Sketching an Institutional History of Academic Knowledge Production in Cambodia (1863-2009)--Part 1 (Report‪)‬

This two-part paper focuses on the institutional mode of academic knowledge production in Cambodia since the beginning of the colonial period. It addresses the importance of French orientalism and its role in constructing a narrative of the new nation state of Cambodia and in assisting--while orientating--the process of indigenous intellectual "modernization". This legacy was continued by the post-independence Cambodian regimes, with the exception of the Khmer Rouge regime which organized the systematic destruction of Cambodia's intellectual and cultural life. Framing the contours of Cambodia and the academic field attached to it, the institutional history of "modern" academic knowledge reveals a contested space between the colonial state and its post-independence avatars. The evolution of scholarship over the country's "modern" history must thus be appreciated against the wider context of the introduction of Western norms during the colonial period (1863-1953) and beyond, upon a local historical substratum indistinctively qualified as "pre-colonial" or "pre-modern". Throughout the last century and a half, we therefore have the example of a European "orientalist" scholarship associated with Cambodia and its past. (2) We also have, emanating from this colonial-era trend, the development of a "nationalist" project of scholarship initiated by the successive incarnations of the independent Cambodian state. I wish to introduce this process within the context of the emergence of an autonomous Cambodian civil society and the initiatives taken mainly by individual Cambodian and French scholars to emancipate themselves from state control.