In her 1980 song Cambodia, Joan Baez celebrated the popular perception of orphan dance shows at that time: ‘A little way in from the border in the crowded camps, I've seen mothers giving birth, seen beautiful orphans dance.’Footnote 1 In the 1980s, when hundreds of thousands of Cambodians languished along the Thai–Cambodia border, a consensus among foreign aid workers and journalists coalesced around the idea that orphan dance shows helped ease many of the difficulties inherent in refugee camp life, enhancing children's dignity by instilling confidence and cultural identity while preserving an endangered tradition. Today though, aid workers and journalists in Cambodia no longer find such dance shows as unambiguously enchanting as Baez's lyrics suggest. The enchantment has been replaced by the position that they constitute ‘child exploitation in action’,Footnote 2 and today one is more likely to hear dance shows referred to as ‘the Dolphin Show of Orphanages’,Footnote 3 reflecting the widespread belief that they demean children rather than dignify them. This shift in perception has in turn led to a dramatic decline in such performances. Whereas in the early 2000s orphanages proudly and prominently featured invitations to dance performances on their websites, by around 2016 nearly all such mentions had vanished from their websites, and today dance performances by orphans are all but impossible to find.
It is somewhat puzzling that perceptions of orphan dance shows reversed so rapidly and so completely. How can something ‘good’ become so ‘bad’? When did this happen? Why did it happen? Who decides whether these shows are good or bad, and upon what are these decisions based? Orphan dance shows provide a valuable case study for examining how constructions of childhood change, and how these constructions spread and have consequence. This article, therefore, comprises both a chronicle and an argument. First, I will recount how Western discourses around orphanage dance shows completely reversed within a single decade, and show how these changes had local consequences but little local input. Second, I will argue that several independent changes, both overt and covert, converged to cause this complete reversal of opinion, even though guiding principles such as ‘the best interests of the child’ remained both constant and primary.Footnote 4 Covert factors leading to the reversal of opinion included changes in constructions of childhood and ideologies of ideal adult–child responsibilities. Overt factors included visible changes in external circumstances, such as the increase in the number and salience of orphanages and changes in audience composition, from aid workers, VIPs and journalists, to foreign tourists. These separate changes converged to shift the Western perception of orphan dance shows from positive to negative, and led to their virtual eradication.
More broadly, I will use the case study of Cambodia's orphan dance shows to argue that even while children's rights narratives gain currency as universal principles, they remain infused with culture-specific values, which themselves may shift in ways that have consequences for practice and policy, even though the divergences may remain unconscious and unacknowledged. In solving the puzzle of the rapid and complete reversal of perceptions about orphan dance shows, this article contributes to an understanding of the powerful nature of transnational constructions of childhood and how these constructions have concrete consequences for local practices surrounding children's well-being. This article also makes a contribution to our understandings of changes in the lived experiences of children in Cambodia, and how those changes articulate with broader changes in conceptions of the ‘global child’.
However, the implications are not limited to children and childhood. Children are pivotal in constructions of the Western imaginary of Cambodia. Colonial disparagements of local communities as ‘childlike’ were a common, well-known way to diminish and delegitimate colonised peoples, and thus understanding constructions of childhood and what assumptions are encoded in the label ‘childlike’ are crucial for understanding colonial and post-colonial relations.Footnote 5 Cambodia is demographically a young country, with 30 per cent of the population currently under the age of 14 — any trend that affects one-third of the total population has to have far-reaching consequences in all corners of society.Footnote 6 Understanding the shift can therefore illuminate some broader social trends in Cambodia, particularly the ways that the disproportionate presence of Western aid workers is influencing fundamental aspects of Cambodian society.Footnote 7 This research also informs larger issues concerning the role global rights discourses and foreign communities have in shaping local practices, and the ways these discourses often lack substantive input from local communities themselves. Human rights narratives are covertly infused with culture-specific values, even as their proponents strive to make them universally meaningful and relevant. Interpretations and implementations of them change and vary, even as we strive to make them timeless and preserve them through formal written instruments and policies.
Symbolic associations of children with ‘innocence’ and ‘vulnerability’ are well-known avenues to enhanced fundraising, and children are the most common subject of NGO report imagery.Footnote 8 In fact, they are ‘key signifiers … a spatial metaphor’ for the relationship of the West with an entire geographic region.Footnote 9 Children figure especially prominently in the tourist imagery surrounding Cambodia, which is a significant factor in how the world at large views and interacts with Cambodia. The powerful symbolic charges associated with children and childhood, in particular the symbolic association of children with ‘the future’ and as a nation's ‘most precious resource’ also make them pivotal in larger political struggles for national identity and prestige on the global stage.
The conceptual framework for this research draws inspiration notably from Vivianna Zelizer, whose analysis of children's shift from economically useful to economically marginalised but affectively priceless helps explain the reformulation of orphanage dance shows; from Toni Shapiro, who insightfully examines the tensions between Cambodian dance as a beloved, endangered art form and the political uses to which it has been put; from David Lancy, who shows how particularistic ideas about appropriate ways for adults to interact with children become globalised as an ‘exportable social good’; and from Kristen Cheney, who has shown how the complex interplays between globalised discourses of children's rights and local constructions of childhood have consequences for the lived experiences of children in specific societies and circumstances.Footnote 10 It is one piece of a broader, long-term project exploring the confluence of constructions of childhood with the lived experiences of children in orphanages in Cambodia.Footnote 11
Methodologically, this research draws upon a purposive sampling of online texts such as blogs, websites and reviews, supplemented with memoirs of camp residents and aid workers and archived news reports. While online discussions remain underutilised as primary sources, they have the advantages of being unprompted, spontaneous and often anonymous, allowing for a level of candour that can be lacking in either live interviews or printed primary documents.Footnote 12 Certain scholarly works have also been analysed as primary sources because changing popular perceptions affect scholarly constructions; for example, the phrase ‘Dolphin show of orphanages’ comes from a refereed journal article.Footnote 13
The organisation of this article is as follows: I will begin in the next section with some discussion of orphans and dance in Cambodia's history, so that the shift in constructions of childhood will be historically contextualised. The numerous factors leading to the popularity of traditional dance performances in the refugee camps during the 1980s will then be presented, followed with some discussion of trends that accompanied their proliferation back in Cambodia after the repatriations throughout the 1990s and 2000s. Then, I will describe the rise of the negative response which resulted in the dramatic reversal in Western perceptions and global media portrayals, beginning around 2008. Finally, I will explore the larger significance and some persistent issues that remain, paving the way for future research.
