Cambodian Culture Through The Years

KHMER CULTURE THROUGH THE YEARS

The line of culture is dimly distinguished by one another. The new age of globalization,

technology, information and transnational economic have allowed wealthy countries to export

not only their political and economic ideologies but also their traditions and values as well.

The Cambodian people has made tremendous efforts to preserve Khmer traditional, culture

and value, but younger generations are hungry for a change. In this critical uphill battle to

maintain c ultural identity in current increasingly homogeneous global community, Khmer

individually has to endure the mission of nurturing and preserving the applicable past for the

bright future.

Due to the geographical position and to the peculiar

On the other hand, local geography influenced these

borrowings to such a degree that today one can rarely see a set of beliefs or traditions in

Cambodian that hasn’t been influenced by local structures.

LOST ART REVIVED

Decades ago, Cambodian art was virtually non-existent, with only handful of painters practicing

their trade. Their focus was typically restricted to the horrors of the Killing Fields and war, or

pleasant pictures of Angkor Wat and rural Areas.

These days, though, the country’s tempo is shifting. Cambodia has moved from a country

ravaged by war to one region’s top tourist destinations with a fledging manufacturing base, and

its evolving art scene is growing up. Artists are becoming more in tune with a rapidly

normalizing society, and local artists are fusing Cambodian traditions with modern and

borrowing ideas from abroad. This has allowed them to move away from the rigid, two-

dimensional depictions of temples and farmers working their rice field, which were