 Welch, ddweudwch. Rwyf ychydigodd, ac maen nhw'n meddwl am hanfodol, rydyn ni'n rhaid i'r fflawni'r byddiol i'r amlwg mwybodaeth. Jamie Le-Mercier. Fy wnaeth yw'r mynd i'r ysgrifennu Richard Black. Rym ni'n llef, yw eich pro-drector. Mae'n gweithio'r amddangos angen am ymddangos Barenness Amos. Rydyn ni'n gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio, a mewn fawr i yw yw yw yw Ymdweithio siwethef, a yw'r ymdweithio â Ysgrifennu Aishley-Thomsen i'r Gweithfyrdd ac i'r Fawr Rhaglen. Dw i'n fawr i'r ddweud yma bod nhw yw ddweud hwnnw'n mynd i ddweud â'r Ysgrifennu Aishley-Thomsen, Y Soes Ynogrol yw ysbesol, y cyfnodd, ac ymddangosiaeth y fath yw'r gweithio ymddangosiaeth ymddangosiaeth. Ynod ymddangosiaeth yma yw y 6 o'r ffordd yw'r Cymru Ynogrol Ysbesol. Ynw'r gweithio ar hyn o'r cyfnodd ymddangosiaeth Ashley a'r cyfnodd ymddangosiaeth ymddangosiaeth. Yn oeddwn i'r gweithio'r profesor Norah Taylor. Nora is the Ausdorff Professor of South and Southeast Asian Art, sorry, Art History at the School of Art Institute of Chicago. She's the author of Painters in Hanoi, an ethnography of Vietnamese art. She's editor of Studies in Southeast Asian Art, Essays in Honor of Stanley O'Connor, and co-editor of Modern and Contemporary Southeast Asian Art and Anthology, as well as numerous articles on Vietnamese and Southeast Asian art. She's also curated several exhibitions including Changing Identity, Recent Work by Women Artists from Vietnam, and she is the recent recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation Award for Research on the History of Performance Art in Vietnam, Myanmar and Singapore. Then you'll have Professor Thompson, and then Professor Penny Edwards will deliver the vote of thanks. Penny is a cultural historian of modern mainland Southeast Asia and a SOAS alum. Graduating in Chinese in 1985, she worked in international banking before completing an M fill in international relations at Oxford. Her experience with the United Nations in Cambodia in the early 1990s shifted her direction from politics to culture and identity negotiations, the subject of her PhD on Cambodian colonial history at Monash University in 1999. Since 2007, she has taught at the University of California Berkeley, where she's an associate professor of Southeast Asian Studies and a member of the group of Buddhist Studies. Best known for her award-winning book, Cambodia, The Cultivation of a Nation, she is the author of a further 20 chapters and articles on questions of gender, religious and ethnic identity in Cambodia, Burma and amongst the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia, and the co-editor of seven volumes in Australia, Cambodia and the US. We're enormously grateful to both of them for being part of this evening's event. I'd like to ask you please to join us for the drinks reception upstairs in the Brunei Suite at the conclusion of the lecture. Two final points. First of all, I'm asked to remind you where the fire exits are in case of an alarm sounding. It will not be a test, so they are over there and over there. And also, I'm sure that some of you will wish to tweet during the lecture. Please do so. But I would also encourage you to turn your mobile phones to silent. So, to introduce Professor Ashley Thompson, I will now pass over to Professor Taylor. Thank you. Thank you. It is my great honour and pleasure and privilege to introduce Professor Thompson. Her pioneering scholarship in the field of cultural history, art, archaeology, epigraphy, Buddhism and post-Khmer Rouge society has been instrumental in shaping our perceptions of Cambodia and the broader Southeast Asian region past and present. She's been a driving contributor to the revitalisation of Khmer studies as well as Cambodia's living arts and heritage that had been nearly destroyed by war and genocide 40 years ago. By participating in the movement to preserve Cambodian arts and heritage through research and research-driven activities, she's inspired Cambodian artists and scholars to examine history from a local perspective, and this in this has shaped the field for the future generation of scholars. In 1994, the eminent late historian of Southeast Asian history, Oliver Walters, argued against historians of a previous generation who believed that, quote, in Southeast Asian tradition there was no interest in the past for its own sake, end of quote. Statements such as, quote, the contemporaneity of the distant past is a hallmark of Southeast Asian historiography, end quote, disturbed him, and in his groundbreaking essay titled Southeast Asia as a Southeast Asian field of study, Walters stated that these academic perceptions of Southeast Asians viewing their past only in relation to specific contemporary needs essentially denied Southeast Asians a future. The late Benedict Anderson, a colleague of Walters at Cornell University, made similar claims in his critique of colonial historiography by denouncing the way in which European explorers at Angkor, for example, could not believe that present day Cambodians were the descendants of the builders of the Khmer Empire, and that this robbing of the Cambodians of an awareness of their past was a means to assert their superiority over them. I bring up these two examples from the 1990s era of scholarship on Southeast Asia at the height of postcolonial studies because this might serve as a backdrop to Professor Thompson's own trajectory as a scholar in the field of Southeast Asian art and cultural history. Her 2011 essay in the absence of the Buddha, aniconism and the contentions of Buddhist art in history, she sees this colonial paradigm whereby Western powers identified with ancient civilizations while condescending to the current inhabitants as manifesting a difference between colonial scholarly emphasis of theory over practice. While this was reversed by postcolonial scholars with the desire to give a voice to the voiceless, she sees the dichotomy of theory versus practice as more complex. Her brilliant essay examines the traces of Buddhism through inscriptions that act both as history and literature. Inscriptions, she argues, are more than historical documents giving us access to the past, as she states, quote, the event is inseparable from its trace. Inscriptions are integral to practice and that they are in themselves acts of devotion. The epigraphic text is an event in itself. Ancient Khmer inscriptions manifest a sharp historical consciousness, to be sure, but this consciousness is also distant from that of the purposefully objective post-enlightment historian and in fact shares an acknowledgement of the role of the contemporary in an unhistorical perspective proposed by Walter Benjamin in his Angel of the Past. Professor Thompson has spent the larger part of her career examining these kinds of complexities that are essentially salient to the history and historiography of Cambodian art and culture. From the post-Encorean so-called middle period of Cambodian art to the annihilation and iconoclasm perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge, Professor Thompson has consistently sought to decipher how Cambodian history can be understood on its own terms. Unlike the generations of scholars trained in area studies at Cornell from Oliver Walters to Benedict Anderson and myself, Professor Thompson came to Southeast Asian art from a different disciplinary and methodological background. After her BA at Harvard, she went on to Paris to pursue her MA and PhD at the University of Paris. Not the most obvious choice in the late 1980s at the height of postcolonial critique and multicultural studies. She veered away from the trendy academic pursuits of young scholars in the United States and chose instead to return where it all began and tackle what might be considered the more classically sounding étude indienne, with courses in poly, Sanskrit, old Khmer, and ancient art and history. At the same time, she leaped centuries ahead methodologically with her training in the progressive and interdisciplinary field of étude féminine, under the supervision of feminist philosopher writer Ellen Siksu. Pulling together these two domains radically different in appearance at least, her dissertation is a remarkably impressive study of Southeast Asia, so boldly distinct from the kinds of histories that American scholars still steeped in guilt about the ravages of war in Indochina were riding, and from the scholarship of her Southeast Asianist contemporaries on the continent steeped as it was still in Orientalism. Produced at a time when area studies dominated the field of Southeast Asian art here and there in the late 1990s, her memoir du Cambodge was grounded in the deep Orientalist knowledge she had gained through years in the field and the French classroom, but took this vast knowledge into new critical territory, attentive to difference above all. What was shared between the Orientalist world and that of French theory was close reading, and this has been the hallmark of her work ever since. It is close reading of texts, artifacts and practices which have allowed her to explore difference in all its glory. Cultural difference, of course, how Southeast Asian art signifies for Southeast Asians, but also sexual difference, how gender matters. Her scholarly achievements since the pursuits that have made her the intellectual that she is today are a long list of brilliant interpretations of the Cambodian past and