Living in the Stone Age: Reflections on the Origins of a Colonial Fantasy by Danilyn Rutherford

Abstract

Reviewed by: Living in the Stone Age: Reflections on the Origins of a Colonial Fantasy by Danilyn Rutherford Veronika Kusumaryati (bio) Danilyn Rutherford. Living in the Stone Age: Reflections on the Origins of a Colonial Fantasy. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2018. While anthropology was born from the belly of colonialism, it was not until the publication of Bronislaw Malinowski’s Diary and Talal Asad’s Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter that anthropology’s relationship to colonial projects was questioned.1 With the emerging dominance of postcolonial studies in the 1980s and the reflective turn within the discipline, anthropological literature on colonialism has become a platform to examine colonialism as one of the fundamental forces of the discipline and its legitimate subjects of anthropological scholarship. Danilyn Rutherford’s recent book, Living in the Stone Age, expands these concerns amidst a recent push for decolonizing the discipline. Combining extensive archival research and philosophical ruminations on the problem of ethnographic inquiry, Rutherford tells a different story of colonialism, a story that “begins with weakness, not strength “(5). She argues that the historical production of a colonial fantasy demonstrates the embedded vulnerability of colonial practice and ideology. The research is set in western New Guinea, which the Dutch claimed through Tidore suzerainty beginning in the seventeenth century, but which it did not incorporate into the Netherlands East Indies until late 1898. While the rest of the colony became independent Indonesia in 1945, New Guinea was ruled directly from the Hague until 1962. After a controversial plebiscite in 1969, New Guinea became part of Indonesia with the names Iran Barat (1962–72), Irian Jaya (1972–98), and then Papua. Papuans themselves prefer the self-identifying term “West Papua.” Against a rather complicated political history, this book covers the period extending from 1936 to 1955, one of the most critical periods in New Guinea’s history. Living in the Stone Age examines the ways in which Dutch colonial officers and anthropologists Jean-Victor de Bruyn and Jan van Eechoud contributed to making the Papuans Dutch colonial subjects. De Bruyn and van Eechoud worked in the Central Highlands among the Mee (or Kapauku or Ekari), whom American evangelical missionaries, Dutch colonial officers, travelers, and scientists refer to as Stone Age people. The Central Highlands, where most Papuans lived until relatively recently, was considered the colony’s backwater, and its pacification was considered too costly for the colonial state. Thus, officers in the field needed a justification for their mission there, especially when Indonesian nationalists increasingly challenged the Dutch colonial [End Page 133] project in the Indies. Rutherford reads along and against the grain of Dutch expedition archives to uncover a structure of feeling that animated the Dutch work in New Guinea and their relationship with the indigenous Papuans. It is a feeling that demonstrates their cultural intimacies and pleasures of local knowledge. It is a feeling, Rutherford argues, that makes the Dutch colonial project in New Guinea not just another colonial project. What strikes Rutherford is that there are “unnerving parallels between colonial practice and ethnographic method” (19) in that they both make use of sympathy as a technology. But while anthropology treats sympathy as a “privileged instrument of ethnography,” Dutch colonialism used sympathy as “a technology of state building” (53, 128). Living in the Stone Age is divided into three parts. In the first section, it traces sympathetic colonialism from the shift of Dutch colonial policy in the late nineteenth century, namely, from the predatory and brutal rule of the cultivation regime to the so-called ethical policy. Rutherford defines sympathy as something that “encompasses empathy, pity, and compassion, but it can spawn hostility as easily as love” (58). She also employs several terms that the Dutch used to refer to their projects, such as de Bruijn’s notion of hospitality and “a cordial form of colonialism” (38). Rutherford demonstrates how these Dutch colonial officers not only wanted to understand and build a good rapport with local Papuans—like good anthropologists—but also that they fantasized their role as “fathers” (78) who would protect and advance the Papuans so that they could leave their stone age past behind. She goes so far as to...