The ethics of survival: Teaching the traditional arts to disadvantaged children in post-conflict Cambodia

Abstract

Cambodia’s recent history of conflict and political instability has resulted in a recognized need to recover, regenerate, preserve and protect the nation’s cultural heritage. Many education programmes catering for disadvantaged youth have implemented traditional Khmer music and dance lessons, suggesting that these programmes share the responsibility of cultural regeneration, and view the survival of traditional art forms as dependent on their bequeathal to these young children. In this regard, the musical future of the country is, at least in part, dependent on the success of the vulnerable. However, these vulnerable students are living in a rapidly changing Cambodia, with higher levels of education, increasing international communications and influences, developing infrastructure, urbanization and fundamentally different ways of going about everyday life, work and leisure, to their parents’ and grandparents’ generations. Through semi-structured individual interviews conducted with Cambodian staff and music, dance and theatre teachers from three music and dance programmes provided by non-governmental organizations catering for vulnerable and disadvantaged young people, we explore how the conflicting objectives of conservation and cosmopolitanism are negotiated and navigated in schools. This study explores themes of conservation, coexistence of multiple traditions and education in wider Cambodian society through performance. These themes are discussed in relation to the ethics of arts teaching, which—whilst intensified in the Cambodian context—are relevant beyond this particular case study.