Orphans and dance in Cambodian history
Dance has been central to the expression of Cambodian identity for a very long time, and orphans have been noted as participants in dance performances also for a very long time. Contrary to the current impression that dance performances by orphans arose as a way to solicit donations from increasing numbers of tourists,Footnote 14 such performances actually have a long and not always maligned indigenous history in Cambodia. The earliest known reference to the role of dance in enriching the lives of unparented children comes from a twelfth-century stele found at Angkor Thom, the last capital of the Khmer empire.Footnote 15 The inscriptions refer to Queen Jayarajadevi, who during her husband's long absence on a military campaign
wept, prayed and then found solace in Buddhist practices. [As she] … realized the benefits of Buddhism, she charged her own dancers to perform and to give representations drawn from the Jatakas. … Having taken, as her own daughters, a miserable troupe of a hundred young women abandoned by their mothers ….Footnote 16
This passage describes phenomena that continue to be important today. It is the earliest known reference to the use of a residential dance troupe as a way to support unparented children, including children whose parents may still be living but no longer provide care for them. It describes how parentless children's dance performance is used to effect transformation in adults, in this case to mobilise support for a new state religion and to make merit for the royal family and the kingdom. The particular kinds of transformations effected may have changed,Footnote 17 but these aspects of orphanage dance shows continue to be relevant today.
A description of dancers’ lives in the nineteenth century shows how residency in a dance troupe continued to serve as a social safety net because ‘Children could “offer themselves” to the king’.Footnote 18 It too continues to reveal themes that are relevant today, in particular what is now called social orphaning of children who were relinquished or abandoned to live as dancers, because ‘Children presented to the king were usually about six years old and in many cases would never see their parents again’.
Khmer dance has long excited the Western imaginary, even provoking riots among would-be spectators in the 1906 first-ever tour of a dance troupe in the Cambodian king's entourage in France.Footnote 19 This tour also led to the most celebrated encounter of a Westerner with Cambodian dance, when sculptor Auguste Rodin sketched the Cambodian royal court dancers, whom he referred to as ‘divine children who dance for the gods’.Footnote 20 His rhapsodic descriptions in many ways resemble the veneration of orphan dancers in the Western tourist imaginary decades later, focusing on their evocative power alongside a somewhat limited awareness of the complexities of dance history, technique or attire. Rodin wrote that his encounter with the young Khmer dancers ‘inspired his imagination’ and ‘made the antique live in me’.Footnote 21 French colonial discourses further fixed Khmer dance into the Western imagination as a living connection with the glories of the ancient Khmer empire and established a narrative of decline that foreshadows the crisis of loss that was so influential during the refugee camp years.Footnote 22
With the overthrow of the monarchy in 1970, dance no longer officially served as mediator between king and spirit world, ‘Yet the notion of the dance as embodying a transcendent essence of the nation remained powerful.’Footnote 23 This signifying power, along with the fact that dancers and musicians were civil servants, would make traditional performing arts a target when the Khmer Rouge later took control of the country.
Prior to the escalation of war in the late 1960s Cambodia had few orphanages and most unparented children were able to remain in extended family care.Footnote 24 There is evidence that residential dance troupes had remained available as a resource for providing care to unparented children. For example, the dancer Chheng Phon explained: ‘Before the war my wife and I had three children and 13 orphans whom I looked after, I brought them up to be artists.’Footnote 25
The intensification of conflict in 1969–75, especially the US bombing, created increasing numbers of orphans and refugees, who strained village and extended family care networks, and magnified the need for other kinds of solutions. Chheng Phon further describes how, when war exacerbated the needs of vulnerable children in this way, he ‘had an orphanage with more than 100 children’.Footnote 26
The 1975 defeat of the US-backed Khmer Republic by the Khmer Rouge led to a radical restructuring of every aspect of Cambodian society, including the abasement of court traditions such as classical dance and the elevation of the new leaders’ idiosyncratic version of traditional peasant culture. While the French narrative of the decline of Khmer culture had originally been constructed, at least in part, in order to justify guardianship, the narrative tragically came true under the Khmer Rouge. It has been reported that ‘close to 90 per cent of Cambodia's professional artists … perished’ during this time.Footnote 27 The symbolic power of classical dance was made clear in the way that the Khmer Rouge suppressed it precisely because it provided a powerful connection to the past.
The Cambodian family was another powerful and meaningful institution in traditional society, and it too was seen as a threat to be dismantled so that many children were sent to live in separate children's camps far from their parents. Consequently, by 1979 when the Vietnamese drove the Khmer Rouge out of power and into the forest, two institutions that had provided meaning and continuity, namely the family and the performing arts, had suffered particularly severe disruption. These disruptions led directly to the proliferation and popularity of orphanage dance shows in the refugee camps throughout the 1980s, and in Cambodia after the repatriations of the 1990s.
Traditional dance in the refugee camps, 1980–91
Orphan dance shows were brought to international attention in the context of a ‘crisis of Western conscience’ triggered by the suffering of Cambodians fleeing conditions during the civil war that began with the Vietnamese overthrow of the Khmer Rouge.Footnote 28 By the end of 1979 there were hundreds of thousands of Cambodians, including several thousand unaccompanied minors, living close to or just inside Thailand.Footnote 29 The powerful media images of starving Cambodians staggering across the border seized the world's attention, and drew humanitarian workers, volunteers and donations from around the world to the refugee camps. The losses endured by the refugees were legion, but before long, material conditions in the camps exceeded those available to many Cambodians who remained inside Cambodia. The ‘air of desperation was palpable,’ but ‘the most insidious problem’, plaguing even the most physically comfortable camp, was ‘boredom and enforced idleness … Refugees stood in line endlessly’.Footnote 30 The challenge for camp residents and aid workers alike became to devise ways to counter the boredom as well as the desperation.