ways of looking at that past. Rather than summarise them all, I would like to devote my remaining comments to her contributions to art history in particular, Southeast Asian art history more generally and Cambodian art history more specifically. The first contribution that she has made is to have brought attention to the previously neglected so-called middle period of Cambodian art history. Late 19th century French scholars, aside from claiming to have discovered Angkor, focussed their attention on what they perceived as the classical period of Angkorian art, the monuments and statuary built at the height of the Khmer Empire, overlooking or worse, denigrating later periods. This emphasis on the 9th to 12th century corresponded to assumptions made by French archaeologists based on Western art historical classificatory schemes. This was compounded by the prevailing colonial mentality based on civilizational discourse, channeled through narratives of the rise and fall of empires in order to legitimise foreign occupation. Professor Thompson's research on the period that succeeded the height of the Angkorian kingdom up until the period of French colonialism significantly expanded the temporality of Khmer art history, denied colonial scholarship, it's narrow minded if not blind definition of Khmer art, and reminded art historians and scholars of Southeast Asia to look beyond colonial assumptions and seek out the voices from within local knowledge. In this way she revealed not only that this in-between period, this gap in art history was not a gap at all, but simply a period that was overlooked by scholars because it did not fit their scheme. She brought to bear concepts of art historical memory that reside in the informs other than texts, the artifacts themselves. Exposing what has previously been instructed, voicing what has been silenced, remembering what has been forgotten, are themes that have run throughout Professor Thompson's scholarship. Her work has made a strong imprint on the discipline of Southeast Asian art history and opening the discussion to other perspectives by taking what I would call a meta disciplinary approach. For example, on an essay on the image of the Khmer king Jayavarman VII, in examining the intimate connections between what is human and what is divine, she thus questions the very category of art and what purpose art has. In her essay on the appearance of the Buddhist stupa in the place of the Hindu prasat in early years of the Khmer middle period, she argues that the presence of these structures symbolize the use of ancient monuments, heritage, in other words before the word we know of as heritage, as relics, sites of remembering and forgetting, a brilliant revelation of how the categories of Hindu and Buddhist bear limited relevance to Cambodian practice, while the work of Hindu Buddhist art serves to structure Cambodian historical consciousness in a thoroughly grounded way. Quote, this type of Theravad and Temple complex, she writes of the stupa prasat after Angkor, seems to have found unusual resonance in serving Cambodia's cultural needs at a moment in its history when relations to the past as well as to the future were questions of particular urgency. Cambodians she is saying loud and clear were aware of the past, aware of their own history and this is nowhere more evident than in their art. What matters she has been saying all along is not what qualifies good or bad art, high or low art, but rather the work of art, what art means, how it means and how this meaning makes a difference and this concern for or this insight into what matters informed as it is by unsurpassed scholarly familiarity with the Khmer language and arts old and new is what has made Professor Thompson's work a beacon in the field. Professor Thompson was one of the first scholars to live and conduct research in Cambodia after the UN restored peace in Cambodia in the early 1990s. Prior to that she had worked in a refugee camp on Cambodia's border with Thailand. A major figure in the cultural and educational reconstruction of Cambodia in the post-war, post-UN period, she taught for nearly seven years at the Department of Archaeology of the Royal University of Fine Arts and I should add that she taught there in Khmer. This deep engagement with Cambodia's past and present and with the privileged means by which the tour linked education and culture brought her also to work for many years under the direction of renowned architect and statesman Van Molivan in developing Apsara, the national organ responsible for managing the vast site of Angkor. This deep involvement in the post-war reconstruction of governmental mechanisms for managing Angkor led to her co-authored book Angkor Emanuel for the Past, Present and Future which quite literally secured Angkor's inscription on the list of world heritage in peril. It was during this time in Cambodia that she co-founded what was at the time the only scholarly journal of Khmer Studies, Udaya. Publishing in Khmer English and French, this multidisciplinary journal continues to provide a unique form for scholarship in the field. At the same time, she has maintained sustained collaboration with contemporary art centres in Cambodia. In the 1990s, she collaborated with Prompen's then premier independent art space and school, Réum, and the famed Buttonbuck Art Centre, Phare Pond Lou, Saupac. At Réum, she co-curated an exhibition on the Cambodian Soul and supported many others through critical contributions to publications and public events. The Soul exhibition was also the occasion for the publication of her esteemed critical edition of and commentary on the middle Khmer ritual text, The Calling of the Souls. With the Buttonbuck Art Centre, Phare, she undertook what I understand to be one of the most demanding and extraordinary projects of her career. The Khmer language staging by a 32-member Cambodian troop of Ellen Sixtu's epic play, The Terrible but Unfinished History of Nordum Sianuq, King of Cambodia. This was a labour of love and anguish, no doubt, working night and day for nearly four years with the Phare troop and its mentors from the Parisian Theatre du Soleil to deliver a seven-hour production critically acclaimed in the major European press, though not surprisingly banished from the Cambodian public sphere, where certain historical figures of the play continued to dominate the Prompen political stage. If the play was banned, however, Professor Thompson is welcomed and indeed celebrated in Cambodia today. And this is for her commitment to standing up and speaking up in the public sphere as an academic with a strong ethical voice, a voice as strong in English as in Khmer or French, a voice always striving to make heard those voiceless by history. She's a revered scholar, teacher and role model. There's much more to account for, and Professor Thompson's past, of course, but time is short, so I will focus on what is to come. Reading pleasure, I hope, for all of you in the audience this evening. Her new book, engendering the Buddhist state, territory, sovereignty and sexual difference in the inventions of Angkor, makes one of the most important contributions to date to our understanding of ancient Cambodia and its historiography. The book brings critical reflection on sexual difference, subjectivity and sovereignty to bear on previous definitions and theorizations of, as she calls it, the Sanskrit cosmopolis and its vernacular aftermath. Through close analyses of the relations between the cosmopolitan Sanskrit and the vernacular Khmer, harnessed together in literary composition or between the statue and its pedestal, to give another example, we come to see the engendering of Angkor, how it was made as territory and empire, how this making was produced by and productive of conceptions of sexual difference. Her talk tonight comes in the wake of this book and announces, as I understand it, its sequel. It is with great honor that I introduce Professor, Doctor, Ashley Thompson, Hiram Woodward Chair of Southeast Asian Art History at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. Thank you. Thank you very much, Richard. Thank you very much, Nora. I'll take my hat off to put my glasses on, see if we can begin. So, and thank you all for being here as well. Let me introduce you to Nianchec Nianchum. Nianchec Nianchum live in a small shrine, not a temple properly speaking, in the town of Siambria, Cambodia, across from the royal residence. Nianchec Nianchum, this is how they are called in Khmer. This translates as Miss Chec and Miss Chum. They can also be called Prangchec Prangchum, formulations in which their proper names are prefaced with the epithet Prang, or Prè, which is typically used for the Buddha or other divinities. In translation, this gives roughly Auguste Lady Chec and Auguste Lady Chum. They are a pair of sisters, they are an ensemble considered as such. They are also statues of the Buddha, the so-called historical Buddha of Theravodan tradition. Nianchec Nianchum are arguably the most important statues in Cambodia today. And I will suggest, they are one of many contemporary iterations of an ancient Khmer tradition of portrait statuary. Not that Nianchec Nianchum are in a literal, or literally material sense, recent constructions. Sculpturally speaking, they are rather old, dating to the Cambodian post-oncorian period, or the middle period as I like to call it. But if I say there