Secondhand Wonderland
Tuesday, March 31, 2009,9:59 PM
Hyperreality in Siem Reap, CambodiaIn today’s global travel market, Angkor Wat is often depicted as that rarity, an exotic treasure, the seventh wonder of the ancient world. Over the past few years, tourism has dramatically exploded in Angkor Wat, many thanks to Angelina Jolie’s Tomb Raider films, and Siem Reap has turned into one of the liveliest cities in Cambodia, becoming this pretentiously first-world, tourist haven ideal for leisure and recreation.Hundreds of hotels (many of them luxurious five-star palaces), restaurants, spas, guesthouses, art galleries, internet cafes and bookstores have sprung up around Siem Reap, catering to the needs of foreign tourists. In 2007, Siem Reap Angkor arrivals had increased with 1,120,586 visitors, representing 55.61% of the entire Cambodia.
Yet amidst these images of economic progress hides an overwhelming irony. It is absurd and disturbing that while Cambodians struggle for survival, tourists feast on extravagant buffets in five-star hotels, shop in decadent craft stores and enjoy full body massage and facials, Cambodians living in Siem Reap, in reality, remain to be exceedingly poor. It is common to see beggars in the streets and elders selling goods and pirated books at roadside stands.
It is in this economic, social and, most notably, political context of Cambodia that this paper revolves around. Anchored on the author’s travel experiences in Cambodia last January 4-7, 2008, this paper looks into the clear and obscure; absurd and disturbing images of (hyper)reality in Siem Reap, one of Cambodia’s main cultural assets where the famous Angkor Wat Archeological Park is located. It also examines how this “contested” tourist space has become “an allegory of consumer society and a place of absolute iconism,” as well as a cultural wonder that serves the consumers’ (Westerners, in general) needs for entertainment.
Having said that, the author’s standpoints are influenced mainly by Umberto Eco’s discourse on hyperreality and Theodor Adorno’s views about the culture industry, but with a little twist. Unlike the two Western theorists, the author positions himself as a subjective third-world citizen entering another third world domain.
Spectacle of IroniesThere is no better way to describe Siem Reap but a vast spectacle. In fact, the journey of getting there, if you happen to travel by land and cross the Poipet border from Aranyaphratet, Thailand, is memorable and shocking for the appearance and impression it gives to its visitors. Take for instance the immigration department at the border. This space is like a microcosm of a typical third-world tourist consumer society – a market full of buyers and sellers, negotiations and transactions here and there. It is not unusual to see fixers around. Corruption seems to be a serious and legitimate business. You can easily negotiate your way out of the border with immigration officials who are more than willing to put stamps on your passport in exchange of grease money. What’s even more astonishing is that people around don’t care at all, as if nothing’s happening.
Once you’ve crossed the checkpoint, confounding scenes of contradiction are going to greet you. Along the bustling street full of underprivileged Cambodians exchanging trades and traversing the Poipet border, you can spot two huge casinos: Golden Crown Casino and Poipet Casino Resort. The “national highway” from Poipet to Siem Reap is also not even asphalted. The main roads are a rocky, crater-marked collection of dust and dirt. However, as you approach the city of Siem Reap, the road condition drastically improves with no transition at all. From scenes of backwardness, you will be greeted by astonishing images of progress. Glitzy five-star hotels, some of them copied from Angkor Wat structures, are erected throughout the city. Flashing lights and huge billboards adorn the streets, and a long stretch of restaurants and spas will feast your eyes.
Both strange and distubing, the city of Siem Reap has a Las Vegas feel to it, mimicking a first-world tourist destination. For those who want to relax or get entertained, there’s a wide variety of options to choose from. You can either go to a theater that presents “traditional” Cambodian dance; visit a museum, a cultural village and art galleries; or go to a casino or golf country club. Apparently, these superificial developments are designed to gratify the desires of foreign visitors who are all in search for authentic touristic experience. The reinforcement of hyperreality in Siem Reap’s tourism industry creates “a form of liminal and heightened experience, of seeking an experience of authenticity outside the structure of mundane, ordinary, alienated work life.” It is shaped by globalized dreams, images and fantasies. The “package holiday” democratized by Western countries is a corollary of this phenomenon.
Angkor Wat, Authentic What?As a bankable, exotic tourist destination, the same old tricks of capitalism or culture industry are blatant in Siem Reap. Getting around the city requires a lot of spending. Before you can enter the Angkor Wat, visitors are required to pay for entrance fee. The prices of ticket vary on how many days you plan to visit the Angkor area: $20 for one day; $40 for 3 days or $60 for one week.
Depending on your budget, bus tour packages are being offered in many travel agencies. Local tour guides who can speak major languages (English, Spanish, French, etc.) can be hired usually for $20 per day, while motorbikes and tuktuks can be arranged through guesthouses for single or multiple days. Inside the Angkor Wat, horse carriages and even elephants are also available for tourists to ride on. In this respect, Siem Reap, similar to parks like Disneyland, becomes an “an allegory of the consumer society, a place of absolute iconism… place of total passivity. Its visitors must agree to behave like robots.” This means that you can “only” enjoy the beauty and attraction of the entire city if you spend money. Tourism in Siem Reap, in the first place, signifies consumerism.