The very tangible devastation of the performing arts aligned with the need for physical activity and emotional purpose, along with the overarching ‘anxiety that the Khmer as a people will cease to exist’,Footnote 31 to make dance an especially inviting focal point for efforts to address at least a few of these losses.Footnote 32 Dance was seen as more precious because of its tragic vulnerability to decline, framing performances as a real solution in the midst of intractable problems. Cambodian culture could be supported simply by enjoying it. By attending a dance performance, visitors could feel as though they were doing something both ‘cathartic and beautiful’, providing dancers with not just physical activity and entertainment, but ‘the return of their dignity, their humanness’.Footnote 33 Foreign aid workers transduced the affective value of performance into concrete advantages such as invitations to perform in Thailand or abroad, and even preferential opportunities for resettlement.Footnote 34 These tangible benefits associated with learning and performing dance were available to children as well as adults, especially to orphans.
At the same time that dance was becoming popular as a way to benefit individuals and to preserve Khmer cultural traditions, orphanages were proliferating in the refugee camps. Although notable among the causes was the sheer overwhelming numbers of children without parental care, the reasons children lacked parental care were in fact numerous and knotty. In addition to the thousands of unaccompanied minors who had made their way across the Thai border, many others were made vulnerable to abandonment by camp conditions. The parents of some children became incapacitated or died, but more often, the social disruption caused by the camp experience itself meant that ‘babies were abandoned frequently, at the rate of one every three days’.Footnote 35 Sexual abuse by guards and soldiers was rampant, and pregnancy of even very young girls sometimes resulted in banishment by their families or abandonment of the newborn.Footnote 36 Domestic violence drove some children to flee their families, and after divorce, if a new spouse rejected the children of the first marriage there was sometimes no alternative but relinquishment to an orphanage. Abandoned or abused children sometimes were detained when they turned to theft in order to survive, and if nobody came to retrieve them from the police station, they were ‘shipped to an orphanage’.Footnote 37 In the context of widespread crime and abuse overall, many camp residents came to idealise the advantages they saw orphans receiving. In one case, not unique, as many as 58 out of 70 children in centres for unaccompanied children actually had relatives living in the camp, but whose existence they had been instructed to deny because camp residents ‘commonly believed that unaccompanied children would receive better care and would eventually be resettled to Western nations’.Footnote 38
Despite the hardships of refugee camp life, the reliance on residential care was not just a case of making do in extremis. The reasons children lived in orphanages in the camps in Cambodia are similar to the ones that are influential today. Many Cambodians viewed, and continue to view, residence away from parents as not necessarily harmful,Footnote 39 and to reckon that the educational and material benefits of residential care can outweigh the disadvantages, especially in the context of domestic violence, spousal rejection, or unsafe or unhealthy living conditions. At the time, a sizeable portion of Westerners agreed. Both Westerners and resident Cambodians saw orphanages as an acceptable solution to overwhelming challenges, rather than as a problem space in their own right. There were several large orphanages (100–150 children) in Site II, the largest camp with almost 200,000 refugees,Footnote 40 and Jan Williamson's memoir of working in Khao I Dang, population 160,000, mentions 5, with need for 16 more.Footnote 41 Often centres that had been created for entirely different purposes were inadvertently transformed into orphanages because so many shelterless children materialised. For example, Nuon Phaly, founder of the Future Light Orphanage, originally had started a mental health centre for women suffering from depression, but reported that ‘The space quickly filled with children’.Footnote 42 As expressed by one aid worker at the time, ‘If you're not careful, all the children in Cambodia could end up in orphanages … Khmers feel that such a facility, especially if run by foreigners, is an educational opportunity not to be missed.’Footnote 43 In addition to academic schooling, the privilege of learning traditional dance was attractive, and in some cases orphanage dance classes were opened to non-orphanage children to alleviate envy, a strategy that continues to be used today in order to defuse resentment about the material benefits that children in orphanages often receive.Footnote 44 Although some aid workers expressed feeling ‘offended by this casual attitude of parents toward their child’,Footnote 45 others recognised that family-based care was not always ideal and that it could even foreclose opportunities. As one policy researcher in the camps explained, sometimes orphans were only invited to live in families ‘to provide an extra pair of hands. Normally they work rather than going to school, and … they often receive less food than other children in the household’.Footnote 46
In addition to the symbolic value of orphans as agents of transformation and redemption for adults,Footnote 47 orphans’ actual loss of kinship ties made the general refugee narrative of loss especially evocative. The idea of extending privileged knowledge to the most marginalised members of society was especially compelling as a way to elevate their status and confer them with self-esteem. Teaching children to dance seemed particularly urgent because of the disruption in transmission caused by conflict and exile, and because the Thai government's ‘humane deterrence’ policy initially forbade formal education.Footnote 48
The belief that dance performance could cultivate positive affect and attributes in children is prominent in memoirs and reports from the time. For example, children's centre founder and teacher Benoît Duchâteau-Arminjon describes how dance provided not just a way to prevent boredom and inactivity, but served to integrate orphans back into the society from which they had been estranged through loss of kinship ties. Linking to tradition through dance was a way to compensate for loss of other kinds of social linkages, and he writes in his memoir of how dance provided a bridge back to their rightful place in their own society:
When the cultural activity is linked to tradition, this gives the child identity and dignity; it makes him feel that he fits in. With a newfound identity, the child's dignity is restored and he becomes capable of fitting in with his own country.Footnote 49
However, Duchâteau-Arminjon's usage of the term ‘dignity’ was somewhat different from how it is used today. Dignity in this context hinged on mastery and display of a valued skill, rather than individual autonomy and deliverance from the tourist gaze, which are more commonly referenced in usage of the word ‘dignity’ today. Significantly, the ability to perform in front of an audience was seen as a way for children to claim dignity, rather than a potential violation as it later came to be seen.
In the refugee camps, performing for audiences of foreign adults was also accepted as an appropriate way to encourage donations or to show gratitude for them. In this context, traditional dance seemed like an obvious win-win enrichment activity, which boosted the morale of the resident children, and also provided them with special privileges, improved living conditions or spending money. Dance was recognised as an effective fundraising tool, and donors and officials from aid organisations were always treated to a dance show, often by children from an orphanage. The fact that the audience was composed of foreigners was considered to be especially validating for them, as Duchâteau-Arminjon describes in his memoir about a performance given for European diplomats, after which the children ‘are most impressed to be applauded by an audience of foreigners. Such ovations help them grow in self-confidence, something they desperately lack’.Footnote 50 Dance performances by the children graced visits of VIPs, such as US First Lady Rosalynn Carter, and Joan Baez, who toured the camps with Amnesty International and was inspired by her experience to write the song featured at the beginning of this piece. The affective power of the orphan trope made it irresistible for journalists, who highlighted orphaning even in articles that were about different topics entirelyFootnote 51 because the juxtaposition of the gracefulness of the dancers with the horrors of their life stories lent an additional layer of dramatic interest.