is something contemporary about these aging sculptures, even that they represent a modern iteration of an ancient Khmer tradition of portrait statuary, this is already a comment on a certain doublness of art and the fact that nothing in art is necessarily as it seems. Nianchec Nianchum have had a very raucous and unsettled life in modern times, a life that has witnessed firsthand, if I can put it that way, and even participated directly in some of the most important fateful events and the tragedy, which I should also say has its hopeful moments and at times a pinch of comedy. That is the history of Cambodia in the 20th and 21st centuries. In particular, Nianchec Nianchum have miraculously escaped capture, a bit like wild animals slipping from the zookeeper's nets, and thus the fate of being forever more cloistered in a museum or private holding. That paradoxical fate which we know can be either deadly or life-saving for living works of art, depending on the situation and one's perspectives, and sometimes both at once. This evening I will speak to the colourful, multi-layered reality of Nianchec Nianchum, their iconography, their modes of display, how they are used and understood. All of this is a path into a consideration of the ways and means of what I see to be the still very much alive Khmer portrait statue tradition. In the back of my mind are the modalities of transition from Hindu and Mahayana Buddhist practices of Cambodia's ancient period in this regard to the Theravod and Buddhist practices which followed on from these in the wake of the Angkorian Empire from the 14th century. What happened in the first instance to the ancient portrait statue conceptually embedded as it was in the linguistic and artistic complex linking the local and the universal and the Sanskrit cosmopolis of which ancient Angkor was a model part? What happened when the Pali language of Theravod of Buddhism replaced Sanskrit as the empire went to seed? What became of Angkor's Devaraja, this mysterious term that appears in ancient Khmer epigraphy and translates literally as God King? Did the statuary cult linking the human and the divine which had it once sustained and been sustained by empire lose ground as it were to the purportedly more down-to-earth forms of Theravod and Buddhist political cultural expression focused on the so-called historical Buddha? And what happened to the female figure after the rich universe of ancient Khmer art characterized by a wide range of male and female imagery was displaced in post-Angkorian Theravod in Cambodia through a radical reduction in typology with the single figure of the Buddha dominating the artistic landscape? Ninh Chik Ninh Chum are what are they exactly? That's really my question tonight. I was going to say that they are properly originally statues of the Buddha. Now you might think that I haven't advanced things very much by saying this given that there is a great ancient open-ended debate as old as Buddhism itself over what exactly the Buddha is. A human being, a God, a representation, an idea, an illusion. But insofar as this figure, whatever it is, is gendered, it or he is pretty unambiguously gendered masculine. Iconeographically from an art historical point of view Ninh Chik Ninh Chum as Khmer middle period Theravoda statues of the Buddha can be said with unassailable justification to be masculine. And yet today for many decades, if not centuries, they have been universally worshipped as feminine divinities. Up to a certain point, the situation is not unique to Ninh Chik Ninh Chum. There are other examples in contemporary Cambodia of Buddha images worshipped as female divinities. The phenomenon has generally been attributed by those who have studied it to the syncretic nature of Khmer religious practice in which imported Hindu and Buddhist forms, beliefs and practices have been incorporated into and have incorporated a pre-existing indigenous animist socio-religious complex. The Buddha statue in these transgendered cases is understood to be inhabited by feminine animist spirits known in Cambodia as Priye or Parme. I don't contest this interpretation whereby the female or the feminine is associated with the local, the indigenous, the ground which underpins a universal or transcendental principle manifest in the male form. But things are not so simple. For one, we simply cannot not be suspicious today that the familiar neat gendered hierarchy this interpretation so unflappably recognises in these artistic representations may not be solely the fruit of a transparent objective analysis but also reflect a theoretical or ideological predisposition. I'll take up several angles or avenues in exploring this suspicion for my next slide. Okay, so this is my next figure, my next question. So are these male figures? That's a question that I ask of us, of you. Is this, for example, a male figure? In the first place, the Buddha him or itself independently of any interaction with Cambodian soil and even the so-called historical Buddha of Theravod in tradition is already caught up in a very complex system of gender relations. The nature of the Buddha's masculinity is a subject of much Buddhist and academic discourse to the extent that one could equally well say that it is his femininity that is the subject of debate. Indeed, it's often been argued, if not always in so many words, that the Buddha figure transcends sexuality. This argument is not unlike that made for the Shiva Linga. When South Asianists of various stripes insist that the Linga is a phallus, not a penis, they highlight its transcendental signification. The point is that the figure of the Linga or of the Buddha distinctly transcends sheer human anatomy. Indeed, that might be said to be the very point of these figures. Yet still it must be said again and again that these transcendental forms take overwhelmingly a very recognizably, we could even say a universally recognisable masculine form. The referent for the figuration of the transcendent is male anatomy, after all. More or less. Let me point up one more interpretive step here before returning to our two sisters in the Buddha. The Linga is made manifest, like most any statue, by its pedestal. A pedestal which is obscurely feminized in a highly abstract iconographic mode as the female genital organ, the yoni. The transcendental form of the Linga is manifest as such only up against the pedestal. The yoni is the ground against which the figure of the Linga emerges, but the two it must be said are an inseparable pair. And the Buddha, the singular historical Buddha of Theravod in tradition, does he stand alone in his supremacy? No. In Cambodia, the Buddha pedestal is more or less obscurely feminized. Since at least the 12th century, the earth goddess has been featured in the pedestal. This is what you see in the two stone sculptures in front of you, if I can show you. This is the earth goddess here. This is the earth goddess here under the Buddha, under the Buddha who was taken out of action in an anti-Buddhist moment after the fact. So since at least the 12th century, the earth goddess has been featured in the pedestal. This is the divinity which in Southeast Asian legend drowns the army of evil threatening the Buddha on the eve of enlightenment by ringing out her long hair. She is quite literally the condition of possibility of Siddhartha's transcendence, which is to say his manifestation as the Buddha. And it is here in the Buddha pedestal, even when the Buddha is only, shall we say, the Buddha, that the Parme, the female supposedly animist spirits of a modern Cambodian Theravod in temple are by and large understood to reside. As we will see, the question of the portrait statue is not a rarefied question of high art or distant history without relevance to our times. To the contrary, the Angkorian portrait statue and its avatars embody an enduring aesthetic and political structure at the center of one of the richest discussions in Southeast Asian art history over the past century or so, but it is a structure and a discussion that touches on something of more general relevance in thinking about art. The question of subject-object relations between observers and observed are more simply put of the very real impact of art on the people, by and for whom it is made. Though I won't have the time to explore the question in any detail this evening, what I will say about Khmer portrait statuary has, I believe, important implications for understanding structures of subjectivity and sovereignty in Khmer sociocultural and political contexts over time. Ni'n ceck ni'n chwm are standing in apia mudra. Let me go back to my picture here, excuse me. They are standing apia mudra. The Sanskrit iconographic term apia mudra meaning the hand gesture of no fear is used in Cambodian academic and conservation milieu to reference Buddha images standing or sitting with one or both hands raised, palm facing forwards. The hand or hands can be raised away from the body as in our statues here. The outstretched lower arms and hands of such figures generally comprise separate sculpted components which are attached to the main sculptural body. Here again are two examples showing this particular construction technique. This pair of crowned standing Buddhas in apia mudra sculpted in wood stylistically dated to the 12th century but re-touched over the years was removed from Angkor Wat Temple in the 20th century and is now displayed