On constate, depuis une trentaine d’annees, un veritable regain d’interet pour les moulages en plâtre et les collections de moulages. Une serie de colloques internationaux ont ete consacres au sujet en France a la fin des annees 1980 et dans les annees 1990, suivis de manifestations similaires en Italie, en Angleterre, aux Etats-Unis, en Pologne, en Allemagne et ailleurs. Ces evenements avaient souvent pour objectif de defaire l’image des moulages forgee au debut du xxe siecle, a savoir des c...

This paper conceptualises modern, locally developed avalanche protection systems in the Swiss Alps as "alpine landscapes of defence," which marked the decisive turning point when the alpine nations of Europe switched from early-modern reactive to modern Alpine proactive/preventive risk management against natural hazards. Using the sophisticated system of dry rubble wall constructions above the small mountain village of Goppenstein along the Bern-Lotschberg-Simplon railway line (built in the mid-1930s as a reaction to a deadly powder snow avalanche in 1908), this paper discusses, first, the hybrid technological history of these avalanche protection systems, which combined the tacit knowledge of local mountain-dwellers, the know-how of railway engineers, and the developing scientific research on Alpine natural hazards; second, aspects of a cultural sociology of risk are pondered by acknowledging avalanche protection areas as useful entities for the analysis of the high-modern cultural history of Switzerland in particular, and of the modern narrative of a gradual cultivation of nature from tentative appropriation to final human mastery in general. Lastly, the unique cultural and historical value of local avalanche protection systems in dry rubble wall construction is discussed, considering the aspects of climate change, biodiversity, and the preservation of historic cultural landscapes.

Going transcultural: from World Art History to Global Art HistoryIn the last two decades, the discipline of art history has entered a new stage of methodological debate. The ever-present challenge of what is generally summarized as globalisation (a term which, for our specific focus, describes the accelerating circulation of (a) migrating global elites, (b) aesthetic concepts and operative terms in the humanities, and (c) - last but not least - artefacts from all over the world for all kinds of exhibition environments around the planet) has certainly triggered this discussion. Various attempts have been undertaken to configure a kind of u0027World Art Historyu0027 - from David Summersu0027 Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism to John Oniansu0027 Art, Culture, Nature: From Art History to World Art Studies in 2006; or from James Elkinsu0027 volume Is Art History Global? (2007) to Kitty Zijlmansu0027 and Wilfried van Dammeu0027s World Art Studies: Exploring Concepts and Approaches (2008). The term u0027World Art Historyu0027 can be - broadly speaking - understood as an additive container to bring together all different historical strands and traditions of art historical terminologies and investigative practices - be they (supposedly vernacular and/or culturally homogeneous) regional or national (institutionalized) - from the last one hundred and fifty years, into one globally valid super-discipline. But what about the term u0027Global Art Historyu0027?In the German-speaking context, Hans Beltingu0027s and Andrea Buddensiegu0027s 2011 exhibition Global Studies: Mapping Contemporary Art and Culture for the ZKM (Zentrum fur Kunst und Medientechnologie) in Karlsruhe, used the term u0027Global Artu0027 in the context of contemporary artistic productions that staged primarily non-Western art - albeit through very Western lenses - within exhibitions and mega-shows. By this time, the first German-speaking Chair of Global Art History with Prof. Monica Juneja, had already been established (since 2008) within the Cluster of Excellence Asia and Europe in a Global Context - The Dynamics of Transculturality at Heidelberg University. In her contribution to the above-mentioned exhibition catalogue, Juneja focused on non-Western artists who were forced by Western curatorial practices to perform their cultural identity through an ever-recognisable kind of self-indigenising art practice. Additionally, she criticised various u0027World Art Historyu0027 approaches and formulated a rough questionnaire on how a new discipline of Global Art History could become operational. Was the originally Western discipline of art history participating in the 19th-century u0027territorial-cum-political logic of modern nation-statesu0027 by (a) establishing supposedly universal taxonomies of art forms from all around the world, and (b), labelling artworks as, for example, u0027Islamicu0027 or u0027Modernistu0027 and subordinating them hierarchically within the civilizational categories of Europeu0027s institutional (such as violent colonial) regimes? A global approach would - according to Junejau0027s counter-position to the above-mentioned works advocating u0027World Art Historyu0027 - necessitate a decidedly transcultural methodology: u0027Casting art history in a global/transcultural frame would involve questioning the taxonomies and values that have been built into the discipline since its inception and have been taken as universalu0027. This approach would call for: u0027new units of investigation that are more responsive to the logic of objects and artists on the move [as] historical units and boundaries cannot be taken as given; rather, they have to be constituted as a subject of investigation, as products of spatial and cultural displacements, [being] defined as participants in and as contingent upon the historical relationships in which they are implicatedu0027. 1 As Juneja explained further in her introduction u0027Kunstgeschichte and kulturelle Differenzu0027 to the themed volume Universalitat der Kunstgeschichte? in the kritische berichte of 2012, the aim of a transculturally embedded art history was u0027to flesh out the multiple processes of appropriation, differentiation, reconfiguration and translation in new correlations in order to interrogate the constitutive repercussions of these processes on the participating agents and visual systemsu0027. …