Meanwhile, orphanages and orphanage dance shows also proliferated inside Cambodia, where the civil war continued. Dance there also took on a powerful symbolic and nationalist value. The Vietnamese-backed government countered charges that their occupation was further weakening Cambodia's culture by encouraging and displaying traditional dance. Spontaneous local revivals also asserted Khmer claims to the dance traditions at the grassroots level. In 1980, Ben Kiernan toured the country and noted approvingly how children in many urban and rural orphanages performed publicly as part of the ‘revival and reinvigoration of traditional Khmer culture’.Footnote 52 The few Westerners who were able to visit Cambodia at that time were also beguiled by the symbolic power of orphans as the vessels through which to relay dance traditions to future generations, and reacted with approval to the dance rehearsals and performances they viewed. As one aid worker recounts in an interview from the period, after basic needs were met, the next priority was to ‘give them back their culture’ through dance.Footnote 53 The possibility of reconciling two irreconcilable symbols — the ugliness of war and the beauty of art, was transcendent, and when the dancers were also orphans, that fact was explicitly noted by most writers during the period. Orphan dancers made the performances not just enjoyable entertainment, but a symbol of hope for the future, precisely the kind of transformative emotional ‘work’ that orphans provide for adults in Western orphanage schemata,Footnote 54 as Toby Volkman described after a visit to Phnom Penh in the 1980s:
At the School of Fine Arts, young orphans of the Pol Pot period are trained to be the new generation of dancers. … Watching these survivors turn into lovely little apsaras or leaping Hanumans, even the most jaded cynic cannot but feel that there is hope.Footnote 55
Repatriation, 1992–99
In the repatriations which took place throughout the 1990s, refugees returned to a challenged and challenging society. The ‘fierce and uncertain scramble for livelihood’ was daunting especially for children.Footnote 56 The number of street-connected children increased dramatically,Footnote 57 and more orphanages were formed during this time. Most had dance instruction and gave performances, modelled on the successful use of dance inside the refugee camps and often supported by government ministries, nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) or foreign donors. The association of orphans with dance in Cambodia had been so consistent that it had become conventionalised, so the two were automatically linked in people's minds, and the schema of ‘Cambodian orphanage’ had come to include dance simply as an expected component of the programming. Performances, open rehearsals and images of dancing children came to be common ways to attract visitors and donors.Footnote 58 For example, the Cambodian Light Children Association (CLCA) was founded in 1995 by a restaurant owner who started an orphanage because, as he stated in a newspaper interview at the time, ‘Many street children came to my restaurant begging.’ In order to ‘uphold Cambodian culture’ the Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts helped CLCA to teach traditional dance, which ‘became a significant source of income for the association’.Footnote 59 Other centres were able to enhance their reputations with high quality performing arts programmes, used directly or indirectly as a way to fundraise as well as cultivate children's cultural pride. In the Kampot Traditional Music School for Orphaned and Disabled Children, founded in 1994, ‘children were transformed from being shy, traumatised and closed, to being open and happier, they also felt a sense of achievement and were proud of their abilities’.Footnote 60 Rehearsals in dance attire with live music were open to the public on a walk-in basis, and teachers and orphanage staff believed it was a positive step to give children practice in front of a live audience to prepare them for their performances at festivals and competitions. Likewise, in 1994 the children of Krousar Thmey,Footnote 61 an orphanage which had repatriated ensemble, garnered the official support of the royal family and of the prime minister when they performed for Cambodia's queen, who was ‘so moved to see the young orphan girls dance to the music played by the blind musicians that she stands to applaud them’.Footnote 62 Throughout the 2000s, children from Krousar Thmey contininued to give regular performances of dance, music and shadow puppets in a restaurant that was founded as a fundraiser for the programme.
The 2000s: The rise of the negative response
Cambodia entered the twenty-first century with considerable momentum supporting the position that orphan dance performances were a win-win enterprise for Cambodia's many children who lacked parental care. In addition to being seen as inherently valuable for children's identities and self-esteem, dance performances’ appeal to foreign donors was seen as natural and unproblematic. The centres’ own materials were unselfconscious in their promotion of dance, and foreign audiences were encouraged to interpret skilful dancing as evidence of the good care that children were receiving — an indicator of a well-intentioned and responsible centre. In her 2000 memoir, Geraldine Cox, founder of the Sunrise Children's Centres and one of the few foreigners to be granted Cambodian citizenship (as recognition for her efforts to support Cambodian orphans), was explicit about the benefits of dance and how she could leverage them for the children's advantage. She wrote ‘I envisage busloads of tourists coming to the centre to see the music and dance lessons in progress’.Footnote 63 In 2001, the Cambodia Daily appreciatively reported on the ‘first nightly Khmer dance show since 1975’, featuring children from an orphanage who performed in a restaurant, providing ‘the enthusiastic children a chance to perform’ as well as ‘pretty much double the income of the charity’. The only concern expressed in the article was possible rivalry with other orphanages because ‘they expect similar shows to pop up to compete with them’.Footnote 64 There was no mention in the article or in response letters of any discomfort with the idea that dance could become a kind of ancillary entertainment for diners, or that the children should not be performing in a public venue under those circumstances.
Meanwhile though, other changes had been occurring which ultimately would have consequences for the reversal of opinions about orphan dance shows. These included changes in social constructions of childhood among foreign aid workers, in particular a rise of rights-based narratives informing aid work with children; changes in construals of dignity even as dignity remained foundational to the whole idea of human rights; an overall increase in the number of foreign aid workers, thereby increasing their influence; changes in the composition of audiences from predominantly aid workers and journalists to predominantly tourists; and, increases in the number and salience of orphanages and orphan dance performances, accompanied by the growth of for-profit orphanages and corrupt practices. In the following sections, I will examine each in turn, and show what it has meant for the change in opinion about orphanage dance shows.