in the National Museum of Cambodia as a pair, you can see them here. These two. Alternatively, the raised hand can be drawn up against the chest as part of a monolithic sculpture as in this example from the central sanctuary of Angkor Wat. Now let me go back to this. On your left it is generally said is the taller sister Ni'n ceck with her right hand raised. On your right is Ni'n chwm with her left hand raised. I hasten to add however that the identities are mobile. In the case of the Ni'n ceck, Ni'n chwm ensemble, the mirror imaging enabled by right, left, both hand alternatives of the apia mudra lend support to a broader principle of Khmer portraiture by which a singular outer appearance does not correspond in any rigid way to a singular personal and sometimes iconographic identity. It has been suggested with reference to Thai and Lao traditions that the post-Angkorian standing Buddha with right hand raised could represent specific episodes of the Buddha's life story in which the Buddha was brought to re-establish peace in turbulent times by raising his hand in this manner. It has been suggested furthermore that the counterpart Buddha with left hand raised represents another moment in the legends of the Buddha's life. That of his encounter with the very first statue of himself. It is an irresistible story for an art historian to which I'll return in a moment. Suffice it to say that the statue is so humbled to see the actual Buddha approaching that it begins to bow in reverence. But the Buddha stops the statue in question and authorises it to replace him on the pedestal throne. In the first instance, Darren has absences from the Jetavana Monastery while preaching elsewhere. Thus begins Buddhist iconic anthropomorphic representation as a temporary substitute for the roving cleric. But it's a famously slippery slope because at the same time the Buddha authorised his airs-outs to stand in for him, literally for the full duration of the 5,000 years the religion is supposed to last. These proposed traditional interpretations are in fact anchored in official codifications of Buddhist iconography in Siam established in the modern period and their place in Thai tradition is itself complex. As for Cambodian middle period art of which Nyingcheng Nyingcheng are fine examples, there is to date no proof that these iconographic codes are applicable in any direct way. Nor does contemporary popular interpretation appear to support any such generalized asignation of the specific gestures to these particular episodes from the Buddha's life story. This interpretive situation flags the important if not always welcome fact that tradition is the product of modernist reforms even if we must acknowledge that modernizing reforms take place throughout history at the many moments when the need to delineate some sort of modernity is felt. This situation also alerts us to a particularly thorny issue in the interpretation of Cambodian Taravadan art. Siam proved a determining influence in the development of Taravadan art in Cambodia, but never was it more determining, I believe, than Encore itself. I'm referring not only to the continuation of this or that Encorean motif, or to the ways in which Hinduism came to be fronted in Cambodia by a Taravadan façade. I refer also to the weight of empire, the benefits and the burden of its memory on what followed. In the following, I will briefly revisit a bit of my past research to draw out certain questions which I have overlooked in the past and which have come to ground the new expanded examination that I'm proposing of the Khmer portrait statue. In certain Cambodian middle period royal foundation context in which we can have sculptural and epigraphic evidence in situ, I believe the standing Buddha and Apiamudra played a distinct role in symbolic authorization of royal rule with the statue of the Buddha effectively taking on the role of the actual Buddha in the story of the Buddha's encounter with the first Buddha statue. If the statue takes the role of the Buddha then the king as the primary worldly judiciary of the statue's commissioning and installation would by implication find himself in the position of the Buddha statue. So basically this bit of role play serves to authorize the king this time in the place of the statue to sit on the throne. It's true that such royal foundations are quite specific context and cannot necessarily be taken as paradigmatic of this very common middle period Apiamudra type of sculpture in the round. I do however think that the evidence is strong that the Apiamudra Buddha has the explicit function of authorizing royal power in those sites associated at their foundation with royalty and comprising not one but four Buddhas standing back to back in Apiamudra and forming an ensemble. This is the case of the Angkor Wat image which I showed you a moment ago here it's reproduced on your left. This is one of four images sculpted in the 16th century in the door frames of the central sanctuary of the 12th century temple. Here in the slide on your right is another one of the four Buddha statues at Angkor Wat's central sanctuary. This particular sculpture was removed from the southern door of the central sanctuary by French archeologists in the early 20th century. They cut out the Buddha which completely sealed off the doorway in order to open up the sanctuary in search of original foundation deposits in the temple's central well. Epigraphic evidence from Angkor Wat's top platform and let me show you where these it's right up at the very top of Angkor Wat that's where these statues are. Epigraphic evidence from this area suggests that these Buddhas were sculpted at the behest of a queen and her son in the context of a funerary ritual performed for the recently deceased king at which the son, the new king rose to the throne. Here are some rubbings of the text in question. These two late 16th century texts are of particular interest. These are the vows of truth as they are called. First of the queen herself, then of her son. Self-professed accounts of their pious Buddhist acts and the benefits they seek to gain from them. In these texts carved onto the pillars of Angkor Wat, the queen mother is depicted virtually worshiping her son, restoring the temple to its ancient glory as she puts it as a means of restoring peace and stability to the troubled ex-empire. The 16th century texts note the positive relics and the transfer of the ensuing merits to four ancestors or four Buddhas, depending on one's translation. Together the artistic and epigraphic evidence suggests that the blocking up of Angkor Wat central sanctuary doorways sculpted with four Buddhas standing in Apia Mudra affected the transformation of the massive Hindu temple into a Buddha stupa, a funerary monument encasing the remains of the deceased king. What is of import for my purposes this evening is the interface between worshipper and worshipped operated through the figure of the Buddha standing in Apia Mudra. The father is literally represented in the body of the Buddha or Buddhas I'll go back to this image. In making the stupa temple out of these Buddhas and venerating it or him or them, the son makes himself in his father's image, the Buddha king or at least a Buddhist king. This mirroring between worshipper and worshipped, which is here the articulation of a relationship between father and son, recalls that between the Buddha himself and his statue in the famous legend of the first Buddha statue. The story recounts how the king of a region where the Buddha is in residence turns to my medic art in order to console himself in the Buddha's absences, when the latter goes away to preach the Dharma to his mother in the heavens. The king missions the statue of the Buddha, the first ever, to sit in the Buddha's place during his absence. When the Buddha himself returns to the earthly kingdom and enters the sanctuary where the statue sits, the statue, embarrassed and humbled, rises from the throne pedestal to bow before his model and predecessor. The Buddha forbids this reference authorizing the statue to take his place on the throne when he, the Buddha is gone. On the one hand this is a story legitimating the Gothic Buddha statue. On the other it is a story reflecting on identification and death and the ways and means we humans have for preserving all sorts of things, memory, presence, power, wealth, continuity in the wake of a father's death. It is also an account of the gaze and visualization for it is only when the living Buddha sees this his statue when the two come into eye contact that the statue comes to life. Now I don't mean to suggest that post-Encorean Buddhas or four Buddhas back to back standing at Pyamudra simply illustrate the legend of the first Buddha statue. I don't think any such rigid iconographic code maintains here. What we do have however is a system of signification by which a statue of the Buddha authorizes the replacement of a newly absented leader with the mirroring between the human form of the worshipper and the sculpted form of the worshipped giving both continued life. What we have here is a technology for harnessing religious and political power in view of ensuring their conjoined perpetuity. We have a story of repetition over time from Buddha to Buddha from father to son. In another context the identification between subject and object of veneration would be articulated as the intended outcome