In the modern history of Cambodia, the temples of Angkor were constantly (ab)used for identity constructions by the actual ruling powers. In this game, the years between 1979 and 1989 represent a unique case study: While the Cambodian territory itself was occupied by the Vietnamese Heng Samrin-regime, the resistance movements around the Khmer Rouge were driven out of the country but recognized by the United Nations as the legal Khmer government under the name of Democratic Kampuchea. As a clever political strategy and in coalition with the former King Norodom Sihanouk, its political leaders around Khieu Samphan and Ieng Sary appropriated the Western discourse on national cultural heritage: with its Permanent UNESCO-Delegation in Paris, the “safeguarding of Angkor” was promoted as an inseparable part of the diplomatic struggle towards national independence. This paper tries to analyse the ways and means of the “Angkor-as-heritage discourse” of the Khmer Rouge/Democratic Kampuchea in the 1980s, including the reactions of UNESCO and the international community.

This epilogue to the edited volume intends to highlight the astonishing continuity of "civilizing projects," from colonial through to post-colonial and globalized eras, in the same object of built cultural heritage in Cambodia. Using a historic photograph as our point of departure, this epilogue will take the reader on a transcultural journey through the different pathways of cultural heritage constructions that developed around the famous temple of Angkor Wat between 1860 and 2010. The temple's central causeway will be used as a motif and metaphor for the "civilizing path" taken by the mission to "Save Angkor," which has been declared by varying cultural brokers and political regimes in and between Asia and Europe through the past 150 years.

It is a commonplace that cultural heritage is not only a highly contested concept of modern times, full of nationalistic undertones, cultural stereotypes and essentialist topoi such as past grandeur and enduring cultural purity. Cultural heritage has also become the easiest and most profitable prey for today's global tourism industry. These observations apply with particularly dramatic consequences to young emerging, postcolonial nation states with a rich repertoire of built (tangible) and performed (intangible) culture - especially if elements of this repertoire are branded 'UNESCO World Heritage' without considering their contested formation histories. Few other iconic heritage sites are more instructive in showcasing these observations than the temple site of Angkor, by charting the transcultural trajectories of Cambodia's heritage construction through the processes of French colonial reinvention, postcolonial/nationalist essentialisation, and global commodification. This paper focuses on the 'Royal Khmer Ballet' as cultural performance and heritage re-enactment in combination with the twelfth-century temple of Angkor Wat as architectural stage. References to similar 'heritagisation' processes in the (post) colonial Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) will help to anchor this transcultural enquiry.