The rights pivot in humanitarian aid took place when the end of the Cold War opened a space for reframing human rights discourses as more than just instruments of superpower ideological hegemony.Footnote 65 This shift toward human rights discourses was also bolstered when the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) came into effect in 1990. Not only did the CRC provide a common set of principles around which to unify and focus consensus within the field, but the approach it provided came to dominate in practice because the need for monitoring and reporting among signatory nations boosted consulting and employment opportunities.Footnote 66 The CRC-focused worldview of aid workers has been especially influential in Cambodia after repatriation because international NGOs ‘flocked’ to Cambodia, so that by 2013, Cambodia had the second largest number of NGOs per capita in the world.Footnote 67 As Steven Prigent has pointed out, the prevalence of NGOs has had a disproportionate effect in Cambodia on policies and practices pertaining to education and childhood.Footnote 68 In contrast, neighbouring countries have maintained higher levels of sovereignty in their thinking about education and children, particularly with respect to children's rights.
Even as these changes were brewing behind the scenes, through the mid-2000s orphanage dance shows retained a generally positive image. This is indicated by a scandal which erupted because a corrupt village official withheld the passports of an orphanage dance troupe that was supposed to tour abroad; the scandal was the official's extortion, rather than the orphans’ performing,Footnote 69 and public sympathy clearly lay with the orphanage director who had arranged for the children to perform for audiences in Japan and the United States. However, around the same time, cautionary messages began to appear on travel forums alongside more positive descriptions. These were at first focused on whether enrichment activities were really a good use of funds, as in the following post and response; while Writer A assumes that enrichment activities such as dance and the opportunity to perform are beneficial for children, Writer B sceptically points out that this is a frivolous use of funds that could be better spent on maintenance. In this exchange, it can be seen that while some aspects of orphanage care were cause for concern, dance performances per se were not:
A: I was very impressed with the work done there. … Furthermore, a musical and drama education is provided and on request traditional music and dance is performed.
B: … they train the kids in dancing, but you can see they have very little money, the place is always getting flooded and the school room has a leaky roof.Footnote 70
Tourism to Cambodia exploded after the turn of the century, first topping one million arrivals in 2004 and increasing every year thereafter. Most tourists came to visit Angkor Wat, but because the dominant perception of Cambodia which has been constructed and relayed among Westerners is still as a site for humanitarian concern, many tourists supplemented tours of monuments by visiting or volunteering for aid projects, including attending performances by orphans.Footnote 71 Most also made donations, thereby incentivising the creation of new orphanages, and amplifying the pull factors already recognised as an issue in the refugee camps.Footnote 72
Dance shows proved to be an effective way to attract visitors and to encourage visitors to give donations. As Cambodia became a popular tourism destination, orphanage dance performances were increasingly recognised as one of the ‘things to see and do’ there, as indicated by their many four- and five-star reviews on online travel review sites in 2008, such as the following excerpt from Lonely Planet: ‘Please go and see their performance, I am sure you will see the best traditional dance performance available in Siem Reap!’Footnote 73 Tourists also subscribed to the schemata that positioned dance performance as a way to enhance self-confidence and cultural connectedness, which remained dominant until the end of the decade. By 2009, though, when posters remarked on the enjoyment, self-confidence or other benefits that might accrue from performing dance, rebuttals inevitably appeared. For example, a volunteer enthusiastically posted on Travelpod (2009) how moving she found the girls’ mastery of traditional dance. Her post portrayed the skill as a self-evident asset that connected the girls to their history and to revered mythical dancers of the past:
The girls’ hands swirled and their eyes took on a faraway look; they were no longer children but dancing apsaras, celestial beings of ancient Sanskrit mythology and Cambodian legend, inscribed on the walls of Angkor Wat. … With their well-practised movements, the children's dance was better than the one I had seen at a restaurant in town.Footnote 74
However, the very fact of a foreign tourist gazing at the dancer, regardless of the respect she might express, was susceptible to reinterpretation as exploitation. This positive Travelpod post received a negative response a few months later that made the increasingly frequent comparison of the children to trained animals: ‘Why do people think it's commendable to … have them perform like dancing bears for tourists?’ A similar post on Travelfish (2010) enthusiastically recommended a dance performance specifically because the children seemed to enjoy it, saying ‘The kids themselves seemed to get a lot from the visit and I don't mean in financial terms. They were terribly excited, had perfected their dances …’. This post quickly became the target of negative responses, including the following two:
If the children are being taught dances to entertain tourists, it should raise red flags. [name] — the operation you visited sounds shady to me — like a circus show.
And that Khmer dancing doesn't seem right to me. Like I said in previous post it might lead to conditioning for the children. ‘Dance and smile, and then the barang visitor will donate some money so we have a meal.’
Both exchanges above show that by the late 2000s, simply the fact of dancing for tourists was coming to be considered degrading. The vulnerable child constructed by rights instruments as anyone under 18 cannot give consent, and therefore regardless of whether or not the children appeared to enjoy performing, the tourist gaze was construed as inherently exploitative.
