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6 Copy Rites Angkor and the Art of Authenticity “What is a nation?” asked a Khmer contributor to the scouting magazine Servir, writing under the pseudonym Yuvan Boraan (Ancient Youth) in 1942. “A nation is all things that are Khmer, . . . the territory on which Khmers live, . . . the conservation of our handicrafts, ancient customs,” and the sites holding the bones of the ancient ancestors of “our Khmer race.”1 The writer’s pen name echoed the central oxymoron of modern nationalisms, which claim both the youthfulness of a nationin -formation and its purported rootedness in antiquity, a bipolarity reflected in the author’s exhortation to his readers to worship both ancient ancestral bones and new national flags. A key example of this bipolarity is the compound Altneuland, coined some thirty years earlier by the Zionist Theodore Herzl to designate the as yet unformed Jewish nation-state and translated into Hebrew as Tel Aviv (spring ruins), a name subsequently given concrete formation in the sprawling modern metropolis of Israel’s largest city. Although tallying with this and other nationalist nomenclature globally, the Khmer writer’s contradictory signature also encapsulated tensions specific to the colonial encounter, particularly marked in Cambodge, where youth and antiquity, variously interpreted as present and past, West and East, new and old, modern and traditional, progress and backwardness, were in constant tension . Culture was to become fixed in its colonial status in Cambodge as in the French Africa, analyzed by Frantz Fanon as both “present and mummified.”2 These tensions, like the name Yuvan Boraan, were natural precursors to Saloth Sar’s imaginings of the Khmer nation and to his identification as Kmae daem. The colonial injunction to contemporary Cambodians was to detach themselves from the past and to live in the modern in a way that would allow presentation of Angkor and other monuments as antiquity. This was linear identity without linear progression. There was no gradual laying of milestones from then to now, as occurred in the marking of national historical time and space in the heritage movements of France, Britain, Germany, and elsewhere. There was only an Angkorean ancestral then and a colonial now, with a yawning abyss in between. Like the figures erased from Mouhot’s sketches of Angkorean monuments and the monasteries removed from the frontal approach to Angkor, contemporary Cambodians disturbed the European view of Cambodge. Refashioning the contemporary Cambodian into a modern national subject—the subject of a colonial protectorate, of a disempowered Khmer kingdom, of the twentieth century—required the bisection of past and pres- Copy Rites : 145 ent. The split space designated for the Khmer in this colonial vista was as the vanished , absent or lacking in the present, and as the ancestral Khmer suspended at the peak of Khmer time. In 1959, Saloth Sar’s future foreign secretary, Khieu Samphan, submitted his doctoral thesis in economics to the University of Paris, arguing that “the decline of handicrafts” in Cambodge exemplified the economic damage wrought by colonial intervention. Cheap goods supplied by French businesses, Khieu argued, had “prompted the decline of much of the national craft sector,” with the result that, in postcolonial Cambodia, “national crafts are fading away and dying.”3 Unknowingly or not, both Khieu Samphan and “Yuvan Boraan” were articulating the thoughts and fears of a colonial administrator who exerted a significant and lasting influence on Cambodian arts, George Groslier (1889–1945). From 1918 to 1942, Groslier had shaped his career as a rescue mission and established institutions, principally an art school and museum, which he described as a life raft to save Cambodge’s national arts from vanishing. While Groslier focused on luxury, elite goods, and Khieu on such crafts as silk weaving, tinware, pottery, and basket weaving, both shared the core assumption that a nation, and its life span, has a material dimension in artistic production. THE BIRTH AND ETERNALLY IMMINENT DEATH OF “NATIONAL ARTS AND CRAFTS” IN CAMBODGE In precolonial Cambodia, objects such as luxurious sampots (lengths of handwoven , hand-dyed silk) and sumptuous silver fretwork functioned as key material signs of prestige. These portable tokens of individual power and status, associated with ritual, ceremony, and gift giving, were treated not just as “symbols of merit, but as proof and manifestations of it.”4 Like the regalia in island Southeast Asia, such objects were probably perceived “not as causes of a person’s prestige, but as the signs or by-products of his or her potency.”5 In embodying such potency, objects such as...

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