Museum-Making in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia

Cultural Institutions and Policies from Colonial to Post-Colonial Times

Jonathan Paquette

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000590180
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Museum Studies

Building on archival work undertaken in France and fieldwork undertaken in Southeast Asia, Museum-Making in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia provides a critical analysis of museum histories and development in three former colonial territories.

This work documents the development of museums in French Indochina (1862-1954), specifically Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. The book explores the colonial culture of exhibition, traces the growth of museum collections through archaeological missions to Indochina and other parts of Asia, and examines the role of museums in the cultural life of this colonial society. In particular, the author re-contextualizes the role and part played by colonial museums in the implementation of heritage policies during the colonial era in French Indochina, a dimension that is often overlooked. Additionally, the book addresses the effects that the Second World War, the Vichy Regime, and the Japanese occupation had on these cultural institutions. The transformation of these museums in post-independence Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia is also discussed.

Providing comparisons with other colonial and post-colonial experiences, Museum-Making in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia will be a valuable resource for researchers in museum and heritage studies. It will also appeal to researchers and graduate students engaged in the study of history, anthropology, sociology, political science, and development and international studies.

Chapter 1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781003161073-1

In 1951, a young French curator prepared a technical report to reorganize and modernize the administration of museums in French Indochina. Bernard-Philippe Groslier, the young curator in question, was Cambodian-born, and the son of Angkor-raised George Groslier, one of the most important figures of heritage conservation. After years of study in Paris, and after joining the resistance, the curator was ready to return to the land where he had lived most of his life and where his father had died under the Japanese occupation in 1945. The 1950s were uncertain times for France in Indochina. Nonetheless, the authorities were determined to maintain their operations and support their institutions. The 1951 technical report prepared by Bernard-Philippe Groslier concludes on the following note:

The legal apparatus, if homogenous, will facilitate the life of the museum. Scientific thoughts will always remain its soul. Financial means will be the necessary condition for its operation. But, what we have not said, and remains capital, is that the museum is one of the highest and one of the most moving manifestations of culture. The potential for spiritual enrichment that it represents is beyond any possible estimation, the most precious institution that a nation has at its disposal.

(EFEO, 1951)¹

While conveying the complexity of the museum, this statement also embodies the series of transformations that were occurring in the museums and collections developed by French colonial authorities in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. In the 1950s, these museums were in the course of being modernized – that is, they were entering, like many museums around the world, decades of a process of intellectualizing museum practices and rationalizing museum administration. This process was the result of the rise of multilateral institutions in the years immediately following the Second World War. Beyond its purely administrative aspect, this conclusion to a technical note for museum management also brings to light important beliefs about the nature of the institution, insisting on its cultural and spiritual values. Museums also serve nations, and the conclusion of Bernard-Philippe Groslier’s technical note is prescient of the new role that the museums of the region would come to play a couple of years later.

In 1951, Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia had been administered by a foreign power for more than five decades. In some parts of the region, French rule lasted almost a hundred years and could be traced back to the early 1860s. In the 1950s, the region was recovering from years of Japanese occupation and years of administration under the Vichy Regime; it had its own experience of the Second World War. The end of the Second World War also gave momentum to nationalist and socialist movements of the region. Nations under foreign domination that had been politically organizing for decades were finally seeing part of their plans come into fruition. In 1954, French Indochina and France’s colonial presence ended over a couple of critical months, between the French military defeat of Dien Bien Phu and the Geneva Conference. While the mid-1950s mark the end of this foreign occupation, the region would endure decades of duress and hardship marked by further foreign invasions, military occupations, and civil wars.

Museums are institutions. They are shaped by individuals (or groups of individuals) – scholars, scientists, and art connoisseurs – who imagine them, who give them their orientations and structures. They are also shaped by broader social and political forces. This book is about museum-making; it is concerned with the practices, ideas, and resources put together to give form to museum institutions. The construction or development of a museum institution may be the fruit of the efforts of a single dedicated individual, an ‘institutional entrepreneur’, but more often institutions – including museums – tend to be the result of a more distributed action across a vast array of actors. These practices are not only seminal to museum institutions, but they give them their specific organizational identities, their fabric and singularity. This book delves into museum-making in colonial French Indochina; it looks deeply into the practices, but it also tries to make sense of the context. Museum-making is a contextual activity; it is the result of individuals’ and groups’ capacity to make sense of and mobilize the resources of their environment, and their capacity to respond to this environment. This book attempts to provide answers to the following questions: What are the main patterns of museum development during the colonial era in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia? What are the main institutional factors that enabled or constrained these institutions and the actors behind these different museum projects? What were the main ideational components, the values and norms, at play in shaping these institutions? How did these institutions transform over time, all the way to post-colonial times? This book provides a series of answers to these questions based on historical documents, archives, press material, and a series of other sources. More importantly, this book brings to light the struggles, constraints, and challenges that actors involved in museum-making had to deal with, and thus challenge a perhaps linear view of these institutions’ development in colonial times.