In 2009, Friends International, a respected NGO serving vulnerable children, especially those working and/or living on the street, launched its alternative care project ‘reinforcing the capacity of families to take care of children so as to reduce abandonment … [and] support of orphanages for implementation of good practices’. At that time, their focus was not on orphanage dance shows or tourists as problems per se, but rather on enlisting tourists as allies in the effort to prevent abuse. However, in 2011 Friends International launched an anti-orphanage tourism campaign, which compiled and disseminated the many concerns about orphanage dance shows that had been previously expressed privately or in online discussions.Footnote 75 While the campaign itself presented a nuanced view of the situation, a dimension of the campaign that was most consistently relayed in the Anglophone media was that dance shows themselves were inherently a problem. For example, one commercial travel blog reported on claims that the dance shows constitute child labour and are enablers of abuse, as quoted below:
Are children required to work or participate in securing funds for the orphanage? The songs and dances may be cute, but they can also be viewed as child labour and groom children for begging and street work that leaves them open to exploitation.Footnote 76
At the same time, concerns became prominent about the commercialisation of traditional dance more generally, and the Cambodian government pointed to the dangers of using it as a tourist attraction because of the risk of undermining its spiritual integrity. However, the government also emphasised the value of cultural performances to the economy and to identity construction, a ‘frustratingly ambiguous position’ that had little real effect on the proliferation or popularity of performances targeting foreign tourists.Footnote 77
Positive reviews of orphanage performances on online travel forums slowed after 2011, and had stopped altogether by mid-2015, although glowing, out-of-date reviews can still be found online. Orphanage websites themselves no longer advertise regular dance performances. Although the process has been a gradual accretion of many separate changes that originated independently, they combined to support each other in a single, clear message, exemplified in the following advice which has replaced all the positive reviews that formerly appeared on the Travelfish forum: ‘One word of caution. Some orphanages offer Khmer dance shows, performed by the young children in their care. We can only advise, ‘Don't do it!’Footnote 78
Dignity or degradation? Accounting for change
The trend toward reversal throughout the late 2000s and early 2010s is clear and consistent; the outcome is definitive. Orphan dance performances today in Cambodia are virtually impossible to find. And yet, it is important to recognise that this entire debate and its consequent shift, from positive and ubiquitous to negative and essentially nonexistent, took place within the Western media and foreign community with little input from Cambodians themselves. Among the reasons for the shift, it is notable that one of them is explicitly not that Cambodians themselves decided that the dance performances were unacceptable. It simply is not known whether local perceptions came to be equally negative. But foreign discourses can have disproportionate effect. Similar to the way in which French colonial discourses of decline became ‘incorporated into Cambodian nationalism’,Footnote 79 Western discourses of the orphan dance shows circulated and had consequence without reference to how Cambodians felt about them, either as participants or as observers. How was it possible for such a profound shift in policy and practice to take place based almost entirely on a conversation taking place within the foreign media and aid worker community? And, why did the consensus in that forum shift so profoundly and rapidly?
At first glance, it might appear that orphanage dance shows became a target simply because orphanages themselves came to be seen as increasingly problematic. Certainly, it is impossible to understand the backlash against orphan dance shows without also taking into account the wider backlash against orphanages more generally. However, the dance shows were a uniquely Cambodian accelerant that fuelled the growth in orphanage tourism, and also served as a lightning rod that attracted attention in their own right. As a distinctively Cambodian embodiment of the global orphanage boom that was taking place especially across Asia, Africa and Latin America, they contributed to the prevalence as well as the salience of orphanages in Cambodia, leading to Cambodia's status as originating point for an anti-orphanage tourism campaign that also spread globally.Footnote 80
Rather than resulting from a collective epiphany based on ‘recent evidence-based research’,Footnote 81 several independent changes converged to cause the reversal of opinion, even though that opinion continued to be based on the overarching principle of the ‘best interests of the child’ which remained both constant and primary. While the anti-orphanage-tourism literature predominantly cites literature condemning residential care, there is also an abundant literature, still growing, documenting positive outcomes of residential care.Footnote 82 An explanation built on assumptions of intellectual and ethical progress ignores the ‘scandal-reform’ cycles and policy pendulum swings which characterise child welfare discourses.Footnote 83 Superimposed foreign models of childhood interacted with local circumstances, which themselves changed extensively during the 2000s. One very influential overt change was the rise of NGOs in the social services sector of Cambodia.
Cambodia has one of the highest numbers of NGOs per capita in the world, and as Anne Yvonne Guillou explains, they have long enjoyed ‘an unusual position of power and legitimacy’.Footnote 84 The disproportionate number of aid workers and aid organisations in Cambodia,Footnote 85 as well as their access to media and other resources for promoting their own messaging, makes the expatriate aid workers’ perspective disproportionately influential. While foreign founded, run and/or supported NGOs are highly visible in the social services sector, much of their influence is covert, or in Prigent's words, ‘silent’, promoted through practices that are presented as values-neutral ‘technology’, but which are in fact deeply shaped by implicit values-based assumptions.Footnote 86 In the case of praxis surrounding child well-being, foreign models are promoted as developmentally informed best practices, aligning with the universalist child rights principle of the ‘best interests of the child’.
International NGOs brought with them not only a commitment to rights-based approaches in principle, but also a pragmatic focus on disseminating child rights-focused information and monitoring CRC compliance because the reporting requirements for the CRC, effective in 1990, made that a funding priority. However, culture-specific interpretations of even the most fundamental principles of children's rights, such as ‘best interests of the child’ and ‘dignity’, are not separable from cultural contexts, but rather are themselves culturally informed.
Paramount in Western modernist discourses of childhood that have come to dominate development discourses is a construction of childhood that privileges the affective value of protected vulnerability and assails the notion that children ought to be making economic contributions to their household.Footnote 87 This interpretation of the ‘best interests of the child’ precludes children from displaying dignity in ways that have been important throughout much of Cambodian history, such as mastering valued skills and contributing to the family's well-being, especially economically. Foreign aid workers measure orphanages against their own imported ideal which sacralises above all the idea of family as primary kin who share an abode, with responsibility flowing in one direction, from adult to child, rather than reciprocally across generations. In this worldview, orphan dance shows are seen as a kind of child labour, and child labour is seen as inherently a violation of children's rights.Footnote 88 This approach devalorises the dignity children accrue via contributions that they make,Footnote 89 and privileges privacy over the increased confidence the children acquired when applauded by foreign audiences, as observed by Duchâteau-Arminjon.
Interpretations of even fundamental rights-based concepts change over time as well, and a fundamental shift in usage of the word ‘dignity’ has accompanied the spread of rights-based views of child well-being since the refugee camp years. The word ‘dignity’ as the ‘foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world’Footnote 90 is central to modern constructions of human rights, but while remaining constant as an aspirational value, the focus of dignity has shifted from positive rights related to children's capabilities, contributions and confidence — the right to claim dignity through effort, skill, self presentation or ‘internal transformation of one's behavior’Footnote 91 to negative rights hingeing upon individual autonomy and freedom from certain kinds of interactions with adults, such as performing in front of them or being expected to perform work that contributes to children's own upkeep.
