Introduction: From a Time of Conflict to Conflicting Times

The opening chapter of the book sets the scene by providing an overview of Angkor, Cambodia’s recent history and the approach adopted in subsequent chapters. A portrayal of the country’s turbulent transition towards political stability and a free-market economy reveals how reconciliation, cultural rejuvenation and economic rehabilitation are urgent and simultaneous demands. With Camodia heavily dependent on international aid, agendas of cultural preservation

and social development converge in fractious and contested ways: nowhere more so than at Angkor. After an introductory overview to the site, the chapter summarizes the analytical frame adopted throughout the book in three sections. Contested Spaces; the politics of heritage examines current debates around World Heritage as a politicized arena, one that continues to impose Eurocentric ideas of culture and landscape within non-western contexts. Cultural Economies of Tourism considers the interweaving symbolic and material economies, transnational networks and flows and the complex relationship between postcolonial culture and capital within tourism. A review of studies on the Taj Mahal, the Acropolis, Borobudur and Bamyan connects the book with current debates concerning this increasingly pervasive industry. Finally, Restoration Culture looks at the cultural politics of post-conflict nation building, and the role of heritage tourism for reconciliation and socio-economic development.

Chapter Two – From ‘Lost Civilization’ to a New Found Peace: recent Cambodian histories

The chapter traces Angkor’s ‘modern’ historical context. An examination of how Angkor has been appropriated, conceived and framed within a variety of contexts over the last 140 years – social, political, economic, cultural – provides an analytical foundation for understanding processes of heritage and tourism today. In essence, chapter two not only offers an account of the modern ‘social life’ of Angkor, but also provides the vital historical contexts within which recent events sit.

Chapter Three – World Heritage Angkor: an enclave of governmentality

Moving on to the early 1990s, chapter three examines Angkor’s establishment as a World Heritage Site. Tourism and conservation are intensely converging agendas, and within a turbulent, corruption ridden economic/political environment, the site is legally and geographically isolated. International assistance focuses on the conservation of an ‘ancient’ temple culture and neglects to consider the needs of 50,000 or so villagers living within the park and how they use the temples as active religious sites. It is argued that this situation re-imposes a former French colonial construction of Cambodian culture, where Angkor is seen as static, dead and frozen in a moment of past glory. Finally, the chapter discusses UNESCO’s failure to look towards the future and consider Angkor’s development as a landscape of rapidly expanding domestic and international tourism.

Chapter Four – Remapping Angkor; from landscape to touristscape(s)

The speed at which Angkor (re)emerged as a destination for domestic and international tourists is perhaps unparalleled anywhere in the world. The numerous challenges arising from this situation were compounded by the extremely difficult political and economic matrix of post-conflict Cambodia. The ‘cultural tourism’ policies which began to circulate in 2000 in response to this new era are critically examined. The chapter introduces the notion of touristscape(s) as the means for examining intersecting spatial, cultural, social and economic relations within tourism. It is argued that a World Heritage framework conceives tourism in static and geographically bounded terms, where the protective isolation of a monumental landscape, as an emergent touristscape, remains precedent. In contrast, an alternative analysis of touristscapes focuses on the socio-economic networks and flows which are now intersecting at Angkor. Innovative in its approach, this analysis reveals the paradoxical ways in which tourism simultaneously erases and strengthens formations of Cambodian national identity, cultural sovereignty and flows of economic distribution.

Chapter Five: Angkor in the Frame

Recent studies of tourism have begun to address the inter-connections between media representations, the narratives of tourists and their embodied consumption practices. This theme is pursued through an examination of how the prevailing constructions of Angkor within a socio-cultural landscape of airline adverts, guide-books, souvenirs and themed hotels connect with the way tourists talk about Angkor and spatially consume it. By weaving together a set of symbolic and discursive representations with an understanding of embodied spatial praxis, the chapter highlights how distinct, and politically charged, formations of an Angkorean culture, landscape and history circulate within the context of tourism. The strong contrasts between domestic and international tourism are also addressed.

Chapter Six – Collapsing Policies and Ruined Dreams

Many of the arguments offered in preceding chapters are brought together through a detailed analysis of two temple sites: Ta Prohm and Preah Khan.Within the Angkor complex these two sites retain an extremely high profile through their preservation as ‘partial ruins’. Essentially, it is argued that the constructions and framings of Angkor discussed above converge on these sites in fractious and contradictory ways. For domestic visitors, the current dilapidated state of these sites serves as a metaphor for a country ‘in ruins’. Whereas for international tourists, Angkor’s ruins denote a romance of exploration and lost civilizations. Crucially however, a politically imbalanced web of international assistance seeks the authority for preserving these sites as ruins from their role within the imagery of tourism. This situation effectively re-imposes an orientalist vision of Angkor constructed during a former colonial era, and silences those voices, such as the Archaeological Survey of India and members of the Cambodian government, wanting to see the two sites restored as architectural and active religious landscapes.

Chapter Seven: In (the) Place of Modernity Appears the Illusion of History, towards some conclusions

The concluding chapter integrates the book’s analytical threads under a number of themes. It consolidates the key arguments concerning the role tourism and heritage play within the national and socio-cultural reconstruction of a post-conflict society like Cambodia. It also reflects upon the importance of understanding the complex web of intersecting nationalisms, cultural-economies and array of post-colonial, transnational relations which arise through converging agendas of development and cultural rehabilitation within a context of heritage tourism. Finally, the chapter highlights why the book’s analysis of Angkor provides important insights for understanding the considerable challenges tourism poses for various other heritage landscapes around the world today.