Hinduism (associated with Angkor). These in turn were intimately tied up...

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