Covert conceptual changes are often not readily available to conscious introspection, but still have consequences for practice and even policy, and interact with overt, external changes in circumstances in consequential ways, seen in other domains as well. For example, Cambodia's official adoption of the Child-Friendly Schools Initiative, emphasising student-centred pedagogies resulting from the ideology that ‘children are all different’ and ‘nobody is the same as anybody else’, resulted in local resistance that undermined implementation, with responses aimed at ‘reforming’ local attitudes, rather than understanding them.Footnote 92 Similarly, ‘deep-seated, permanent misunderstandings’ have been observed between foreign aid workers and Cambodian medical staff, attributable to deeply rooted differences in values orientations surrounding the meanings of development and the conditionality of gifts.Footnote 93
In addition to covert changes such as weighting of rights-based discourses and interpretations of children's best interests, there were overt changes in external circumstances that further pushed opinions from positive to negative. Notable among the reasons dance shows were singled out for criticism independently from the overall mobilisation against residential care was the change in audience composition from aid workers, celebrities and journalists, to tourists. As tourism to Cambodia increased throughout the 2000s, from 466,000 in 2000 to one million in 2004 to 2 million in 2007, to 4 million in 2013, tourists came more and more to dominate the audiences for orphan dance shows. The negative connotations generally associated with tourism, combined with more specific dissonances between development workers and tourists, meant that concerns about children's best interests were exacerbated by bias against tourists — performing for tourists is construed as inherently less dignified than performing for VIPs. Because tourists, in contrast to aid workers and journalists, are paying for their experience, anything they do is automatically susceptible to being cast as consumption, and tourists’ consuming of orphanage dance shows was analysed as commodification of children. In this way, the connotations of the phrase ‘orphanage tourism’ colour perceptions of orphanage dance shows, regardless of what actually transpires when they are performed.Footnote 94 Dance itself came to be seen as a kind of grooming, as discussed in the travel blog quote above in the section on the rise of the negative response, as well as a form of child labour verging on modern slavery.Footnote 95
The practice of using dance performances as a way to attract donations is particularly disquieting for critics, and can be seen as a form of child labour that is inherently ‘highly unsafe and exploitive’.Footnote 96 For example, there have been numerous reports of children in tourist spaces, sometimes at night, passing out flyers for their dance performances.Footnote 97 However, closer examination reveals that widespread claims are often based on occasional instances or unverified anecdotes. For example, a 2011 UNICEF document cited a key informant who reported an orphanage that sent children out to play musical instruments and solicit donations at night in public tourist venues.Footnote 98 Then, a different orphanage posted on its own website that ‘Many organisations send their children out to the streets to give flyers and other organisations make their children dance every single night to raise funds. It may not seem like it, but this is child labour and exploitation.’Footnote 99 These limited reports have subsequently been cited and re-cited in both scholarly and popular articles. As a result, the claim that many orphanages regularly force children to dance or to roam tourist spaces late at night has come to circulate as an accepted fact, even though there has been no investigation into the actual incidence of these practices, or acknowledgment that they have been discontinued since the criticisms began. Most orphanages in Siem Reap did not send their children into the tourist markets at night to recruit audiences for dance shows, and in recent years those who did have halted the practice, yet the small number of ones who had came to dominate the Western discourses about orphanages.
The tensions regarding tourist dance shows performed by orphans mirrored broader tensions regarding the relationship of traditional Cambodian dance with tourism and tourists. As Celia Tuchman-Rosta has explained, Cambodia's Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts has ‘pointed to the dangers of using classical dance as a tourist attraction because of the risk of disrespecting its spiritual integrity’ but at the same time, has ‘emphasized the value of cultural performances to the economy and to identity construction’.Footnote 100 Seeing tourism as a way to revitalise and support dance traditions while also seeing it as profaning a sacred tradition creates a tension that is difficult for dancers, both orphans as well as adult professionals, to navigate. On the one hand, it meant that they could earn a livelihood as professional dancers, albeit not a highly paid one; on the other hand it compromised their beliefs about the integrity and meaning of the dance itself. For many foreigners, not understanding the correct forms or significance of traditional dance, performances by ‘cute’ orphans were more accessible and enjoyable, and the orphan tropes gave a new sense of emotional significance to replace the religious and nationalistic dimensions of Khmer dance.
While the shift described above is a consequence of a complex of many factors, both overt changes, that is, of changing circumstances, and covert changes, that is, conflicted underlying ideologies about the nature of childhood, what it is strikingly not a consequence of is changing opinions on the part of Cambodians themselves, either adults or children. The Cambodian government's own minimum standards, for example, say nothing about dance performances, either paid or unpaid, but rather do focus on the child's right to cultural knowledge, recreation and identity. The discourse framing dance shows as inherently exploitative has circulated among foreigners, with little effort or success in integrating local perspectives. What do Cambodians themselves think about the dance performances?
There has been little research of orphanage residents’ own views on learning and performing traditional dance, but a few studies reveal that their perceptions are not always negative. Ruth Emond found that children in the orphanage she studied viewed dance lessons as an example of how ‘the orphanage was providing them with skills and competencies which would improve their adult social status and acceptability’.Footnote 101 Similarly, Amanda Miller found that a majority of the children she interviewed in a performance-based orphanage in Siem Reap were ‘pleased to learn and perform traditional dance and music for tourists and their responses indicated pride in their new skills’. They also understood and appreciated how visitors who came to see the dance performances often later returned to the orphanage to teach English, which was a highly desired and much valued opportunity for the children.Footnote 102 By early 2019 though, the strong pressure to discourage dance performances resulted in closure of the orphanage, because it was no longer financially viable.Footnote 103 In my own interviews with former residents of a Buddhist temple-based orphanage, I found some nostalgia for public performances, as well as recognition of the practical value of performance skills. Two of the former residents had been able to support their studies by dancing part-time after leaving the orphanage, and two others currently are professional musicians, using the skills they acquired in the orphanage. The one former resident who expressed a strong, unprompted dislike for traditional dancing nonetheless explained that he sympathised with the logic of performance as a way to attract funding, but that he would have preferred to learn more modern dances. At the orphanage, I regularly observed children demonstrating their enjoyment of dance by practising spontaneously on their own and by teaching each other when the instructor was not present. Neighbourhood children were also eager to join in the dance classes and orphanage staff were able to build good relations with families in the village by inviting local children to join in the dance classes.Footnote 104
One obstacle to understanding local perceptions is that they can be treated as erroneous if they don't align with dominant Western discourses about childhood. For example, the same UNICEF study cited earlier found that most village leaders and parents have a variety of reasons for favouring residential care, including especially that children in orphanages receive a better education than children in the village, and so concluded that: ‘[t]he principle that institutional care should be a last resort and a temporary solution has not been fully engrained in the general mindset in Cambodia’,Footnote 105 and recommended increased training to change this widespread opinion, in particular to ‘create radio spots that promote the value of raising vulnerable children at home’.Footnote 106 The local preference for residential care is generally attributed to families who ‘lack knowledge of the harms of institutional care’, and a need for ‘the skills and knowledge to be better parents’,Footnote 107 rather than villagers’ more intimate understanding of the lived realities of rural families. Many Cambodian families believe they are making an intentional ‘sacrifice of love’Footnote 108 by allowing their children to live apart from them in order to continue their education in these centres or access other perceived advantages in doing so, which is informed by their own understanding of what it is to be a ‘better parent’.