So as expected, many of the travel agencies and hotels in Siem Reap capitalize on Angkor Wat’s prestige and historical value. They offer tour packages for visitors who want to have an “authentic” travel experience and genuine feel for the destination. The famous Angkor Village Hotel and Resort, for instance, boasts that what they provide to travelers are “exotic Indochinese ambiance and architecture built in “true” Khmer tradition.” That assertion, of course, is highly debatable. Is there really anything “true” or “authentic” about this hotel? None at all. Everything is absolutely fake: manmade gardens, wooden walkways, Lotus ponds and airconditioned rooms decorated with Cambodian arts and crafts.
The presentation of Khmer dance in Angkor Village’s Apsara Theater is also superficial. For one thing, the traditional dance is taken out from its original context. Dancers, singers and musicians perform in an airconditioned theater infront of foreign viewers who know nothing about the meaning of the dance’s hand gestures and functions.
Even the authenticity of a tourism-driven cultural heritage like Angkor Wat is contentious because, while most of structures in Angkor Wat remain to be “authentic,” there have been restoration and preservation efforts that already changed some of its original elements. There is also “nothing” authentic about Cambodian tourism officers who clad in traditional dresses welcoming guests; souvenir shops selling replica and sculpture of Angkor Wat and Bayoun; spas offering “oriental” massage; and restaurants serving “authentic” Khmer food. Roaming around Siem Reap, hence, is like a pilgrimage filled with images of hyperrality or, as Umberto Eco puts it, the world of the “absolute fake,” in which imitations don’t merely reproduce reality, but try to improve it. Absolute unreality is offered as real presence.
In the newly-costructed Angkor National Museum, for example, guests are given the chance to take on a “journey back in time from the creation to the highest point of civilization…enchanced by a realistic atmosphere.” This so-called “realistic atmosphere” means replicating Angkor Wat’s elements in both its interior and exterior. The building is a pastiche and bricolage, putting together under one roof the most “essential” Angkor features like honeycomb towers, standstone walls and plenty of architectural references such as bas reliefs, Apsaras and other elements from Angkor Wat’s past heritage. The wide collection of sculptural artifacts is juxtaposed with interactive exhibits using high-tech displays and video screens to provide visitors a deeper knowledge of customs and traditions of the ancient Khmer empire. Without a doubt, this museum no longer pretends it is imitating reality, but “within its magic enclosure it is fantasy that is absolutely reproduced.”
Designed like a cultural mall of some sorts, the Angkor National Museum also offers other amenities. At the first floor is a Souvenir Shop that sells “genuine” Cambodian arts and crafts and other gift items. There is also a Coffee Shop which serves coffee and snacks. Visitors can visit the spa to relax while deciding on whether to have traditional Cambodian or international cuisine at the delectable restaurants located in the complex. A “Travel Discovery Center” is strategically built inside where visitors can choose a range of tour packages.
Not faraway from this museum is the Cambodian Cultural Village, which brings together all the miniatures of famous heritage buildings, customs and practices of different ethnic minorities in Cambodia. There are full scale models of different Cambodian architectural types, including various styles of huts, hill tribe houses, pagodas and temples. There’s even a Wax Museum that features people, scenes and figures from Khmer culture and history, and a manmade Floating and Fishing Village that imitates the houses of Cambodians living along Tonle Sap Lake. On top of that, tourists, as they roam around the park, can watch traditional dance performances, rituals, wedding ceremony show, circus, acrobat, elephant shows and many others.
The falsehood of this park, bluntly put, is enjoyed in a situation of “fullness” or horror vacui, where the boundaries between game and illusion are blurred. Inside such a postmodern landscape, the surface and even quantity of touristic experiences seem to have exceeded profundity and quality. Everything about Cambodian culture is displayed in this made-up village so there is no longer need to visit the “real” space for an exotic experience. A hyperreal experience of Cambodian culture in the park is just as enjoyable.
The Culture Industry of HyperrealityClearly, in Siem Reap’s culture industry (Angkor Wat being its main “cultural asset”), it is the “experience” that’s being sold. In order to sell the place and generate income even better, the power of media and technology is reinforced, in which the Cambodian culture is being commodified as uniform as a whole and in every part. It is no wonder why, in Lonely Planet and other international travel guides and magazines, Siem Reap is always portrayed as a charming, mysterious, exotic (and other “othering” terms) tourist destination. Brochures and pocket guides, which act as advertising tools, are given to visitors for free. Mass-(re)production of art and cultural goods such as paintings and replicas is also quite rampant in Siem Reap. Angkor Wat-inspired souvenirs are sold in front of temples. You can also purchase pirated books and DVDs about Angkor Wat and the history of Cambodia.