This introduction presents the historical and theoretical anchorage of this book. The first sub-section aims to engage with the literature on colonialism in Museum and Heritage Studies. The objective is to synthesize the main ideas in the literature and situate this book in relation to decades of scholarship on colonialism in Museum and Heritage Studies. The second sub-section further elaborates on the concept of museum-making that is central to this book and provides some insights about its value for comparative analysis, in particular for making sense of museum-making during the colonial era in Asia. Finally, the third section discusses the existing literature on heritage and museums in French Indochina, and presents the book’s singular contributions, as well as offers a general outline of the book and its main arguments.

1.1 Museums, heritage, and colonialism

The museum is a fascinating institution. In his global historiography of museums, Krzysztof Pomian (2020) even suggested that the museum is a ‘strange institution’ and that its strangeness or uncanniness is owing to its paradoxical nature as an institution that is simultaneously unnecessary and indispensable (p. 9). It is true that the museum is an institution whose necessity varies from one society to another. In some societies, there is very little support for museums; in other societies, museums are seen primarily as private institutions, while in others still, they are public institutions and sustained by strong public policies. The place that a museum occupies in a given society depends largely on the nature and range of functions that it undertakes (Higgins, 2008; Gray, 2015; Gray & McCall, 2020; Hadley & Gray, 2017). Some of these functions are intrinsic; they are linked to the core activities that museums provide, which include collecting, preserving, researching, and communicating heritage. Others are further reaching social and political objectives. It is generally assumed that museums have come to be indispensable in some societies because of the nature and range of services they provide (Davies, 2008; Kann-Rasmussen, 2019). Museums are stronger, and arguably more indispensable, when they are capable of linking their core activities to a broader societal or political objective. Museums are seen as tools for social and economic development (Nelson, 2020), as educational institutions (Zipsane, 2011), as instruments for greater social cohesion and inclusion (Gunter, 2019; McMillen & Alter, 2017; Sandell, 2003), as tools for cultural diplomacy (Cho, 2021; Mairesse, 2019; Nisbett, 2013), and as former (or current) instruments of the colonial order (de l’Estoile, 2010; Doustaly, 2017; Grognet, 2007). This idea is generally where any reflection on museums and heritage in colonial times begins. In many societies, and for most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, museums and heritage have been commonly discussed as instruments of colonial power.

Colonialism and colonial history are major themes in museum and heritage studies. There is copious literature devoted to these topics, with researchers documenting the significant role of museums in colonial history. While there is significant overlap in the literature on colonialism in Museum and Heritage Studies, there are also a number of important nuances that should be kept in mind when approaching the issue. The main differences tend to be theoretical and epistemological. In this sub-section, we will go over some of the main and most important themes of this literature in order to better situate the premise from which this book is operating.

One of the most important streams of the literature dedicated to the relationship between museums and colonialism focuses on the museum in European metropolises. Multiple case studies show how Western museums have reflected certain racial ideologies, promoting the so-called civilizing effect of European colonizers on ‘primitive’ populations (Bennett, 2004; Bennett et al., 2014; Coombes, 1994; Lynch & Alberti, 2010; Rahier, 2003). Whether through harmful perversions of evolutionary theory and ideas on ethnicity, or through the advancement of a cultural imaginary that underscores the exoticism of foreign cultures, museum spaces have been, and in some cases arguably remain, an accomplice of colonial ideology, both explicitly and implicitly. This literature emphasizes the co-construction of the museum institution and the museum experience of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the development of colonial empires. This rich literature typically revolves around the accompanying rise of colonialism and museum culture in Paris, Brussels, Lisbon, London, Berlin, and many other European cities. It also extends to the development of museum cultures in Canada, in the United States, in Australia, and in New Zealand, where museums are studied as part of the number of political, social, and cultural institutions that were developed through these singular experiences of colonialism characterized by the production of new colonies, new settlements, made possible by the mass migration of not only European but also African and Asian populations. What we learn from the development of museums in the Americas and the Pacific is that most of the national institutions followed collection and exhibition practices that meshed with the practices in colonial metropolises. Decades after entering the twentieth century, many of these institutions of the ‘New World’ developed museum exhibits, often uncritically, starting their new national histories from the memory of their former homeland.

Whether it is to document cases in Europe, the Americas, or the Pacific, this literature, very likely the most important in the field, shares three important commonalities. First, museums are seen as a prominent agent responsible for the construction and circulation of colonial ideology. There is a strong Foucauldian thesis (see Bennett, 2004, 2009) that underlies this literature and which makes of the museum a space where a discursive practice is performed (Foucault, 1969); the museum space provides a ‘truth effect’ to colonial discourse. This is a dominant theoretical perspective for studying the relationship between museums and colonialism.

Strangely, these critiques of colonialism lose their systematicity and some of their relevance when applied to museums in the colonies in post-colonial times. As much as Benedict Anderson (2006) would like to see a connection among Asian museums after independence, the reality is that most of the strength of the analysis loses its power when confronted empirically. Paying a visit to a national museum in Beijing, Hanoi, Singapore, or Kuala Lumpur should suffice to convince one that the v...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Preface
• Chapter 1 Introduction
• Chapter 2 French Indochina as a colonial project
• Chapter 3 Museum-making in French Indochina
• Chapter 4 Heritage preservation and museum administration in a colonial society
• Chapter 5 Collection development and collection management
• Chapter 6 Museums and their publics
• Chapter 7 Museums in post-colonial times
• Index