Cambodians’ beliefs about the orphan dance shows may be embedded in entirely different cultural schemata about child circulation and children's role as contributing members of their own families.Footnote 109 Erik Davis explains that ‘Adoption is so widespread in the region that social parentage is established and maintained, regardless of biology, through practices of affiliation’ [because] ‘The dominant understanding of the method by which one establishes the possibility of moral progress and maturation is through procedures of adoption’.Footnote 110 Similarly, Cambodian parents comment that ‘they “give” their children to the teacher’ in a symbolic relinquishment that may provide conceptual underpinnings for relinquishment to educators at an orphanage.Footnote 111 While concerns about dance performances revolve around more general condemnation of child labour, children themselves often self-report heightened feelings of self-efficacy and achievement through their contributions to the family economy.Footnote 112 Miller has concluded that while the dance performances, as well as other opportunities for paid work, are discouraged by most foreign NGOs as a violation of children's rights, such policies actually violate the children's own rights to express and abide by their own choices, as well as their right to fulfil family obligations, which is highly important in Cambodia and is itself a source of self-esteem.
Conclusion
The story of the rise and fall of orphan dance shows provides a unique lens onto a singular, pivotal moment in Cambodia's rich history. It can reveal much about how idealised constructions of childhood and ideal adult–child relationships change and have concrete consequences. But this is more than just an interesting story and there are larger points to be made. Orphan dance shows came to pervade Western media portrayals of Cambodia in prominent, diverse English news outlets,Footnote 113 and as such shaped broader global perceptions of Cambodia.
The case study of orphan dance shows also provides a lens through which to explore the historically and culturally contingent nature of constructions of childhood and how they articulate with ideology, especially rights discourses and related ideas such as the ‘best interests of the child’ and ‘dignity’. As Linda Gordon writes: ‘One of the most transcultural markers of what historians call modernity has been an ethical, or at least discursive, prioritizing of children's welfare.’Footnote 114 The idea of childhood and the assumption that the ‘development of the child thus complements development of the country’ dominates Western relationships with other societies, and the category of child ‘bears a heavy burden for a struggling young nation that has seldom known peace or stability’.Footnote 115 The problem, though, is that the discursive prioritising of children's welfare does not always lead to solutions that serve the purposes of actual children. Children must not only survive and flourish amid challenging circumstances, but they must do so while also serving the discursive purposes imposed on them by Western modernist discourses.
Orphan dance shows are a lightning rod in a larger dispute over the nature of childhood in Cambodia, and the nature of adult–child roles and responsibilities. Just as dance came to bear the heavy symbolic weight of ‘social resurgence’ for all of Cambodia,Footnote 116 the case of orphanage dance shows in Cambodia exemplifies the way that rights-based discourses about child well-being are covertly infused with culture-specific values even as they overtly stake claims to universality. An uncritical embrace of such approaches runs the risk of imposing imported models of idealised childhoods that fail to take into account the values of local communities or the reality of the circumstances and choices that are actually open to them. The rigidity of acceptable responses itself is an indicator of the symbolic, but not necessarily pragmatic, nature of positions about childhood, locked into the ‘scandal-reform’ cycle. The strident terms used in the debate, such as ‘grim’, ‘circus’, ‘dancing bear’ and ‘dolphin show’, suggest that larger issues are at stake.
Paradoxically, the construction of children as rights-bearers which is prevalent among Western aid workers attributes to children less capacity and more vulnerability than local, more long-standing constructions of childhood. Orphanage dance shows have moved from being seen as a solution to a host of serious problems to being viewed as a serious problem in their own right, but both positions are legitimated by being ‘in the best interests of the child’ and by prioritising children's dignity. These notions themselves, though, are culturally and historically contingent. The new schema of the ‘vulnerable child’ removes the child's ability to decide for herself whether an experience is enjoyable or not, just as the bright line formalised by the CRC dividing childhood from adulthood at the chronological age of 18 makes it impossible for children to give consent. Somewhat ironically therefore, a consequence of the rise of child rights-based discourses is that it has come to matter less whether or not children themselves enjoy dancing and performing, and children's voices have been largely missing from the debates over the merits and defects of orphanage dance shows. Children are not seen as being able to legitimately enjoy the experience; if they do enjoy performing, it is because of ‘conditioning’.
Children's welfare is never just about children, of course. Potent symbols that they are, the controversy over children's dance performances is also about the modern Western adult need for childhood to be a protected metaphorical space of innocence, even at the expense of carefully examining whether this construction of childhood is shared by children themselves, or whether it benefits children. Conflicting views of the best interests of the child are the inevitable result. It may seem strained to cast discussions of children's welfare in terms of ideological proclivities rather than self-evident developmental imperatives. However, the same tensions described in this article have characterised the controversy over child street vendors; the elimination of opportunities for children to sell to tourists on the streets of Siem Reap actually drove children into worse forms of labour, and reduced their access to schooling.Footnote 117 Parents in Cambodia today struggle with conflicting messages and models about their parental roles and their children's behaviour, expressing widespread anxiety over losing control of their children as a result of changing circumstances and the pressures of globalisation.Footnote 118
Throughout history, Cambodian dance has often emerged as focal in situations of conflict or cultural change; as Shapiro has explained ‘because of its aesthetic and ritual power in Khmer life … The mobilization of resources to fight a war or an ideological battle involves, in Cambodia as elsewhere, a mobilization of cultural and symbolic as well as material resources’,Footnote 119 or, as was proclaimed during Cambodia's civil war, ‘dance is another front of struggle’.Footnote 120 It continues to be a ‘front of struggle’ now in a different kind of ideological dispute, one that exists at the very centre of modernity, that is, a battle over the nature of childhood.
