On the cover: The dancer in Cambodia embodies the Khmer ideals of beauty, grace, and continuity.
Photo by David A. Feingold, Ophidian Films, Ltd.
By: Heather A. Peters
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. A stroll through the Museum of Natural History in New York City aptly illustrates this point. Its galleries include those I remember from my childhood—dark rooms with illuminated panoramas […]
By: David A. Feingold
David Feingold has watched the revival of Khmer dance over the past nine years, seeing students start to regain the mastery he found thirty-four years ago when he accidentally wandered into the Royal Dance School in Phnom Penh. These photographs were taken between 1986 and 1994. The themes and forms of Khmer “classical” dance have […]
By: David Bowden
Tourism is a commodity supporting a vast industry. Indeed it is claimed to he the biggest industry in the world, employing more people than any other activity. But for many people, it is more than this, “it’s about hope, it’s the prospect of cross-cultural communication and exploration of self and other” (New Internationalist 1993:1). As […]
By: Richard A. Engelhardt
Commanding a strategic location on the uppermost tip of Cambodia’s great Tonle Dap lake, the ruins of the Angkor Empire expand north, east and west from the shores of the lake up to the sacred Kulen mountain plateau. This entire 5,000-square-kilometer site, once the location of one of the world’s largest metropolitan areas, is a […]
By: Thierry Zephir
In many ancient religions, mountain tops—from the Greeks’ Mt. Olympus to the highest Himalayas of Hindu mythologywere believed to be the privileged home of the gods. Southeast Asia, largely dependent on India for its principal religions of Hinduism and Buddhism, is no exception. On the island of Java in Indonesia, for example, the ancient holy […]
The five authors of this special issue of Expedition all have lived or worked in Cambodia, some for many years. They have witnessed the destruction caused by the devastating civil war of 1975-1979; they have participated in Cambodia’s own extraordinary efforts to reconstruct its countryside and revive its cultural institutions. Their approaches cover the fields […]
By: Jeremy A. Sabloff
“museum: an institution devoted to the procurement, care, and display of objects of lasting interest or value.” -Webster’s Third New International Dictionary One of the most important and worthy goals of an archaeology/anthropology museum is to preserve a material record of the past. However, museums also must strive to show how aspects of that record are […]