Celestial Dancer Certification :Khmer a Moment
by Mike Violette
My good friend Alex K, knowing my penchant for Asia, rang me up a few years back.
“Hey Mike, do you want to go to Siem Reap?”
“Sure! Where is that?”
“There is an event on IP happening there in a few months, and would you like to give a speech?”
“I’m game!”
So off we went.
The event in Siem Reap was organized by the International Intellectual Property Institute (iipi.org) whose mission for this conference was aptly-stated in the conference title: “Harnessing Intellectual Property to Protect and Promote Traditional Arts and Crafts and to Empower Women.”
Seems the handicrafts that anchor a large part of the tourism in Cambodia were getting over-run by fakes. These traditional crafts are most-often made by women, who hold the strings to family incomes in developing countries.
For this Throwback, we travel (back) to Southeast Asia and get to look around a little. If you are inclined to click on, you’ll find out how many elephants were used to construct the amazing City-Temple of Angkor Wat.