The appropriation of the past by actors in the present is subject to multiple dynamics. These span a field of forces composed of nation states, transnational organisations, and local communities, each concerned with preserving the remains of the past in order to emblematize identities, to protect and project a nation’s patrimony, or alternatively to construct a notion of world heritage. There are many facets to the study of heritage in modern societies; the concept is part of a transcultural order that has emerged in the last two centuries. A child of the European Enlightenment, it circulated under the aegis of colonialism across the globe where it was harnessed to the civilizing programme of the colonial state and at the same time appropriated by the agenda of nation building to wrest locality from the global constellation of empire. In the contemporary world, heritage has become increasingly enmeshed with modern media, tourism, and the spectacle, which in turn has led to the creation of a veritable ‘heritage industry.’ Today’s global heritage industry does not flatten cultural difference; rather, it exploits the particularity of the local and re-packages the exotic as a commodity for the world bazaar in ways that are reminiscent of the Orientalist fabrications in the world exhibitions of the nineteenth century. Yet the globalization of ethnicity ought not to detract from the observation that the varied national and local articulations of identity and its tangible anchors make heritage a contested issue and often a site of tension and violent conflict.

Besides the commodification of original artefacts from the Orient as museum objects of Occidental curiosity, the transfer and display of Asian monumental architecture was a powerful means to appropriate the built cultural heritage of the colonies for the European métropole. Addressing a scientific desideratum in architectural and museum research until today, this paper investigates the medium of plaster casts as an early colonial strategy of the transfer and substitution of Oriental architecture for newly invented museum spaces in Europe. With the focus of the largely forgotten musée Indo-chinois in the Paris(c. 1880-1930) and the architectural plaster casts of the Cambodian temples of Angkor, this contribution develops a transcultural perspective1on (pre-)colonial architectural museum spaces of the 19thcentury which covers the scene in Paris from 1800 onwards with the protagonists Alexandre Lenoir (after 1800) and Eugène Viollet-le-Duc (before 1880) as well as the concurring museum projects in London with the South Kensington Museum (after 1870) in the first place.

This book investigates what has constituted notions of "archaeological heritage" from colonial times to the present. It includes case studies of sites in South and Southeast Asia with a special focus on Angkor, Cambodia. The contributions, the subjects of which range from architectural and intellectual history to historic preservation and restoration, evaluate historical processes spanning two centuries which saw the imagination and production of "dead archaeological ruins" by often overlooking living local, social, and ritual forms of usage on site. Case studies from computational modelling in archaeology discuss a comparable paradigmatic change from a mere simulation of supposedly dead archaeological building material to an increasing appreciation and scientific incorporation of the knowledge of local stakeholders. This book seeks to bring these different approaches from the humanities and engineering sciences into a trans-disciplinary discussion.

Seit Ende des europäischen Kolonialprojekts und mit den aktuellen Auswirkungen der Globalisierung ist die eurozentrische und nationalstaatlich orientierte Konzeption von »Kulturerbe« in eine konfliktgeladene Schieflage geraten, die auch die institutionalisierte Denkmalpflege vor neue Herausforderungen stellt. Dieser Band stellt mit Fallbeispielen aus aller Welt die kulturwissenschaftliche Denkfigur der »Transkulturalität« vor, mit der sich neue Zugangsformen zu Kulturerbe ergeben: mit einer Wertschätzung grenzüberschreitender Kontaktzonen, flüchtig-bildhafter Erscheinungsformen, hybrid-ephemerer Materialität und heterogener Identitätskonstruktionen.

Besides the commodification of original artefacts from the Orient as museum objects of Occidental curiosity, the transfer and display of Asian monumental architecture was a powerful means to appropriate the built cultural heritage of the colonies for the European metropole. Addressing a scientific desideratum in architectural and museum research until today, this paper investigates the medium of plaster casts as an early colonial strategy of the transfer and substitution of Oriental architecture for newly invented museum spaces in Europe. With the focus of the largely forgotten musee Indo-chinois in the Paris (c. 1880-1930) and the architectural plaster casts of the Cambodian temples of Angkor, this contribution develops a transcultural perspective(1) on (pre-)colonial architectural museum spaces of the 19th century which covers the scene in Paris from 1800 onwards with the protagonists Alexandre Lenoir (after 1800) and Eugene Viollet-le-Duc (before 1880) as well as the concurring museum projects in London with the South Kensington Museum (after 1870) in the first place.