Destination Asia : rethinking material culture

Today, the legacy of Cambodia's colonial past can still be seen in the country's 'cultural heritage.' Indeed, commonly held prescriptions of an 'authentic' Khmer or Cambodian culture, forged during a period of French colonialism, have been re-invigorated through the cultural logics of a post-conflict international tourism and heritage industry overwhelmingly oriented around the World Heritage Site of Angkor. Closer examination of tourism in Cambodia today, however, suggests important shifts are now occurring. During the 1990s, North America and Europe dominated Cambodia's arrival statistics. More recently, Northeast Asia and ASEAN countries have become the country's key source markets. Today, over 70 percent of all tourists traveling to Cambodia are from within Asia. This shift in markets holds important consequences for Cambodia's material culture, where a Eurocentric discourse of what is considered as 'traditional' Khmer or Cambodian is now being overlaid, transcended and reconstituted by the aesthetics of a tourism industry linked to Taiwan, Korea and China. Characterized by a multitude of economic and cultural flows, this shift in tourism holds major implications for a country still very much engaged in a task of socio-cultural rehabilitation and identity reconstruction.