Abstract
This article analyses the role of the changing meanings of material objects in processes of identification, inclusion, and exclusion of people in the (former) colony and the Netherlands between 1900 and 1970. It reveals how and why people and nation-states relate to history, and to the Dutch colonial past in particular. I will argue that objects collected by the European colonial elite and the nostalgic feelings they evoked could be powerful instruments for people’s social well-being and for the social standing of this particular social group in both the (former) colony and the Netherlands.
Highlights
‘These objects were the staffage of my life’, declared Trude Ament-Resink (1914– 2002) recalling growing up in Yogyakarta in a colonial house full of artefacts collected by her mother Anna Resink-Wilkens (1880–1945) between 1910 and 1940.1 She was surrounded by batik cloths, Hindu-Javanese statuettes and utensils, Dutch-Indies seventeenth- and eighteenth-century furniture, European paintings by fashionable painters like Andreas Schelfhout, and Javanese wayang puppets
Many of these families eventually donated their colonial objects to museums in the Netherlands or colonial Indonesia
In recent years the histories of these sorts of ethnographic collections and the biographies of their collectors have been examined in notably anthropological, social, and cultural studies.3. This ‘material turn’ stressed the importance and complexity of social meaning that such objects hold, many scholars consider the collecting of colonial objects solely as a scholarly practice, isolated from wider social dynamics in both the colony and its motherland
Summary
‘These objects were the staffage of my life’, declared Trude Ament-Resink (1914– 2002) recalling growing up in Yogyakarta in a colonial house full of artefacts collected by her mother Anna Resink-Wilkens (1880–1945) between 1910 and 1940.1 She was surrounded by batik cloths, Hindu-Javanese statuettes and utensils, Dutch-Indies seventeenth- and eighteenth-century furniture, European paintings by fashionable painters like Andreas Schelfhout, and Javanese wayang puppets. Literary scholars and historians Hirsch and Spitzer call these carriers of memories ‘testimonial objects’ (Hirsch and Spitzer 2006:353) These mnemonic and social-cultural meanings of objects can play an important role in the conscious (and unconscious) fashioning and refashioning of the identity of the keeper, as we have seen in the case of Trude Ament-Resink (Bann 1994:37; Erll 2010:6). I consider identity as something personal, as something a person thinks distinguishes him/her in socially relevant ways from others, and which is not fixed This image, identity, is determined in relation to others by attitudes and beliefs, group membership rules, and (supposed) characteristic attributes such as memories, cultural capital, and certain perceptions of the past (Iyer and Jetten 2011:95; Cooper 2005:71–2). I will demonstrate here how a particular kind of memory (that is, nostalgia) could be triggered by objects and how this nostalgia turned out to be helpful in the way people were able to handle changing social and political circumstances
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