ABSTRACT
For the purposes of this paper, I use the term “graffiti” to refer to such individual acts and impromptu inscriptions, in contrast to the texts sponsored by the royal donors and wealthy restorers of key spiritual sites. Such graffiti have largely fallen outside the margins of official translation, documentation, and conservation projects. However, they offer valuable historical records of transactions between individuals and their environment that can bring marginal and non-national players into the orbit of our understanding of such “national” monuments as Angkor. They also yield insights into the role of such loci as compass points on the physical, spiritual, emotional, and psychological itineraries of visitors. In their layering of old sites with new meanings, these graffiti form part of what we might call a “palimpsest” of memory. In his recent book, Andreas Huyssen calls for an understanding of the city as such a palimpsest, and considers how the physical incarnation of diverse pasts and memories in the built environment can shape present political identities (Huyssen 2003: 101-2). Specifically, he explores the role of monuments to tragedy as stimuli to memory, whose intervention in the present triggers resistance to a common human desire to forget past trauma. As a cultural subscript rather than a self-conscious monument, the graffiti considered in this paper operate as a palimpsest of memory, but in a different way. These runes encode past desires for future lives.