of visualization technique. Our 16th century Theravod in events may appear to be at some remove from such practices in the Mahayannist or Tentric context. I would argue however that the process of identification between subject and object operated through the Buddha image as a portrait statue and harnessed as it was at the summit of Angkor Wat in the 16th century to the consolidation and perpetuation of political power points up how supposedly non-Teravod in modes of perception and use of Buddha imagery can also be discovered at work at the heart of official Teravod in practice. And the mother. Looking on in and through her text she conditions the identification between father and son in the image of the Buddha. She also integrates her own body into that or those of the venerated ones. The queen mother's vow of truth also recounts how in the end the queen mother cuts her hair to have it burned in order to make a lacquer with which to coat Buddha statues. This is just a first stage of integration into the Buddha's body. For an accomplishing this pious act she makes the vow to progress over the course of her future lives until she transforms into and I quote a great man a Mahapurusha which coincidentally perhaps is an epithet for the Buddha. She will she vows become a monk and ultimately enter Nirvana alongside the future Buddha Maitreya. Perhaps it is no coincidence that in the 20th century the four Buddhas of Angkor Wat Central Sanctuary have been documented as being worshipped at once as the four Buddhas of the past well-known in Theravada Buddhism and as four ancestors among whom we find the August mother and the August father and Khmer Premida and Preveda. As in the epigraphic context accompanying this four Buddha ensemble in the ethnographic context accompanying them in our times there is no contradiction in somehow seeing the woman in the male figure of the Buddha. Before returning to our two sisters Ning Cik Ning Chum I want to turn briefly to Angkor's iconic and paradigmatic queen mother whom I would also describe as having reanimated and reappropriated the Khmer portrait statue and whose image is inseparable from that of Cambodia's first woman author. These are two of three more or less identical statues. Other fragments suggest that there were more than three of this model. On your left is a piece now held by the National Museum of Cambodia. The statue on your right is held by the Musee Guimet in Paris. The third similar statue is held by the Angkor Conservation Office. All were recovered from within or near the temple of Precan and Angkor. Precan is a late 12th century temple built under the reign of the Mahayana Buddhist King Javram VII in honour of his father associated with Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara as a monument of compassion. Precan temple was consecrated a few years after the consecration of Taprom temple dedicated to the king's mother associated with Precna Parimita the embodiment of wisdom and particularly known in this context as the mother of all Buddhas. The statues before you have long been interpreted as representing at once Precna Parimita and King Javram and the seventh's wife whose name was Jayaricha Devi. One of the crucial aspects of Angkorian art for the ancient Khmer as for the modern historian was the widespread erection of statues of Hindu gods named after ancestors of the reigning king as well as the king himself. A slight but significant twist would seem to have been given to this tradition during the reign of Javram VII in which the sculptural corpus came to include images also made to resemble particular human beings living and it would seem also deceased members of the royal family. Several factors indicate that this period of Khmer art saw a move beyond established patterns whereby a new artistic style was developed in each significant reign and seems to have been used to define it and set it apart from its predecessors. Under Javram VII we see a number of series of very similar images bearing the same physical traits. These physical traits are clearly at some distance from the stylized ideal forms characterizing their Angkorian precursors. These figures are sometimes presented as masters of veneration or meditation as opposed to standing or sitting with divine authority as was the rule under all previous Khmer monarchs. Yet crucially, as in the case of the thin female figure pictured here they can also bear the attributes of divinity. Conversely similar physical traits can appear in explicitly divine figures. Distinct artistic style once associated with a reign but not think, with the physical traits of specific human beings, now appears to be identified with or by the actual physiology of the members of the ruling family. One Sanskrit inscription in particular is often invoked in interpretation of the images before you. This is the inscription from Pimenaka Temple written by Queen Indra Devi the sister of Queen Jayarica Devi who became Javram VII's queen after her sister's death. The inscription, the first ever attributed to a woman in over 600 years of prolific textual production is a eulogy of the former queen. The long opening of the text is devoted to a description of the deceased queen's ascetic practices oriented to expressing her devotion to her absent husband and attracting him home from his travels abroad. She, the devoted queen in this text is likened to an earth goddess as he, the king drawn home through the spiritual practices off his wife is likened to the Buddha himself. This dramatic account is followed by a more prosaic account of the good works the reunited couple performed. Amongst these we learn was the queen's erection of statues of her family members. The epigraphic author Indra Devi then confirms that she has continued the tradition herself. After her sister's death the new queen erected statues of her deceased sister along with statues of herself and the king in every city. The accepted interpretation of the statue sees the figures physique which stands out starkly from earlier female models for its narrow shoulders and small compressed breasts along with its meditative almost severe face as rendering a woman emaciated subdued and tranquilized by sustained ascetic practice in the name of the Buddhist faith in accordance with the 12th century epigraphic account. One interpretive challenge in this piece is the combination of a kneeling posture more appropriate for a human than a supreme divine figure with the attribute of a divinity in the headdress. One explanation for this apparent fusion of human and divine traits is that this is a posthumous figure of a woman who after a lifetime of practice fused with the divine. This scenario obeys established on corium practice on the one conceptual level while it ruptures with it in the actual rendering of a divine figure with human traits. Another possible interpretation is that this figure renders a living woman obtaining the divine in meditation. In the absence of names inscribed directly onto or in close physical association with the statues in question and in the similar absence of any visual narrative contextualization we cannot in my view identify specific statues as representations of specific named historical figures with absolute certainty. There is no reason that this image in front of you could not equally represent the king's mother who is the individual explicitly associated with the goddess Prachnaparamita in the period of epigraphy. The elision of mother and wife via the image of Prachnaparamita would not however be surprising. This is a context in which the king's father or is it the statue of the king's father while explicitly associated with Avalokiteysvara is named Raya Vamishvara after the son himself. The logic of the portrait statue as a technology for ensuring continuity of political power underpins and I would even say necessitates such confusion or simply fusion between father and son or mother and wife. The statue whoever she may be makes manifest like no other the driving principles of the Khmer portrait statue. In her we can actually see the articulation of identification between worshipper and worshipped, subject and object, human and divine at work in much onchorian statuary. And there are a number of ways in which she may be seen as a matrix for the female figure in Theravada tradition which was to come in her wake. As I mentioned in opening there are very few manifestly female figures in post-onchorian statuary dominated as it is by the single figure of the Buddha. We do have a number of wooden devotees and a single bronze earth goddess, this figure. These modest images share their kneeling posture with our famous onchorian figure. This piece in front of you is dated approximately to the 15th century. It is a unique example in the pre-modern period of an earth goddess in the round so apparently disassociated from the Buddha pedestal. What appears irrevocably associated these days is the appellation Pratnyaparamita. For the term designating those ubiquitous benevolent female spirits inhabiting the pedestal of the Buddha inside the worship hall on modern temple grounds is the lingering remains of the appellation Pratnyaparamita. Parame is the Sanskrit Pali term for perfection or perfections and it would appear that the use of this term to designate specifically female spirits of the Buddha those spirits which give the Buddha his potency, which is to say his