Creator
Ang Choulean
អាំង ជូលាន
Cambodian ethnologist who studies Khmer rites and village beliefs, a professor at the Royal University of Fine Arts and a former director of culture at APSARA.
Ang Choulean (អាំង ជូលាន) is a Cambodian ethnologist who studies the rites, beliefs and village life of the Khmer.[1][2] He teaches historical anthropology at the Royal University of Fine Arts and won the Grand Prize of the Fukuoka Prize in 2011.[1][2]
Early life and education
Ang Choulean was born in 1949 in Kampong Khleang, by the Tonle Sap lake in Siem Reap province.[2][1] He took a degree in archaeology in Phnom Penh in 1974. He then studied in Paris at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, where he earned a doctorate in ethnology in 1982.[1]
Career
Ang Choulean led the work to reopen the Royal University of Fine Arts, which opened again in 1990, and took a teaching post there.[2] He also became director of the Department of Culture and Monuments at the Authority for the Protection and Management of Angkor and the Region of Siem Reap (APSARA) in its early years. APSARA is the body in charge of the Angkor monuments. In that role he worked to protect monuments that were close to collapse, and appealed for international help through the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).[2] Angkor Database lists him as a professor of historical anthropology and Old Khmer in the university's Faculty of Archaeology and a special advisor to APSARA.[1]
Many young Cambodian researchers have trained with him on long field studies of religious rites.[2] From 2005 he turned to teaching the public in the Khmer language under the name "Khmer Renaissance", which locates Khmer tradition in everyday village life.[2]
Work
His thesis, published in Paris in 1986 as Les êtres surnaturels dans la religion populaire khmère (Supernatural Beings in Khmer Popular Religion), opened a new direction in Cambodian ethnology, in the words of the Fukuoka Prize committee.[2][1] He reads folk rites as layers of belief laid one over another over time, from the worship of spirits through Mahayana Buddhism and Hinduism to the Theravada Buddhism of today. Many rites that look purely Buddhist mix older beliefs with Buddhism.[2]
His other books include La cuisine rurale d'Angkor, a study of cooking and daily life in the villages around Angkor, published in Khmer and French in Phnom Penh in 2020.[1] In a 2024 interview he described the ordination of young men as monks as a rite of passing of age, through which young men gained an education as much as a religious life.[3]
Honors
In 2011 he received the Grand Prize of the Fukuoka Prize, given by the city of Fukuoka in Japan.[2] Angkor Database notes that he was the second Cambodian to receive it.[1]
The government of Japan named him to the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Neck Ribbon, in its spring honors of 2022, for promoting academic exchange between Japan and Cambodia. The Embassy of Japan was to present it to him in May 2023.[4]
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 Angkor Database, Ang Choulean (undated)
- ↑ 2.00 2.01 2.02 2.03 2.04 2.05 2.06 2.07 2.08 2.09 Fukuoka Prize, Ang Choulean, Grand Prize 2011, award citation (2011)
- ↑ Cambodianess, Ky Soklim, The Tradition behind Ordaining Young Men in Cambodia, interview with Ang Choulean (August 17, 2024)
- ↑ Southeast Asian Archaeology, reprinting Khmer Times, Cambodian Anthropologist Dr Ang Choulean to Receive Japan's Prestigious 'Order of the Rising Sun' (May 11, 2023)