ABSTRACT
This chapter contains the results of research in Cambodia into the destruction or plunder of cultural heritage, the difficulties of its protection, the looting, trafficking and return as well as the invention of false documents of provenance, fraud and misrepresentation. Colonial regimes regarded their colonies as possessions and for the most part recognised only their own law in those areas. Even more disastrous are ideologies of fundamentalist religious or political movements dedicated to destruction. The drafting of national law inspired by the interest of antiquarians goes back to papal decrees in the fifteenth century. A major international discussion is raised by the question of retroactivity. There is a view of culture that takes account of its dynamisms, appropriations, hybridizations, and contaminations, as opposed to sanitised and anaemic presentations of cultures and this approach allows a corrective to the paradoxes of cultural property, relying rather on a counter-narrative of cultural fusion and hybridity.