very life, comes down to us from the most famous of Angkor's Buddhist mothers, Pratnyaparamita herself. Today, Ningcek Ninchom are on display in an open-air pavilion adjacent to the royal residence in Simbriyptown at the head of the Grand Colonial Boulevard leading to Angkor Wat Temple. They are popularly reputed to have been made or commissioned by two ancient princesses and the spirits came to reside in them after their deaths. Ningcek and Ninchom are effectively though unofficially Palladia of the Kingdom. National visitors to the temples of Angkor will inevitably make a stop at the Ningcek Ninchom pavilion as part of an established pilgrimage circuit to the ancient temple sites. Locals make regular offerings to the pair. In modern times, the pair has been caught up in political power struggles, national identity and the interface between conservation, military, police and royal authorities as each of these participate in while at times instrumentalizing the power of belief in art or otherwise put the power of belief in the Buddha and his many local avatars. The role of female figures in the story of Ningcek Ninchom may appear to be secondary, but it is in fact pivotal. The modern history of Ningcek Ninchom begins in the 1950s when a now infamous general, Dapchuun, obtained military and administrative control over Cymru at Province. Dapchuun had been a leader of the Khmer Iserach and anti-French, anti-Sianoch independence movement operating in the Thai border regions in the 1940s. In exchange for coming into Sianoch's royal governmental fold Dapchuun was given a series of top security posts. By 1957 he was governor of Cymru at Province and military commander of the country's northwest. By this time King Sianoch had abdicated in order to run the country as its elected head of state. Sianoch's father had replaced his son on the throne. Sianoch wielded power under the aegis of his parents and with the support of his devoted people all the while maintaining himself the aura of the king. He struggled however, as we all know, to control the country's borders. Dapchuun's reputation for magical military might preceded him. He was reputed to carry with him at all times one of the most potent of talismans, a charm composed of the knotted pubic hair of his first wife. Nyingcheg and Nyingchum, who appear to have been installed at the time in a Cymru at Pagoda and to have already been of national renown before Dapchuun's arrival on the scene, emerged in Cymru at town as the general's own patron saints. According to numerous accounts, Dapchuun had the statues removed from where they were traditionally venerated and placed in the spot they stand today where he maintained personal if highly public devotion to them. But his loyalty to the king, to the head of state that is, was not to last. And his loyalty to Nyingcheg and Nyingchum, or theirs to him, proved crucial in this renewed show of rebellion. Dapchuun and his entourage plotted to seize the province of Cymru from governmental control and ultimately overthrow Sianoch. The plot was uncovered and the royal army encircled Cymru. At some point during the turbulence, Dapchuun had Nyingcheg and Nyingchum removed to his mistresses home in Kval village, some 200 km northeast of Cymru at town, near the foot of the Gulen mountains. Dapchuun initially escaped the governmental net, thanks, it has said, to the magical powers he harnessed, until those very powers turned against him. He was caught and assassinated by royal forces in the vicinity of the Gulen on March 3, 1959. Three weeks later, Sianoch's mother, at once queen and queen mother, presided over a ceremony at Angkor Wat Temple. Nyingcheg and Nyingchum were installed on the terrace, preceding the entrance to the temple's second enclosure. This is his mother, Nordrum Kosamach, and I'm assuming this is her and this is Sianoch. This was reported in Sianoch's official comboge that you have in front of you as a boeng sueng ceremony to pay devotion to the gods in view of ensuring prosperity. After the queen paid her respects to Nyingcheg and Nyingchum, and I quote the article, 20,000 people came to express their faith before the statues of the master, along with their devotion and appreciation of our sovereigns and Prince Nordrum Sianoch who pursued the work of the ancient kings of Angkor. The next day the article continues. Queen mother visited the Glyn mountains and I quote the most sacred of places in Cambodia which saw the birth of the Khmer monarchy over 1,000 years ago. The very place of course where Nyingcheg and Nyingchum had been recovered and the rebel usurper assassinated. This royal progress whereby the queen mother worshipped the statues at Angkor Wat as a means of reaffirming sovereign control over territory was of course a thoroughly contrived political show like so many choreographed by Sianoch. This is not to say however that it was not also a thoroughly traditional show with Queen Nordrum Kosomach following in the footsteps of the 16th century queen mother mentioned a moment ago, returning to Angkor Wat to worship Buddhas in view of confirming her husband and her son's sovereignty over disputed territory. And of course she was following in the footsteps of Jayorica Devi or Pratnya Paramita wife of Jayorim in the 7th but also mother of all Buddhas and of 7th confirming her husband's return to re-establish control over Angkor in the late 12th century that is on the eve of one of its many abandonments. The pattern demonstrates of course that in some fundamental way there's always a return to Angkor in the offing. I will skip over subsequent details here just to say that while further research is required to establish a robust history of the statues before and after the Dapchun affair what is clear is that ownership and control over the two statues has, since at least the mid 20th century and I suspect for much longer, been perceived as essential to affirming ownership and control over Angkor, an Angkor metanimically representing the entire Cambodian state. Now in closing I want to tell you a more recent personal story of Nyingcek Nyingcham. This is a scan of a faded photograph taken in December 2012. It was commissioned by the woman standing next to the taller figure Nyingcek, from one of a number of professional photographers stationed at the site at that time. I am pictured standing next to Nyingcham. I was at the Nyingcek Nyingcham pavilion that day with a student who was investigating the circulation of photographs of King Sianok following the monarch's death in October of that same year. Things like this. One of the main points of sale of these photographs was the Nyingcek Nyingcham pavilion itself. A group of elderly women, most of whom resided as non-ordained nuns in Wat Dam Nak, a local pagoda which is considered by many to have been the original site of Nyingcek Nyingcham prior to Dapchun's co-optation, sat on mats near the entrance of the pavilion platform displaying and selling these photographs or these photo mats of the deceased king. These elderly women were integrated into the expanded array of regular vendors selling images of Nyingcek Nyingcham, other cult objects and souvenirs, as well as incense and flowers or other sorts of traditional offerings. Also on hand was a Pimpiat percussion orchestra which could be hired to play a piece or two as an offering to Nyingcek Nyingcham. Next to the Nyingcek Nyingcham sanctuary on the pavilion platform was a display of two large portraits of the recently deceased king. So I don't have a single picture of it so I've put my two together. This is what the pavilion looked like. We were sitting talking with the nuns when I heard someone calling my name. I turned around to find myself very enthusiastically embraced by the woman seen here in the photograph. I embraced her in return as I struggled to recollect exactly who she was. Her voice, accent, face and attitude were quite familiar but it took a few minutes before her life story and the intersection of my own with it came back to me. I had a young coconut juice vendor at Prairup Temple in the Angkor park whom I had befriended nearly 20 years earlier when I was working for the Cambodian Government organization responsible for the maintenance and development of the Angkor region. I had come to know the family who lived in Pradak village a 45 minute drive from Siamriyptown where I had undertaken research on medium possession. I became something of a family member for a while playing a role somewhere in between a younger sister to the aunt and an aunt or mother to the coconut vendor girl. Family relations were in any case open to interpretation as in most in the Cambodian context. For example, the girl called her aunt mother and lived with her in a larger house next to the shack where her biological mother lived. Before too long, the girl had married a Japanese tourist and moved to Japan and I had gone my own way. In December 2012 it turned out the aunt was at the Niancheg Nianchum pavilion to purchase photographs of Sianook to send to her niece while no doubt also to pay her respects to Niancheg Nianchum and the deceased king. She seized the opportunity to have a picture made of the two of us with Niancheg Nianchum to include along with the images of the king in her mailing to Japan. The composition of the photograph was of her devising in collaboration with the photographer. I was instructed to touch Nianchum's feet just