Colloquium with Supeena Insee Adler and Christopher Adler
Wednesday, March 11, 2015
12:00 PM - 1:30 PM
10383 Bunche Hall
UCLA Campus
Los Angeles, CA 90095
Mourners visiting a shrine to the deceased King Norodom Sihanouk in Phnom Penh. Photo by Christopher Adler.
In February 2014, King Norodom Sihanouk of Cambodia was cremated in an elaborate and spectacular week-long ceremony in Phnom Penh. Cambodian scholars reconstructed royal cremation rituals from archival evidence and adapted these to a modern, urban, multi-media context for consumption by common Cambodians and international dignitaries. Supeena Insee Adler, Christopher Adler, and ethnomusicologist Deborah Wong visited Phnom Penh to witness and document the events at the ground level. We survey the events of the cremation ceremony through image and sound, exploring the civic and royal rituals and the ways common people were variously invited to gaze upon them or to be excluded from them, and we present the ritual activities conducted by common people surrounding the ceremony.
Supeena Insee Adler is an ethnomusicologist whose research concerns Thai royal musical traditions and ritual healing in Northeast Thailand. She received a Ph.D. from UC Riverside in 2014 and is teaching and performing Thai traditional music in San Diego. Christopher Adler is composer, pianist, performer on the Lao mouth organ khaen, and Professor of Music at the University of San Diego.
Cost : Free and open to the public.
Barbara Gaerlan
310-206-9163
cseas@international.ucla.edu www.international.ucla.edu/cseas/
Sponsor(s): Center for Southeast Asian Studies