Such mass reproduction of goods renders the acquisition and experience of luxury and mobility available to a larger audience. By purchasing a particular good, the consumer buys a souvenir of their experience of desire for another culture or lifestyle. According to Theodor Adorno, “the irreconcilable elements of culture...are subordinated to one end and subsumed under one false formula: the totality of the culture industry. It consists of repetition. That its characteristic innovations are never anything more than improvements of mass reproduction is not external to the system.”
As a consequence, Angkor Wat is reduced to being an “object” rather than a “subject.” And this tranformation is not a natural occurrence but a product of a centralized power of global tourism corporations and media companies. It should be taken into account that most of, if not all, five-star hotels, restaurants, spas and other businesses in Siem Reap are owned by foreign investors. Oddly, the Angkor National Museum is operated by a Thai company, whereas the Angkor Village is owned and designed by a French architect. It is not Cambodians but rather multinational corporations and global tourism industry players that control the production and distribution of cultural goods and benefit a lot from the income and popularity of Siem Reap as a tourist haven.
Thus, if there’s anything Siem Reap teaches us, it is the contradictions and challenges facing many heritage tourism landscapes in third world countries. That while the influx of foreign tourists generates billions of dollars to Cambodia’s economy, it only tranforms Angkor Wat into a mere masterpiece of the past; an illusion of the present; a secondhand wonderland alienating its own people who still struggle for survival.
That’s what you call hyperreality to the nth level.
References:Adorno, Theodor. The culture industry : selected essays on mass culture. (London : Routledge, 2001)
Eco, Umberto. Faith in Fakes: Travels in Hyperreality. (London : Vintage, 1998)
Cambodia Ministry of Tourism Official Website. http://www.mot.gov.kh/
“Gazing at the Box:Tourism in the Context of the Internet and Globalization.” http://scottmacleod.com/anth250v.htm
Official Website of Angkor National Museum. http://www.angkornationalmuseum.com/anm.html
Siem Reap Visitor Guide. 25th Edition. September-December 2007.
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VJ,
Sunday, March 29, 2009,10:10 PM
Kanina inihatid ka na namin sa huling hantungan mo. Pasensya na, naiyak kami. Ang lakas pa nga ng atungal ng iba. Agaw-eksena. Pero anong magagawa namin, eh mahal ka namin. Tulad ng karamihan ng mga kasama’t kaibigan mo sa Kule, magkahalong lungkot, panghihinayang at iba pang emosyong hindi maipapaliwanag ng simpleng salita lamang ang naramdaman namin nang mabalitaan ang biglaan mong pagpanaw. Pero VJ, alam ko, masaya ka na diyan, kung saan man ‘yan. Iyon naman ang isa sa lagi’t laging nais mong makamit ‘di ba? Katahimikan.
'Di kita malilimutan, VJ. Malinaw pa sa alaala ko nang minsang damayan mo ako sa mga panahong kailangan ko ng kaibigan, kuya at tatay na sasalo sa bumabagsak kong katinuan. 2006 iyon. Dalawang araw bago magbukas ang bagong taon. Hindi ko alam kung ano ang gagawin ko nang magwakas ang halos apat na taon na kasaysayan namin ni D. Lutang ako. Katatapos ko lang pagpapagin ang mga agiw ng nakaraan at iligpit ang mga gamit sa aming mumunting paraiso. Nung mga oras na iyon, wala na akong ibang matakbuhan. Halu-halong salita at imahe ang bumubulahaw sa utak ko. Binabaliw ako ng mga nawasak na pangako. Pero sa isang text ko lang, dumating kayo para damayan ako. Hinding hindi ko makakalimutan ‘yon, VJ. Sinamahan n’yo ako nina Caloy, Punk at Fuj. Saksi ang buwan (at ang trunk ng iyong kotse, nakakatawa man) kung paano natin pinagsaluhan ang gabi ng aking kalungkutan at kabaliwan. Pinasaya n’yo ako ng sobra. Sinagip n’yo ang buhay ko. Sabi mo nga sakin nun, “kaya mo yan, ‘kaw pa. Isipin mo na lang, may karma.” At tama ka. Iyon na yata ang pinakamasayang gabi ng buhay ko.
Natapos ang gabi, pero ayoko pang umuwi. Wala akong lakas at tapang na umuwi ng bahay. Takot akong mag-isa at mapag-isa. Kaya inampon mo pa ako sa bahay ng pinsan mong si Karla, at kinabukasan, sinamahan n’yo pa nga ako ni Punk na magpagupit sa Sta. Lucia. Bago tayo maghiwalay, sabi mo, magiging okay din ang lahat. At nagdilang anghel ka naman. Tama ka, VJ, ang buhay ng tao ay siklo. May panahong lugmok ka, pero makakabangon din. Panahon lang ang iyong kaaway. Maghihilom din ang mga sugat. Kaya tuloy lang ang laban.
Salamat sa lahat, VJ. Magkikita-kita rin naman tayo balang araw. Basta ipaghanda mo kami ng engrandeng inuman diyan ha.
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