as my long lost sister was touching those of Niancheg. She purchased incense and flowers and commissioned the Pin Pied Orchestra to play a tune in offering to the two sisters as we were being photographed. She purchased three of these photos, one for me, one for her niece and one for herself. There are a series of doubles imaged here, the most evident are the two sisters in the Buddha, adjacent to the two images of the king and framed now by the two devotees. First to comment on the two portraits of the king. This was a very common mode of display in the period between the monarch's death and his cremation. A more elaborate but similarly double display was made at the public façade of the Royal Palace in Phnom Pen. I understand that Sino-Thai funerary practice in the modern period incorporates such double portraiture where the one portrait is taken as the body itself and the other the representation thereof. Another path possibly related to that I just mentioned for interpreting the double portraiture of Sianuk heads in the direction of the ancient Khmer portrait statue tradition in which we have seen the double of the king serves to ensure continuity in territorial sovereignty. There is the king who dies and the one who lives on after the other's earthly death. Note now inside the name Chechnyne Chumpavilion adjacent to this double portrait display of Sianuk, a portrait here of his son Siamuni who prior to his father's demise and in anticipation of it had already been named king. More than 50 years after abdicating in favor of his father Sianuk had abdicated a second time in favor of his son. Having authorized his son to replace him on the throne, the transition at his actual death was smooth. This principle of monarchy whereby the transcendent figure of the monarch or what we could also call the institution of monarchy is embodied by a particular individual for a relatively limited period of time, a human lifetime before another individual comes to embody it, is also of course a principle of Buddhahood. I won't dwell on the analogous relations between the king and the Buddha. It is a fascinating topic which is received substantial scholarly attention while still demanding more in the context I'm exploring here. In the interest of time I will dwell instead on notions of time embedded in and conveyed by the double imagery at hand. In his book Nirvana and Other Buddhist Felicities Stephen Collins analyzes ways in which apparently opposing perceptions of time, repetitive on the one hand and non-repetitive on the other function in tandem in Theravod and Buddhist textual traditions. Repetitive time can be tracked through the repeated reappearance of Buddhas for example where the life story of each apparently successive Buddha merely repeats itself in that of any other Buddha saves superficial changes. To some degree we can evoke the famous eternal return. Perception of time is non-repetitive, functions however in tandem with the perception of repetitive time. This can be tracked through Buddhas or others progression through a lifetime and a lifetime of lifetimes, the samsara. We may return but we also progress through these returns. In Gyirthian terms we are dramatic personae embodying here and now and always already established character role. From this perspective a king's son is not just a repetition of his king father he is a substitute for him the same but different and defined by the tension held between these two apparently mutually exclusive terms. Buddhas share the structure through which they are at once timeless, generic, universal and grounded in the here and now as specific individuals. Let me look a bit more closely at the Nying Csak Nying Chum display. The two Buddhas are at once the Buddha two iterations of the universal figure and two individuals with specific identities. They are at once timeless through their highly codified iconography for example and present in the here and now in their very living presence. The vitality of this presence derives from a communal practice of veneration with devotees and caretakers attending for example to the statues daily dressing and hygiene needs. In addition to the two statues on their feet or their side we see here a rather typical Cambodian altar display. The backdrop primarily comprises painted and printed tableau of episodes from the Buddha's life story. Most prominent are two scenes of the Buddha returning from Tabatimsa heaven after having preached the dharma there to his mother. The figure of the Buddha is repeated twice in each of these tableaux you can see behind the central figures in one of a few standard panneigs whereby progression in time is not rendered through perspectival distinctions or the linear arrangement of discrete scenes. Rather, progression in time is conveyed primarily through codified postures and context with the main character reappearing in different ways and in different contexts within a single composition. The Buddha is pictured here descending the stairway from the heavens and then seated upon his return to earth. In each of the four instances raised in Apiamudra, which you will recall has been associated with the story of the living Buddha's address after his return indeed from Tabatimsa to the first statue of himself authorizing the statue to reign as it were in his place. To the left of Niangcham there is a framed picture of Angkor Wat Temple over here. To Niangchak's right is a poster with the five Buddhas over here at the heart of Theravod and Buddha's tradition of the past Buddhas culminating in the historical Gautama Buddha and at the center of the four the fifth Buddha yet to come. Just below this is a clock as you can see with its long hand very nicely pointing to the portrait of the now fully confirmed new king set in a nearly symmetrical manner thus against the painting of Angkor Wat. These arrangements may all seem random. They are not. If the clock is a must-have on contemporary Cambodian Buddhist altars this is no doubt in part a bid to participate in modernity by adorning one's place with its trappings. We see also a decorative electric lamp and a tie poster of an idyllic waterfall but the clock is at the same time a keeper of the two times noted above. In the repetitive mode the clock hands go round and round. In the non-repetitive mode going round the clock is our very means of measuring progression in time. Let me show you another scene of the Buddha's life story this time from a set of murals painted in 1939 inside the worship hall of the Cambodian pagoda in Vietnam's southern Mekong valley region. This is an episode in which a rich merchant offers the Buddha a magnificent monastery as his own stomping ground. Note first the backdrop of Angkor Wat temple. The temple of Angkor Wat is wielded here as a means of setting the Buddha's life story in the first instance in Cambodia. This is not a sign of ignorance but it is the actual truth of the Buddha or Buddhism. This is Buddhism itself. The knowledge that the famous Jitavana monastery was in what we now call India does not contradict the knowledge that setting the Buddha's life story in ancient Cambodia in a painting set in a Cambodian temple in the 20th century brings the Buddha alive again then and there. That is what was at the time here and now. Note also the intrigate to the temple in this painting which as many of you will know does not exist. It does however resemble modern Cambodian Theravodan monastery temple gates. Set inside the front end of the gate is a clock. Like the decorative lamp which by the by formally resembles that inside the Niancheung pavilion in my 2012 photo the clock is a wink to modernity. It is also the 1939 iteration of a traditional Buddhist figuring of time accounting for the union of the transcendent eternal perpetual and the historically conditioned. This image demonstrates ways in which Buddha's practitioners insert themselves into the grand Buddhist narrative. We see her a nice early yet late rendering of the donor making himself a part of the Buddha's life with both the rich merchant of legend and those who commissioned and accomplished the artistic representation thereof in 1939 becoming in the process part and parcel of the story itself. So, let me return now to Niancheung Niancheung in December 2012. Through the artistic medium available to her photography my modest Pradaq village friend also inserted herself and me or our two lives together into the grand everlasting narrative. Donors pictured standing next to the Buddha's and bowing to their feet we are that much further along our own paths to Buddhahood I would expect. We are in any case through the careful composition likened to the two women Buddhas standing alongside Sianuk and Siamoni for the past and future of the Cambodian Buddhist state. That is of course if you believe in it and me. I will stop there. Thank you very much. Good evening. It is my duty and my pleasure to give the vote of thanks. I begin my vote of thanks with a shout out to the Ruby Lord fund for Taravada Studies at the University of California Berkeley which has allowed me to be here today and also to consult the archive of Thomas and Caroline Rhys Davids. Thomas Rhys Davids being the founder of the Pali Tech Society at the University of Cambridge earlier this week. Among these papers I found a draft letter to King Tula Longcorn of Siam seeking money for an endowment for Buddhist studies. Written 120 years ago the letter appealed to the king to I quote found a professorship of Pali and Buddhism either at the University of Oxford or Rhys Davids wrote at the new university now being established in London. There are great advantages attaching to London as the seat of government and as the place where almost all the Pali manuscripts in England are kept. The atmosphere of London moreover is more open to new ideas and pupils would be more easily obtained there than at Oxford. On the other hand though the choice of London would probably be better for the cause sorry I said that wrong our intonation was wrong. On the other hand although the choice of London would probably be better for the cause the university there is at present only in course of formation. This was an appeal to a universal public good as well as the king's perceived position as Rhys Davids wrote the head of the Buddhist church Siam alone in Taravada south east Asia having escaped colonialism it was not without self-interest Rhys Davids saw himself as a natural incumbent for such a position but he was completely transparent about these goals timing was everything if the thing could be done now Rhys Davids wrote Buddhism would rapidly become a subject of ordinary study in all the great universities of the west but while European interest in Buddhism was thriving Rhys health was not following a severe attack of illness he was under doctors orders to stop burning the candle at both ends I begin with Rhys Davids vision and his plea some 120 years ago in 1895 as a reminder that there once was no university of London no sawers, no chairs in Buddhism or south east Asian studies and yet today we are celebrating both a milestone in Ashley's illustrious career her inaugural lecture coinciding with the publication of her long-awaited and ground-breaking book and the spirit of pioneering, exacting and utterly grounded scholarship that Ashley represents a scholarship that transcends and extends the disciplinary silos of academia embracing Buddhist studies literature, art history and ethnography Sanskrit, Khmer and French placing gender at the centre of her analysis but working outward from her sources and exploring iconography as potent vessels of spiritual and political legitimacy and channels of power as we have just seen in her outstanding lecture Ashley really has changed the landscape of not only Cambodian studies and Theravada Buddhist studies and I begin with the candle the candle that Rhys was burning at both ends because I find it an apt metaphor not only for Ashley's intellectual flame the late Susan Chandler once described her genius as a mind on fire whose ritual function as Ashley elaborates in her book doubles as both a source of light and as a marker of time turning the candle at both ends I will attempt in this short vote of thanks to illuminate the linkage between the new work Ashley has presented in her talk and her extraordinary new book engendering the Buddhist state so as to light a torch to a scholar whose work while framed today around the theme of doubling is multi-valent and polyglot indeed Ashley's facility of language and her attachment and attunement to Cambodian statuary and Khmer voices downtime and a cross space and genre gives her writing a finely chiseled effect in the book engendering the Buddhist state Ashley segues back and forth through time and cultural media suturing the 11th century Khmer sansgrit, Sadok Gok Tom inscription with the 12th century verse of Queen Indra Devi and a ritual from a middle period text but still practiced in Cambodia the hauprolong or calling the souls in which a candle is passed around the contemporary candle passed around on a ritual vessel echoes the lamps for worship donated by Queen Indra Devi in the 12th century but lamps and candles are not only sources of light they are also markers of time that literally wax and wane in her paper just now Ashley made a brief allusion to a clock that I see is still there handily in the photo as a wink to modernity and the clock is a common element in late 19th and early 20th century studio portraits of monks and royalty in South East Asia her book shows that to Angkor there was no end in sight even though and especially though via the art historical schema established by colonial scholars we can mark Angkor as ancient even though there was an abrupt haught in temple construction stone sculpture and Sanskrit composition at Angkor Ashley's work and in particular her interweaving of visual textual and ritual sites and sources across different times and spaces shows us that Khmer culture was and is never in stasis rather it has continually drawn on past foundations via a process of selective adaptation and creation what Ashley shows us in the talk she just presented on the figure of the Buddhist portrait statue as in her book is an asphetic and literary textual recycling of beliefs and motifs whose reiterations across contexts makes a nonsense of any attempt to antiquarianise art history by labelling what is present the ruins of Angkor as past nothing is ever ancient in its own time and thus everything is timeless. There were no clocks at Angkor but time was kept and marked in part through ritual as in the iterations of epic Bathri Lief the lamps donated by Queen Indra Davy and the candles passed around in later ritual epitomise a nature impermanence even as they mark time. One of the many important interventions Ashley has made, both here today in her book and in her earlier work on cultural memory is that time is not only repetitive but creative through the cultivation of individual merit the real and or apocryphal two sister princesses who chose to take care of statues were rewarded with their possession the statues themselves gained a new lease of life on their rediscovery in the 1950s and are now as Ashley has just shown us two of the most important statues in Cambodia for their actual spiritual potency the scope of Ashley's talk gives a sense therefore not only of the depth and complexity of her scholarship but it's grounding in space and in human relationships a major contribution of her opus is the banishment of the spectre of the vanished Khmer and with it the negation of the narrative of rescue but another vital contribution is her approach to Cambodia studies which has forged new pathways of best scholarly practice through not only her deep integrity but also her continued engagement with Cambodian scholars and voices as we have seen today her work also amplifies the great paradigms of south east Asian studies notably that of the man of prowess not by seeking to eliminate male figures of dominance but rather to situate them in a more complex terrain her careful reading both of the statues discussed today and of the queen of the inscription a one in a thousand inscription by a woman for a woman alongside her reading of the conflation of gender and space in inscriptions lauding the city of Angkor as bride bring gender to the forefront of inquiry while deeply attuned to cultural complexity her work is also a warning against cultural essentialism she reads inscriptions as works of historiography of their time and place shaped not only by asphetics and she shows us that words ideas, images, cultures travel and are always on the move even when for a myopic lens we might only see something called antiquity if you put culture under a bell jar or quarantine it behind a museum vitrine it dies this is not to attack the valuable work of curatorship these holdings among them a beautiful gold at the Asian art museum in San Francisco and others Ashley draws in her wonderful book rather it is to challenge the hegemony of the ancient as a dominant category and unit of value as Ashley showed us today and in much other of her work the ancient Khmer was never in her or his time ancient but was in the moment ascendent, looking forwards and backwards for an asphetic that was at once key to ancestors and future descendants then middle period statuary becomes as we just saw new technology divinity is at once tactile and ethereal I conclude with two quotes from Queen Indra Davies 12th century inscription which I all add you to really invest in or get hold of somehow Ashley's book it's really amazing but here's the quote for it is duty and not success that occupies the mind of great people and all those who because of the decadence of learning were crazed by objects of the senses in the 21st century era of financial austerity Queen Indra Davies words to which Ashley guested in her paper today through her analysis of Platniau paramita statues and which she explores in meticulous detail in her book are a salutary reminder to us all that as scholars our paramount goal and role is not as collectors of objects or honours but as mediums but as mediums not like those studied by Ashley concerned with possession interpretation and mediation of aesthetic legacies and cultural histories Ashley's erudition is as Nora signalled in her introduction multivalent but at its heart are two valves language and place it is her continual engagement with place through an approach that is at once epigraphic and ethnographic that situates Ashley's scholarship a cutting edge of intellectual inquiry I'm just about to invite you to join me in applauding Ashley it's wonderful achievements but first I wanted to pass on an invitation to you all to join the reception after we give her a round of applause thank you